Dress To Thrill

            Coming to work on the bus the other day, I sat
across the aisle from a woman who was probably in her 50s. She was plain
looking and plainly dressed. I guessed her to be a household worker. Her slip
was showing. That is not unusual. What struck me was that the hem of her slip
was lace.

            I spontaneously said to myself, "What a pitiful
attempt at elegance!" But when I got off the bus and ruminated on it, I
realized that was a condescending and stupid reaction. She was saying
something. She was saying; "I'm not just a two-legged vacuum cleaner or
dishwasher. I'm a person who deserves to be respected and loved."

            That bit of lace made a big difference to her. It
was the difference between a work uniform and private, personal dress. Wearing
the lace was a decision she had made for herself, beyond the requirements of
her working life. She was expressing her membership in a class of people who
have a life beyond work and who have some bit of "fancy" in their dress to show
it.

            To whom was she making this statement? To herself,
of course. There may have been someone else--a husband or a boyfriend. But
first of all she was making it for herself, to make herself feel good.

            How do I know this,
Watson? I have not interviewed her nor spoken any word to her. But I imagine
that is the way people are. I imagine that people want to think of themselves
as belonging to a group that they admire or respect and dress as they think a
member of that group dresses. Their object is not to display their
individuality, except that they want to choose their group. I don't believe
that people in China were happy all wearing the same Mao jackets, because that
did not express membership in a group that they had chosen. I understand that
under those Mao jackets there were frequently bits of colorful clothing that
reflected more private choices.

            The message of the clothing is first of all to the wearer.
I think of those girls in West Side Story singing "I Feel Pretty!" They
didn't sing "I'm So Pretty." The important thing for them was to feel
pretty, and they associated the way they dressed with the feeling of being
pretty.

            We see all the young
women--and some not-so-young--walking around in the office district in short,
black dresses and shoes with built-up, chunky heels. For many of them, that is
not the most becoming outfit they could wear. That depends on how good their
legs are. And they are surely not expressing individuality. They are expressing
their membership in a class of women who are smart, professional, liberated,
and also feminine and sexy. They are expressing it to themselves and to
whomever may be looking.

            At the street corner there is a group of young men with
exceedingly droopy trousers and black, high shoes. The laces flopping loosely.
They are imitating prison dress. In their way--which may be entirely peaceful
and law-abiding--they are showing their solidarity with those who thumb their
noses at the mores of bourgeois society.

            What about all those men
you see in gray slacks and navy blue blazers with brass buttons? They are
ever-young alumni of Eastern colleges--or want to feel they are. They are proud
to be "Scarsdale Galahads," "Brooks Brothers types," despite the disdain with
which those words are used in Guys and Dolls .

            Of course, the extreme in men's dress is the dinner jacket.
All men--at least, the ones I know--say they hate to have to get into that
monkey suit. They curse as they struggle with the bow tie. But is there a man
with a soul so dead, or a waist so big, that he does not smile and say, "Bond,
James Bond," when he looks at himself in the mirror fully attired?

            When I was in the Nixon
administration, we were all very buttoned-down during the week. On Saturdays,
however, when only the "responsible" people, the presidential appointees, came
to work in the White House and the Executive Office Building, casual dress was
the uniform. That was our way of showing, to ourselves especially, that we were
intimates of those eminent locations.

            And what about me now? On the days I go to my office, I
wear a flannel shirt with no necktie if the weather is cool. In warm weather, I
wear an open-necked sport shirt with no jacket. Some people have said that I
dress "Israeli style," but that isn't really it. I am asserting my membership
in the club of "Old Geezers." We have paid our dues. We are free of
obligations, including the obligation to dress like everyone else. We know that
our dress is only a trivial sign of our liberation, but it is a sign we
enjoy.

            So, hail to you, my lace-bedecked bus mate! May you
always be elegant to yourself, as you will always be to me.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             War by Numbers

            Do Americans grow faint at
the sight of their own blood? Certainly the poll-watching White House thinks
so. Congressional leaders from both parties are now urging the president not to
"rule out any option." Still, Clinton insists that "he has no intention" of
committing ground troops to the Kosovo war front and remains convinced that
airstrikes alone can persuade Serb forces to swear off their favorite pastime
of rape-and-pillage.

            Of course it is possible
that the parsable president sees political advantage in allowing Congress and
the public to push him into a ground conflict of uncertain cost and consequence
(Who knows the true meaning of "has no intention"?). But the White House may
also be misreading public attitudes. Polls taken during U.S. military
engagements from World War II through Bosnia suggest that the U.S. public is
pretty tough--tougher probably than our misty-eyed commander in chief.

            True, pundits such as Andy Kohut, director of the Pew
Research Center, have repeatedly warned that the public will cool once U.S.
casualties are incurred. During the first week of the NATO bombing of Serbia,
the White House got scant comfort from the public. Polls showed the expected
"patriotic bounce" when the action started but it was relatively small and
evanescent. In the last week of March, only slightly more than 50 percent of
Americans approved of the president's handling of the situation--a far cry from
the 80 percent plus who applauded President Bush's 1991 bombing of Iraq. This
despite the fact that the conflict had most of the hallmarks that,
historically, have made for American support for military interventions:
humanitarian purpose, concerted allied action (usually good in itself for a
10-point boost in the polls), and an identifiable villain.

            Still, that initial
lukewarm response didn't surprise polling experts. The American Enterprise
Institute's Karlyn Bowman, for example, pointed out that Americans are always
wary about putting troops in harm's way especially when U.S. interests aren't
well understood. And, despite his lingering credibility problems on foreign
policy, Clinton did manage to rally some 70 percent of the public behind his
February airstrikes on Iraq. "Perhaps that's because the public is more
familiar with the Saddam issue," Bowman noted, "Kosovo is less clear-cut."

            Since then, however, public opinion has gradually
toughened. And that doesn't surprise the experts either. Even at the start of
the bombing the public was remarkably realistic. In a March 25-26
Newsweek poll, while only 53 percent then approved of the airstrikes, 60
percent agreed ground forces would be required to persuade Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic to back down. Expectations that American lives would be lost
even in an air campaign have ranged from the high 60s to the low 80s. Still,
support for the actual use of ground troops hovered in the lower 40s.

            Then came a week
saturated with coverage of Serb atrocities and a very sharp rise in public
attention to the conflict. A Newsweek poll taken April 1-2--partly
before confirmation of the capture of three U.S. soldiers on the Macedonian
border--showed that support for the airstrikes had risen to 68 percent. And a
majority, 54 percent, expressed strong or moderate support for the use of
ground troops to end the conflict (83 percent supported sending soldiers to
rescue any U.S. prisoners of war). By April 5, a Washington Post /ABC
poll found 55 percent support for taking to the ground. Two days later, an NBC
News/ Wall Street Journal poll found that an astounding 73 percent said
the United States and NATO should send soldiers if it was the only way
to stop the fighting in Kosovo. Bolstering that average were hefty majorities
of two normally pacific groups: women (74 percent) and Democrats (81 percent).
Thus do politics make strange foxhole fellows.

            What accounts for the rapid shift in opinion? Apparently
not presidential leadership. Despite Clinton's strong support among Democrats,
in the early April Newsweek poll only 54 percent approved of his
handling of the Kosovo situation; 55 percent thought the White House didn't
think through its plans sufficiently, a finding supported by a New York
Times /CBS News poll taken April 5-6. The Times poll, however, also
found majority support for ground troops if needed to stop ethnic cleansing or
to drive Milosevic from power, and the latest ABC News/ Washington Post
poll (April 8) shows 57 percent supporting ground troop operations if
airstrikes fail to deter the Serbs.

            Obviously, horrifying
footage of refugees played a role in rallying the public. But perhaps Americans
are not the wimps that the pols--and the Pentagon--sometimes seem to think.

            Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland's
Program on International Policy Attitudes, points to his own studies and a
recent RAND study showing that from World War II through Bosnia, public support
for bellicose action often surges in the face of U.S. casualties. Public
support for U.S. involvement in the 1991 Persian Gulf War remained at very high
levels even at the start of ground combat operations in which most Americans
expected (incorrectly) that U.S. casualties would be high. In the Somalia
intervention, high initial public approval of the humanitarian aims had faded
by 1993 as the public came to perceive that the United States had wandered into
the middle of a long-running civil war. Still, support for strong action
actually rose briefly after the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers.

            But, says Kull, "One would not expect a real bounce
until you see some signs of success." What jades the public on military
intervention in civil wars such as Korea, Vietnam, and Somalia is the prospect
that the sacrifice in lives and treasure may be in vain. Serbs may find
solidarity in the memory of defeats past and present, but when it comes to
rallying America, nothing succeeds like success.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Yankee Go Home

            Every
time the United States goes into battle, anti-war activists blame the causes
and casualties of the conflict on the U.S. government. They excuse the enemy
regime's aggression and insist that it can be trusted to negotiate and honor a
fair resolution. While doing everything they can to hamstring the American
administration's ability to wage the war, they argue that the war can never be
won, that the administration's claims to the contrary are lies, and that the
United States should trim its absurd demands and bug out with whatever
face-saving deal it can get. In past wars, Republicans accused these domestic
opponents of sabotaging American morale and aiding the enemy. But in this war,
Republicans aren't bashing the anti-war movement. They're leading it.

            Last
weekend, three of the top five Republicans in Congress--Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott of Mississippi, Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas--went on television to discuss the war.
Here's what they said.

            

               1. 
               The atrocities are America's fault. "Once
the bombing commenced, I think then [Slobodan] Milosevic unleashed his forces,
and then that's when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really
started," Nickles said at a news conference after appearing on Meet the
Press . "The administration's campaign has been a disaster. ... [It]
escalated a guerrilla warfare into a real war, and the real losers are the
Kosovars and innocent civilians." On Fox News Sunday , DeLay blamed the
ethnic cleansing on U.S. intervention. "Clinton's bombing campaign has caused
all of these problems to explode," DeLay charged in a House floor speech
replayed on Late Edition .

            

               2. The failure of diplomacy to avert the war is America's
fault. "I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning,"
Lott offered on Late Edition . "I didn't think we had done enough in the
diplomatic area." Nickles called NATO's prewar peace proposal to the Serbs "a
very arrogant agreement" that "really caused this thing to escalate."

            

               3. 
               Congress should not support the war. When
asked whether they would authorize Clinton "to use all necessary force to win
this war, including ground troops," Lott and Nickles --who had voted a month
ago, along with 70 percent of the Senate GOP, not to support the NATO air
campaign--said they wouldn't. Nickles questioned the propriety of "NATO's
objectives," calling its goal of "access to all of Serbia ... ludicrous."
DeLay, meanwhile, voted not only against last week's House resolution
authorizing Clinton to conduct the air war--which failed on a tie vote--but
also in favor of legislation "directing the president ... to remove U.S. Armed
Forces from their positions in connection with the present operations against
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." When asked whether he had lobbied his
colleagues to defeat the resolution authorizing the air war, as had been
reported, DeLay conceded that he had "talked to a couple of members during the
vote" but claimed not to have swayed anyone since it was "a vote of
conscience."

            

               4. We can't win. "I don't know that Milosevic will ever raise
a white flag," warned Nickles. DeLay agreed: "He's stronger in Kosovo now than
he was before the bombing. ... The Serbian people are rallying around him like
never before. He's much stronger with his allies, Russians and others." Clinton
"has no plan for the end" and "recognizes that Milosevic will still be in
power," added DeLay. "The bombing was a mistake. ... And this president ought
to show some leadership and admit it, and come to some sort of negotiated
end."

            

               5. 
               Don't believe U.S. propaganda. On Meet
the Press , Defense Secretary William Cohen argued that Yugoslavia had
underestimated NATO's resolve more than NATO had underestimated Yugoslavia's,
and Joint Chiefs vice chairman Gen. Joseph Ralston asserted that Milosevic "had
already started his campaign of killing" before NATO intervened. Nickles
dismissed both arguments. "This war is not going well," he declared. "I heard
Secretary Cohen say, 'Well, Milosevic miscalculated how, you know, steadfast we
would be in the bombing campaign.' But frankly ... we grossly miscalculated
what Milosevic's response would be." Later, Nickles volunteered, "I would take
a little issue with [what] Gen. Ralston said. ... The number of killings prior
to the bombing, I think, has been exaggerated." Moreover, given NATO's
desperate need to "bring Milosevic to the table," DeLay cautioned, "It is not
helpful for the president's spin machine to be out there right now saying that
Milosevic is weakening." The truth, said DeLay, is that "nothing has
changed."

            

               6. Give peace a chance. Cohen said it was "highly unlikely"
that Clinton would meet with Milosevic in response to Yugoslavia's release of
the three captured American soldiers over the weekend, since the Serbs were
continuing their atrocities and weren't offering to meet NATO's conditions.
DeLay called this refusal "really disappointing" and a failure of "leadership.
... The president ought to open up negotiations and come to some sort of
diplomatic end." Lott implored Clinton to "give peace a chance" and, comparing
the war with the recent Colorado high-school shootings, urged him to resolve
the Kosovo conflict with "words, not weapons."

            

               7. 
               We have no choice but to compromise.
Unless Clinton finds "a way to get the bombing stopped" and to "get Milosevic
to pull back his troops" voluntarily, NATO faces "a quagmire ... a long,
protracted, bloody war," warned Lott. Clinton "only has two choices," said
DeLay--to "occupy Yugoslavia and take Milosevic out" or "to negotiate some sort
of diplomatic end, diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed
policy."

            
               8.
We're eager to compromise. NATO has insisted all along that Milosevic must
allow a well-armed international force in Kosovo to protect the ethnic
Albanians. When asked whether "the administration ought to insist" that these
requirements "be met" as a condition of negotiation, DeLay twice ducked the
question. Nickles advocated "a compromise," and Lott expressed interest in
Yugoslavia's proposal for a "lightly armed" U.N. peacekeeping force in Kosovo
rather than a fully equipped NATO force. "Surely there's wiggle room," said
Lott. "Obviously, [the Serbs] don't want them heavily armed, but they've
got to be armed sufficiently to protect themselves. ... So, I think something
can be worked out."

            

               9. 
               We'll back off first. Nickles discounted
the administration's demand that Yugoslavia halt its ethnic cleansing in order
to halt NATO's bombardment: "Secretary Cohen says, 'Well, Mr. Milosevic has to
do all these things, then we'll stop the bombing.' Tim, I strongly believe we
need a simultaneous withdrawal of the Serbian aggressive forces, have a
stopping of the bombing, and an insertion of international police-keeping
force." Lott's formulation put NATO's withdrawal first: "Let's see if we can't
find a way to get the bombing stopped, get Milosevic to pull back his troops,
find a way to get the Kosovars [to] go back in." And DeLay suggested that the
United States should pull out unilaterally: "When Ronald Reagan saw that he had
made a mistake putting our soldiers in Lebanon ... he admitted the mistake, and
he withdrew from Lebanon."

            Some
Democrats call Republicans who make these arguments unpatriotic. Republicans
reply that they're serving their country by debunking and thwarting a bad
policy administered by a bad president. You can be sure of only two things:
Each party is arguing exactly the opposite of what it argued the last time a
Republican president led the nation into war, and exactly the opposite of what
it will argue next time.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 239: "Terror Train"

            
               "We're not being
motivated by what's to come, but a fear of being left out as the train is
pulling away from the station, with some exotic station in mind." Who said this
about what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 238)--"4-Meta-4":
            

            
               "The so-called
low-hanging fruit has all been picked."
            

            
               "All of the cards
have fallen the wrong way at the same time."
            

            
               "If all you do is
fix the watch, nobody ever builds a better watch."
            

            
               "Everyone's in
deep yogurt."
            

            

               These four lines have something in common. What?
            

            "Every
college student knows this one! They are the four sentences you always insert
in plagiarized papers to throw the professor off track."-- Dale
Shuger
            

            "Promo
lines for Yoplait's new 'playing card and watch parts on the bottom'
yogurt."-- Al Petrosky
            

            "They
are all quotations from the Old Testament Book of Aunt Ruth."-- Adrianne
Tolsch
            

            "OK.
Four haiku translated and only 16 more to go for my Japanese final."-- Mike
Mays
            

            
"Awkwardly translated, anti-American signs held by Chinese
protesters."-- Beth Sherman
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Reasons To
Read the Paper Wrap-Up
            

            Many cultures have a great epic filled with heroes
and villains who personify the culture's values and vices. That function is now
provided by our daily papers, which offer a kind of ongoing myth, related to
but not a literal rendering of any actual events, much as the Old Testament
account of Noah's Ark may allude to an actual flood, but it doesn't really
matter. (A more simplistic version of our National Mythology is provided by TV
news--the Classics Comic version, the Cliff Notes.) This serialized myth
presents a roster of stock characters--among them, the erotic dynamo, male; the
erotic dynamo, female; the sexless genius, male only; the sexless workaholic,
female only; the amiable doofus--to nobly embody or disgracefully lack the
qualities we prize.

            If you follow our Ongoing Epic, you become familiar
with these characters, handy for making metaphors or making conversation with
your fellow North Americans. This theory also gets at the proliferating
sections of many daily papers, devoted to so much that is clearly not
news--developments in TV sitcoms, personal lives of athletes, chefs. These
aspects of life provide additional character types, imps and demigods, nymphs
and satyrs, to further populate our great saga. If we lived in ancient Athens,
we'd sprinkle our conversations with references to gods and goddesses; instead
we refer to those Titans of the Times .

            The particularly loopy
metaphors in Thursday's question inspired many of you to suggest the same
candidate for the role of amiable doofus in our national drama, a sort of Loki
figure if that clever trickster were just a little less, well, clever. See
below.

            
               Code Blue
Answer
            

            Each was said by a doctor worried about cuts in
Medicare payments to teaching hospitals.

            The particular mission of these
institutions--training new doctors, developing new methods, treating the
poor--is paid for not by patient fees but by federal funds, and cuts have been
severe. Medicare cuts alone will cost New York state hospitals $5 billion
through 2002. Doctors will be laid off. Entire departments will be closed
down.

            

               "The low hanging fruit" (Dr. David Skinner) refers to the most easily made
budget cuts.

               "The cards" (Dr. Stuart Altman) are the lamentable combination of
increasing expenses and decreasing funds.

               "The watch" (Dr. Alan Roper) is the patient; "fixing" it is curing the
patient; "building a better watch" is developing new medical techniques if you
really torture the metaphor. He's a doctor, damn it, not an English speaker.
Well, OK, he is an English speaker, but he's not a writer.

               "Deep yogurt" (Dr. Mitchell Rabkin) is a coy metaphor for deep
trouble.

            

            
               Does Your Doctor's
Size Count Extra
            

            An ad for the Barron
Centers runs in today's New York Times under the banner: "When it comes
to ... PENILE ENLARGEMENT ... there is a difference" (ellipses theirs). Below,
some all too infrequently asked questions with answers gleaned from the ad and
the Web site, www.barron-centers.com.

            

               Q: Is there an illustration with the ad?
A: Yes. The famous statue, the discus thrower. I'd never noticed this before,
but he appears to be embarrassed by his unusually small penis.

               Q: Have the centers been seen on television?
A: Yes. (I'm not sure where I first heard about the centers, but it may have
been on Everybody Loves Raymond Despite His Unusually Small Penis .)

               Q: Does penis size matter?
A: Duh! Dr. Rodney S. Barron's answer is more articulate, more elegant,
more--what's the word?--Lincolnesque: "Size matters to some of the people all
of the time and to all of the people some of the time, but not to all of the
people all of the time." And then he didn't go on to add: "Is that the
Emancipation Proclamation in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

               Q: But surely there is nothing known to medical science that could possibly
give me a lovelier scrotum, that could make a silk purse out of my, er,
wait--is that my phone ringing?
A: "Yes, there is. It's possible to do a fat transfer to the scrotal sac, which
results in a larger and fuller looking scrotum."

               Q: Is there some sort of hoity-toity name you could give the procedure to
make is sound kind of--I don't know--not stupid?
A: "Scrotum Enhancement."

               Q: How do I know where my penis fits in? No, wait, let me rephrase
that.
A: Don't worry. I'm writing in the voice of a doctor. A chart on our Web site
shows the percentage of the population that has various sizes of erect penis
from 3.75 to 9 inches, broken down in quarter-inch increments. And it shows
erect girth from 1.5 to 6.75 inches. (You understand, that's the size of the
penises. We're not a country full of guys only 6-inches tall. Now that would be
funny. Little 6-inch guys. Can you imagine! Is that my phone?)

               Q: Does the site have lots of before-and-after pictures of penises dangling
next to rulers?
A: Indeed it does. They'll put you in mind of a rather odd fishing trip.

               Q: Isn't there some way you could cash in on the insecurities of women as
well as men?
A: Would you like to rephrase that?

               Q: Isn't there some way you could use your medical training to help women
as well as men?
A: In addition to penis stretching, the Barron Centers offer liposuction. And
not just to women. If you can afford it, we'll happily suck the fat out of a
poodle or a peach cobbler. In accordance with medical ethics, of course.

               Q: What's all this going to cost me? Not me, but one of those small penis
guys or the fat gals.
A: "The simple truth is that the procedures range from about $4,900 to slightly
over $6,900, depending on which procedure or combination of procedures you
select. All fees include the procedures you've selected, all facility costs,
anesthesiology charges, and aftercare-follow-up with Dr. Barron. There are no
'optional extras.' "

               Q: So, I suppose that rules out some kind of blinking red light?
A: Medical science is in its infancy.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Dan Quayle

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Killers

            The comedy Analyze
This requires little analysis: It plays like a slapstick fever dream. It
boasts, essentially, a single joke, the one about the Mafia kingpin (Robert De
Niro) who goes to a Freudian psychiatrist (Billy Crystal) to cure his panic
attacks. The introspection that this process entails flies in the face of
everything we know and cherish about gangster movies. Hotheaded crime bosses
like Scarface and Little Caesar are attractive vessels for our fantasies
because they don't think through the moral consequences of what they do. They
want, they take. They get mad, they get even. Most of us enjoy seeing their
real-world counterparts stripped of their ill-gotten gains; at the movies,
however, we're shameless hypocrites: We love the gangster's vitality, his
charismatic demonstration that, with big guns and even bigger balls, everything
is permissible. So what's the point of psychoanalyzing the id?

            Laughs, of course--big
ones. The juxtaposition of macho bloodletting with touchy-feely explorations of
self-doubt. The incongruity of watching De Niro's Paul Vitti, a Gotti-like mob
boss, being counseled to phone a rival gangster (Chazz Palminteri) who has
tried to have him whacked and communicate his feelings ("I feel anger") for the
sake of "closure." Freud, of course, is hardly touchy-feely, but Analyze
This is funny enough to be forgiven its muddling of therapeutic modes. The
script, by Harold Ramis (also the able director), Peter Tolan, and the
brilliant playwright Kenneth Lonergan ( This Is Our Youth ), must have
been a tag-team effort. Its structure is repetitive, but each scene begins with
a joyous blast of comic energy. The gangster's hooligans continually disrupt
the personal life of the psychiatrist, Ben Sobel, who's on the verge of
marrying a straitlaced TV newswoman (Lisa Kudrow). They track him to Miami
Beach, where he's plucked from his suite in the middle of the night to treat
his patient's sudden impotence. They kidnap him from his wedding ceremony on
pain of death. Each impromptu session ends with the patient's exclamations of
relief--"You got a gift, my friend! Yes you do! A load is off my shoulders!
You're good!"--followed, a short time later, by the return of the mobster's
anxiety and another forced appointment: "You did nothing for me!"

            For all its comic exaggeration (almost no gangster or
Freudian cliché is left unparodied), Analyze This ends up affirming the
efficacy of psychoanalysis more than any picture since Spellbound
(1945). It turns out that both Sobel and Vitti are staggering under the legacy
of powerful fathers, giants in their fields of psychoanalysis and racketeering,
respectively. So Sobel has to fire a gun and Vitti has to get in touch with his
blubbery inner child--shticks that sound more offensively pat than they play,
largely because Crystal's handling of a pistol and De Niro's bawling like a
3-year-old seem like sensible therapies for each actor . In the last few
years, Crystal's high-profile hosting chores have made his hunger for approval
seem too sweatily transparent. Playing the straight man becomes him, and when
he finally has a chance to cut loose--in a climactic speech before a meeting of
the crime families, where he's forced to pose as Vitti's
consigliere --his macho vamping jumbled with Jerry Lewis stammers had me
laughing so hard that I almost needed supplemental oxygen.

            De Niro is borderline
appalling. Once the most unaffected actor of his generation--the most
magnetically self-contained--he has evolved into the movies' most shameless
ham. To every part he brings an all-purpose dyspepsia. As Frankenstein's
monster, his sour expression was so ingrained that you had to conclude that the
mad doctor had misaligned his intestines, resulting in a steady stream of acid
reflux. His grimacing convict in Great Expectations seemed less in need
of food and shelter than of a swig of Maalox. His Vitti in Analyze This
has the dodgiest gastrointestinal tract of all. At the best of times he winces,
in repose appearing ulcerous; in the throes of a panic attack, he might be
struggling with an Alien -like parasite about to burst through his chest.
The miraculous thing is that De Niro still has his timing. I've never met a
psychiatrist clumsy enough to use the words "Oedipal conflict" with a patient,
let alone to explain it by invoking Sophocles, but this dumb bit is worth it to
watch De Niro blanch, shake his head in disgust at the thought of Oedipus and
his mom, and exclaim, "Fuckin' Greece."

            It's a testament to the hilarity of Analyze This
that it's going to survive comparisons to The Sopranos, the rich and
exuberantly tragicomic HBO series. Working from some of the same impulses as
Ramis and company, creator David Chase has fashioned an elegy to a vanishing
world of "family-oriented" crime--and an exploration of the dislocation that
its passing evokes in sometime boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Loping
around his overdecorated New Jersey manse in an open bathrobe, Gandolfini's
Soprano is part muscle and part flab, with no connecting sinews. He carries his
tension in his shoulders, so that even when he's sweet he suggests a man on the
verge of snapping. Arrested between thought and action, Gandolfini still bears
traces of childlike befuddlement in his doughy face; he can't begin to figure
out why the foundations of his world have become so illusory. Analyze
This is a hoot, but The Sopranos really sings.

            
               Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels is
the laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some
people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees. It combines
the music video syntax of Trainspotting with the jokey nihilist
bloodletting of Pulp Fiction . You're supposed to root for the hapless
amateur crooks over the platoons of murderous professional ones, and to watch
as, with farcical precision, the bad guys end up accidentally blowing one
another away. As someone who has written Feydeauesque farce, I can tell you
that it's no easy feat. But the real trick isn't bringing disparate groups of
people into slapstick alignment, it's figuring out what to do with them once
they're all assembled. The writer-director, Guy Ritchie, doesn't need to bother
with sorting them out at the end, because there's nothing left but piles of
corpses. Now, why didn't I think of such an easy way out?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Mau-Mauing the Dogcatcher

            Americans hate racism and
they love dogs, so maybe it's not surprising that prejudice among the pugs and
poodles is a growing national concern. Actually, the purported prejudice is
among dog owners, not dogs. But increasingly dogs are being talked about as if
they had the same civil rights as humans and that the same rules of civil
discourse apply to man and his best friend alike. The implied parallel can be
seen as either an insult to the struggle against human racism or a commentary
on its occasional excesses. Or, of course, it can be seen as perfectly
reasonable.

            The Complete Dog
Book was first published by the American Kennel Club in 1929. Widely
considered the bible of dog breeding, it is essentially the blue book for dog
buyers. The 19 th edition was released in 1997 but was recalled in
April of last year because of an uproar from breeders who contended that the
book's "breed profiles" perpetrated pernicious stereotypes. The hottest issue
was that 40 dog breeds had been reclassified as "not good" for children.

            Hardest hit by this development were dachshund and
Chihuahua breeders, whose product is often sold to kids--and without warning
labels of any kind. (At least they are ostensibly for the kids. How many adults
have the guts to buy a dachshund without blaming it on the children?) On ABC
News, Roger Caras, president emeritus of the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, got right to the point: "To say that all
these dogs are 'this' and all these dogs are 'that,' that's racism, canine
racism." Carl Holder, the outraged secretary of the Dachshund Club of America,
told the New York Times , "You just can't make such a blanket statement
about dachshunds."

            Wait. Why exactly can't
we make blanket statements about these ankle-snapping pipe cleaners with feet?
"Dogs are not vehicles stamped out of an assembly line," asserted Holder, "Each
one is an individual." A week after the AKC's announcement, Dr. Vicki Hearne,
author of Animal Happiness , joined the battle in a New York Times
op-ed piece, where she raised the specter of genocide, or at least breed
cleansing. To brand dogs such as Chihuahuas as "not good" with children "is not
just an insult; it is a dangerous statement in an age when every state and many
towns have adopted or are considering laws restricting, banning or even
requiring the killing of particular suspect breeds."

            Nicholas Dodman of the Tufts University Animal Behavior
Clinic charged that labeling Chihuahuas as bad with children was essentially
blaming the victim: "It's mainly the child's fault because they're doing really
stupid things with the dogs." He told ABC, "They're pulling on their tails and
pulling on their ears and poking in their eyes, and doing lots of things, and
you know, you have to have a pretty long fuse to tolerate that." The problem,
in other words, is that children are bad with Chihuahuas. Perhaps the solution
is to ban children.

            Eventually the kennel
club caved like Denny's before a class action suit. The club recalled over
10,000 copies of its book--at a cost of nearly $800,000--and declared that the
profiles had been published with "inadvertently incorrect and controversial
information." Also, "The AKC sincerely regrets the distress caused to dog
owners and breeders by the errors. AKC neither agrees with, nor endorses, the
material." This is a good start. But where, one wonders, is the AKC's apology
to the dogs?

            Don't ask me whether each of the breeds on the AKC's
blacklist can accurately be labeled good or bad for children. But the idea that
stereotypes are not valid about breeds of dogs is ridiculous. While it is true
that all dogs go to heaven, there is a bowl curve when it comes to dog
abilities and personalities. Basset hounds are sweet and stubborn. Golden
retrievers are beautiful, joyous, dumb blonds. Border collies work hard--even
when they're asleep. Mastiffs are lazy but lovable. Labradors are the kind of
dogs you want to have a beer with. Chihuahuas are snappish and
temperamental.

            Judging humans by the
color of their skin is different than judging dogs by the texture of their
coats. It is different even if you leave aside the question (which I find easy
but some people find difficult) of whether dogs have the same moral claims as
human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's say they do.
Even if so, the analogy of dog stereotypes to human racism is mistaken.

            Racism among humans is overwhelmingly based upon cultural
differences--what breeders might call "training." The actual genetic
differences between human "races" are so infinitesimal that making sweeping
statements is rarely useful and often dangerous. Genetic differences between
human races are literally superficial. But the differences between purebred
dogs are anything but. That's why they call it breeding. For example, border
collies instinctively herd anything that moves--without any training. Put a
border collie in the living room during a cocktail party, and soon you'll find
everybody scrunched into the corner.

            Strong genetic
differences among dog breeds are not just the result of natural selection.
Evolution among dogs has got a big push from humans. On ranches, border collie
puppies are taken from the litter and tested for their instinctual desire to
herd sheep. The most fearless and enthusiastic pups are the most likely to be
bred to pass that herding gene on to the next generation.

            Doggy eugenicists sometimes disagree about what traits they
ought to be pushing. Many border collie breeders, for example, take great
exception to the dog industry's emphasis on ideal appearance rather than
behavior. They fear that if border collies are bred for the color of their
coats rather than the content of their character, eventually their herding
instinct will fade away.

            Another example is
pointers. One need not be an expert in evolution or zoology to understand that
pointing at dinner rather than catching it is not a successful evolutionary
strategy. But the reason pointers point is not that they are responding to a
capital gains tax cut or any of the other incentives known to affect the
behavior of human beings. It is that pointing has been bred into them. Right
now, something called the Dog Genome Project is trying to isolate the various
genes for breed-specific behaviors, including the basenji's genetic reluctance
to bark and the basset's genetic refusal to catch Frisbees.

            Lovers of certain breeds readily acknowledge the positive
genetic tendencies of their favorite dogs. Newfoundland and Portuguese water
dog owners want pooches that can swim. Rottweiler owners want beasts that
protect. German shepherders like a good running buddy. And, basset people, like
me, want dogs that have the good sense not to do any of those things. But
suggest that negative behavior might be genetic too, and dog nuts--and,
increasingly, their lawyers--declare that this is like saying Jews are
naturally greedy or that laziness is a genetic trait of blacks.

            Take the pit bull, the
most "discriminated against" dog in the country. In most breeds, a litter of
puppies will have one "alpha dog." The alpha dog is the most aggressive male in
the group, the one that instinctively wants to be leader of the pack and will
not bow out of a fight. Pit bull litters are nearly all alphas. If a child lets
a pit bull gain alpha dominance, watch out: A tea party with Fido could turn
into a bloodbath. The pit bull's brain chemistry is the product of selective
breeding too. Unlike, say, a German shepherd, pit bulls were not bred to
protect humans but to kill other dogs. They are more prone to become addicted
to endorphins, which often translates into a lust for pain. Thus, they don't
quit when their opponent is licked or when they are told to go to a neutral
corner. Also, most dogs have an instinctual body language. If two dogs meet on
the street and they don't want to fight, they bow their heads, exposing their
necks and demonstrating their vulnerability. It's a nice gesture, and pit bulls
bow too. But unlike any other breed, they have an instinct for attacking the
other dog while he's still bowed.

            In 1989, New York Mayor Ed Koch tried to impose strict
rules on pit bull ownership. He called them, "the Great White Sharks of
Doggiedom." New York courts ruled that such laws were prejudicial because of
their disparate impact on owners of different breeds of dogs. Other cities
trying to curb pit bulls met with similar rulings. Since then, groups like the
Animal Legal Defense Fund--does the name sound familiar?--have been arguing
hard that the issue isn't owners' rights but dogs' rights. In vet malpractice
cases and other instances of dog deaths, reports Evan Gahr in the Wall
Street Journal , lawyers frequently argue that compensation should be
determined by the "intrinsic value" of the dog. In dog attack cases, animal
behaviorists, psychiatrists, and activists try to claim that the dogs were
simply "misunderstood." But whether they're defending a dog that kills or
eulogizing a dog that was killed, the mythology that dogs are simply products
of their environments holds sway.

            Many people don't realize
that dogs were not made by God. Rather, God gave man the raw materials--the
ancient offshoot of the wolf--and said "show me what you can do." Purebred dogs
have been selectively bred for thousands of years in some cases. Even a
millennium of unnatural selection still leaves room for some environmental
influence: A cocker spaniel that wears a "Kick Dog for Service" sign from 9
till 5 will be a lot more likely to bite than a Rottweiler that grew up in a
loving home. Some dogs will be closer than others to the Aryan ideal of their
particular breed. But the worst herding border collie in the world will still
herd better than the most masterful Mexican hairless.

            A poodle will bite you for forgetting to put the accent
mark over the "e" in André. But you could use a bloodhound's tail as a jump
rope and the worst you'd get is a fierce yawn. Yes, it is possible to teach a
bloodhound to hate kids, just as it is possible to teach poodles to be sled
dogs. But this would be conditioning against the grain of the breeds'
personalities. "Canine racism" may be a convenient way to shake down courts and
corporations. But it drains the moral currency from a very real and still
unfortunately useful concept in the world of humans.

            There is simply no such thing as canine racism. In
fact, some of my best friends are German shepherds.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Segregation Today,
Segregation Tomorrow
            

            Boston College administrators may
force feminist theologian Mary Daly to admit men into her classroom. For 25 years,
Daly has preached her brand of mystical feminism and revolution against the
patriarchy to an all-female audience. Most men stayed away, and those who
enrolled were assigned to a special section. But last fall, a male student
enlisted the support of a conservative law firm and threatened to sue under
discrimination law after Daly ejected him and another male from her classroom.
Rather than admit the men to "Introduction to Feminist Ethics," Daly took the
semester off, accused the school of "caving into right-wing pressure," and
refused the retirement package offered by the Jesuit school. Institutions find
themselves increasingly under legal scrutiny for supporting race and gender
preferences. Last month, Dartmouth College announced that it will no longer
tolerate single-sex policies at the school's fraternities and sororities, while
Radcliffe College said it would encourage more men to apply for its prestigious
Bunting Institute fellowships. Meanwhile, federal courts continue to debate
whether the National Collegiate Athletic Association should be subject to
federal sex discrimination laws.

            
               The Presidents of
the United States of America
            

            College presidents can
now be hired from a temp agency. According to the Wall Street Journal ,
the Florida-based Registry for College and University Presidents maintains a
list of 55 retired college presidents who are ready to lead academic
institutions around the country on an interim basis. Robert Funk, the former
president of a Seattle college, is already finishing up his second
assignment.

            
               Book
Bind
            

            Looking for a book?
Don't go to East Lansing, Mich. Michigan State University's Movimiento Estudantil Xicano de
Aztlan (Chicano Student Movement) took 4,500 university library books hostage
for a day and presented the administration with a list of demands that included
asking the university to inaugurate a Hispanic studies major, hire more
Hispanic faculty, introduce dormitory "culture rooms" devoted to Latino themes,
and name a building after Cesar Chavez. Will booknappings catch on? When
Columbia University undergraduates wanted an ethnic studies major a couple of
years ago, they held a successful hunger strike on campus. It remains to be
seen whether hoarding books will prove as effective as self-starvation.

            
               Surrender Your
Right to Party
            

            Universities are playing
parent again, reported the New York Times this month: Pennsylvania State University now
hosts an alcohol-free student center that features adult-supervised weekend
parties; the University of
Wisconsin has started theater outings for students and staff; the University of Virginia may
start telling parents of student drinking violations; Lehigh University prohibits
campus parties without a staff member or approved adult in attendance; and
after 10 students suffered alcohol poisoning in January, Princeton
University banned its annual Nude
Olympics, in which students streak naked through campus on the night of the
year's first snowfall. According to the Times , the crackdowns represent
the biggest shift in campus social policy since the '60s student revolts
ushered in laissez-faire attitudes. Both ends of the political spectrum seem to
favor the trend. The Chronicle of Higher Education attributes the increase
enrollment at Christian colleges--up 24 percent between 1990 and 1996--partly
to parents' concerns about binge drinking and other behaviors at public
institutions. Meanwhile, in a Times op-ed, libertarian feminist Katie
Roiphe declared herself in favor of "establishing a benign and diffuse adult
presence" on campus.

            
               Block
Busting
            

            Washington's new mayor,
Anthony A. Williams, wants to move the beleaguered University of the District of
Columbia from its affluent Northwest Washington digs to Anacostia, the
District's poorest and most isolated area. The school's poor academic record
has made it a frequent target of critics but, according to the Washington
Post , Williams still believes it can become a magnet for economic
development in its new location. UDC President Julius Nimmons Jr. worries that
the move will demoralize a school, which, like the District itself, is just
beginning to recover from a fiscal crisis. Other critics add that the
university's current presence in Northwest gives many Washingtonians a valuable
opportunity to leave their troubled neighborhoods behind.

            
               Ad-git
Prop
            

            The Menchú wars continue.
David Horowitz, right-wing firebrand and head of the Center for the Study of Popular
Culture, has taken out an ad
in six college newspapers excoriating "tenured radicals" for defending the
distorted autobiographical writings of Guatemalan Nobel laureate and activist
Rigoberta Menchú. (See the Feb. 2 "" for the back story.) The ad singles out
one Wellesley College professor by name and declares, "This fraud was
originally perpetrated and is still defended by your professors." A few weeks
ago, a conservative foundation placed an ad in college papers urging
undergraduates to sue their schools in order to battle affirmative action
policies. Will suing professors be next?

            
               The
Bookie
            

            Robert Darnton, an
expert on the history of the book, predicts a long life for the medium in the
New York Review of Books . The prophecies of '60s media
guru Marshall McLuhan have not come to pass. In spite of the rise of television
and the Internet, we do not live in a "post-literate" civilization dominated by
"technological man." Although the book remains uniquely portable, durable, and
an aesthetically satisfying means of conveying written information, there is
one corner of the Gutenberg galaxy where print may be passé--the world of
scholarly publishing. The monograph, traditionally the young academic's ticket
to tenure and promotion, has become too expensive for presses to produce or for
libraries to purchase. Darnton suggests that electronic publishing can change
not only the way scholarly work is disseminated--online rather than in the
stacks--but also the shape of scholarship itself. The electronic book would
ideally be arranged "in layers, ... like a pyramid." Readers could move from
basic information to complex analysis, from primary sources to ongoing debates.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies
have committed funds to the development of such books.

            
               School's Out for
Chandra
            

            Malaysian dissident
Chandra
Muzaffar lost his post at Universiti Malaya last month. University officials claim that
tight finances forced them to cut funding for Chandra's Centre for
Civilisational Dialogue. But human rights groups in Malaysia and abroad see
other motivations at work: A vocal supporter of the embattled ex-Deputy Prime
Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Chandra has "frequently criticized the abuses of power
by the authorities," writes one Malaysian group. He was the founding president
of a prominent Malaysian human rights organization and, together with Anwar's
wife, Azizah Ismail, he founded the Social Justice Movement known in Malaysia
as Adil. Human Rights Watch
has initiated a campaign on Chandra's behalf. Jonathan Fanton, chair of Human
Rights Watch and president of the New School University, wrote to the Malaysian
government urging both an investigation into Chandra's dismissal and a stop to
the spread of political battles into the academic realm.

            
               MIT's Woman
Problem
            

            Confessing a decades-long pattern of discrimination
against female faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking measures to cure
itself. In a report posted on the Web, the country's leading institute of
science documents entrenched if subtle discrimination against women in almost
every aspect of professional academic life from salaries and promotions to
committee work and office size. The report notes that the school's tenure rate
for women has stagnated at 8 percent for two decades (the national average is
26 percent) and that women faculty were required to raise twice as much money
in outside grants as men. "I believe that in no case was this discrimination
conscious or deliberate," Robert Birgeneau, dean of MIT's School of Science
told the New York Times . "Nevertheless, the effects were real."
Birgeneau has promised increases in salary, lab space, and research money to
women faculty and vowed to bring the number of tenured females to 10 percent by
next year.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 204: "Stay!"

            

               Who said this to whom about what: "Keep on doing what you're doing, and
don't call us, we'll call you."
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Monday's Question
(No. 203)--"Gloat, Little Gloat Worm":
               

               

                  Mattel, Al Gore, Landry's Seafood Restaurants, and Cruel
Intentions can all make the same boast. What?
               

               "All
can be purchased in Beijing."-- Daniel Radosh ( Greg Diamond and
David Ballard had a similar answer.)

               "They
are each based on a Jane Austen novel. (I could be wrong about Cruel
Intentions .)"-- Andrew Silow-Carroll
               

               "Four
things that drove Stanley Kubrick into self-imposed exile."-- Beth
Sherman
               

               "Each
would have had more effect on the Balkans peace process than Bob Dole
did."--Joe Lengieza
               

               "One
makes Skipper. One wakes Tipper. One bakes Flipper. And one ... to take a guess
at what Peter Travers said in Rolling Stone , is 'like Les Liaisons
Dangereuses , but much, much hipper!' "-- Meg Wolitzer
               

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

               Ah, the smell of it. Many
of you wallowed in the olfactory, particularly in the odor of corruption and
fish. (If News Quiz were played by dogs, what a merry romp that would be!
Crazy, hey? I give the Cabinet secretary; you give the scent.) Oscar nominee
William Shakespeare alludes to fish aroma when he says, "Something is rotten in
the state of Denmark." His was another example of the bisexual symbolism of
fish; it is one of the few things used to represent both male and female
genitalia. "Stinking fish" was a derogatory Elizabethan reference to vaginal
odor; and cod--as in cod piece--was slang for penis. Perhaps the fish is such a
flexible metaphor because the general shape of its body is phallic, while its
open mouth suggests the vagina. So, who's hungry? Anybody up for seafood?

               
                  Inductive,
Funductive Answer
               

               As Pamela Weishaar knew (click for more Pamela
Weishaar), "We're No. 2!"

               Mattel, the nation's No. 1 toy company will become
its second largest consumer software producer, behind Microsoft, when it
completes its purchase of the Learning Company for $3.8 billion.

               Al Gore requires no explanation except, perhaps, for
his astonishing physical grace. The man moves like a young panther.

               Landry's is No. 2 in what the restaurant industry
calls the "casual seafood" category. Last week, Landry's agreed to buy
Consolidated Restaurants for $84 million in stock and $80 million in assumed
debt, giving Landry's control over The Spaghetti Warehouse. For my money,
nothing says good eating like "warehouse."

               
                  Cruel Intentions
was No. 2 at the box office this past weekend in what the movie industry calls
the "dim-witted teen remake" category. ( Analyze This was No. 1.)

               
                  You Be the MBA
Extra
               

               I give the revealing
detail; you give the corporation.

               
                  Revealing Detail
               

               1. Fourth quarter operating earnings fell 27
percent.

               2. Laying off thousands of the lowest-paid
workers.

               3. Last year's pay for two co-chairmen exceeds $26
million each.

               4. Head of the corporation says linchpin of
long-term strategic development is: "talent, talent, talent, talent,
talent."

               5. Board of directors
damned to hell for all eternity.

               
                  Answers
               

               1-3. All refer to Citigroup.

               4. Quotes Charlotte Beers, new chairwoman of J.
Walter Thompson advertising.

               5. Is conjectural; check
with your spiritual leader.

               
                  Common
Denominators
               

               Plastic parts and fish
fragrance.

            

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 252: "Euphemism?"

            
               "We want to be
able to land in grandma's backyard at night, in thick fog, without hitting the
clothes line," says Jack Allison, an engineer on the project. What
project?
            

            
               
                  (This question
courtesy of Jill Pope.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 251)--"Now Even Reformier!":
            

            
               Rabbi Gary Bretton
Granatoor of New York's Stephen Wise Synagogue, at the forefront of today's
Reform Judaism, says, "There is a group in the synagogue called Morei Derech,
which means role models, and they are lay people taking on responsibilities
that in the past many congregants felt professionals had to do." What
responsibilities?
            

            

               
                  (This question courtesy of Beth Sherman.)
               
            

            
"Selling reconditioned hyperdrives to stranded Jedi knights."-- Daniel
Radosh
            

            "I'm a
huge anti-Semite, so I'd have to say they're celebrating the
Eucharist."-- Tim Rogers ( Tim Carvell had a similar answer.)

            
"Molesting young boys? Oh, sorry, wrong church."-- Chris "Pushing the Limits
of Taste" Thomas
            

            
"Closed-captioning 700 Club broadcasts in Yiddish, so everybody laughs
at the same time."-- Al Petrosky
            

            
"Converting non-Jews by tapping them on the top of the head and proclaiming,
'Jew!' "--Morris Jackson (similarly, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            With subtle--Talmudic!--reasoning, Rabbi Sheldon
Zimmerman sees anti-Semites behind the movement to reform Reform Judaism:
They're just not anti-Semitic enough. Bastards! The rabbi, president of Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, our seminary, suggests that as
anti-Semitism has declined in America, the larger society less frequently
reminds Jews of their identity, so people embrace ritual to, as he puts it,
"find themselves Jewishly."

            When I worked at
Late Night (oh, no, not another of his tedious stories about the old
days!), I asked the writers' assistant to scan the viewer mail pile for
correspondence I could use in my planned anthology, Kids' Anti-Semitic
Letters to Dave . For a while there was a satisfying flow of vitriol
beginning "Dear Jew Letterman ..." It seemed like Anti-Semitism Classic. But
anyone who envisioned Dave's big, friendly, goyish head bent over the Torah
needed not more tolerance,  but more Prozac. It wasn't genuine hate mail; it
was nut mail, and there wasn't enough of it to do a book. I felt like an Apache
contemplating the last anti-Semitic buffalo, sad and scraggly and demented. But
I still had a ham sandwich for lunch, he said Jewishly.

            
               Mucho Mitzvah
Answer
            

            Some lay people want to visit the sick.

            That's just part of the "remarkable transformation"
going on at Stephen Wise, including more Hebrew in the service, more singing
and chanting by the congregants, and a greater interest in religious education.
These changes are typical of the new Reform Judaism.

            Begun in Germany more than a century ago, the
Reform movement emphasized ethics over ritual, abjuring the wearing of
tallis and yarmulkes at services, for instance, and encouraging the use
of local languages rather than Hebrew.

            Last week, Reform
Judaism's Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted the Pittsburgh
Principles, reviving many of these customs in what supporters call a reclaiming
of Jewish tradition, and critics call Conservative Judaism Lite, and even
harsher critics call a retreat from rationalism.

            
               Ayn Rand's Panties
Extra
            

            This past Sunday,
Showtime presented The Passion of Ayn Rand , with the fierce and
smoldering Helen Mirren as the dishy right-wing egomaniac, leaving many
otherwise sensible people hungry for the forbidden passions of the
libertarians. Satisfy these cravings at Laissez Faire Books, "The World's Largest Selection of
Books on Liberty." Below, some items from its May catalog.

            
               Those Dirty Rotten
Taxes , by Charles Adams

            "A lively chronicle of courageous, patriotic
Americans who hated taxes and did something about it."

            I believe he also wrote
Those Dirty Rotten Prices , a lively chronicle of courageous
shoplifters.

            
               Hide Your Assets and
Disappear , by Edmund Pankau

            "A step-by-step guide to vanishing without a
trace."

            And yet, so few on the
right actually do.

            
               The Food and Drink
Police , by James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo

            "America's Nannies, Busybodies, and Petty
Tyrants."

            A heartfelt plea for the
return of tainted meat.

            
               That Every Man Be
Armed , by Stephen R. Halbrook

            "Halbrook shows that your right to bear arms isn't
some crackpot notion."

            I particularly enjoyed
the chapter, "A Legal Theory From Those Screaming Voices in My Head."

            
               Freedom in
Chains , by James Bovard

            "Shocking story about government gone wild."

            Party down with those
maniacs at Health and Human Services ... if you dare.

            
               Myth of the Robber
Barons , by Burton W. Folsom Jr.

            Turns out, those steel
strikes were staged with actors who were not killed by the Pinkertons, but
retired to mansions on Fifth Avenue.

            Hayek poster: $9.95

            This month marks the
centenary of Friedrich August von Hayek, the Austrian economist,
anti-socialist, Nobel Prize winner, and dreamboat. There's only a cursory
description of the poster, but I smell string bikini.

            Video: Phil Donahue
Interviews Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, Part I and Part II
            

            Oh, like I don't already
own it on laserdisc.

            
               Ayn Rand: A Sense of
Life , by Michael Paxton

            "Hundreds of revealing, never-before-published
photos."

            The perfect companion
for my William Buckley vibrator.

            
               Tim Carvell's
Bloated Indulgence Extra
            

            Participants are still
invited to find a sentence in an actual publication that best conveys hideously
conspicuous consumption in 1999. Submissions due by noon ET, Monday, June
7.

            
               Headline
Haiku
            

            The Making of
A True Threat:
Artists in Love
And No Ale

            
               Village Voice , June 1, 1999

            
               --Francis
Heaney
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            It's a brisathon.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <I>The Phantom Menace</I> Strikes Back!

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  The Phantom Menace
                (20 th Century Fox). A
trickle of praise for The Phantom Menace after the first wave of
negative reviews. The film "offers a happy surprise: it's up to snuff," writes
Janet Maslin in the New York Times . "[T]he Star Wars franchise
was funnier and scrappier when it was new. But it simply wasn't capable of
this." The Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert awards the film 3 1/2 stars.
Peter Travers' generally negative review in Rolling Stone concedes that
the movie is "loaded with cool stuff" and that "in terms of visual
sophistication ... Lucas ranks with the masters." The majority continues to
slam the film. Gripes: 1) wooden acting, 2) bad dialogue, 3) confusing plot, 4)
weak storytelling. (Click for a synopsis of last week's negative reviews and to
read David Edelstein's review of the film in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               
                  Notting Hill
                (Universal Pictures). Adoring early
reviews for this Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant romantic comedy that many critics are
calling Four Weddings and a Funeral , Part 2. Both films were written by
Richard Curtis and both cover the same turf--Grant falling for a ravishing but
distant American woman--in this case Roberts, who stretches to play ... a
skittish Hollywood megastar. Entertainment Weekly 's Lisa Schwarzbaum
calls the film "blithe and exhilarating," and Time 's Richard Schickel
calls it "utterly charming--and very smart." (Click here for a
Roberts fan site, here for a Grant fan site, or here for information on
the London neighborhood where the film is set.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Jesse & the 8 th Street Kidz
               ,by Jesse
Camp (PGD/Hollywood). Critics are surprisingly kind to MTV VJ Jesse Camp's
foray into the world of rock. The sound is equal parts glam, punk, and metal,
and features Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen. Rolling Stone gives it
three stars and says "believe it or not, his album is a genuinely rocking
detention-room blowout, a spew of motormouthed microwaved teen rebellion
upholding the noble legacy of Twisted Sister" (Rob Sheffield). Many, though,
find the album as irritating as Camp's goofy on-screen presence and call it
"ersatz rock--all guns and poses" (David Browne, Entertainment Weekly ).
(Find out more about Jesse here.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Woman: An Intimate Geography
               , by Natalie Angier
(Houghton Mifflin). Reviews--published and killed--of New York Times
science writer Angier's feminist exploration of women's biology stir up a
journalistic controversy about conflict of interest. After the Times
published a review by Marilyn Yalom in its daily review slot calling the book
"dazzling," the Boston Globe reported that Angier had positively
reviewed Yalom's A History of the Breast two years ago. Also, the
Times ' Sunday book review section killed a second review of the book, a
negative one by theorist Helena Cronin. Book Review Editor Charles
McGrath defended delivering the spike to Cronin's piece: "I didn't like the
tone of the review--I thought it was too snarky. ... And I thought the review
failed to address the whole range of the book." Cronin told the Globe
that Angier's book was "totally idiotic. ... [S]he was so wrong-headed in the
areas where I knew the science that, even if there were areas where she might
have been correct, I could no longer trust her." After killing Cronin's review,
the Sunday Times ran a gushing review of the book ("it is a tour de
force, a wonderful, entertaining and informative book"--Abraham Verghese). But
the paper also apologized for violating the Times ' conflict-of-interest
policy by assigning the book review to Yalom in the first place. Back to the
book: Other publications give it a warm response--Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes
in the Washington Post that Angier "eviscerates two ... old saws: that
hard science must be boring and that feminists have no sense of humor." Other
reviewers are put off by Angier's ecstatic, florid prose. (Read the first
chapter here [requires free registration].)

            

               
                  Music for Torching
               , by A.M. Homes (Rob Weisbach
Books). Mainly positive reviews for Homes' latest novel, which, like her other
work, is designed to outrage: A corporation man gets genital tattoos, a bored
suburban couple burn down their house on a whim, etc. Dissenters find the
novel's transgressive bent a touch stale, but the pack praises it. The
Westchester, N.Y., setting makes the story read like "Cheever country on crack"
(Norah Vincent, the Boston Globe ). "People will be talking about this
one" ( Kirkus Reviews ). (Read an excerpt of the novel here.)

            

               
                  The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
               , by Melissa
Bank (Viking). The critics love this collection of interconnected stories of a
woman who navigates the worlds of love and dating from the age of 14 to the age
of 35. "[F]ast and funny with real moments of poignancy" (Yahlin Chang,
Newsweek ) and "one of those rare occasions when a highly touted book
fulfills the excitement" ( Publishers Weekly ). Some critics detect shades
of the single-gal dippiness of Bridget Jones's Diary , but most say that
this is much more witty and sophisticated. (Francis Coppola has hired Bank to
write a screenplay of the book.) An overtly negative review in the New York
Times Book Review , by Courtney Weaver, calls the tone "self-consciously
humorous"; says the wit at times "disintegrates into cutesy one-liners"; and
complains that the stories are plagued by a "certain generic weariness."
(Read one of
Bank's stories, "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine.")

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Movie
            

            
               
                  Love
Letter
                (DreamWorks). Kate Capshaw (a k a Mrs. Steven Spielberg)
stars in a so-so romantic comedy about an older divorced woman whose life is
changed by the discovery of a love letter. It's plagued by "bland dialogue and
dull sitcom acting," writes the New York Times ' Stephen Holden.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 237: &quot;Flawed and Tailored&quot;

            
               The bombing
campaign--15,000 bombs and missiles so far--is working, says Germany's Gen.
Klaus Naumann, NATO's senior military officer. "We will see how they will feel
after a few more weeks and months or what have you of continuously pounding
them into pieces." However, he adds, "We may have one flaw in our thinking."
What?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 236)--"Tragedy Plus Time Minus Taste":
            

            

               Columbine students resumed classes Monday at nearby Chatfield High
School. Many wore white T-shirts imprinted on the front with "We Are..." and on
the back ... what?
            

            "...
Guaranteed straight A's."-- Stuart Wade and Brooke Saucier
            

            "...
Famous."-- Matt Sullivan and Charles Star ( Lynn Rosetta ,
Lori Hoffman , and Greg Diamond had similar answers.)

            "...
Suing."-- Greg Diamond
            

            "...
Not riding the bus for fear of a NATO misfire."-- Michael Holloway
(similarly, David Ballard )

            "Hmm
... that's odd. I could have sworn I had my 10-foot pole right here
..."-- Tim Carvell
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Some participants, confused by the question,
replied with slogans for both the front and back of the Littleton T-shirt. I
blame the ambiguous use of ellipses. And those damn video games. Violent
movies. The estrangement of too many parents from John McCain's life. (Have any
of you phoned him today?) Our failure to embrace a lackluster technical fix
from Al Gore and his Web cronies. The absence of Orrin Hatch praying in the
nation's schools. (Isn't there some high-tech way to fly him from class to
class, perhaps on Boeing's new Delta III rocket; you know, once it stops
malfunctioning.) I'll tell you who I don't blame, the NRA. Or myself. OK, I do
blame myself. I should simply have asked: "What did it say on the back?"
Sorry.

            Displeasing in content
as well as in form, today's question garnered a record number of responses
scorning the heartlessness of News Quiz. It also garnered a record number of
responses, or if not a record, certainly a lot. So, presumably participants
were not as offended as they claimed to be. When Boswell expressed enormous
sympathy for the victims of an earthquake, Johnson took him to task for his
showing deep feeling, saying he doubted that Boswell had even missed a meal.
Johnson disdained exaggeration. If anyone wants to discuss this further, I'll
be at Chuck Heston's house hacking around on his Playstation and giving him a
little talking to. Of course it's his fault.

            
               A 100 Percent
Cotton Answer
            

            The front of the
T-shirts says, "We are ..." and the back says, "Columbine." Chatfield,
Columbine's traditional rival, welcomed their guests with banners and signs
including, "We Are One," featuring Columbine's colors, blue and white, and
Chatfield's colors, maroon and white, entwined in a heart.

            
               Mom-arama
Extra
            

            Giddily promoting online
shopping for Mothers Day, Yahoo reduces every mom to 18 categories of desire,
each linked to shopping opportunities. Which of these are actual Yahoo Mother's
Day categories?

            1. Candies and Sweets

            2. Beer and Cigarettes

            3. Fashions for Mom

            4. Inappropriately Erotic Fashions for Mom

            5. For the Home

            6. For the Farm, Factory, or Faculty Lounge

            7. Get Mom Online

            8. Get Mom off Crack

            9. Her Green Thumb

            10. Her "Blond" Hair

            11. Her Incessant Nagging

            12. Leave Me Alone! Leave Me Alone! Leave Me Alone!
Oops, sorry.

            13. Moms-To-Be

            14. Moms-To-Beware-Of

            15. Movies and Video

            16. Liquor and Porn

            17. Music

            18. Persistent Abrasive Noises

            19. Pamper Her

            20. Pester Her

            21. Leap out of the Closet and Scare the Bejesus
out of Her

            22. Perfume

            23. Other Things With
Powerful Odors

            
               Real Yahoo
Mom
            

            1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15,
17, 19, 22

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Heartless online quizzes.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Kill and Die for &quot;Credibility&quot;?

            At least Henry Kissinger is consistent. When he and
Richard Nixon took over the Vietnam War in 1969, they didn't make much of an
effort to defend the original objectives of the enterprise. Instead, the
emphasis was on "credibility": having got in for whatever reason, wise or
foolish, we couldn't just change our minds and get out. In order to preserve
credibility we needed victory, or (as time went on) "peace with honor" or (as
more time went on) a "decent interval" between our withdrawal and the other
side's triumph.

            Thirty years on, Kissinger and many others are
saying a similar thing about Kosovo. Having got in, NATO must win or the
alliance's credibility--and possibly the alliance itself--will be destroyed.
But for most who make it, the credibility argument serves a very different
purpose this time. During Vietnam, it was a last-ditch appeal by people who
generally had supported the war for years. With Kosovo, the credibility
argument popped up after about five minutes, and mainly from people who say
they oppose the original decision to get involved--or who avoid saying
precisely where they stand on that basic question. "Credibility," in short,
used to be a cover-up; now it's a cop-out.

            During Vietnam, "credibility" did not persuade many
who otherwise opposed the war. As a moral argument it seemed scandalously
trivial, and as a debating point it seemed like moving the goal posts. You no
longer have the stomach to pretend that the mission of young Americans killing
and dying for freedom for the Vietnamese people can succeed, but you want them
to kill and die for credibility? Even geostrategically it seemed wrong: Every
extra day we spent blood and treasure on a war we no longer believed in made
subsequent threats to use military force less credible, not more so.
(And thus, more than a decade after that war ended, an overnight victory in
Grenada was hailed, desperately, as the end of the Vietnam Syndrome.)

            Credibility is still a
slender reason to kill and die. What would President George W. Bush or
President John McCain say to a grieving mother? "Your son died for
credibility." Al Gore and Bill Clinton have also invoked credibility in answer
to the question of why we fight.

            Perhaps credibility would be worth dying for if it actually
deterred war. That is the argument: If the enemy believes that you're not only
willing but also certain to use enough force to defeat them, you won't
have to start a fight to get your way. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., echoes the
arguments over Vietnam when he says that if we don't persevere in Kosovo,
"tyrants in Europe and Asia and the Middle East will run wild because there's
no one on the block to speak for the values and security that we hold
dear."

            But consider the history
of credibility since World War II. There have, of course, been occasions when
the United States let its credibility founder. In the '60s, there was the Bay
of Pigs; in the '70s, the fall of South Vietnam; in the '80s, the retreat from
Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks; in the '90s, Somalia. In each
case, the United States committed force and then withdrew after the situation
became intolerable.

            Did these defeats irreparably harm our credibility and
propel would-be aggressors to believe that the United States would never fight?
Perhaps--although I don't remember too many Republicans saying that the Gipper
had irreparably jeopardized American security by pulling the Marines out of
Beirut. (The line between a deft, strategic withdrawal and a collapse of
credibility is in the eye of the beholder.) U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in
1973 didn't prevent the United States from using its nuclear deterrent to keep
the Russians out of the Yom Kippur war later that year.

            Conversely, American
wins haven't dissuaded tyrants. As Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne have
written: "Just as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was not deterred by
U.S. action against Iraq; Saddam Hussein was not deterred by U.S. action in
Panama, Manuel Antonio Noriega was not deterred by U.S. action in Grenada,
Lebanon and Vietnam; Ho Chi Minh was not deterred by U.S. action against North
Korea; and Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin were not deterred by U.S. action
against Adolf Hitler." Tyrants, it seems, act up whether the United States has
been winning or losing.

            Some have argued that because Kosovo represents such a huge
commitment of U.S. power, it can't be compared to, say, Lebanon or the Bay of
Pigs. (Lieberman made this argument on Meet the Press recently.) And
others have said that since this is a NATO operation, it's different--although
the principle is the same whether its one nation or 19 that are fighting. But
neither of these arguments holds up. Vietnam represented a much larger
commitment of U.S. force than we see now in Yugoslavia and yet the United
States retreated from Indochina. Likewise, NATO's credibility is said to be at
stake in Kosovo. But who can doubt that NATO's original mission as a
defensive alliance would remain strong even if Milosevic managed to
prevail in Kosovo? Would a crazed Russian dictator in 2020 really believe that
he could roll tanks into Germany with impunity because NATO had failed to wrest
a Yugoslavian province from Belgrade's domination in 1999?

            It's telling that the
credibilitists don't apply their standards to all countries. Ironically,
there's a certain Blame America First quality to their argument. Cold Warriors
like Kissinger hardly argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended Soviet
credibility. If credibility were such a fragile commodity, we wouldn't have
needed the Reagan buildup after the Russians blinked during the Cuban Missile
Crisis, or in 1973 when they made noises about helping the Arabs in the Yom
Kippur war and then backed down.

            Perhaps the better conceit than credibility is
consistency . The consistent Israeli policy, for instance, of not giving
concessions to terrorists is widely acknowledged to have stymied the once
common hijackings and other acts of terror directed against Israel. The
consistency of Israeli policy made the difference. But consider Israel in
Lebanon. Today, the Jewish state maintains only a thin security zone in
southern Lebanon; deeper in Lebanon, Hezbollah guerillas now operate openly in
territory once policed by Israeli forces. But who thinks this retreat has
eroded Israeli credibility? I doubt military planners in Damascus and Tripoli
think of the Israelis as softies.

            The difference between
consistency and credibility is that consistency implies a reason. You will use
force to defend some policy or principle. This is inherently more credible than
a commitment to use force for no good reason except that you said you would.
It's more credible because it is more limited and because it's more plausible
that you'll do something if it's something you have a good reason to do,
whether you've said you'll do it or not.

            For example, suppose NATO could establish a consistent
principle that the Western nations will not permit genocide or near-genocidal
ethnic cleansing to take place anywhere they are in a position to stop it
(i.e., there would be no pretense of an obligation to invade Russia or China or
far-flung regions like East Timor). By discouraging future ethnic slaughters,
that would give an added moral justification to saving the Kosovars. That would
be credibility worth fighting for. Unfortunately, most of today's credibility
mongers invoke credibility precisely to avoid such a moral commitment.

            Incredible.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Refugee Showdown

            The European press engaged
in name-calling Wednesday over the handling of the Kosovar refugee crisis. In
an exclusive interview with La Stampa of Turin, Italy, NATO Secretary-General Javier
Solana said that after much debate European countries had agreed that 120,000
refugees should be airlifted to Western Europe. But the Guardian of London
reported on its front page that the countries of the European Union are "at
loggerheads" on the issue and insist that they can absorb no more than a
10 th of the one million Albanian Kosovars ousted by Serbia. The
countries are heading for a showdown over which of them will accept refugees,
how many, at what cost, and on what terms, the paper said.

            On the Guardian 's
op-ed page, columnist Polly Toynbee attacked British government policy, saying
"it's not body bags the Government fears at the moment, it's live Kosovan
bodies swamping our shores." In another British liberal paper, the Independent , France
was condemned for its initial refusal, subsequently reversed, to accept any
refugees, with reference to the "similar attitude struck during the Bosnian
war," and Germany was attacked for "drastically reducing the numbers it had
been expected to take."

            France's leading newspaper, Le Monde , said in an
editorial Wednesday that the French government has "good and solid reasons" for
not wanting to accept the Kosovars--that to do so would be to condone "ethnic
cleansing" and to play Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's game. But it
added that Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's position would be clearer and less
subject to the suspicion that he was only worried about reopening the country's
immigration debate, if he carried his argument to its logical conclusion. This
being that the refugees can only be returned to Kosovo if there is some kind of
intervention on the ground. "The defence of the right of the refugees to return
home is a slogan empty of meaning if one continues to exclude categorically the
committal of ground troops," the editorial concluded.

            Like Solana in his
interview with La Stampa ,Western European newspapers stand united
behind NATO's outright rejection of Milosevic's cease-fire offer, and the idea
of sending in ground troops seems to be gathering ever stronger support. But
Secretary-General Solana stressed the limitations of the NATO offensive. "One
can't do miracles with countries with pilots who belong to countries that have
parliaments," he said. "One has to go forward step by step. General [Wesley]
Clark, furthermore, has two constrictions: to safeguard the lives of the pilots
and to guarantee that there is no collateral damage. So this is not a war in
the classic sense but a military campaign." The conservative Daily Telegraph of
London said in an editorial that Milosevic's promised respite from "hounding,
killing and raping Kosovars does not begin to meet alliance requirements." The
alliance should keep in mind the "infamy of what is happening and hold true to
the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law which its
founding treaty proclaims."

            The Israeli papers continued to wrestle Tuesday (they were
not published Wednesday) with the analogies between the Kosovo crisis and the
Holocaust and with Israel's wartime debt to the Serbs. "As a Jew, I am sure it
is my obligation to come to the aid of Milosevic's victims in Kosovo," Elie
Wiesel, author, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, wrote on
the front page of Yediot Aharanot . "Some say that when we, the Jews in
Europe, needed the world's intervention, no one came to our help. But does that
mean we must be indifferent today? On the contrary. What the world did not do
then, it is doing now." Yet he dismissed comparisons between Milosevic and
Adolf Hitler: "What is happening in Kosovo is not a Holocaust. A Holocaust is a
genocidal plan. Milosevic is committing grave crimes, but the comparison of
other disasters to the Holocaust has led to the diminution of its significance.
Every disaster has become a Holocaust and every criminal a Hitler."

            While the Russian papers Wednesday gave top billing
to domestic stories, especially the arrest warrant for President Boris
Yeltsin's tycoon friend Boris Berezovsky on charges of money laundering, they
covered the Kosovar refugee crisis in a manner often strongly critical of the
Western alliance. Izvestia said the West was losing its image as a
"wise, democratic, and civilized collective force ... Rather, as represented by
NATO, the West is doing insane things, contrary to the fundamental principles
of democracy." "Allegedly for the sake of their own salvation, the Kosovar
Albanians are being crushed from the air along with Serbs and Montenegrans.
Trying to prevent the Kosovars' mass exodus to Europe, NATO did nothing but
provoke it by its air strikes. The West's civilizing role seems to involve the
destruction, for the first time since Hitler, of Europe's most beautiful
cities. ... A game with no rules has started in the world, and one beyond the
limits of law, too. There is only one step from this to the apocalypse," it
said.

            Finally, an apology: In
a last week, I mistakenly referred to an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail
attacking the NATO air strikes as an editorial, when it was in fact a signed
piece by Marcus Gee.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Monica Unclothed

            At the outset of her
interview with Barbara Walters, Monica Lewinsky complains that she's been
"misportrayed." "Behind the name Monica Lewinsky, there's a person," she sobs.
For two hours, Lewinsky bares her soul to Walters and the world. Beneath a
flimsy undergarment of professed remorse, she exposes a psyche built on
blame-shifting, self-interest, and moral indifference.

            
               1. It's not my
fault. Lewinsky delivers her canned message in the interview's opening
seconds: "I waited a long time to be able to express to the country how very
sorry I am for my part in this past year's ordeal. ... I wouldn't dream of
asking Chelsea and Mrs. Clinton to forgive me. But I would ask them to know
that I am very sorry for what happened and for what they've been through." As
the interview progresses, however, Lewinsky defines her "part" in the fiasco
narrowly, leaving others to account for "what happened." When Walters asks
whether she takes "responsibility" for the affair, Lewinsky answers, "Not
complete responsibility." Later, Lewinsky speculates that Clinton came
to her for a sense of "normalcy." Walters reasonably inquires, "Can't you get
that from your wife?" Lewinsky bats the question aside. "That's something for
him to answer, not me," she says.

            2. It's just a disease. Lewinsky calls the
affair a "mistake" but frames the mistake in terms of technical error and
emotional imbalance rather than moral failure. She refers constantly to
self-esteem and anti-depressant medication. When asked why she has had affairs
with married men, she explains, "I didn't have enough feelings of self-worth."
What lesson does she draw from her mistakes? "I have a lot of healing to do,"
she concludes. Blaming her excesses on a chemical defect allows her to feel
good about her seductive inclinations. When asked whether her behavior with
Clinton was "out of control," she concedes, "I needed help. I needed to be on
some sort of anti-depressant." But she rephrases the question in flattering
terms: "For someone like me, who's a very passionate, loving woman, I think you
often get close to that line."

            
               3. It's all about
me. Walters asks Lewinsky about the May 1997 conversation in which
Clinton told her they had to end their affair because it was "not right in the
eyes of God." Lewinsky conveys no interest in this moral appraisal. Instead,
she reflects on her own needs. "I was heartbroken," she recalls. "It hurts."
Later, Walters asks about Clinton's refusal to have intercourse with her. "I
felt it was unfair to me ," Lewinsky pleads, "that I would never know
what it was like to be that intimate with him." As for the episode in which
Lewinsky exploded in jealousy over Clinton's meeting with journalist Eleanor
Mondale, Lewinsky explains, "I don't know that people can understand ... how
confusing it would be for me to on the one hand have someone saying things to
you--'I promise this, I promise that, I care about you, I don't want to hurt
you, I want to take care of you'--and then the actions are something different.
... It's pretty tough emotionally." She delivers this speech without a trace of
irony.

            4. It's about loyalty. Lewinsky emphasizes
at the outset that she's "very loyal." She says she "trusted" her friends to
keep silent about her affair and feels "violated and betrayed" by Linda Tripp.
Why did she give Kenneth Starr the stained dress that was in her mother's
apartment? Because to do otherwise would have violated her immunity agreement,
she explains, and "I needed to take care of myself and my family." Toward the
end of the interview, Walters asks, "Have you learned anything from this
experience?" "I've learned how important family is," Lewinsky replies. "I have
learned the true meaning of friendship."

            
               5. It's none of
your business. "From the time I was 2 years old," Lewinsky recalls
with a smile, "one of my first phrases [was], 'You are not the boss of
me !' And I've been that way ever since." When Walters suggests that
White House aides were right to keep Lewinsky away from Clinton, Lewinsky
defiantly retorts, "I don't think so. I don't think that my relationship hurt
the job he was doing. It didn't hurt the work I was doing. It was between
us . And I don't think it was their business."

            6. It's OK if you don't get caught. Walters
asks Lewinsky about her phone sex with Clinton. "It's fun ," the younger
woman giggles. "Did you ever think about Hillary Clinton?" Walters inquires. "I
did," says Lewinsky. "But I never thought she'd find out." In the interview's
final seconds, Walters asks, "If you had it to do all over again, would you
have the relationship with Bill Clinton?" Lewinsky reflects on what she has
learned. "There are some days that I regret that the relationship ever
started," she says, still grinning. "And there are some days that I just regret
that I ever confided in Linda Tripp."

            ABC's pre-interview hype depicted Lewinsky as a
smitten, deluded romantic. She thought Clinton was her "soul mate," went this
spin, whereas he was actually a reckless, ruthless narcissist. What the
interview actually suggests, however, is that both perceptions are true. The
man Lewinsky seduced was scheming, shameless, and incapable of accepting
responsibility for his conduct. And in her, he met his match.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 242: &quot;Reading Is Fundamentalism&quot;

            
               Kicking off a $7
million ad campaign, gospel singers, children, and evangelists poured out of a
giant copy of The Book , an updated, "cool" version of the Bible. But,
says The Book 's promoter, televangelist and former presidential
candidate Pat Robertson, "Our goal is not to sell Bibles. It is to make
Bible-reading cool and American." Participants are invited to devise other ways
to achieve that goal.
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 241)--"A Very Special ...":
            

            

               A recent episode of a popular TV series was postponed because it was
frighteningly like an actual, front-page event. Now the network says it will go
ahead and broadcast the show's season finale, although it too is disturbingly
reminiscent of that same event. How will the listing in TV Guide
describe the big show?
            

            
"Dharma and Greg (ABC; 8 p.m.): Dharma gets her toe stuck in a bowling
ball and shoots BBC newscaster Jill Dando in the head."-- Tim
Carvell
            

            
"Friends (NBC; 8 p.m.): A puffy, besotted Chandler dissolves his
Cabinet--again! Also: Phoebe decides to learn to ski."-- Bill Wasik
( Robert Rothman had a similar answer.)

            
"Drew's Uncle Charlton makes an ass of himself at the convention."-- Bob
Ringle
            

            
"Ally McBeal : A horrific school shooting provokes discussion and
soul-searching among the Boston legal community and the nation. Ally frets over
her uncertain love life and her biological clock."-- Ananda "Hear, Hear!
Death to the Autoreplies!" Gupta
            

            
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer : Head cheerleader Andie Pamerson decides to
remove her breast implants because they're possessed by demons."-- Steven
Kiefer
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            "Map maker, map maker, make me a map.
Find me a find, catch me a cat.
Map maker, map maker, make up your mind,
and make me a perfect map!"

            
--from the Broadway musical Fiddler Somewhere in the General Vicinity of the
Roof
            

            The news event most
participants played with was, of course, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy.
This story contains two sure-fire comic ingredients (at least for 12-year-old
boys): incompetence and destruction. Thus, Roadrunner . Thus, the string
of successes on Late Night With David Letterman involving the dimwitted
demolition of culturally evocative objects--Running Stuff Over With a Steam
Roller, Dropping Stuff off a Five-Story Tower, Crushing Stuff in a Hydraulic
Press, Dropping a 1,000-Pound Weight Onto Stuff, Crashing Into Stuff With a
Locomotive. With one fleeting exception, when he shot up, and later blew up,
his own cue cards, Dave shunned firearms and explosions. Just not funny. If he
were alive today, he'd never get a show on the WB.

            
               Buffy the Vampire
Answer
            

            I don't have a copy of TV Guide around, but
the New York Times described Tuesday's episode this way: "Cordelia likes
the new watcher."

            Last month, the WB pulled "Earshot,'' an episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Sarah Michelle Gellar stumbles onto a
mass-murder plan by fellow students. This past Monday, the network announced
that it would run Buffy's two-part finale, "Graduation Day," chockablock with
gun-toting high-school kids.

            "We are airing the
episodes. There are no plans to pull them," said Julie Kingsdale, a WB
spokeswoman owned by Time Warner Inc. No, wait: It is the WB and not Kingsdale
that is owned by Time Warner. Under current U.S. law, human beings cannot be
owned and must instead be rented.

            
               A Personal Tribute
From Jon Delfin
            

            To the shame of my
closest friends, I am now hooked on Buffy. Been watching since December. My
favorite episode so far was the one where Armageddon was the "B" story. Last
night's best moment (which I suspect won't travel well out of context) was when
the prom emcee thanked Buffy for saving so many students' lives that "our class
has the lowest mortality rate in the history of the school!"

            
               Augmented
Quotations Extra
            

            (Each final sentence added by News Quiz.)

            

               "If you do the procedure correctly, it's very
safe. And right after surgery, I take the fat I sucked out and fry up a couple
of eggs."--Dr. Alan Kling defends liposuction, despite a few regrettable
deaths.

               "This product is made with fur from animals that
may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poisoning,
clubbing, stomping or drowning, and may have been trapped in steel-jawed
leghold traps. Or by improperly performed liposuction."--Warning label that
would have appeared on fur coats had Beverly Hills approved Proposition A.

               "Instead of Theodore Roosevelt's 'talk softly and
carry a big stick,' we have yelled and carried a toothpick. And so I announce
my intention to undergo penile enlargement, and as long as you're down there,
let's go for the scrotum enhancement."--Retired but not retiring, Newt Gingrich
assesses our Kosovo policy.

               "Supposedly everybody
was watching, and in reality no one was watching. But then again, who wants to
see Newt Gingrich get his penis stretched?"--Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lambert
Lincoln assesses security failings at the Energy Department.

            

            
               Tech
Talk
            

            

               
                  Slate
                has ordered the autoreply shut off. There is,
however, little they can do about the fawning farewells to Robert Rubin.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Chinese takeout.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Me on Me on Garrison Keillor

            

               
                  (Note: Garrison Keillor's new book, Me by Jimmy (Big Boy)
Valente as Told to Garrison Keillor , was published Monday. The publisher
describes it as "an uproarious political satire about a professional wrestler
who's elected governor.")
               
            

            
               What have you got
against Garrison Keillor?
            

            Me:
Nothing.

            
               Come on, you're talking
to me.
            

            Me:
Nothing, really. Just one time (this was years before I was a second-tier
public radio personality) I went to see his show at the Tech College, caught
him out in the corridor, and lied to him about how much I liked his show
(really, he talks so slow it makes me nervous, plus all that lip noise
indicating introspection being released into the atmosphere) and, silly boy,
launched into how I was doing a live daily radio show from a greasy spoon and
all, and he looked at me and said, "Do you know where the bathroom is?" I did,
having just been there. But I vowed on the spot that, should I ever be in a
position to be accosted by fans, or faux fans, in a hallway, wanting to tell me
about their life, I would always have something more constructive to say.

            
               Unless you really have
to pee.
            

            Me:
True. But I try to emulate country music stars--they may be assholes, but
they're great to their public.

            
               Working on the asshole
part?
            

            Me: You
should talk.

            
               Right. So what besides
that?
            

            Me:
Nothing. Well, in every press interview I've ever had that goes over 25 words,
two of them are "Garrison" and "Keillor." That gets to you pretty quick. They
all want to talk about what we have in common, as if I'm doing Lutheran
standup. I told one guy from Night Scene in Biloxi, Miss., that I was up
to .67 Keillor Units, but that was just bravado and doesn't include royalties,
speaking fees, catalog sales, ancillary rights, etc. Now this well-timed new
book should put him way ahead. You could probably get two or three of me for
one Garrison now.

            
               And a player to be
named later. So it's the shadow thing?
            

            Me:
Yeah. Either he's getting bigger or the sun is setting.

            
               On the other hand, he's
got Mark Twain between him and daylight.
            

            Me:
That would account for the occasional white suit.

            
               And he's got to get
past Ring Lardner first.
            

            Me:
True. And Benchley. And S.J. Perelman ...

            
               ... can rest in
peace.
            

            Me: You
said it .

            
               Who wins a Jesse "The
Body" vs. Gary "The Kitty Boutique" grudge match?
            

            Me: My
money's on Garrison, as long as it stays out of the parking lot.

            
               Yeah, in a parking lot
he's dead, bent over the trunk of a Trans Am, face smeared against the rear
window.
            

            Me:
Brains all over the Oakley Thermonuclear Protection decal.

            
               Yeah. For messing with
the best.
            

            Me:
Hooyah! But if it's strictly hyperbole, with the ring strung with verbal barbed
wire, Garrison will helicopter him on one finger so Jesse pees outside the
ring.

            
               Read the new book,
huh?
            

            Me: Worse, I took it on
vacation. Fortunately, I had Nabokov's short stories. White Russians drinking
the same. Anyway, Me is kind of a comic book, very heavy on graphics
like you used to find in Johnson and Smith catalogs, and rife with bold print
emphasizing nothing in particular:

            

               Fairbanks White Blaze Vanderbilt Used Rambler Alcan Highway The post
office The cogs simply do not mesh As a bear would say goodbye to a leg
trap
            

            
               That's not bad. I kind
of like that.
            

            Me:
Sounds like Red Green on acid.

            
               So you pretty much
liked the book then?
            

            Me: No.
It's pretty hard to parody a parody.

            
               But it's "a political
satire."
            

            Me:
Animal Farm was a political satire. "A Modest Proposal," was a political
satire. What Garrison has written is a parody. Look it up. And why do we call
him by his first name, anyway? What is he, "Saddam"?

            
               Anything else you liked
about the book?
            

            Me: The guy looking at the
Playboy spread "The Women of NPR." Now that's funny.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Advise and Consent (Also Obstruct, Delay, and Stymie)

            Five months ago, the U.S.
Sentencing Commission achieved something remarkable. Chairman Richard Conaboy
resigned, leaving the seven-member commission with exactly zero members. Since
then, President Clinton has nominated no one to fill the empty seats. The
commission still has more than 100 employees, $9 million to spend, and no
authority at all over federal sentencing policy.

            Nor has the president
nominated anyone to replace China Ambassador Jim Sasser, who returns home in
May. According to MSNBC and the New York Times , at least six gray
eminences, including former Rep. Lee Hamilton, former National Security Adviser
Anthony Lake, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili,
have turned down the job. The president did manage to send the Senate Richard
Holbrooke's nomination as U.N. ambassador in February, eight months after the
previous U.N. delegate left and eight months after Clinton announced he would
nominate Holbrooke. Not that Holbrooke will be taking office any time soon:
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., refuses to schedule a confirmation hearing for him
till the administration agrees to Helms' U.N. reform package.

            Holbrooke, at least, will get a hearing someday. In
February, the president again nominated Bill Lann Lee as assistant attorney
general for civil rights, a nomination the Senate has refused to consider for
the past two years. Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says
he won't hold any hearing on Lee's nomination.

            The appointments process
is a perennial source of indignation for goo-goos. Even so, it seems
particularly grim these days. There are different explanations for the various
holdups above--the sentencing commission is empty because Democratic and
Republican senators failed for months to compromise on a slate of nominees;
Holbrooke's nomination was delayed by an almost-but-not-entirely meritless
ethics charge; the Beijing job is difficult to fill because no one wants to
defend Clinton's China policy to Senate Republicans, etc.--but together they
suggest a process that is astonishingly screwed up.

            The time it takes presidents to confirm nominees has soared
in recent years: On average, it took Clinton more than eight and a half months
to confirm his initial appointees, up from five months for Ronald Reagan and
less than three for John Kennedy. According to ranking Judiciary Committee
Democrat Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., it now takes more than 260 days for the Senate
to confirm a federal judicial nominee, up from 183 days in 1996 and only 86
days in 1994. One judge waited more than three years for confirmation. It takes
eight to 10 months for the average ambassadorial nomination to be approved. The
administration is overflowing with unconfirmed "acting" officials. A 1998
survey found that "acting" officials hold about 20 percent of jobs reserved for
presidential appointees.

            Some of this mess is to be expected. Filling
positions is always a hassle during the last years of a two-term presidency: No
one wants to chuck a good career for a lame-duck job. And a divided government
inevitably slows confirmations: Republican senators are more skeptical of
Clinton appointees than Democrats are.

            But the screwiness of
the process runs deeper, and almost everyone in Washington deserves a share of
the blame. Clinton, especially early in his term, has taken endless months to
nominate candidates for critical executive branch and judicial openings. The
confirmation process has become massively politicized. "Elections no longer
settle anything," says Colby College Professor G. Calvin Mackenzie, the leading
authority on the appointments process. "What used to be the norm--that the
president wins the election and appoints his people--is no longer. Now the
losing party continues to fight through the appointments process."

            All Cabinet-level appointees are now fair game for a
confirmation challenge. The deference the Senate used to grant sub-Cabinet
nominees is vanishing, too. Senators have increasingly deployed secret "holds"
to delay confirmations, often for reasons having nothing to do with a nominee's
qualifications. Helms, for example, held up numerous ambassadorial appointments
to pressure Clinton to reorganize the State Department. Committee chairs also
refuse to schedule confirmation hearings: Helms (again) derailed William Weld's
nomination as ambassador to Mexico by refusing to let Weld testify. The
confirmation process is "nasty and brutish without being short," as Anthony
Lake quipped after his nomination as CIA director went down in flames.

            The number of
presidential appointees has multiplied--including judges, there are more than
4,000, five times as many as in Kennedy's time--making it difficult for the
Senate to find time to consider everyone. Cumbersome ethics rules have made
simply accepting a nomination onerous: Health and Human Services Secretary
Donna Shalala had to pay accountants $20,000 just to complete her financial
disclosure forms. Nominees usually have to give up their lucrative law
practices and businesses as they await confirmation, a sacrifice that leaves
them without income for months or years.

            It was not always this way. Until the late '60s, the Senate
was deferential to the (many fewer) presidential nominees. It did much more
consenting than advising. Abe Fortas' 1968 nomination as chief justice of the
Supreme Court, which Republicans delayed to death, marked the first sign of
change, but Robert Bork's 1987 Supreme Court nomination truly ushered in the
era of appointments warfare. Since Bork, partisan interest groups and
grandstanding senators have freely challenged even obscure nominees.

            You can make a case that
the appointments mess is more aesthetic than substantive. The Senate, after
all, is apparently nearing a compromise on the sentencing commission, and the
president will likely nominate seven new commissioners in the next few weeks.
Holbrooke's U.N. nomination may be iced by Helms for a bit longer, but everyone
agrees that he will be confirmed. The administration will find a China envoy.
Lee has already been serving as acting assistant attorney general for 14
months. If the Senate refuses to hold a confirmation hearing, he will continue
in that acting job till the end of Clinton's presidency. These are the
exceptions: Most nominees are confirmed smoothly. And whether or not all the
right jobs are filled with exactly the right people, the United States still
manages to negotiate with China and the United Nations, the civil rights
division still manages to file cases, and judges still manage to impose
sentences.

            But the rising obstructionism does damage government.
Presidents, who are elected to remake executive policy, find themselves
hamstrung. Career civil servants act in place of unconfirmed presidential
appointees. The career folks are unwilling and unable to impose the policy
changes the president may want. The president often skirts the law by
appointing "acting" officials who "act" for years (such as Lee), depriving the
Senate of its constitutional right to approve appointments. The eternal
shortage of judges means that some cases are adjudicated peremptorily. The
president--and this has been especially true of Clinton--frequently nominates
the least offensive nominee rather than the most qualified in order to pacify
the Senate. The endless obstacles to confirmation deter the best candidates:
According to Mackenzie, the presidential personnel office must frequently offer
a job to its fourth or fifth choice because the top candidates don't want to
endure the inconvenience.

            The goo-goos would cut the number of presidential
appointments by a third or more, lessening the burden on the Senate and
allowing the president to pick better candidates. They would eliminate
senatorial holds. They would simplify background investigations and financial
disclosures. These are promising and admirable ideas--modest solutions to a
modest problem. Appointment and confirmation is a political process, and like
any political process it will always be messy. But it doesn't have to be
this messy.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Go E-Mail Yourself

            
               
                  Slate
                is pleased to
announce a new feature: E-mail This Article. Just click on the words "E-mail
This Article" at the top of each article. That's all there is to it.

            Well, obviously, there's more to it than that. If
that was all there was to it, we would have made it something like, "Give Me a
Million Dollars" or "Send Milosevic to Hell" or "Have a Nice Day."

            But clicking on the words E-Mail This
Article is all you have to do. 
                  Slate
                Program Manager
Andrew Shuman and his crack team of developers take it from there. Your click
sets off an alarm in their lair, Shuman kicks awake his nearest dozing acolyte,
and he or she will personally retype the 
                  Slate
                article in
question and e-mail it to anyone you choose. Or so they've explained it to me.
You can even e-mail it to several people at once, thanks to the miracle of
carbon paper, or something. What gets e-mailed is not just the URL (Web
address) and not the HTML page, which some e-mail programs can't handle, but a
plain text version of the article itself.

            Who should you e-mail

                  Slate
                articles to? Friends, enemies, members of Congress,
potential subscribers, and advertisers (thanks!) ... the possibilities are
endless! One option you should not overlook is e-mailing to yourself. Why would
you wish to do that? After all, 
                  Slate
                readers are all much too
popular, successful, and psychologically secure to send themselves flowers or
any such thing. You are not the sort of folks who need to artificially inflate
your in-boxes, thank you very much. But consider:

            

               E-mailing yourself an article is a way of putting it aside to read
later.

               Reading e-mail at your desk looks more like working than reading

                     Slate
                  's elegantly designed Web pages. (Caution: this should not
be interpreted as an attempt by the Microsoft Corp. to collude with you to
deprive your employer of your services. Solitaire is for that.)

               If you download your e-mail, you can read 
                     Slate
                   articles
without going online.

               You can print out the e-mail using fewer pages than printing out directly
from the Web.

               If you finally think of someone else to e-mail the article to, you can do
that.

            

            Do remember that spamming is bad form, and avoid
e-mailing 
                  Slate
                articles to people who wouldn't want to get them.
Unless, of course, in your opinion the article is so insightful and brilliant
that it must be forced upon the ignorant and wrongheaded. In that case, e-mail
away.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Judge Me by My
Actions
            

            I write to you about the comments by Paul Krugman
in a to a recent column of his in this magazine ("Don't Blame It on Rio ... Or
Brasilia Either"). In it, Krugman states that during the week prior to my being
offered the central bank presidency by President Cardoso, I "was negotiating
with the government" and that meant I knew nothing bad was going to happen to
Brazil. At the same time, he goes, Soros was "buying up large quantities of
Brazilian debt at deep discounts."

            Paul Krugman is a great economist, perhaps the best
in his generation. As a journalist, however, he was careless, and I happened to
be his unlucky victim. His accusation is false. He did not bother checking with
me. I did meet with senior government officials that Wednesday (Jan. 27), but I
was not offered any government job, not the least the central bank presidency.
I did not have access to any privileged information either. As it turned out,
Friday was a chaotic day in the markets, and on Sunday I did get the
invitation, which I was honored to accept. These are the facts.

            Since then, Krugman has
written two notes on the episode, both available on his Web site. In them he
states that he does not believe that I am corrupt (thanks, but in my worst
nightmares I never dreamed my name and the word corruption would appear on the
same page) and that he did not treat me unfairly. I beg to disagree. Whether
Krugman thinks it is right or wrong for someone with market experience to take
a government post is immaterial. People should be judged by their actions and
their record, not by labels of any kind, not by rumors.

            

               --Arminio Fraga
            

            

               Commentary
            

            I suppose you think you
are being iconoclastic by publishing Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter's nasty
musings on King Hussein on the day of his funeral (see ""). You are wrong. It
is never iconoclastic or even interesting to read the predictable
chauvinism-driven propaganda of hacks: The Israelis (the right-wing ones,
anyway) are always right. The Arabs are always wrong. It is so very tired. Too
bad that the kind of thinking these two represent has led to so many dead
(Israelis and Arabs) over the past 50 years.

            
               --M.J.
Rosenberg
            

            Chevy
Chase, Md.

            
               And
Dissent
            

            Why are you subjecting your loyal and (usually)
enthusiastic readership to the reactionary, bigoted, and sexist drivel of Midge
Decter and Norman Podhoretz in ? We don't subscribe to 
                  Slate
                in
order to expose ourselves to the ramblings of Anita Bryant's spiritual
parents.

            While Podhoretz may be correct in his opinion of Al
Sharpton, his comments regarding Sharpton and Jesse Jackson possess a thinly
disguised undertone of racism: As he castigates "white liberals" for assuming
that "Negroes" could do no wrong, his discussion of Sharpton's actions seem to
say, "Well, what can you expect? We told those white liberals years ago that
you couldn't expect more from Negroes." Podhoretz implies that Sharpton's
behavior is both representative of and entirely in keeping with the "character"
of African-Americans in general.

            Of Decter's comments, the less said the better.
While we may deplore that sex has become the dominating factor in many young
people's lives, the goal should be to expand and emphasize the nonsexual means
of personal expression ("liberation") available to them, not to return to the
repressive and contaminating moral hypocrisies of a previous age.

            The best thing that may
be said of Podhoretz and Decter is that their biological clocks can't have many
more minutes left on them. And that the editors of 
                  Slate
                will
never see fit to subject their readership to them again.

            
               --Christopher
Milazzo
            

            
Albuquerque, N.M.

            
               Straight
Shooter
            

            In his "," Jonathan Chait says it's misleading to
focus on the ratio of tax revenues to GDP. Why? Because the boom in stock
prices has led to a big jump in federal tax receipts but isn't counted as an
addition to GDP. But why should it be? The price of a stock reflects the
present value of expected future earnings; these earnings will be counted as
income when--and if--they're achieved. It would surely be silly to count the
expected earnings implicit in the stock price of Amazon.com as income earned
today.

            Chait also errs when he
criticizes the Tax Foundation. The group, he says, "assumes that the average
taxpayer pays an average share of estate and capital gains taxes, which is
absurd." In fact, it isn't absurd at all. The median or modal taxpayer may not
pay the average, but the average one obviously does.

            
               --Ira Carnahan
            

            
Washington

            

               Taxonomy
            

            Jonathan Chait may be correct that 40 percent of
income does not go to the federal government, but he is wrong if he
thinks that we don't pay around that in taxes overall. Does he include the
Social Security and Medicare "non-taxes" in his calculations of tax burdens?
State, local, sales, property, and gasoline taxes? Does he count the other 7.5
percent of one's salary that goes to Uncle Sam in his tax burden number?

            Back of the envelope, it seems that every working
American pays a flat 15 percent of salary, plus around 5 percent to 10 percent
in state and sales taxes on every dollar earned or spent, respectively, plus
some unknown amount in property taxes (and renters get screwed the most here,
since rent of course includes prorated property tax pass-throughs), plus
gasoline taxes, plus some special local taxes (such as D.C.'s extra taxes on
restaurant meals, liquor, and other "sin" taxes). All told this seems to add up
to a total tax burden for a typical family of nearly 40 percent.

            The typical American pays a greater percentage of
total income to taxes than the rich who would have to pay estate or capital
gains taxes. This is true because the vast majority of tax revenue that is
collected in the United States is regressive: sales taxes, property taxes
(which are passed on to renters, so paid by everyone), Social Security, etc.
And poorer people are more likely to spend money on things like cigarettes,
alcohol, and so on, making their total percentage tax burden even larger.
Finally, Social Security tops out at around $70,000, making it a smaller
percentage tax burden for the rich than the poor.

            Perhaps Chait and his
buddies should donate more to the government.

            
               --Eric M.
Eisenstein
            

            
Philadelphia 

            
               Notes on
Groove
            

            Almost everything Cullen Murphy states about the
word "groovy" in "" is accurate, except for its original meaning. Jazz
musicians did indeed use the term to indicate being "in the zone," but it
didn't necessarily refer to the grooves of a record. It referred more to the
sense of swing derived from the rhythmic variation in their playing of eighth
notes. While classical performers tended to interpret their eighth notes
strictly and evenly, jazz musicians provided a little bounce in theirs, a
slightly uneven distribution of rhythm achieved by placing them slightly behind
the beat, and/or by making the first eighth note slightly longer than the
second. This heightened the sense of groove, by playing against the beat rather
than on top of it. Musicians often refer to a great rhythm section with terms
like "grooving," "popping," and "killing."

            All great jazz musicians
have an original approach to playing eighth notes, from Louis Armstrong to
Coleman Hawkins to Lester Young to Charlie Parker to Bill Evans to Miles Davis
and on and on. They all play eighth notes in a unique way. They all have their
own "grooves." Jazz musicians also experimented with several mood-altering
substances, and this also plays into a sense of "feeling groovy."

            
               --Andre White
            

            Montreal, Canada

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Suffocating the Cat

            Gen. Augusto Pinochet made
a comeback on Europe's front pages Friday after British Home Secretary Jack
Straw announced that Spanish extradition proceedings against him could go
ahead. The Daily Telegraph of London claimed that it would now be "several
years" before the 83-year-old former president of Chile would either be sent
for trial in Spain or freed. In Spain, the British decision was warmly
welcomed. El País
said in an editorial Friday that the mere fact that Pinochet is to be
subjected to extradition proceedings constitutes "an irreversible victory for
the rights of man." It represents "the birth of an effective universal
jurisdiction for dealing with crimes against humanity and, at the same time, an
unequivocal warning that the United Kingdom will not be a refuge for
blood-stained dictators."

            In another editorial, El Mundo of Madrid said much the same thing, welcoming the
arrival of "a supranational judicial structure that will be able from now on to
knock down the protective barriers that tyrants throughout the world have
erected around themselves." Both papers welcomed the fact that Pinochet's
friends and supporters-- El País named Margaret Thatcher, Henry
Kissinger, ex-President Bush, Sen. Jesse Helms, and the pope--had failed in
their efforts to get him freed.

            In London, the
conservative press took the opposite view. The Daily Telegraph called
Straw "a straw man" and ridiculed his claim to have made his decision "with an
open mind." The paper said, "The Home Secretary does not allow his open mind to
be troubled by the fact that, long after Gen. Pinochet peacefully relinquished
power, his former opponents are pleading for his return. Nor does the damage
inflicted by the affair on British national interests, already palpable in the
Falklands and on our annual exports to Chile of 200 million pounds [$320
million], disturb the peace of the ministerial open mind." The tabloid Daily
Mail quoted Thatcher as saying that Straw had "demeaned his office" with a
vindictive decision.

            The main story across Europe, though, was NATO's admission
that it accidentally bombed a refugee convoy in Kosovo. This gave rise to much
comment that clean wars don't exist and renewed support for NATO's decision to
continue the bombing. "Wars mean casualties" said the Telegraph , calling
once again for the deployment of ground troops. And the liberal Guardian had an
editorial saying exactly the same thing: "If Nato is to blame for Wednesday's
carnage, then that has only underscored the inadequacy of air power. Forces on
the ground is becoming urgent." Le Figaro of Paris said the West has no choice but to
continue fighting and quoted a Provençal proverb: "Once one has started
suffocating the cat, one has to finish it." The German press reported broad
support in the Bundestag for the government's commitment to the war and noted
American reservations about its peace plan.

            
               Corriere della Sera of Milan reported huge flight
delays in Italy because of congestion in the skies caused by military aircraft
bombing Yugoslavia. Five out of six domestic civilian flights are now departing
late, it said. In Britain, the Times reported that the BBC's world affairs editor, John
Simpson, was coming under fierce British government criticism for "Serb bias"
in his coverage from Belgrade. "In an astonishing attack, senior officials
accused him of presenting at face value claims by the Serbs about damage done
by Nato attacks, being grossly simplistic in suggesting that the Nato assault
has united the Serb population and Milosevic's forces, and of swallowing Serb
propaganda about the impact of Nato's air raids," the Times said. In an
editorial, the paper defended Simpson's reporting from Belgrade, but attacked
NATO for being so quick to blame Serbia for the deaths of Albanian refugees in
the disputed convoy incident.

            "The Pentagon's
inordinately clumsy handling of the news when it first broke must have left
Slobodan Milosevic weeping tears of joy," the paper said. Since the Pentagon
had no evidence at that time to show who was to blame, its spokesman Kenneth
Bacon "did the credibility of the Alliance nothing but harm by alleging that
Serb forces had done the killing themselves to embarrass Nato. ... [T]his
disastrously gave the impression that Nato might stoop to the black propaganda
at which the Milosevic regime excels."

            
According to an Australian biologist, certain
"rebel" worker bees have found ways of breeding in defiance of the convention
that only queen bees are allowed to reproduce. Ben Oldroyd of the University of
Sydney told the Sydney
Morning Herald Thursday that in normal bee colonies only the queen is
allowed to lay eggs, and if worker bees lay their eggs, they are destroyed in
seconds by other bees, which can identify the queen's eggs by a special
chemical she marks them with. Because of a genetic mutation, however, certain
bees are able to put a fake royal marker on their eggs, making other bees think
they are the queen's. The forgery enables a worker bee's eggs to survive,
thrive, and reproduce, Oldroyd said.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Arab Alert

            Arab newspapers are now
warning their readers that the current escalation of United States airstrikes
on Iraq could culminate in a major military offensive aimed at bringing down
President Saddam Hussein. The Pan-Arab Al-Quds Al-Arabi said Tuesday
that the U.S. and British bombings were virtually a repeat of Operation Desert
Storm except that they were conducted in slow motion so as to deflect media
attention and thus avoid an Arab backlash like the one that followed last
December's campaign. In the Bahrain daily Akhbar al-Khaleej , the
Egyptian columnist Assayed Zahra wrote that the United States was now carrying
out its intention to carve up Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines and to
trigger a civil war that would unseat Saddam.

            Zahra referred to an
interview Monday in the Turkish daily Milliyet in which Frank Ricciardone, the American
diplomat in charge of "transition" in Iraq, said that the division of Iraq
imposed by the no-fly zones was intended to be permanent. Ricciardone also
intimated that Iraq has no future as a united country in Washington's plans.
Ricciardone's interview with Milliyet was also discussed Tuesday in the
Saudi Arabian daily Asharq al-Aswat , which highlighted his remark that Saddam was
most likely to be deposed suddenly in a military coup. But, in sharp contrast
to what Zahra wrote, the Saudi paper stressed that Ricciardone said that he
thought the chances of Iraq breaking up after the overthrow of Saddam were
minimal.

            Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the daily Scotsman quoted "Washington
insiders" Wednesday saying there was now a clear U.S. policy to oust Saddam's
regime in six months to a year through small-scale but continuous air attacks.
The paper also quoted a Pentagon official saying that the United States has so
far been highly successful in keeping up public awareness levels. "Scale is
important," the unnamed official went on. "Too much bombing will raise Arab
hackles, but a continuous campaign will achieve what Britain and its allies,
including those in the Middle East, crave--the end of Saddam Hussein."

            The massacre of eight
Western tourists in Uganda this week was the subject of much editorial comment
in the British press, with the Times of London seeing it as a kind of karmic revenge for the
West's refusal five years ago to act against, or at first even acknowledge,
"the extraordinary genocide in Rwanda--the worst action of its kind since the
second world war." It said, "Those who died in the Bwindi Park have been, in a
sense, the victims of past indifference of outsiders." The Daily Telegraph , in
an unfortunate play on words, declared Wednesday in its main editorial: "The party in
Bwindi set out in search of mountain gorillas. They met instead murderous
guerillas."

            The Telegraph also said that "the prosecution of
those suspected of war crimes in the 1994 massacre should be pursued with much
greater vigour in the court set up for that purpose in Arusha, Tanzania." The
London Evening
Standard led Wednesday with a report that Rwandan rebels threatened
to kill U.S. and British tourists two weeks before the murders, but the Ugandan
authorities failed to pass on the warnings. The Guardian of London listed
27 countries or areas of the world that the British Foreign Office described as
dangerous to visit.

            The daily New Vision of Uganda led its front page Wednesday with
a report not mentioning the murders but stressing that 17 of the 32 abducted
tourists had escaped, and it placed this next to an account of a 19-year-old
Namibian woman winning the 1999 Face-of-Africa modeling contest at the Windhoek
Country Club.

            The link-up between Pat
Robertson, the TV evangelist, and the Bank of Scotland to launch a new
telephone banking service in the United States was the subject of a two page
feature in the Guardian , which said questions might
be raised over "why a bank presumably looking for long-term deposits might team
up with a man who believes the world as we know it might be about to end." The
Bank of Scotland "must just hope that it can recoup its investment before
Armageddon looms," the article concluded.

            Wednesday's Monica Lewinsky event in Europe was an
interview with Corriere della Sera of Milan in which she said that she
doesn't believe having oral sex was vulgar: "Some people like pizza for lunch;
others prefer a dessert." She also said she would never again fall in love with
a married man.

            The Prague Post reported
Wednesday that Russia had sought to reduce its $1.3 billion debt to Slovakia by
selling it a place on its latest mission to the space station Mir for $20
million. According to the paper, a Slovak defense ministry spokesman said that
since the debt would probably never be collectible, Slovakia had decided
instead to take advantage of this opportunity to send the first Slovak citizen
into space.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  True
Crime
                (Warner Bros.). Clint Eastwood, in his 21 st
directorial effort, is a decrepit newspaper reporter rushing to save an
innocent man on death row. The A-list critics who usually puff the star offer
only bland praise this time. The film is "assembled ... with loving care," says
Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune . It's "a wickedly effective
thriller," writes the Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert. And the New
York Times ' Janet Maslin finds it a "quietly poignant ... involving
thriller." The naysayers toss spit wads. The film is "a hopelessly cliched
newspaper yarn--I kept waiting for someone to scream into the phone, 'Baby, get
me re-write!' " (Chris Kaltenbach, the Baltimore Sun ). Says Kenneth
Turan in the Los Angeles Times : "It's a gritty story made in the
director's more elegiacal mode, a confusion of style and content that is not in
the film's best interests." No one comments on the movie's most notable
feature: that here Eastwood crusades on behalf of a character he would have
summarily dispatched, vigilante style, in previous films. (Check out David
Edelstein's 
                  Slate
                review ; and read a review of Eastwood's
Mission Ranch Restaurant in Carmel, Calif., here.)

            
               
                  The King and
I
                (Warner Bros.). This animated effort kiddifies the classic
Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The Chicago Sun-Times ' Ebert says the
themes about defying class and convention don't work: "kids aren't much tuned
into that." Trying to make the story interesting, the creators ladle in wacky
animals, an evil royal counselor, and a hot-air-balloon action scene--and
refuse to let the king die in the end! The result is "an above-average
Saturday-morning TV show," says Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun . The
animation gets mixed reviews: "The cartoon characters' faces and body language
aren't doing much of an acting job," says the New York Times ' Anita
Gates. To Robert Koehler in Daily Variety, the animation "is a curious
hodgepodge of awkward human movement, tired nature effects and fine painterly
backgrounds and detail work." (Discuss the real version of the musical with other stage
nuts in the "forum" at Musicals.net.)

            
               
                  Forces of
Nature
                (DreamWorks SKG). Reviews for the Ben Affleck-Sandra
Bullock romance are all over the place. Some like Affleck, some like Bullock,
others like neither. The soppy plot (wedding-bound strait-laced guy gets
waylaid by wild girl) produces severely mixed reaction as well. Turan in the
Los Angeles Times is captivated: Besides being "smartly written" and
"directed with a lively intelligence," the film "has several surprises in its
repertoire, and most--but not all--of them make this a most pleasant and
diverting venture," he says. The Village Voice isn't buying the
overuptight Affleck: "You can't have screwball comedy if only one party
desperately wants to screw," writes Justine Elias. Richard Corliss in
Time hates the whole thing: "Well, it had to come sometime: this is
DreamWorks' first reprehensible fiasco." A subtext to the reviews is outrage at
the ending, which critics try not to give away but still bridle at. "Forces
of Nature is less about the anarchic powers of love and sex than it is
about the bond between a man, a woman, and two nonrefundable, first-class
airline tickets," concludes Elias. Ebert is beside himself: "It's not even
clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy
ending," he writes in the Chicago Sun-Times . (The Affleck
Store--part of the official Affleck site--has to be seen to be
believed.)

            

               Television
            

            
               The
Oscars (March 21, ABC). Raspberries for Whoopi Goldberg's hosting
performance at the 71 st Academy Awards. Reviewers say she wasn't
funny and spent too much time congratulating herself. Los Angeles Times
TV critic Harold Rosenberg scored her "gratuitously coarse language and
one-liners, and cheap political jokes." The Boston Globe 's Jay Carr hit
Goldberg's habit of being her own best audience: "Goldberg spent too much time
laughing at her one-liners (often, she laughed alone)." Otherwise, everyone
expressed dismay at the epic, record length (four hours plus) and a dance
number strange even by Oscar standards (it included what were apparently
interpretive steps to World War II), but marveled at Roberto Benigni's
irrepressible speeches and Shakespeare in Love 's upset win. Second-day
stories in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times let the
Hollywood establishment lash out at Miramax capo Harvey Weinstein, who had the
temerity to take the Best Picture Oscar away from Steven Spielberg.
"[Weinstein's] costly promotional campaigns ... had paid off more handsomely
than expected," writes Bernard Weinraub in the New York Times . The big
spending is seen both as the roots of Shakespeare 's win and as
portentous of Normandy-scale campaigns on everyone's part next year.
(Everything you wanted to know about the Oscars is here.)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  Years of
Renewal
               , by Henry Kissinger (Simon & Schuster). Henry
Kissinger, who was not , gets hosannas for the third volume of his White
House memoirs. These were the boring Ford years, but Kissinger is given credit
for masterful analysis, trenchant characterizations, and vivid storytelling. In
an almost prostrate review on the front page of the New York Times arts
section, Richard Bernstein writes, "Mr. Kissinger's history of his own time in
office is a work whose breadth, clarity of vision and historical scope amply
justify its size. It is an event, a likely classic of its genre." Kirkus
Reviews agrees: "A brilliant, masterly, even seminal book." The Wall
Street Journal puts things a bit more into perspective: " 'Years of
Renewal' is an engrossing book, truly hard to put down, at least for
aficionados of U.S. foreign policy," writes Josef Joffe. (You can read
Time 's excerpt here.)

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  
                     Movie--
                  
                  The
Deep End of the Ocean ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The
Corruptor ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The Rage: Carrie
2 ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Wing
Commander ;

               
                  Death-- Stanley Kubrick;

               
                  Book--
                  Black Hawk Down: A
Story of Modern War , by Mark Bowden.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Analyze This ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Cruel Intentions ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Lock, Stock & Two Smoking
Barrels ;

               
                  Book -- Monica's Story , by Andrew Morton;

               
                  Theater -- Annie Get Your Gun ;

               
                  Theater -- Bright Lights, Big
City .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  8MM ;

               
                  Movie -- 200 Cigarettes ;

               
                  Movie -- The 
                  Other Sister ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Houdini Girl , by Martyn Bedford;

               
                  Book -- Perfect Murder, Perfect Town , by Lawrence
Schiller;

               
                  Theater--
                  Not About Nightingales .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  October Sky ;

               
                  
                     Movie --Jawbreaker ;

               
                  Movie -- Office Space ;

               
                  Music--
                  The Hot Rock , by Sleater-Kinney;

               
                  Book--
                  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith ,
by Anne Lamott;

               
                  Book -- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and
the Quest for the Ultimate Theory , by Brian R. Greene.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Good Nukes Make Good Neighbors

            South Asian papers gave
extensive coverage to the goodwill journey of Indian Prime Minister A.B.
Vajpayee, who crossed the Indo-Pakistani border on a bus this weekend to meet
with his counterpart Nawaz Sharif. According to Karachi's Dawn , Pakistan's foreign
minister emphasized that nuclearization had given rise to new challenges and
opportunities by bringing the two countries to "a defining moment."

            The two day summit
culminated in the Lahore Declaration, in which the parties resolved to
intensify efforts to solve the Kashmir issue through ministerial talks and
agreed to a series of "confidence-building measures." These measures include
providing advance warning of ballistic missile tests and the continuation of
the nations' respective unilateral moratoriums on nuclear testing. The
countries plan to ease travel restrictions, and Sharif is expected to take a
trip to New Delhi. The Times of India called the visit "a new chapter of amity in
Indo-Pakistan relations," while the Independent pointed toward organized protests in
Lahore as evidence that the "commitment to neighborly amity is still less than
total."

            The papers highlighted the symbolism of the event. Vajpayee
is the first Indian prime minister to visit Pakistan in the last 10 years. His
visit marked the opening of the first regular bus route between the quarrelling
nations since their foundation over 50 years ago. The Hindu of Madras quotes
Vajpayee's suggestion that "the running of the bus between the two countries
symbolizes the desire of the people to improve relations." The Guardian of London quotes
Pakistan's information minister's assertion that "in a situation where people
don't even make gestures, this is a powerful sign." Nevertheless, the Indian
papers differed in their assessment of the summit's outcome. The Hindu
commented that "this modest outcome was on expected lines and while it provided
a framework for a new beginning, a lot would depend on the follow-up," whereas
the Times of India wrote that the "bold steps" in the memorandum of
understanding "set the tone for a shared vision of peace and stability."

            The coverage in Pakistani
papers was tepid. The Lahore-based Nation reported that the visit took place "amidst
feeling of both apprehension and optimism." By contrast, the coverage of
the visit to Pakistan of China's defense minister in Karachi's Dawn was
glowing.

            Headlines throughout the world were also dominated by the
stalled Kosovo peace talks. Nine hours after the NATO deadline for a deal on
returning autonomy to the Yugoslavian province had passed, the French foreign
minister announced that the deadline had been extended by three days, thus
forestalling the airstrikes that NATO had threatened. The Sunday papers placed
the blame for the deadlock on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's
intransigent refusal to countenance a NATO-led force as peacekeepers, despite
the fact that Kosovo Albanians were holding out for a referendum on
independence once the three year interim period covered by the proposed
settlement expired. Britain's Daily Telegraph called Milosevic "Belgrade's master of
brinksmanship." The Sunday Times of London commented that the stalemate evinced
NATO's weak hand in forcing a settlement.

            In a story
titled "US fails to win right to bomb Kosovo," Britain's Independent commented
Monday that the Kosovo Albanians' refusal to unilaterally sign on to the
settlement frustrated U.S. attempts to corner Milosevic with the choice of
accepting the peace package or facing airstrikes. The paper remarked that the
Kosovo Albanians' refusal to assent makes it more likely that the talks will
end in "a fudged compromise."

            
The Sunday Times reported that British
police have had some success in sartorial sleuthing. A computerized database of
footprints found at crime scenes reveals that Reebok Classics recently
displaced Nike Air Max as the favorite footwear of British criminals. In one
case, police used a shoe print to link an unlucky Nike loyalist to 36 other
crimes. The paper said that although the police cannot use sneaker stereotyping
to arrest people, officers are told to watch out for suspicious shoes. Readers
beware of choice of footwear when in a country without a bill of rights!

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            How Free Is Louise?

            The
indictment of President Slobodan Milosevic by the International War Crimes
Tribunal in the Hague was variously interpreted Friday in the European press.
The hawkish papers of Fleet Street raised loud hurrahs, while some of the more
dovish ones on the continent were gloomy about its effects on the Kosovo war.
There was also widespread suspicion that NATO's war leaders had more to do with
the timing of Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour's announcement than she, insisting
on the independence of her U.N. role, cared to admit. There was general
unanimity, however, that her decision made a peace settlement much more
difficult to achieve and increased the prospect of NATO ground troops being
eventually deployed in Kosovo against Serb resistance.

            In
London, the Times and the Daily Telegraph , both conservative papers, were delighted.
The Telegraph said the indictment would put muscle into the United
States because "though Bill Clinton might be happy to compromise with a
fugitive from justice, the American people could not stomach such a peace with
dishonour." The Times said the West "has to thank the brave Canadian
judge" for ending any chance that NATO would grant Milosevic immunity from
arrest and prosecution--one of his principal peace conditions. Such immunity
would not only be "morally repellent," it was "now illegal," it said.

            The
liberal Independent of London was no less pleased, saying Milosevic
should have been indicted long ago. Its main front-page headline said the indictment has split the allies, but this was
effectively contradicted in an article by its political editor, Donald Macintyre, claiming that
the European allies were holding much closer to the U.S. and British positions
than was generally imagined and that German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's
much-reported statement that a ground invasion was "unthinkable" had actually
meant only that German troops would not participate. Clearly relying on British
government sources, Macintyre wrote that even the Italians don't rule out
entering Kosovo in "non-permissive" circumstances, but instead he described it
as "hypothetical" (though in an interview Thursday with the Italian magazine
Panorama , Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini warned that Italy would
"dissociate itself" from an invasion).

            The
liberal Guardian of London, while leading with the headline "War
crimes move dims peace hope," pronounced the indictment "overwhelmingly
positive" and said it augured well "not just for the resolution of this war,
but for the world of the twenty-first century." Its international commentator,
Martin Woollacott, wrote that the indictment, combined with the commitment of
more ground troops, a hardening of NATO's peace terms, and the intensification
of the air campaign, represents "a new strategy." It marks a moment when "NATO
ceases to be ready to deal with Milosevic and declares itself ready, instead,
to deal with Serbia." Woollacott noted that Arbour's words in the Hague, while
underscoring the independence of the tribunal, "suggested quite directly that
the timing of the indictment had been affected by the disclosure of
intelligence by certain countries. The control by the United States and Britain
of intercepts and other secret information has always meant that the war crimes
card could be played at a moment they deemed would best serve their
interests."

            In
Paris, Le Monde ,
welcoming the indictment as an important new step "in the fight against
impunity and barbarism," said Arbour had acted with full independence and
freedom, but this view was questioned south of the Alps. In Corriere della Sera of
Milan, the 90-year-old columnist Indro Montanelli, one of Italy's most
influential journalists, said he hoped it wasn't so, for this would mean that
the tribunal had deliberately timed the indictment to sabotage peace
negotiations. While British papers were expressing the hope that it would lead
to the overthrow of Milosevic by the Serbs, Montanelli predicted the opposite.
So did Libération of Paris, which said in an editorial that
President Jacques Chirac's call Thursday for an internal coup against Milosevic
was most unlikely to come about. Le Figaro also said that to think the Serbs would now desert
their leader showed "a deep misunderstanding of the psychology of a people
which considers itself persecuted and besieged." Writing from Belgrade for
La Repubblica
of Rome, Bernardo Valli reported that despite Milosevic's unpopularity and lack
of charisma, he now appears to have the country behind him.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
The House
endorsed sending U.S. troops to Kosovo . The nonbinding resolution
backing President Clinton's plan to assign 4,000 soldiers to a peacekeeping
force passed 219-191. Forty-four Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis
Hastert, R-Ill., joined Democrats in support. Many Republicans argued that
Clinton can't be trusted to bring the troops home on time. Democrats accused
Republicans of playing politics and undermining American unity in foreign
policy. Clinton's old spin: The House shouldn't endanger the peace talks by
debating the troops issue. Clinton's new spin: The "bipartisan" House vote
"confirms the strong commitment of the United States." The half-cynical spin:
Clinton will fail to fulfill the conditions the House placed on its approval (a
timetable for the troops' return; that Clinton will explain to the nation why
the troops were sent; that the troops will report to American commanders only).
The completely cynical spin: The Serbs and Albanians will kill the peace deal,
and the House will withdraw its support for sending the troops.
(3/12/99)
            

            
Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr invited the Justice Department to investigate his
spokesman for leaking and lying to investigators. The spokesman, Charles
Bakaly, says he's innocent but will resign. Background: After the New York
Times reported Jan. 31 that Starr thought he could indict a sitting
president, Starr launched an internal probe. In that probe, Bakaly denied to
Starr's FBI agents that he was the Times ' source. Now that the probe has
found evidence contradicting Bakaly's denial, Starr is referring his findings
to the Justice Department. The Washington Post calls this "an implicit
admission that [Starr] suspects serious wrongdoing on his own staff." The
spins: 1) This proves Starr is a vicious leaker. 2) This proves Starr won't
tolerate vicious leaking. Best tidbit: The Times says Starr's new
spokeswoman "did not return a telephone call seeking comment on Thursday's
developments." (3/12/99)
            

            

               Elizabeth 
               Dole launched her presidential
campaign exploratory committee. Pundits slotted her as the GOP field's
runner-up, trailing Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. Dole staged her announcement
with ordinary people, in implicit contrast to Bush's campaign launch days
earlier. Together, their announcements sandwiched the candidacy kickoff of
ex-Gov. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. The positive spins on Dole: 1) She's the first
serious female candidate for president. 2) She's a public servant but not a
politician. 3) She'll restore "civility" to politics. 4) She'll listen to
voters rather than dictate her views. 5) She's attractive to Democrats and
independents. 6) She's attractive to women. The negative spins: 1) She's too
tightly wound to handle the campaign trail's surprises. 2) She's too tightly
wound to handle the press. 3) She's too tightly wound to handle criticism. 4)
Her views are vague and mushy. 5) Nothing is more political than a politician
who pretends not to be one. (3/12/99)
            

            
Reports indicate
that China obtained atomic secrets from a U.S. nuclear lab and may have
used them to vastly improve its nuclear missiles. Republicans and the media
demand to know why U.S. security was lax and why the Clinton administration
didn't recognize, admit, or aggressively investigate the problem when the first
signs of trouble appeared in 1995. The White House says it got wind of the
problem in 1997 and responded promptly. Republicans plan to hold a hearing. The
spins: 1) Clinton didn't want to believe there was a problem because he knew it
would disrupt his policy of constructive engagement. 2) He knew there was a
problem but hid it anyway. 3) He hid the problem so it wouldn't stop him from
helping U.S. companies sell technology to China under the guise of constructive
engagement. 4) He hid the problem so it wouldn't stop him from being nice to
China in exchange for 1996 campaign contributions. 5) Republicans are blaming
Clinton in order to hide similarly lax security under Presidents Reagan and
Bush. (3/10/99)
            

            

               RJR
Nabisco 
               is breaking up . Nabisco will jettison the company's
tobacco interests and will sell its foreign cigarette business to Japan Tobacco
to shore up the severed domestic unit, known as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. The
media spun the story in two directions with two different villains. Story 1 is
about the excesses of the leveraged buyout era--exemplified by the RJR Nabisco
merger--and the comeuppance of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., which saddled
the merged firm with unbearable debt. Story 2 is about the rise of tobacco
litigation and regulation and the gradual financial buckling of evil cigarette
companies. The convergence story is that RJR merged with Nabisco in the hope of
escaping its "tobacco taint" but found instead that the taint simply spread to
Nabisco. (3/10/99)
            

            

               Joe 
               DiMaggio died of complications from lung
cancer surgery. News accounts recited his résumé--the Hall of Fame, nine World
Series championships, 11 All-Star games, and three American League Most
Valuable Player awards--but focused on his record 56 game hitting steak in
1941, which still stands today. While sports analysts compared his greatness on
the field with that of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, commentators traced his
celebrity to his courteous, humble, all-American, son-of-immigrants
personality. The spins: 1) DiMaggio represented the grace and dignity of the
good old days. 2) Ruth and Ty Cobb represented the pugnacity and decadence of
the good old days, and DiMaggio was the exception. (3/8/99)
            

            
Gov. George
W. Bush , R-Texas, announced he is forming a presidential campaign
exploratory committee. Though he won't officially declare his candidacy until
June, he paraded notable supporters such as former GOP Chairman Haley Barbour
and House GOP Chairman J.C. Watts Jr. before the press. His aides also listed
scores of governors and members of Congress who are backing him. Everyone
agrees his strategy is to create an air of inevitability and suffocate his
competitors. The spins against him: 1) He's inexperienced in public office. 2)
He's inexperienced in national politics. 3) He has no base. 4) He lacks
organization in early states. 5) He's had it too easy and is due for a fall. 6)
His expectations are too high. 7) Elizabeth Dole's entry into the race will
kill his momentum. 8) His supporters don't know what he stands for. 9) He
doesn't know what he stands for. (3/8/99)
            

            
Film director
Stanley Kubrick died . Obituaries recalled his movies' eight Academy
Awards, focusing on Dr. Strangelove , A Clockwork Orange , and
2001: A Space Odyssey , also mentioning Lolita and The
Shining . Commentators debated the significance of the bleak fantasies in
which he portrayed human recklessness, madness, brutality, murder, and nuclear
holocaust. The half-cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as
savages. The completely cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as
savages because they deserved it. (3/8/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Who's Worse, China or Russia?

            

               
                  Economist , May 15
            

            The
editors find
a silver lining in Chinese outrage over the bombing of its Belgrade embassy:
The famously withdrawn country may finally expand its role in world affairs.
... The magazine defends
day traders. The onliners have helped the market by driving down commissions
and encouraging efficient pricing. ... A column
feasts on Larry Summers' ill-suitedness for the politicking-heavy job of
treasury secretary ("Imagine the effort required for this man to feign interest
in the idiotic ramblings of some member of Congress, next to whom the stupidest
graduate student Mr. Summers ever met was John Maynard Keynes.").

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , May 31
            

            The
cover story argues that NATO has been more a relief organization than a
military force in the Kosovo crisis, sheltering and protecting the displaced as
the U.N. relief operation became mired in bureaucracy. "NATO is not in the
business of meals on wheels; it should be in the business of guns and
missiles," an American soldier sighs. ... An editorial argues that the embassy riots in Beijing are a
warning that the United States should stop underestimating anti-American
sentiment in China. ... A piece explains the drubbing Gen. Wesley Clark has received from
fellow military leaders. Clark's peers are suspicious of his pedigreed
background and political connections; worse, NATO's half-hearted military
strategy smells to them of another Vietnam. ... A delightful essay slams Germaine Greer's new book as "a sour and
undiscriminating litany of charges against men."

            
               
                  New York
Times 
                  Magazine , May 16
            

            The
second installment of the magazine's year 2000 series is devoted to women, "the
shadow story of the millennium." (Click if you missed the first installment.)
... A brief history rates monogamous marriage, education, employment,
and improved health among the major developments in the lives of females over
the last thousand years. An accompanying time line illustrates women's
progress, beginning with a 12 th -century German nun and ending with
Purdue University's 1999 women's basketball team. ... A piece reports
that Japanese scientists are close to creating the first artificial womb.
Drawback: American researchers suspect that fetuses perceive their mothers'
emotions in utero. ... An article surveys changing attitudes toward
female sexual pleasure, from St. Thomas Aquinas' 13 th -century
allegation that "woman is defective and misbegotten" to a 1995 study suggesting
that orgasms may be linked to fertility. ... The magazine's food
columnist gushes over Martha Stewart, calling her "America's superego."

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek , May 17
            

            
               Newsweek blasts the hype surrounding Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
(its star turns in major magazines were "carefully engineered" by Lucas) but
splashes the film on its cover anyway. Inside, a critic brands the film "a big disappointment." Carrie Fisher, a k a
Princess Leia, dryly reminisces about her metal bikini and crush on Harrison Ford
during the filming of the original trilogy but says she can't even remember
what the third installment was called. Time applauds the film's splashy
special effects but deems it short on "human magic" (for more early returns, check

                  Slate
               's own "").

            
               Time 's cover profile of Madeleine Albright defends her Kosovo policy
from charges of poor planning and incoherence, and tallies her successes
instead: She consolidated European support for airstrikes at Rambouillet, has
deftly cultivated consensus among NATO's member countries, and is drafting a
"mini-Marshall Plan" to restore stability to the Balkans. ... The
magazine tracks how Albanians around the world are funneling money to the
Kosovo Liberation Army. Émigrés write checks to organized fund-raising
networks, which then smuggle cash and weapons over remote Albanian roads into
Kosovo.

            
               Newsweek
wonders how George W. Bush will survive the transition from
honeymoon to full-fledged campaign. ("If Bush were a movie, he'd be the new
Star Wars : the closely guarded, breathlessly anticipated next episode in
a multigenerational saga of family destiny.") ... 
               Time lauds
Elizabeth Dole's New Hampshire debut, citing her gutsy stances on gun control
and huge potential to win centrist voters. She "is running the campaign she
wanted her husband to run."

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report, May 17
            

            The
cover story christens professional wrestling "a new American art
form," albeit a savage one: Fifty episodes of a popular wrestling TV show
included "1,658 instances of grabbing or pointing to one's crotch, 157
instances of an obscene finger gesture, 128 episodes of simulated sexual
activity, and 21 references to urination." The wrestlers also enact
crucifixions, sadomasochism, and prostitution. ... A sidebar speculates that Slobodan Milosevic is probably
hoarding chemical weapons, including nerve gas, blister agents, choking
compounds, and hallucinogens. ... The magazine predicts softer GOP
stances on gun control and abortion. Elizabeth Dole has sounded the cry for
increasing restrictions on guns, and both Dole and George W. Bush have
been "mute" on abortion. (For 
                  Slate
                Editor Michael Kinsley's take
on Dole's and Bush's halfhearted pro-life stances, click .)

            
               
                  The New
Yorker , May 17
            

            A
piece describes how the leading Kosovar Albanian newspaper is currently being
published in exile in Macedonia by a ragtag bunch of twentysomething editors.
The paper, which serves as a lifeline for dispossessed Kosovars, is lukewarm on
the KLA and favors the establishment of an international protectorate.
... A mesmerizing article describes how a cadre of plaintiffs'
attorneys, fresh from recent victories over Big Tobacco, are going after the
gun industry. Amazing detail: The idea of suing gunmakers, one of the lawyers
says, came straight from a Wall Street Journal editorial decrying the
ever-widening scope of tort lawsuits. ... A writer chronicles the
transformation of her baby nephew, born with a severe genetic cranio-facial
disorder. A series of operations has given the baby eyes, fingers, a navel, and
an airway for breathing.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , May 17
            

            A
jubilant cover
story congratulates Gov. Jeb Bush for the passage of Florida's--and the
nation's first--statewide voucher system. To avoid charges of being
anti-public-education, Bush cannily referred to the vouchers as "opportunity
scholarships." ... An editorial mocks the overtures white politicians
make to minorities: Republicans are "dorky and patronizing;" Bradley is
"schoolmarmy" and self-righteous; Gore is "cartoonish"; and none is serious
about dismantling the racial and ethnic classifications that still plague
American law. ... A piece recommends that Alan Greenspan be awarded the
Nobel Prize in Economics. "Shouldn't a man who saves the world financial system
rank with one who makes a fundamental discovery in the field?"

            
               
                  The
Nation , May 24
            

            Almost
the entire magazine is devoted to opposing the Kosovo intervention. The
editorial declares that the intervention "has failed catastrophically." The
editors argue that Milosevic's release of the POWs was a "humane gesture that
should be built upon." The allies must stop bombing and let the Russians
negotiate on their behalf. A U.N. force with Russia at its core should police
the peace. ... Tom Hayden calls "Clinton's war" a "Vietnam-style
quagmire" that should be abandoned. ... An article argues that
NATO is "the armed hand of the new capitalist global order." NATO averted its
eyes to Milosevic's atrocities until it was clearly in the strategic interest
of capitalism to intervene.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Stoppard in Love

            Early in Shakespeare in
Love , the narcissistic twit we are supposed to believe went on to write the
greatest dramatic poetry in the language steps outside the theater to offer
words of solace to a snaggletoothed urchin, originally slated to play Juliet,
who has just been fired. The boy, it turns out, is a particular aficionado of
stage violence. The best parts of plays, he tells Will as he prepares to feed
one of his pet mice to a passing alley cat, involve dismemberment and murder.
Will asks the boy's name. "John Webster," he replies. There is a beat, as if to
cue audience laughter, and then Shakespeare walks away. The scene, which serves
no purpose in the film's plot (though Webster will later be instrumental in
stirring up the suspicion that Gwyneth Paltrow is a woman), is indeed a joke:
John Webster is the name of the bloodiest of all English dramatists--the
Quentin Tarantino of the Jacobean stage. The young torturer of mice will grow
up to write revenge tragedies such as The White Devil and The Duchess
of Malfi . Get it?

            The scene I've just
described is an exemplary Tom Stoppard moment: A literary in-joke that turns on
the accidental, and wholly conjectural, collision of two historical figures.
(One of Stoppard's best-known plays, Travesties , grows out of his
discovery that Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara all spent
time in Zurich in 1916, and imagines what their table talk might have been
like.) The British playwright co-wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in
Love , and over the past few months a number of my friends have tried to
excite my interest in the movie by invoking this fact. Stoppard's name,
familiar to anyone who cares about modern theater or who took AP English in
high school, signifies a deft blend of high culture and high wit, deep thinking
and schoolboy cleverness. I keep hearing and reading the words "smart fun" in
connection with Shakespeare in Love , and (leaving aside that the movie
is neither) smart fun is Stoppard's stock in trade. Watching his plays, you
feel smart. What could be more fun?

            Some writers demand erudition of their audiences. Stoppard
supplies it. I am surely not the only person who walked into the Vivian
Beaumont Theater to see Arcadia a few years back knowing next to nothing
about English landscape gardening or chaos theory; by the time the play was
over I felt as though I did. And while many theatergoers will arrive at
Stoppard's most recent play, The Invention of Love , with some notion of
Oscar Wilde's glorious career and tragic end (especially if they have already
seen Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency or read Pat Barker's novel The
Eye in the Door ), few will be familiar with the life and work of the Oxford
classicist and poet A.E. Housman, and fewer still will have any prior knowledge
of the differences between English editions of the ancient Roman love poet
Propertius. But playgoers will leave the theater flush with the thrill of
having learned something about these arcane matters, even if an hour later they
will be hard pressed to say just what they've learned. Stoppard's genius lies
in his ability to excite our intellectual curiosity and, in a stroke, to
satisfy it.

            In Stoppard's plays, the
messy and diffuse complexities of history, science, philosophy, and art are
tied into neat and compact parcels. The plays share a certain puzzlelike
quality; they are full of easy paradoxes and diverting logical conundrums.
Stoppard belongs to an international literary tradition--call it brain-teaser
modernism--whose theatrical godfather is Luigi Pirandello, and which includes
writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, and Italo Calvino. For
these writers, literature is a grand chess game of mental possibilities, an
irresistible occasion for philosophical showmanship. (Stoppard, born Tomas
Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, has also shown some affinities with the
playful philosophical playwrights of his native country, from Carel Capek in
the 1920s to Pavel Kohout and Václav Havel in the '60s and '70s.) But whereas
Borges at his best elicits from readers a shudder of metaphysical terror, and
Calvino stimulates a spasm of epistemological ecstasy, Stoppard consistently
induces in his audiences a frisson of self-congratulatory pleasure.

            Stoppard, who started out as a journalist and theater
critic, turned to play writing in the late 1950s, at a moment when, as he once
said, "the least fashionable playwright was as fashionable as the most
fashionable novelist." When the National Theatre staged his first full-length
stage play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , in 1967 (he had
previously done radio pieces for the BBC), he joined the fashionable ranks of
such English playwrights as Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter. Today,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the rest of his early work-- The Real
Inspector Hound and Jumpers , as well as numerous short plays for
stage, television, and radio--are best appreciated as part of the golden age of
English silliness, a moment that produced such indelible monuments of the human
spirit as A Hard Day's Night and Monty Python's Flying
Circus .

            In the 1970s, Stoppard
augmented his play writing with screenwriting, enhancing his highbrow
reputation by supplying scripts for auteurs Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Joseph
Losey. (By then the least fashionable screenwriter was as fashionable as the
most fashionable playwright.) In the years since, Stoppard has readily indulged
himself with hack work ( The Russia House ), middlebrow entertainments
( Empire of the Sun ), and pre- Shakespeare in Love house calls as a
script doctor ( Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ). Andrew Lloyd Webber
and Steven Spielberg recently commissioned a Cats screenplay from
Stoppard. But while Stoppard has slummed a bit for the big screen, he has done
some of his most serious and demanding work for the small one: Professional
Foul , a 1977 BBC commission, addressed the moral dilemmas faced by a group
of English academics at a philosophical conference in Prague; and Squaring
the Circle: Poland 1980-81 , broadcast in 1984, brought the playful
self-consciousness of Travesties to the deadly serious events
surrounding the Lenin Shipyard strike and the subsequent government
crackdown.

            Stoppard still scoffs at the idea that theater can be an
agent of political awakening or social change: "If I wanted to change the
world," he once told an interviewer, "the last thing I would do is write a
play." "The 'role' of the theater," he has written, "is much debated (by almost
nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost
as a recreation. This seems satisfactory." Since the late '70s, however,
Stoppard has shown intermittent dissatisfaction with the kind of intellectual
jeux d'esprit that made his name and has committed himself to a more
ambitious theater of ideas. The philosophical puzzles--about chance and order,
appearance and reality, science and art--are increasingly tethered, in plays
such as The Real Thing , Arcadia , and The Invention of
Love , to a more conventionally theatrical register of feeling. As in
Shakespeare in Love, we get smart fun and pathos too.

            But what we get is mostly less than meets the eye:
the erudition of the cocktail party and the emotional range of a good TV
sitcom, middlebrow pleasures dressed up in the trappings of high
learning--modernism without difficulty. Stoppard is often called a playwright
of ideas, but he is more accurately a playwright of the idea of ideas, just as
Shakespeare in Love is a movie for people in love with the idea of
Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot, who will no doubt share screenwriting credit with
Stoppard in the film version of Cats , once referred to his poetry as a
"superior amusement," a description that applies to Stoppard's plays as well:
They are amusing, and they make us feel superior.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  Analyze
This
                (Warner Bros.). Robert De Niro and Billy Crysal star as a
panic-ridden mobster and his shrink. It's a one joke movie, but the one joke is
good, and the actors are great: "Laughs battle formulas and laughs win" (Jay
Carr, the Boston Globe ). As the mob boss, "De Niro parodies his own
persona with huge relish" (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal ),
and Crystal's put-upon analyst is refreshingly underplayed. Some critics note
the conceit's similarity to HBO's new series The Sopranos , which
features a mobster on the couch as well. (
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein
the movie hilarious and calls it "a slapstick fever dream.")

            
               
                  Cruel
Intentions
                (Columbia Pictures). The fourth screen adaptation of
the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses , this time set amongst
Manhattan's rich teens, gets a mixed reaction. Some like it: a "foxy, snotty,
enjoyably trashy update," says Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly .
Others find the idea of such young actors in this tale of sexual intrigue and
betrayal ridiculous: "The liaisons here aren't dangerous, they're incongruous"
(Jami Bernard, the Daily News ). Critics are either entranced by the
youngsters' acting or find the whole concept of fresh-from-the-WB kids as
Vicomte De Valmont and Marquise De Merteuil "faintly ridiculous" (Stephen
Holden, the New York Times ). (This site has links to information on all the film versions of
the novel, as well as sound clips and photos.)

            
               
                  Lock, Stock
& Two Smoking Barrels
                (Gramercy Pictures). Great reviews for
this "cheeky, blackly comic heist picture" (Schwarzbaum, Entertainment
Weekly ), the debut from British director Guy Ritchie. The plot is
labyrinthine and the body count high, but critics agree that the film is "dark,
dangerous, and a great deal of wicked, amoral fun" (Kenneth Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ). Many compare Ritchie's style to Quentin Tarantino's.

                  Slate
               's Edelstein pooh-poohs all the critical oohing and aahing,
and dismisses the film's combination of "the music video syntax of
Trainspotting with the jokey nihilist bloodletting of Pulp

               Fiction ." (Read the rest of his review .)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  Monica's
Story
               , by Andrew Morton (St. Martin's Press). Most critics are
more interested in highlighting the tasty details than debating the literary
merits of Princess Di biographer Andrew Morton's as-told-to tell-all about
Monica Lewinsky. No.1 favorite detail: Clinton was "enthralled, actually
sexually aroused" by Lewinsky's description of her trip to Bosnia. One of the
few reviewers who delves into the book's form, as opposed to its content, is
the New York Times ' Michiko Kakutani. She says it lacks sourcing and
attribution, "reverberates with the cloying sound of the talk-show
confessional," and has a "propensity for Gothic melodrama and romance-novel
prose." Judith Shulevitz writes in 
                  Slate
                that Morton is our poet
of female self-pity. (Read the rest of her review , and read excepts from the
book here courtesy of the New York Times [requires free
registration].)

            

               Theater
            

            
               
                  Annie Get
Your Gun
                (Marquis Theatre, New York City). Advance word from
tryouts in Washington was overwhelmingly negative, and the show does get plenty
of bad reviews, but it also gets some good ones. Those who like the show call
it "immensely enjoyable" (Jess Cagle, Entertainment Weekly ) and say it
"takes a new bead on the familiar old target and hits the bull's-eye with ease"
(Richard Zoglin, Time ). Those who don't like it say that the new version
(expurgated of several un-PC songs) is an uneasy mix of '40s and '90s
sensibilities and falls flat. "Every so often, though not close to often
enough, something sharp and radiant pierces through the acrid smog that is
being called 'Annie Get Your Gun,' " (Ben Brantley, the New York Times ).
The radiance mentioned is all from Annie as played by Broadway vet Bernadette
Peters, who everyone agrees is top-notch. (Find out about show times and
tickets at sidewalk.com.)

            
               
                  Bright
Lights, Big City
                (New York Theatre Workshop, New York City).
Harsh pans for Rent director Michael Greif's musical based on Jay
McInerney's novel of debauched young Manhattanites: "The musical is sung
through, and there's something comically embarrassing about hearing people say
things like 'You got any blow?' in recitative." (Nancy Franklin, The New
Yorker ). Worst bits: 1) Paul Goodman, who wrote the show's music, book, and
lyrics, has inserted himself into the musical, strolling onstage with a guitar
and narrating in his thick Scottish accent; 2) songs with titles such as "I
Love Drugs" and "I Wanna Have Sex Tonight." As Charles Isherwood writes in
Variety , "nothing fades more quickly than fabulousness"; the
name-dropping glitter of the novel seems hopelessly old hat in the '90s.
(Read an interview with McInerney in Salon .)

            Find a movie playing
near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  8MM ;

               
                  Movie -- 200 Cigarettes ;

               
                  Movie -- The 
                  Other Sister ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Houdini Girl , by Martyn Bedford;

               
                  Book -- Perfect Murder, Perfect Town , by Lawrence
Schiller;

               
                  Theater--
                  Not About Nightingales .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  October Sky ;

               
                  
                     Movie --Jawbreaker ;

               
                  Movie -- Office Space ;

               
                  Music--
                  The Hot Rock , by Sleater-Kinney;

               
                  Book--
                  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith ,
by Anne Lamott;

               
                  Book -- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and
the Quest for the Ultimate Theory , by Brian R. Greene.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Blast From the Past ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Message in a Bottle ;

               
                  Movie
                  --My Favorite Martian ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Testament , by John Grisham;

               
                  Book
                  --South of the Border, West of the Sun ,by Haruki
Murakami;

               
                  Theater--
                  Death of a Salesman (Eugene O'Neill
Theatre, New York City).

            

            :

            

               
                  Movie -- Payback ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Simply Irresistible ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Rushmore ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Dry Cleaning ;

               
                  Book -- Werewolves in Their Youth , by Michael
Chabon;

               
                  Theater -- You're a Good Man,
Charlie Brown .

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 202: &quot;Death Sentence?&quot;

            

               Under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, R.J. Reynolds will
add a single sentence to each print ad for Winston. Saying what?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 201)--
                  "No-Stick Finish":
               

            

            

               
                  Fill in the blank. Ending her China trip yesterday, Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright was disappointed with that nation's position on
human rights but has few ways to alter it, says Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings
Institution. "The administration has got only one carrot--that is
_____________."
               
            

            
"Baywatch ."-- John Mott
            

            "A
sentence with which the Freudians will have a field day."-- Tim
Carvell
            

            "Louis
Vuitton handbags and Scottish cashmere sweaters ... oops, wait, not
anymore."-- Ananda Gupta
            

            
"Hoo-hoo! There's a guy named 'Lardy' at Brookings! Lardy-butt, lardy-butt,
cannot get the bathroom door shut! Ha!"-- Kate "Cruel things were done to my
name in childhood" Wing
            

            "Uh ...
Dammit! Did anyone remember to tape 20/20 for me last
night?"-- Leslie Goodman-Malamuth
            

            Click
for more answers. 

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            What have we got that
others envy? What are the crowning accomplishments of our society the world
yearns for? Cheap consumer goods, crappy fast food, and bland mass
entertainment! That's what News Quiz players cite. And, incidentally, when
George W. announces his candidacy, I believe that that will be his official
slogan. Can't fit it on a bumper sticker? You can if the bumper's on a big
enough SUV--seven miles to the gallon and it'll crush anything in its path,
comrade! Want one?

            
               Flies With Honey
Answer
            

            "The administration has got only one carrot--that is
permanent trade status ."

            Weary of facing an annual
vote in Congress, China wants to be enshrined as a "most favored nation" with
the same economic rights as the major trading partners of the United States.
This might induce the Chinese to take action on human rights and is even more
likely to urge them toward membership in the World Trade Organization. Joining
this body, American officials believe, would lead to lowered Chinese tariffs
and increased adherence to international trading laws, such as copyright.

            
               CCC
Extra
            

            South Carolina GOP activist and Republican National
Committee member Buddy Witherspoon announced last week that he was severing his
ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens: "I am a Christian. I am a
conservative. But one thing I am not is a racist." (One thing he will remain is
a man voluntarily known as "Buddy.")

            In January, he had refused to leave the group,
saying it was not racist but merely an advocate for causes such as displaying
the Confederate battle flag and playing "Dixie" at public events.

            The Southern Poverty Law Center says the CCC is "the
reincarnation of the racist white Citizens Councils" that battled integration
in the 1950s.

            Decide for yourself by
visiting the CCC Web site.
Some highlights from the table of contents on its home page:

            
               OUR
WAR
            

            A multi-part exegesis of
the CCC's ideology. "The Northern liberals have been waging a religious war
against the Southern whites all this time: secular humanism is intent upon
stamping out Christianity."--I believe we've got American church attendance
down to 90 percent and representation in the Senate to a meager 95 percent.

            
               VIEWS
            

            Various opinion pieces,
including "American Troops Don't Belong in Kosovo," by Phyllis Schlafly.--I
thought she was kept pretty busy writing for When Animals Attack .

            

               LINCOLN
            

            Including astonishingly
nutty anti-Lincoln links.--These guys are going to be so upset when they find
out he's dead.

            
               M. L.
KING
            

            A man of durable
fascination to the CCC, the first article: "Liar? Sex Addict?
Fellow-traveler?"--Buddy, Buddy, Buddy ...

            

               MILLARD
            

            An endless river of
goofball theories from the CCC's most prolific thinker, H. Millard, including:
"Betty Crocker Gets Blended," "Clarence ('I Am Not A Hater Of Southern Whites')
Page," "The Vanishing American White In Search of White Identity for the Next
Century," "Growth in Anti-Whitism," "Clinton's Stupid Race Panel Bashes Whites.
Surprised?"--It's about time someone had the guts to take on that Clarence
Page.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The comedy of
literalism.

             

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Splat! Bam! Pow! <BR>@#$%&amp;!

            Fear no more, earthlings,
the age of frustration and humiliation is over! I am the great Shopping
Avenger, who hath descended to Earth from the planet Galleria in a
nuclear-fueled Chrysler Town & Country minivan (base price: $27,385, left
sliding door standard in most models) to save you from the dark forces of
turbo-charged capitalism and shoddy customer service.

            OK, enough with the superhero shtick. It's
unsustainable over several paragraphs.

            Here's the problem: Like
most American shoppers, I've been doing my part to fuel the Dow to absurd
heights. My own personal consumer confidence is high (up 2.5 percent just this
last month!), and my spending is profligate--laptops and children's toys and
weed whackers and coffee tables and SUVs. They make it, I buy it. Retail,
even.

            But what do I get in return, except for 1 billion American
Express Membership Rewards points (which I can apply toward, among other door
prizes, an "NBA Black Leather Zip Daytimer") and a personal note from Robert
Rubin thanking me for my help?

            Frustration is what I get. When I went searching The
Home Depot for a replacement charger for the Skil Twist Xtra Flexi Charge
Interchangeable Power System Cordless Screwdriver, did anyone there know what a
Skil Twist Xtra Flexi Charge Interchangeable Power System Cordless Screwdriver
even was? No. When Northwest Airlines charged me $1,000 for a ticket I didn't
want and didn't order, could I even get anyone on the phone in less than 15
minutes? Also no! When I ordered Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus from
Amazon.com and received instead a copy of Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi,
Quran, Miraj, Poets and Theological Writings , did I get justice in the form
of a refund or a copy of the book I needed? No! (Although I am now a recognized
Sufi master.)

            Just as I was writing
this last paragraph, I received an e-mail from Amazon boy-wonder Jeff Bezos. I
figured he was writing to apologize (Bezos claims to know what I want to read,
so why shouldn't he also know when I'm mad at him?), but instead his
e-mail--which he apparently sent to other people too--flacks his new, sure to
lose money and at the same time boost his stock price another 200 percent
venture, Amazon.com Auctions. I think I'll start by auctioning off my copy of
Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poets and Theological
Writings .

            But the Shopping Avenger digresses. Now, I understand
retail. I'm not naive. In order to boost quarterly earnings to meet the
cosmically greedy expectations of a handful of Wall Street analysts who've
never sold anything in their lives, American corporations must cut, cut, and
cut again. Pensions are out, job security is out, and customer service is most
definitely out.

            This column will not
address such issues as pension rights and job security (though it will refer to
them from time to time out of guilt--at one point, earlier in my life, I
pretended to be a democratic socialist, and I was for a time an actual
kibbutznik).

            This column instead will seek vengeance for you, the loyal
American consumer.The Shopping Avenger was born a couple of years ago, at a
dinner party in New York. I was seated next to a man who said he was one of the
inventors of corporate voice-mail routing systems. (This, of course, was a
lie--Al Gore was the inventor of corporate voice-mail routing systems.) I told
him that, in my humble opinion, the advent of voice mail and the disappearance
of live operators meant longer waits on the telephone for help.

            He said I was wrong. I told him I felt this fairly
strongly. He again told me I was wrong: Surveys show that the waiting period
for help has been cut by 98 percent, or some such number. I then told him that
earlier in the day I had spent seven minutes pushing buttons in order to make a
single airline reservation.

            He told me it was just my
perception that I spent seven minutes pushing buttons. Then I called him an
asshole, and that was that. It was then that I decided the American consumer
needed help battling the forces of corporate arrogance. I felt I was the one to
lead the charge. But like most selfless impulses, I thought about it for a
while and the feeling eventually passed.

            But the Shopping Avenger was born again. He was born again
in Toys "R" Us, where none of the employees seemed to know what a potty seat
was, and he was born yet again at the Budget Rent a Car counter at La Guardia
Airport, where the reservation he had made and confirmed suddenly ceased to
exist, and where he got yelled at for his troubles.

            And so, this column. Here's how it works. You
e-mail your tale of woe--inferior products, ignorant customer service--to
shoppingavenger@slate.com, and
the Shopping Avenger will use his reporting skills, which have been described
by some as "almost supernatural in scope" (and have been described by others as
"adequate" and "sort of pathetic") to extract on your behalf grudging apologies
from faceless bureaucrats at Fortune 500 companies.

            First come, first served
and, be warned, the Shopping Avenger looks askance at the bearing of false
witness. Those companies that deserve praise will be praised. Onward!

            P.S.: The Shopping Avenger
will also entertain questions about Sufi mysticism.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Whitehall No Longer?

            The top British story is a
massive strengthening of the country's anti-racism laws. As a result of a
report on the 1993 case of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man whose murder was
poorly responded to and inadequately investigated by the police, Home Secretary
Jack Straw declared all-out war on racist government action. Calling the
Lawrence case "a catalyst" and "a watershed," he announced that the police and
government officials will now be personally and criminally liable for any
expressions of the "institutional racism" common in British life. Nevertheless,
the reforms are less aggressive than those sought by the independent commission
that investigated the case. The 
                  Times
                reports that those recommendations would
make "racist language or behaviour" criminal and would allow racial attacks to
be defined by the victim not the police (if the victim says they're racist,
they are).

            Despite calls by
Lawrence's parents for his resignation, the London Metropolitan Police
Commissioner Sir Paul Condon is staying in office. He conveyed his "sense of
shame" and vowed to make the police into "an anti-racist force." The

                  Guardian
                stresses the drama and context of the changes:
It's the first major anti-racist legislation in 20 years and will cover "any
long-established, white-dominated organisation which is liable to have
procedures, practices and a culture which tend to exclude or to disadvantage
non-white people."

            The 
                  London Evening Standard
                relays an embarrassing postscript to Straw's announcement:
He had to withdraw a thick chunk of the already published report Thursday
because it contained the names and addresses of witnesses and informants who
assisted investigators. The paper calls the information "the most sensitive
that could be imagined to be involved in any police investigation" and surmises
that those mentioned could already be in danger. The Standard also
reports that hours after the report was published, a
memorial to Lawrence was defaced with paint. The vandals were not caught
because a security camera trained on the memorial was not loaded with
videotape.

            European papers keep a
troubled eye on yet more avalanches in the Alps and the rescue attempts they
are delaying. Just as rescuers were digging out victims of Tuesday's avalanche
in Austria, another hit Wednesday, decimating four buildings. The death toll is
still climbing, but all agree that this is the worst avalanche season in
generations. The Swiss paper 
                  Neue Zürcher Zeitung
                nervously watches smaller, and so
far nonlethal, avalanches in the Swiss neck of the mountains. Most of the
accounts are morose, but a British writer in the Times opines that the
Alps are exacting revenge on greedy tourists for exploiting their natural
beauty.

            In Middle Eastern news, fresh ripples and rumors about
Yasser Arafat's future plans: Toronto's 
                  Globe and Mail
               
reports that Arafat appears to have dismissed Faisal
Husseini, the Palestinian official responsible for Jerusalem affairs and, until
now, a name high on his list of potential successors. Husseini denies that he's
been ousted, but Arafat has already cut off his funding and handed his
portfolio to another minister. The paper mentions "disputes" between Arafat and
Husseini but gives no specific reason for his dismissal. The Jordan Times
quotes Arafat as saying that his successor will be chosen by the Palestinian
people in an election.

            Meanwhile, the Egyptian
paper Al-Ahram reports that Arafat is giving new consideration to
the prospect of an official Palestinian-Jordanian confederation. Given the
recent transfer of power in Jordan, the upcoming Israeli elections, and his
self-imposed May 4 deadline for declaring a Palestinian state, the link with
Jordan could help Arafat consolidate ever-slippery support among his various
constituencies, Israel, and the United States.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence
               
               
                  ,
               
            

            
               I cannot agree with your advice to the young
immigrant from Pakistan (""). Henry Kissinger came to this country when he was
16. Time hasn't done a lot for his accent--though, admittedly, there are rumors
that he cultivates his slow, lumbering delivery.
            

            
               But what if the young man had crooked teeth?
Would you advise him to skip orthodontia, telling him "appearances mean nothing
... those who make judgments based on looks and speech are superficial
Neanderthals?" That's a high-minded philosophy, but I'm afraid it may hinder
you in real life.
            

            
               What if this person
wants to study law? Telling people that "time will solve all problems" is a
bankrupt idea. My advice to this person is to seek help from a speech
pathologist. Actors and entertainers often do this. Richard Burton wasn't born
speaking the king's English. As the English say, "Accent is
everything."
            

            

               --Accent on Success
            

            Dear Ax,

            Though no Brit has ever said to Prudie, "Accent is
everything," she accepts your other arguments. She cannot resist pointing out,
however, that Mr. Kissinger has done OK for a guy who sounds like he is
growling in a German movie.

            The points you make are more useful than Prudie's
earlier oh-just-ignore-it approach. Prudie culpa , Prudie
culpa .

            In this particular case,
let's just say when the original advice was given the wheel was spinning, but
the hamster had gone.

            
--Prudie, correctively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence
               
               
                  ,
               
            

            
               For the next few months I must use the laundry
room in the basement of the building where I'm house-sitting. There is one
thing that I have never figured out about laundry room etiquette; perhaps you
can clear things up. When a washer or dryer finishes and the owner doesn't show
up within a few minutes to collect the clothes, what am I supposed to do if I
am waiting for the machine? Leave it and hope they remember to retrieve it, or
remove the contents and place them on top of the machine or a table?
            

            
               I ask because my
practice has always been to allow about five minutes grace, then remove it.
That always seemed fair to me, and I wouldn't expect more of others. However, a
few times the owners have arrived while I'm emptying the machine, and they have
been apoplectic! Most people either remove their laundry right away or leave it
for hours. Please help.
            

            

               --Tired of Waiting, Toronto
            

            Dear Ti,

            Prudie finds your five-minute grace period generous.
Putting forgotten laundry--wet or dry--on the machine or a table is perfectly
acceptable in a communal situation.

            The next time you
encounter an apoplectic latecomer, just say, "Lucky you! I don't do this for
everybody." And smile.

            
--Prudie, disarmingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence
               
               
                  ,
               
            

            
               In a recent column, "" asked for advice about a
friend who lies. Your answer made sense, but I have a curve ball to throw you
in a variation on the same theme: My sister, whom I love very much, is prone to
lying. She constantly embellishes her stories and everyday conversation with
nonsensical, made-up whimsy that she expects people to take at face value. When
I occasionally confront her with what I know to be the truth, she gets
defensive and abusive in tone.
            

            
               I am sure this
behavior carries over to her other relationships, as I have discussed this
problem with other members of my family who share my concern. What must I say
to not only get her to stop lying but also to see the damage she is causing in
her own life?
            

            

               --Concerned Brother, S.
            

            Dear Con,

            Having occasionally confronted your "whimsical"
sister with the true version of events, and apparently getting nowhere, Prudie
suggests you have a tough conversation outlining the potential damage
dishonesty can create in relationships with those having less "whimsy."

            Let's be blunt. If your
sis is a congenital liar, words of warning will have little effect, and you
cannot save her from herself. You don't mention anyone's age, but if you fail
to interest her in therapeutic help, perhaps your sib could try
screenwriting.

            
--Prudie, honestly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence
               
               
                  ,
               
            

            
               I am very interested
in a man who is involved with several organizations that I fear keep people out
due to sex, race, etc. He is quite wonderful, but it is impossible to reconcile
this with the exclusive club business. Who is having the problem here? He
really is so kind and good to me.
            

            

               --Scared in NYC
            

            Dear Scare,

            You are having the problem, my dear. He is having no
difficulty at all being both a loving partner and a practitioner of prejudice.
You must weigh your democratic values against the romantic and the personal. If
you can envision a future with a man who supports bigotry without it nagging at
your principles, then by all means choose the personal over the political.

            If, however, you see this
cloud becoming blacker over time, then follow Prudie's dictum of "See no evil,
Hear no evil, Date no evil."

            
--Prudie, democratically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence
               
               
                  ,
               
            

            
               Have you seen those
travel trousers with the zippers at thigh level? Two quick zips and you're
wearing a pair of shorts. Great idea! But there's a problem: I wear only white
socks with shorts and only non-white socks with trousers. Do I have to give up
my custom? What's the answer?
            

            

               --Confused in Quito, Ecuador
            

            Dear Con,

            Reversible socks.

            --Prudie,
pragmatically

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Middle East Stew

            A rebuff to President
Clinton by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdallah at the funeral of King Hussein
of Jordan last week was heralded in the Saudi press Thursday as evidence that
the country wasn't a pawn or a puppet of the United States. Abderrahman
al-Rashed, the editor of the leading Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat , wrote
that the heir apparent's rejection of Clinton's attempt to get him to meet
secretly with Israeli officials in Amman ("Mr. President, I think friendship
has limits")--news of which broke Wednesday in the same paper--was a cause for
Saudi pride. Perhaps Clinton thought that all Arab leaders could be "bought,"
or coaxed, or intimidated, he wrote. But Saudi policies could not be bought,
since Riyadh was not indebted to Washington. "The friendship between the two
countries is strong indeed. But there's no reason why Saudi Arabia should
abandon its commitments to the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, as well as
to its own citizens, just to please the American president," Rashed
concluded.

            Turki al-Hamad, another
commentator in the same paper, said that the Amman incident confounded those
who believed that Saudi Arabia was just another pawn on Washington's chessboard
and therefore had probably already established secret links with Israel. He
wrote that the crown prince, the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, could have
met secretly with Israeli officials, as Clinton asked, and struck deals with
them behind closed doors, subsequently to denounce Israel in the strongest
terms, as many Arab leaders did. But he has consistently applied the principle
of "transparency" and candor, believing this to be the best guarantee of sound
policy. "His rejection of Clinton's proposal is consistent with Saudi Arabia's
policy of not officially recognizing Israel until the Middle East peace process
has reached a successful conclusion, at which point Riyadh will make the
appropriate decision," Hamad added. "Saudi Arabia has already said all these
things. So what would have been the point of a secret meeting? That is
undoubtedly what Crown Prince Abdallah had in mind when he turned down the U.S.
president's proposal."

            A l-Khaleej , a daily from the United Arab Emirates,
claimed Thursday that the United States helped Turkey capture its most wanted
man, the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, in exchange for Turkey abandoning its
policy of rapprochement with Iraq. Commentator Mohammed Idriss wrote in the
paper that the betrayal of Ocalan had been preceded by another betrayal--that
of the Iraqi Deputy Premier Tariq Aziz. Aziz went to Ankara at the invitation
of Turkey's pro-Iraqi Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to discuss closer economic
ties and the problem of Kurdish separatism, which both countries feel is being
fueled by the United States' "mismanagement" of the Iraqi crisis.

            Baghdad also saw the visit as an opportunity to
persuade Turkey to withdraw logistical support for American bombing raids on
Iraq and to speed up the erosion of international sanctions against it. Yet,
when Aziz arrived in Ankara, President Suleyman Demirel bluntly refused to meet
him, and he found himself boycotted by Turkey's political parties. The
explanation for this had to be collusion between the U.S. and Israeli
intelligence services, both of them highly active in Kenya, to deliver Ocalan
to the Turks.

            Idriss wrote that Greece
must have been put under "enormous U.S. pressure" to have agreed to be involved
in Ocalan's abduction. "And for the U.S. to be prepared to exert so much
pressure on Greece on Turkey's behalf, the price must have been worthwhile," he
added. "At this juncture in particular, what better price could there have been
than sabotaging any attempt to effect an Iraqi-Turkish rapprochement?" The
Pan-Arab al-Quds
al-Arabi also saw the delivery of Ocalan to Turkey as its "reward" for
toeing the U.S. line on Iraq. In the Gulf state of Bahrain, the daily
al-Ayyam said that Ocalan's abduction boded ill for Osama bin Laden,
America's most wanted man. He, too, had the intelligence agencies of several
countries on his trail.

            Without directly addressing the question of Israeli
involvement in the abduction of Ocalan, the moderate Israeli paper Ha'aretz said in an
editorial Friday that the affair had shown "the narrow and very
dangerous line that Israel walks in its ties with Turkey." It said there was
"no doubt that the military alliance with Turkey is one of the most important
Israel has ever signed with any country" and that "[t]his type of alliance
inherently involves targeting common enemies, or at least fosters the
expectation that an agreed-upon map of common threats and dangers be drawn up.
The Kurdish question has naturally found its way onto this map of common
interests." But Israel has always had very good relations with the Kurds, who
also see the Israelis as their friends. "Consequently, Israel must make a very
sharp distinction between Turkey's war with what it defines as a terrorist
organization, and its ideological and cultural struggle with the Kurdish
people," the editorial concluded. "In the aftermath of the tragic incident in
Berlin, this distinction must now be expressed openly and publicly in such a
manner to make it clear to the Kurds that we are still their friends."

            The Italian papers,
which see Turkey's human rights record as a serious impediment to its ambition
to join the European Union, reacted with outrage Friday to a photograph issued
by the Turkish government showing Ocalan blindfolded and manacled in front of
the Turkish flag. La
Stampa , in a front-page comment, called it "a punch in the stomach,"
comparing it to other sadly unforgettable photos such as those of the dead Che
Guevara, the napalm-burnt little girl during the Vietnam War, and the
despairing Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro as a prisoner of the Red Brigades.
The difference in this case, though, was that the photo was "propaganda
material of a government which calls itself democratic, a government of our
times," the paper said.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 240: &quot;So Stop and Ask Directions&quot;

            
               Fill in the blank
on this thoroughly satisfying explanation from Defense Secretary William Cohen:
"None of those maps indicated that it was the Chinese Embassy that was being
targeted. It was not a human error or mechanical error--it was a(n) __________
error."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 239)--"Terror Train":
            

            

               
                  "We're not being motivated by what's to come, but a fear of
being left out as the train is pulling away from the station, with some exotic
station in mind." Who said this about what?
               
            

            "At
which point I always say, 'Mom, if Elderhostel is not something that you
continue to enjoy, you do not need to be a participant.' It sounds a lot less
formal in Yiddish."-- Andrew Silow-Carroll
            

            "The
eponymous protagonist says this of his Weltschmerz in the
revised-for-the-'90s edition of The Little Engine That
Could ."-- David Finkle
            

            "Hey,
you know, at the end of Entrapment , a train pulls out of a railway
station, and Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones are on it, and it's in
Malaysia. So I'm going to go with: Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, about
their train. In Malaysia."-- Tim Carvell
            

            
"Elizabeth Dole, at a kaffeeklatsch in Iowa. Then she lifted her dress over her
head and sang 'They Call Me the Pineapple Princess.' "--John Leary
            

            "I
have no joke for this, but may I be the first to weigh in with 'Dana Plato's
Retreat?' "--Bill Scheft ( M. Pesca had a similar answer.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Not motivated by what's
to come but by the fear of being left out. Puts me in mind of Boswell's
description of what in the 18 th century was called a hypochodriack,
what we'd call a depressive:

            
               His opinion of himself is low and
desponding. His temporary dejection makes his faculties seem quite feeble. He
imagines that everybody thinks meanly of him. ... He regrets his having ever
attempted distinction and excellence in any way, because the effect of his
former exertions now serves only to make his insignificance more vexing to him.
... There is a cloud as far as he can perceive, and he supposes it will be
charged with thicker vapour the longer it continues. He is distracted between
indolence and shame. Every kind of labour is irksome to him. Yet he has not
resolution to cease from his accustomed tasks. ... He acts therefore like a
slave, not animated by inclination but goaded by fear.
            

            
               
                  The
Hypochondriack , December 1780
            

            
               ElectroLiteracy
Answer
            

            Laurence Kirshbaum, chief executive of Time Warner
trade publishing, said it about electronic books. He and his colleagues have to
deal with them, but they don't yet know what to think about them. (To find out
what Jacob Weisberg thinks about them, click to go to his piece in

                  Slate
               .)

            One conflict: What
royalty are writers entitled to? Because electronic publishing eliminates
paper, printing, warehousing, and delivery, costs are lower, say writers, so
publishers should take a smaller share of a book's price, and the writer's
share should increase. Not so, say publishers, who insist they should continue
to take a whopping chunk of the money for no particular reason. Oh, yes:
Because they can.

            
               Match Wits With a
Times Editor Extra
            

            Below, pertinent details
of stories in today's New York Times , each followed by a pair of
headlines. Can you determine which is the real headline and which is the
amazing simulacrum?

            1. "She grabbed her dog,
Lucky, and his insulin. Then she and the others simply walked to a nearby
apartment complex for foreigners."

            A. Let's Throw Stones at Lucky, the Diabetic
Dog

            B. Envoy Says Stoning
Will End, Ties Won't

            2. "On Saturday night, at
an event called Columbine Surprise Party, players from the Denver Broncos and
the Colorado Rockies mingled with students and family. On Sunday, Shania Twain
visited. Later, for the second time, votive candles sparked a fire which
consumed a canopy tent, bouquets, scraps of poetry and stuffed bears."

            A. God Proves Sadistic, but With Sense of Humor

            B. Teacher of Colorado
Gunmen Alerted Parents

            3. " 'More than anything
else, Silicon Valley is on the 50-yard-line of the political spectrum,' Mr.
Randlett of Technet said."

            A. Techno Guy as Articulate as a Doctor

            B. Candidates Falling
Into the Finally Open Arms of High Technology

            4. " 'I tired of getting
urine tossed on my back,' said Mr. Fallopa."

            A. Disney To Retire Dull Rides at Sao Paulo Theme
Park

            B. Making Brazilian
Soccer a Bigger Deal

            

               Answers
            

            

               1-B, 2-B, 3-B, 4-B.
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Bad service on trains.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 226: &quot;It Depends&quot;

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 224)--"Spring Break":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    
                                       
                                          

                                             Back in Washington after the two-week congressional recess, Trent Lott
answered a reporter this way: "I would describe it one word--quizzical. Like,
why? And what?" How did Sen. Lott spend his
vacation?
                                          
                                       
                                    
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            Thursday's Question

            "This is quite controversial," said Kevin Sparkman of Pennsylvania. "Until
now, we have always depended strictly on altruism." What is he talking
about?

            Wednesday's Question (No. 225) "Love Hurts"

            On Tuesday, in Texas, after a public display of affection, one of them

            playfully grabbed the other by the wrist and shouted, "Run! Run!" What was
going on?

            "Leper practical jokes."-- Dave Gaffen ( Greg Diamond had a
similar answer.)

            "Gov. Bush got a playful French kiss from Anna Nicole Smith at the annual
World's Biggest Boob Relay Race at the Texas State Fair"-- Brooke
Saucier
            

            "Jesse Jackson, looking in the mirror, decides the country needs him ...
again."-- Christopher Clark
            

            "Sounds like another one of Darryl Strawberry's romantic liaisons about to
be called foul by the vice squad."-- Peter Carlin
            

            "Lyndon Johnson and Lee Harvey Oswald, trying not to be seen together. The
Tuesday was in mid-November 1963."-- Tim Carvell
            

            Click here for more answers.

            
               Daniel's Wrap-Up
            

            Even when TK is sitting in, it's still World News Tonight 
               With
Peter Jennings . Just because Johnny goes on vacation, The Tonight Show
Starring Johnny Carson doesn't suddenly become The Tonight Show With Jay
Leno . The task of a guest host is delicate. He has to be familiar (and
competent) enough to keep viewers satisfied but also distinct (and flawed)
enough so that when the star returns, everyone remembers exactly why they love
him so. Similarly, when a telegenic politician with a good head of hair and who
prides himself on compassion teams up with the mayor of New York City, the
result is a comedic explosion of matter and antimatter.

            OK, that's not the least bit similar. These segues are harder than they look
from where you're sitting.

            
               Was It Good for You Too Answer
            

            Rudolph Giuliani and George W. Bush were simpering and giggling for the
press after their 90-minute meeting at the governor's mansion in Austin, Texas.
It was a love fest.

            "He is one of the real hopes that the Republican Party has of regaining
control of the United States," said the mayor in his characteristic military
style.

            "He's a good tough campaigner," the governor reciprocated manfully.

            "I think I might have eaten a bad clam," said someone, perhaps me.

            Neither man would formally endorse the other, but when a reporter asked the
mayor if he'd specifically urged the governor to run, Bush contorted his arm
behind his back and said, "He twisted my..." Well, you know what he said. Then
Giuliani displayed his usual flair for playful repartee with the run run
business.

            (Answer composed pre-departure by Randy Cohen)

            
               Military Intelligence Extra
            

            1. According to NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, "Milosevic is losing,
and ..."

            a) He knows he is losing.

            b) He doesn't know he is losing.

            c) I can fly!

            2. Which explanation did NATO spokesman David Wilby give for the attack that
killed 10 civilians in a residential area of Pristina last week?

            a) "One bomb appeared to be seduced off target at the final stages."

            b) "Relax, it's not like we hit a convoy of refugees or anything."

            c) "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out."

            3. Explaining why he went to Belgrade, Dan Rather said, "On some days, in
some ways ..."

            a) I miss Afghanistan.

            b) Tom Brokaw can kiss my ass.

            c) Danger is my business.

            4. Which was not said by a college student at a Kosovo teach-in?

            a) "I'm very against genocide."

            b) "This Milosevic guy is Serbian, right?"

            c) "Forget ground troops, let's send in Buffy."

            5. A party for NATO's 50 th anniversary will still go ahead as
scheduled, but administration officials acknowledged that they would have to
"adjust the tone" to make it, in the words of the NSA's Don Blander. ..

            a) Less "triumphalist," more "serious and sober."

            b) Less "imperialist," more "pathetic."

            c) Less "Greek, Hungarian, Italian and French," more "British and
American."

            
               Answers
            

            1-a. Solana was also asked what would constitute a "permissive environment"
for NATO troops. "Why don't you help me a little," he replied, "and not ask me
to define the word 'permissive.' " He was not asked to define "losing"
either.

            2-a. A little candlelight, a bottle of Alizé, and that ordnance just can't
control itself.

            3-c. "I get $19,178 a day plus expenses," he could have added, but
didn't.

            4-c. At least, that's the only one the New York Times reporter didn't
overhear.

            5-a. Meanwhile, a NATO postage stamp illustrated with a dove of peace has
been "rescheduled for a later date," the postal service said. "They're
replacing the dove with an Apache helicopter, so it'll take at least a month
before it arrives," the postal service did not add.

            
               Common Denominator
            

            Texas-sized homoeroticism.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Historic Kiss

            As Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic prepared to join NATO this week, the Prague Post welcomed the
event Thursday with the front-page headline: "Dreams do come true." The paper
said, "The Czech Republic has come full circle from underdog in the dark days
of fascism and communism to a member of the world's strongest defense
alliance." The weekly Warsaw Voice said that Poland's commitment to its new allies
will be immediately put to the test by the crisis in Kosovo, to which it is
pledging troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping force.

            But in the West, Italy's
commitment to NATO was looking wobbly. Thursday's Italian papers all led on
Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema's statement to parliament that the
agreements on U.S. NATO bases in Italy would have to be renegotiated if the
United States failed to deliver justice for the victims of last year's Alpine
disaster in which 20 skiers were killed by an American plane. A front-page
comment in Corriere della
Sera of Milan called this "an audacious challenge to the United States,
but one full of risks." A revision of the 1951 agreements will be difficult, it
said, because they were signed by all the allies, and above all it is important
to avoid a new wave of anti-Americanism. "We should not forget how important
the link with the sole superpower still is both to Italy and to all of Europe,"
it said.

            The other big story in Italy was the visit of President
Mohammed Khatami of Iran, the first by an Iranian leader to the West since
1979, which was soured by the coincidental, simultaneous presence in the
country of Salman Rushdie, the British writer condemned to death 10 years ago
by Ayatollah Khomeini for allegedly blaspheming against the Muslim religion in
his book The Satanic Verses . While Khatami was in Rome, Rushdie was in
Turin receiving an honorary degree from the university there, to the
embarrassment and anger of the Italian government, which had not been
informed.

            In an interview Thursday
with La
Repubblica of Rome, Khatami said he was "deeply displeased to see that
a person who has offended the feelings and the religious beliefs of more than
one billion people of the Muslim faith throughout the world should be
encouraged in this way, thus perpetuating the conflict between our
civilizations." The president reiterated that "the Iranian government has
explicitly stated that no action will be taken by our government to apply the
fatwa," but also emphasized that that sentence has been "approved and confirmed
by all Islamic countries."

            The Iranian press took an even harsher line. Iran
News accused the Italian government of "an incredible insult" and proposed
"a reappraisal of policy towards Italy, a country which had been thought to be
friendly." The supposedly moderate Iranian daily Kar-o-Kargar blamed
Rushdie's presence on the influence on the Italian government of "groups of
Mafiosi and of arms producers linked to the United States and Israel." The
conservative Jomhuri Islami claimed that the Italian foreign ministry,
under the influence of Zionists, tried to orchestrate Iranian protests against
Khatami during his visit. On Khatami's meeting with the pope, Friday's Italian
papers highlighted an incident at the end of their talks in which an
unidentified mullah, a member of Khatami's delegation, approached the pope and
said in English, "Can I do something?" When the pope replied, "Of course," the
mullah leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

            Arab press comment focused Thursday on U.S. Defense
Secretary William Cohen's Middle East visit and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi's
views on the Lockerbie dispute. The London-based al-'Arab said Cohen's
Gulf tour had been successful as an arms-selling exercise but a relative flop
politically because he had "failed to obtain the traditional show of collective
Gulf support for the policy of aggression his country pursues against Iraq."
Tarek Massarwa, a Jordanian commentator in the Pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi , blasted
Arab rulers for distancing themselves from Washington's Iraq policy in public
while colluding with it in private.

            In Saudi Arabia, the
leading daily Asharq al-Awsat quoted Col. Qaddafi as snubbing Egypt over
its efforts to broker an agreement among Tripoli, London, and Washington for
the trial to go ahead in Europe of two Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of a
PanAm airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. Although Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr
Mousa stated that the Lockerbie dispute was the main topic in weeklong talks in
Cairo between Qaddafi and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the Libyan leader
claimed that Egypt had no role in current efforts to reach a settlement, the
paper said. Talking to a group of Egyptian journalists, he implied that he
would prefer to rely on the continued mediation of South Africa. He said that
Egypt, as an Arab state, enjoyed uneasy relations with Britain and the United
States. "Such problems don't exist between Mandela and Blair or Mandela and
Clinton," the paper quoted him as saying. "On the contrary, they are
friends."

            Interviewed Thursday by the Guardian of London, U.S.
financier George Soros, taking his first public position on the new European
currency, the euro, which recently plummeted 10 percent against the U.S.
dollar, forecast that it is destined to be a weak currency because of
fundamental flaws in the structure of the European Monetary Union. But the
interview was published before the resignation from the German government
Thursday of Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine, which caused an immediate 2
percent rise in the euro's value. The resignation of "Red Oskar," as the
British press dubbed him, was warmly welcomed Friday in London newspapers,
which reported that champagne bottles had been opened in Downing Street.

            In an editorial, the
Times of
London called Lafontaine's departure "good news for both Germany and Europe"
offering "some hope of a saner German economic policy" but, stressing his
continuing power on the German Left, said he was likely to be "the most unquiet
ghost since Banquo." In France, Le Figaro and Libération played the story as a major setback for socialism
in Germany, as did the newspapers in Italy. In Madrid, El País said it put both
Germany's ruling coalition and the integration of Europe at risk.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Humble Pie

            As all
Europe heaved a sigh of relief over the Kosovo peace deal, a feast of humble
pie was consumed in Fleet Street Friday as British newspapers grudgingly
admitted that air power alone seems to have done the trick. The Daily
Telegraph , the
Times , the
Guardian ,
and the Independent , which all spent the war urging a land invasion
of Kosovo, were disconcerted by the fact that a peace settlement has apparently
been achieved without one. "We take no comfort in saying that NATO's bombing,
in crude terms, 'worked,' " said the liberal Guardian in an editorial
that honorably recalled its previous insistence that Slobodan Milosevic could
not be "bombed to the negotiating table." The settlement was "a victory for
NATO and a vindication of its belief in modern air power," said the
conservative Daily Telegraph --but the paper qualified this with a claim
that Milosevic only capitulated because of "the growing willingness of the
Alliance to consider the deployment of ground troops."

            The
Independent said that "victory for NATO should also put an end to the
thoughtless assertion that 'wars cannot be won from the air.' " Thoughtless
assertion or not, this is what the Independent had been saying all
along. Or had it? "This newspaper consistently called for the deployment of
ground troops to be threatened--and to make the threat credible, NATO would
have had to be prepared to go through with it," it said Friday. So it never
really wanted a ground invasion--just a credible threat of one! The
Times , which had been just as eager as the other broadsheets to send in
the troops, sought to preserve its dignity by avoiding the issue altogether. In
an editorial urging the allies to remain wary, it said NATO should not suspend
its air campaign until Serbia "is in compliance with all its commitments" and
warned that Russia's involvement in the international peacekeeping force was "a
potential bear trap." It said, "A 'unified control and command' should not
become cover for a semi-detached Russian military presence that could permit
the creeping partition of Kosovo."

            The
tabloid Sun , the Times ' down-market stablemate in the Rupert
Murdoch empire, has the advantage of having always campaigned against the
commitment of ground troops to Kosovo, and so headlined its editorial Friday
"Air might WAS right" as vindication of its stance. The Sun , which is
Britain's biggest-circulation paper, may have been heading for a confrontation
with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on this issue, but the peace agreement
ended any danger of that. Instead, the paper presented the deal as a personal
triumph for Blair, who, it said, stiffened the backbones of "wobbling alliance
partners" such as President Clinton. "One man's evil ambitions caused the
Kosovo crisis," it went on. "One man's resolve has played the lion's share of
ensuring he has not been allowed to succeed."

            In a
report from its Washington correspondent Friday, the Independent said
that the Belgrade agreement, if it sticks, will be a victory for Clinton over
his generals. "Bill Clinton's war, dismissed as a 'coward's war' and ridiculed
as 'immaculate coercion,' will be vindicated," Mary Dejevsky wrote. "His
insistence that the conflict be conducted from the air and only from the air,
and that an air war was winnable, was denounced in military circles, ever more
openly, as the irresponsible reverie of a non-military man."

            The
Financial Times of
London reported Friday that an international banking deal between the Bank of
Scotland and the Rev. Pat Robertson is "almost certain to unravel" following an
attack by the televangelist on Scottish homosexuality. The paper said Bank of
Scotland Chief Executive Peter Burt flew to the United States to confront
Robertson for saying on his U.S. TV program The 700 Club that "in
Scotland you can't believe how strong the homosexuals are. ... [Scotland] could
go right back to the darkness very easily." Robertson, who claims his family
emigrated from Scotland in 1695 (the same year the bank was founded), made a
deal with it last March to start a telephone banking service in the United
States. The announcement sparked a storm of controversy over his reputed
bigotry, however, and scores of the bank's customers, including charities and
trade unions, threatened to take their business elsewhere. In a "right of
reply" column in the Independent of London last week, Robertson wrote:
"I abhor bigots and bigotry. I denounce racists and racism. ... Discrimination
in whatever form or guise has no part in my beliefs or my life."

            The FT also
reported Friday that the number of European Internet users almost doubled last
year and is expected to achieve overall household penetration of 17 percent by
the end of this year. A forecast due to be published next week by Dataquest, a
market research company, suggests that Europe is beginning to close the
"technology gap" with the United States, the paper said.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Flesh and Bone

            D.W. Griffith raised
"crosscutting" to an art in his racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation ,
in which he jumped back and forth between "renegade Negroes" preparing to
ravish a white maiden and Ku Klux Klanners galloping chivalrously to her aid.
In True Crime , director Clint Eastwood demonstrates at once how far the
medium has come in terms of race and how far it has backslid artistically--to
about 1910. As a white journalist (played by Eastwood) hastens to save an
innocent black man (Isaiah Washington) from execution for the murder of a
pregnant white convenience-store cashier, Eastwood cuts from the reporter's car
careening around hairpin curves to poison-bearing tubes being inserted into the
black man's veins: screeching car, needle in vein, screeching car, poison
descending the tube, screeching car, clock going tick-tick-tick, glazed
expression on the dying man's face, screeech ... Not even Robert Altman,
who parodied this sort of climax in The Player , was cynical enough to
let his sellout filmmaker play the intravenous card.

            Melodramas like True
Crime are all pretty much hustles, but the good ones are stylish enough to
make you love the old song and dance. This one tends toward unlovably brazen
pokes and shoves, yet there are moments (mostly in the script) when a higher
sensibility can be glimpsed through all the galumphing crumminess. The film's
most emblematic character is a beggar who trails people outside the offices of
the Oakland Tribune yelling, "Gimme pussy on toast!" or "Gimme money on
toast!" True 
               Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid
bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre
concoction, but it's riveting--and I use that term advisedly, in the sense of a
hack-'em-up serial killer riveting somebody's head to the side of a door.

            The film presents Eastwood as Steve Everett, a philandering
ex-alcoholic with (I swear that the movie exhumes this phrase) a "nose for
truth." After a young female reporter whom Everett has plied with drink crashes
her car on something called Dead Man's Curve, the former New York hotshot is
forced to fill in at a "human interest" interview with Frank Beachum
(Washington) a mere eight hours before his scheduled San Quentin demise. That's
the cue for what in movies is called a "conversion narrative," in which a
heretofore lost soul pursues a seemingly lost cause--and, inevitably, finds
redemption.

            The script, credited to Larry Gross, Paul Brickman,
and Stephen Schiff (from a potboiler by Andrew Klavan), is often laughably
schematic, but much of what's outside its ramrod narrative is masterfully
orchestrated: the physical exam on Beachum that begins the film (he's in
perfect health to be killed), the meetings between the warden and his guards on
execution procedure, the testing of the different colored phones--one connected
to the governor's office--outside the lethal injection chamber. The raunchy
patter between Eastwood and James Woods as his editor in chief might have made
for classic scenes if the former had known how to rein in the latter: Woods has
ballooned into such a self-congratulatory grotesque that he now upstages his
own blowhard characters. Two funny, affecting sequences exploit every father's
pained awareness of his daughter's unmet needs. In one, the besieged Everett is
obliged to take his little girl to the zoo, so he stuffs her into a cart and
races past the animals ("Speed Zoo!") while hollering out their names--at once
thrilling the child and endangering her life. In the other, Beachum's daughter,
visiting for the last time, loses a green crayon she needs to draw grass, and
her mounting hysteria conveys her grief at the loss of her daddy more
eloquently than any direct expression ever could. The scene's punch line--the
prison guards comb the parking lot for the crayon--might be the best, most
irrationally moving moment in the movie. Unless that moment is Everett's retort
to Beachum's wife (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who cries out angrily, as if confronting
a wayward savior, "Where were you all this time?" Shrugs the journalist, by way
of expiation, "It wasn't my story."

            That the actor has
condemned so many killers to death with his .44-caliber Magnum gives the
liberal thrust of True Crime a certain piquancy: Only Eastwood can go to
San Quentin. But is he plausibly cast as a journalist? As the taciturn
protagonist of vigilante pictures, Eastwood could be a hoot, and his struggle
to articulate something clearly beyond his range resulted in the one true
multidimensional performance of his career: the aging Secret Service agent of
In The Line of Fire (1993). But this is not a man who strikes me--either
in interviews or on the big screen--as being at home with words. His comic
acting style is based on a gunfighter's paranoia, on letting others speak (and
draw) first; the verbal forwardness of Everett sits uneasily on his 68-year-old
frame. In any case, it has become painful to listen to Eastwood talk. That
voice, which never had much timbre, has grown so raspy that you can practically
see the flakes of his vocal cords swirling around his head like dandruff.

            That's not an appetizing image, but I'm preparing you for
Ravenous , the cannibal saga I predict will elicit the most derisive
reviews of any film this year. I'd like to recommend it, but it's too silly. On
the plus side, it's ravishingly well directed by Antonia Bird ( Priest ,
1995), who reportedly came on board two weeks after shooting had commenced and
as such had little say about the thrust of the script. She could not alter the
coven of frontier cannibals to, say, lapsed Catholic priests, although I bet
that the idea crossed her mind. Even so, the first half of Ravenous is
tantalizingly scary. A captain, Boyd (Guy Pearce of L.A. Confidential ,
1997), is decorated for heroism in the Spanish-American War and then exiled to
an isolated fort high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California--a seemingly
godforsaken place where, at least in winter, the only passers-by are starving
wagon-trainers. Why exile a hero? It seems that he initially played dead in the
heat of battle, then awoke to find himself lodged under a messy corpse, the
blood from which was running into his mouth. Invigorated à la Popeye the Sailor
Man, he proceeded to capture the enemy regiment single-handedly. Not a man
you'd want to have hovering around your mess hall.

            Bird and her cinematographer, Anthony B. Richmond,
create a world of blinding white peaks and deep black crevices in which demons
might lodge--a world of humans driven batty from fear and isolation, where
reaching out to other people sometimes takes the form of ingesting them. The
metaphor would be better if left suggestive, if the strange new appetites were
somehow the product of anxieties associated with American westward expansionism
and "Manifest Destiny." But the second half of Ravenous is almost
literally a dumb vampire picture, in which the chief vampire woos a reluctant
half-vampire who has pangs of conscience about cooking and eating his fellow
man("Join us! You know you want to!" etc.).

            By all means see Ravenous if your taste runs
to bloody cannibal pictures. (I found it less of a gross-out than, say,
You've Got Mail , which would have benefited from a touch of
flesh-eating.) Although Pearce brings little to the party but his cheekbones,
Jeffrey Jones makes a wonderfully mordant fort commander, and Robert
Carlyle--who pops up out of the wilderness with burning eyes and a tale of
having been forced to cook and eat his horses, dogs, and traveling
companions--might turn out to be a major actor. Carlyle looks like just the
sort of fellow who'd think it his duty to explore things that the rest of us,
deep down, want to know about but wouldn't dream of investigating ourselves.
He's someone you could actually imagine taking aside and asking, "Er, Robert,
tell me ... does it really taste like pork?"

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Apples and
Oranges
            

            In "," Eliza Truitt discusses installing Linux on a
PC with Microsoft Windows already installed on it. She doesn't compare the
reverse; that is, installing Windows from scratch on a machine with Linux
pre-installed on it. It is no piece of cake, if not downright impossible, for
the average user to perform this sort of install. Installing Linux on a PC with
Windows already loaded is far easier.

            In fact, people like Truitt do not generally
install their own operating systems of any type and make heavy use of help
desks on a day-to-day basis to keep their systems running. She talks about
configuring printers, connecting to networks, and so forth on Linux--I wonder
if she has ever done the same on a Windows machine. Very few computer users
install their own operating systems these days; they buy their computers with
the system pre-loaded. There are plenty of vendors who sell Intel boxes with
Linux pre-installed, including Dell, VA Research, and so on.

            Truitt writes, "compare that with Windows 98: $199
for a full setup, $89 for an upgrade, or bundled for 'free' as part of nearly
every non-Macintosh computer." I think that it is pretty nonsensical to make
the statement that Windows is "free" under any circumstances. Nor does Truitt
note that when you get Linux from any of a variety of sources you get far more
than just the OS that Windows 98 users are accustomed to. You get a full
development system with an unlimited server-based OS. The equivalent software
would cost upward of $15,000 if you were to try to duplicate it from
Microsoft--an unlimited client version of Windows NT costs $5,000. The
databases, programming tools and applications included in Linux are worth many
thousands more--if you can find them at all for Windows NT.

            If you expect to attract
readers to 
                  Slate
               , you really need to do a better job in
presenting balanced, factual reporting.

            
-- Eric Larson
            

            
               Free for
All
            

            I just read Andrew Shuman's "," and I feel I have to
write to make a few points. The very first paragraph contains a stunning number
of errors. Linus Torvalds is the original author of the Linux kernel, but he is
by no means the author of Linux. There are literally thousands of
people, both programmers and non-programmers, who have made contributions to
the Linux distributions. Linux is not derived from an operating system
called GNU. GNU is not an operating system but a software suite that runs on
many operating systems (mostly Unix-based OS's, but Windows is also supported
by many of the packages). The proper name for Linux is Linux, not "GNU/Linux."
And just for your information, there is a "GNU operating system" in
development, it's called the HURD and it is different in a number of respects
from Unix.

            Shuman makes the claim that just because software is
freely distributable, the authors have no means of recompense for their work.
That is simply untrue--there are many ways that software can remain free but
still allow the authors to get paid (just look at RedHat or Netscape).

            Then Shuman claims that Linux provides no graphical
user interface. The truth is that you have a choice--if you want a text
interface you can have it, if you prefer a graphical interface that's fine too.
Shuman also makes the totally unsubstantiated (and untrue) claims that there is
very little in the way of application software for Linux and that very few
people use it: The latest estimates of the number of Linux users run into the
millions--how can that be "so few"?

            Then Shuman claims that free software is less tested
than commercial software. I use both commercial software and free software in
the course of my work (I'm adminstrator of a large number of NT and Unix
computer systems), and it's pretty clear to me that it's the free
software that is rigorously tested and the commercial software that gets
released just as soon as it appears to run. Why? Because the incentive to an
author of free software is to make her package the best, so releasing
inadequately tested software will do the author's personal reputation no good
at all. The incentive to a commercial author is to get the application on the
shelf so she can derive income from it; if Version 1 happens to have bugs in
it, the bug fixes become a selling point for Version 2.

            I'm not anti-commercial
software or even anti-Microsoft. I am in favor of choice and freedom though,
and your article doesn't exactly encourage readers to exercise their choice and
freedom.

            -- Steve
Bennett
            

            
Lancaster, England

            
               Zero Zero
Sum
            

            It doesn't make a big difference to me--or, I
suspect, to most Linux users--whether Truitt, Shuman, or any other Windows
users like Linux or not (see ""). Most Linux contributors don't primarily
care about competing with Microsoft, or decreasing Bill Gates's wealth, or
giving away something for free. Linux contributors simply are creating systems
they themselves enjoy using and find productive.
            

            The main reason Linux users are increasingly
concerned about Microsoft is because Microsoft increasingly attempts to set
proprietary standards for how data are exchanged. That is, technical and legal
documents are often found in Microsoft Word formats, access to online and
banking services often requires the use of Microsoft-only software, multimedia
data often come in Microsoft-only formats, and hardware often only ships with
Microsoft-only drivers. This is not because Microsoft-based systems are
necessarily better, but because Microsoft is the biggest player, and that's
what companies are going to focus their efforts on when writing drivers and
software; there are, after all, only limited resources for writing drivers and
front-end software.

            So, the concerns Linux users have about Windows are
related to whether network effects involving proprietary content formats are
going to exclude them from some areas of public and commercial life. Just like
Truitt would not enjoy being forced to struggle with Linux, most Linux users
don't enjoy being forced to do their work on Windows using its "WIMP"
interface.

            Microsoft needs to
become more sensitive to concerns about interoperability and open standards.
Recent efforts by Microsoft in the areas of XML and other Web standards are
encouraging. Clear support for Sun Java would also be good (and would, in the
long run, benefit Microsoft). I hope that, as Microsoft matures, so will its
attitude toward standards and cooperation. The computer market is big enough
that it does not need to be winner-take-all.

            -- Thomas M.
Breuel
            

            San
Jose, Calif.

            
               Simple
Elegance
            

            Eliza Truitt's article,
"A Labor of Linux," on her experiences with her Linux installation provides
wonderful inspiration for the intimidated. But a word to Truitt: The term
"elegant" in science and technology has a special meaning apart from common
use. Elegance is not synonymous with "simple." Rather, it refers to the most
terse solution to a problem. Such a solution will tend to be cryptic to
the uninitiated. Therefore, "elegant" is most often used by those after the
fact of having used a procedure successfully. For the others, I would venture
to say, their word for it would be arcane.

            -- Roger Imai
            

            
Nashville, Tenn.

            
               Emperor Has No
Clothes
            

            Please note in your fascinating "" on hara-kiri
that there is one point on which I believe you are mistaken. In feudal Japanese
society, the person who would order suicides in place of executions was the
shogun, or military leader of Japan. Emperors, excepting the period from the
late 19 th century to the end of World War II, have yielded little if
any power in Japanese society.

            One fascinating example
of ritual suicide in 18 th century Japan that still regularly appears
in movies and television in Japan is the story of the 47 samurai. According to
this actual historical account, an adviser to a Tokugawa period shogun
antagonized a rival to the point where this rival drew his sword. This all
occurred in front of the shogun, which meant serious trouble, because
displaying a weapon in the shogun's presence was punishable by death. Despite
the fact that he was forced into this situation, the offending adviser was
sentenced to death and committed suicide as you described in your magazine.
After this, 47 of the condemned official's samurai decided to take revenge.
They coordinated an attack on the enemy adviser and murdered him. Honor called
on them to avenge their master's death, but the laws forbade murder. After
regaining their master's honor, all 47 samurai went to their master's grave and
also committed hara-kiri to take responsibility for breaking the law. The site
of these samurai's graves is still a well-visited location in Tokyo.

            
               --Mike
Cojerian
            

            Princeton, N.J.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Greens Back Bombing

            

               Kosovo update: 1) Germany's Green Party, on which the German
government's survival depends, rejected a resolution demanding a permanent,
unconditional halt to NATO's bombing but approved a resolution calling for a
"limited halt" to let the Serbs withdraw troops from Kosovo. Hawks'
spin: Germany and the NATO coalition are standing firm behind the bombing.
Doves' spin: Germany is splintering, and the coalition can't last. 2)
Responding to NATO's mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade,
Chinese President Jiang Zemin called the United States a "hegemonist" that uses
its power to "wantonly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.''
However, he also agreed to speak with President Clinton. Sinologists debated
whether the Chinese regime is sincerely paranoid or is feigning belligerence to
appease the Chinese public's paranoia. 3) Clinton changed his spin on Balkan
history. His old spin: NATO must intervene in the Balkans because ethnic
violence there has been awful for centuries. His new spin: NATO can heal the
Balkans because ethnic violence there has only recently become awful.

            

               Senate Republicans endorsed new gun restrictions. After
killing a Democratic measure that would have required background checks on all
customers at gun shows, they proposed a similar measure. They also voted to ban
sales of semiautomatic assault weapons to minors, and many of them voted for a
Democratic provision that would prohibit high-capacity ammunition clips from
being imported. President Clinton's spin on the GOP's initial vote against
background checks: "They passed up this chance to save lives." The spins from
liberal senators and editorialists: 1) Republicans are turning their backs on
the National Rifle Association because the public wants gun control. 2)
Republicans are helping the NRA stave off serious gun laws by pushing weaker
restrictions riddled with loopholes. 3) Even so, that's progress.

            

               The Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against American
Airlines. The suit accuses the airline of using short-term fare cuts
and service increases to drive away competitors in order to resume charging
high fares. It's the government's first suit over predatory pricing since
airline deregulation. The government's spin: We're busting illegal monopoly
tactics. The positive American Airlines spin: We're being busted for providing
better service at lower cost. The negative American Airlines spin: We're being
busted at the behest of our competitors. The competitors' spin: We're doing
well despite American's illegal monopoly tactics. The cynical spin: The suit
will help American's competitors attract investors.

            

               The House ethics committee cautioned House Majority Whip Tom DeLay,
R-Texas, that House members may not use their offices to punish organizations
for financial transactions with political parties. Reports depict the
action as a response to DeLay's attempts to pressure an industry lobbying group
to hire a Republican rather than a Democrat as its president. Although the
letter evidently just spells out House rules, the Washington Post said
it "chastised" DeLay, and the New York Times called it a "rebuke."
Campaign-finance watchdogs' spin: It's an attempt to curb DeLay's fearsome
power and ruthlessness. DeLay aides' spin: "The committee has disposed of this
matter." The lobbying group's spin: DeLay has "sensitized" us to the importance
of hiring Republicans.

            

               Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov
and replaced him with the head of Russia's internal security forces.
This comes one day before the Russian parliament begins prescheduled
impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin. The Moscow stock exchange plummeted 10
percent, prompting officials to halt trading. Yeltsin's spin: Primakov failed
to save Russia's economy. The Clinton administration's spin: Don't worry,
Russia will continue to reform its economy and play a "constructive role" in
Kosovo. Other spins: 1) Yeltsin was unhappy because Primakov was failing. 2)
Yeltsin was jealous because Primakov was succeeding. 3) Yeltsin decided, as he
does every month or so, that it was time to fire his government. 4) Now that
Primakov is gone, economic reform can proceed. 5) Now that Primakov is gone,
the political system will collapse. 6) The parliament, which liked Primakov,
will respond by impeaching Yeltsin or forcing him to call new elections. 7) Now
that Russia is in turmoil, it can't help solve the crisis in Kosovo. 8) Now
that Russia is in turmoil, it can't cause further mischief in Kosovo.

            

               Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is resigning. Deputy Secretary Lawrence
Summers will succeed him. The official explanation: Rubin wants to
return to "private life." The unofficial translation: He wants to resume making
boatloads of money. Rubin's fans hope he'll take over the Fed next year if
Chairman Alan Greenspan retires. The spins: 1) Rubin engineered the current
economic boom. 2) No, Greenspan did. 3) Neither of them did; they just got the
credit. Congressional Democrats lauded Rubin as their ally in the Cabinet.
Congressional Republicans lauded him as their ally in the Cabinet.
Pessimists sold their stocks because Rubin is leaving. Optimists bought the
stocks because they trust the economy he's leaving behind. (For more on Rubin,
see "")

            

               Marine Capt. Richard Ashby, the pilot whose jet severed an Italian ski
lift cable, killing 20 people, was sentenced to six months in military
prison. He was acquitted on manslaughter charges but convicted of
obstruction for destroying a videotape of an earlier part of the flight. The
upbeat spin: The obstruction conviction makes up for the manslaughter acquittal
by reaffirming (especially to angry Italians) that U.S. military misdeeds won't
go unpunished. The cynical spin: As with last week's bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade and last year's bombing of a Sudanese chemical plant that
was evidently mistaken for a chemical weapons facility, the ski lift disaster
(attributed in part to government maps that failed to show the ski lift) proves
again that U.S. military intelligence is an oxymoron.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bibi, Bye-Bye

            "There
have never been elections in Israel that focused so explicitly on the
personality and leadership of an incumbent prime minister," A. B. Yihoshua, a
distinguished Israeli author and sometime political commentator, wrote Monday
in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot . "The main issue that got this
campaign going was not the final status agreement with the Palestinians ... but
the prime minister's problematic personality." In the same paper, Emuna Elon
wrote that Israel could not trust Labor Party leader Ehud Barak: "Israel wants
change, but Israel cannot settle for a non-leader like Barak, a man who until
two months ago was said, even by his supporters, to be 'not taking off' until
he was suddenly reinforced by a battalion of expensive American advisers who
taught him to recite some slogans convincingly."

            As
opinion polls showed Benjamin Netanyahu likely to lose in Monday's national
elections in Israel, the liberal daily Ha'aretz urged a large
turnout by voters opposed to him, so as to ensure his defeat. It described his
statements in the final days of the campaign as "further proof of his lack of
responsibility." The conservative Jerusalem Post said a pall had been cast over the campaign by
the death on Saturday of a Likud campaigner during an altercation with a Labor
supporter who had been trying to deface a Netanyahu poster and replace it with
one of Barak. Representatives of both parties deplored the incident and
described it as murder. La Repubblica of Rome Monday described Netanyahu in a
front-page comment as "the worst of all the heads of government that the Jewish
state has had in its half-century of existence."

            A
flurry of diplomatic activity within NATO to reassess its Kosovo strategy
dominated war coverage in the British press Monday. The Times of London led its
front page with a Newsweek report of the Pentagon warning President
Clinton that the Kosovo war cannot be won without the use of ground troops. In
an editorial, it continued to bang the drum for ground troops and said British
Prime Minister Tony Blair must "convince a reluctant President Clinton to take
those steps that might render plausible an integrated air-ground campaign in
Kosovo. ... Mr Clinton, the candidate who memorably 'smoked but did not inhale'
is for now the Commander-in-Chief who 'bombed but would not fight,' " the
editorial said. "The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary must now convince
the President that his reputation, and NATO's future credibility, rests upon a
willingness to use the tools at his disposal."

            A day
earlier, the Sunday Times , quoting a British government source, said Blair
is feeling "a deep sense of frustration" with Clinton after failing to persuade
him to commit ground troops to Kosovo. But in another British Sunday paper, the
Observer , Blair dismissed claims of a divide between the
president and himself. "The vast bulk of this military operation is being
carried out by US forces, although Kosovo is a very long way from Kansas," he
said in an interview. "Their commitment and leadership is something for which
President Clinton should be praised, rather than the sneers he receives from
the Right in this country."

            The
Independent
led Monday with the angle that Blair is isolated on the ground war issue. It
quoted a "senior Nato source" as saying that not only the United States but
also Germany is still against committing ground troops because it could lead to
"unknown repercussions from Russia" and "cause governments to fall in Italy,
Greece and the Czech Republic." It quoted a British government source as saying
there is "no threat to the Bill and Tony relationship" but that Britain wants
NATO "to get a move on" and "face up to the decision." In an editorial, the Independent said that Blair, a "hawk
without wings," has been allowed to become isolated by Clinton "as the US
reluctance to commit ground troops has hardened rather than softened and the
President has followed the line of least resistance."

            The
moderate Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova told Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Monday that the joint declaration he signed last April in Belgrade with
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was "without meaning." It demanded, among
other things, an immediate end to the NATO airstrikes. Rugova, who was recently
allowed by Milosevic to leave Yugoslavia for Western Europe, said in an
interview that he had only signed to give his family some space, since he was
effectively a prisoner of Belgrade. He said he wanted the air offensive to
continue until Serb troops leave Kosovo and are replaced by a NATO-led
peacekeeping force.

            The
main Italian newspapers led on NATO's rejection of a proposal by Italian Prime
Minister Massimo D'Alema that the bombing should stop if there is agreement in
the U.N. Security Council on a Kosovo resolution supported by both Russia and
China. La Repubblica reported from Brussels that NATO spokesman Jamie
Shea has reiterated that Milosevic must accept the alliance's conditions before
the offensive can be halted. D'Alema discussed his proposal with German
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at a meeting in Bari, Italy, on Monday. Corriere della Sera of
Milan said Germany's peace initiatives have also been cold-shouldered by the
alliance.

            
China's leading newspaper, the People's Daily , ran an editorial Sunday
headed "Stopping Bombing--Precondition for Any Political Solution." The
government organ said that while the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade provoked widespread indignation, NATO leaders, instead of changing
their stand, "have continued the barbaric raids on an even larger scale against
Yugoslavia." It said, "It is well known that the Kosovo issue is an internal
affair of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia involving complex ethnic and
religious contradictions. ... Events over the past 50 days have demonstrated
that the lunatic bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S.-led NATO has not solved the
Kosovo crisis. Instead, it has caused a larger exodus of refugees and seriously
devastated stability and peace in the Balkans and even Europe."

            On the
failed impeachment of President Boris Yeltsin by the Russian Duma, the daily
Segodnya said that the "hearings in the Duma have proved beyond doubt
that Boris Yeltsin hardly has a match among politicians." But other Russian
papers said the president has little to be proud of. Novaya Gazeta noted
that "not a word in support of the president has been said in the three days of
parliamentary hearings." Moskovsky Komsomolets said that "even those who
opposed the impeachment could not find a good word to say about Yeltsin and
spoke against the impeachment solely in the interests of preserving a semblance
of stability in the country."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Wipe Out

            Let other journalists
travel the world in search of scoops. My story is in the kitchen and the living
room--and in the toilet. In researching this piece, I turned my apartment into
a paper torture facility as I compared the wiping power of 10 brands of paper
towels, six lines of facial tissues, and 11 types of toilet paper. Not all my
experiments were successful, and as I mop up the spills I can only hope that my
landlady doesn't read 
                  Slate
               .

            Thanks to late-stage capitalism, the supermarket
shelves sag with scores of brands in the three main paper categories. This is
not as daunting as it sounds, because the market is now dominated by four
companies: giant Procter & Gamble (Bounty, Charmin, and Puffs), and three
other products of merger mania Kimberly-Clark (Scott, Kleenex, and Viva),
Georgia-Pacific (Coronet, Sparkle, Angel Soft, and MD), and Fort James (Brawny,
Quilted Northern, and Green Forest). In picking the 37 contestants for this
survey I strove to find representatives of the three price points--premium,
middle-of-the-road, and generic--and to give recycled and novelty products an
equal opportunity to impress.

            All paper--facial
tissues, writing paper, newsprint--is created equal. What makes "sanitary
wiping paper" (to use the wonderful cadences of marketing-speak) stretchy and
absorbent is a process called "creping": A metal blade removes the paper as it
dries from the steel cylinder on which it was formed, lowering the paper's
density. The premium wiping papers are also embossed, which creates pockets to
hold more "moisture." (Kimberly-Clark's Web site boasts that "On the East Coast only, Kleenex Cottonelle has
been given a unique, patented, gentle texture that is designed to give
consumers a clean, fresh feeling." Apparently, we hardy westerners don't
deserve such luxury.)

            
P aper towels contain more
fibrous pulp. This increases their strength, and the manufacturers usually give
them more pronounced embossing for greater soaking power. Whereas little girls
and babies appear on toilet paper wrappers, paper towel packages depict beefy,
brawny guys, indicating their toughness. In this category the contestants
were:

            
               Premium
            

            Bounty Rinse & Reuse

            Versatile Viva

            Kleenex Viva Job
Squad

            
               Middle-of-the-Road
            

            Scott Towels

            Brawny Pick-a-Size Big Roll

            Kleenex Viva

            
               Recycled
            

            Seventh Generation

            Second Nature Plus

            Envision Preference

            Natural Value

            To see if the towels really could provide the
implied strength and security, I tested the ability of a single sheet to hold
the moisture produced when a damp tea bag was left on it for two minutes.
Unfortunately for me and my security deposit, none of my towels succeeded. I
didn't have any of the blue liquid ad agencies use in commercials to indicate
absorbency, so I gauged the soaking power of individual sheets with tap water.
Absorbency varied little as I poured a quarter-cup of water onto towel after
towel. Not a single one could hold all the fluid, but even the cheapest towel
stayed solid as it was wrung out and used to wipe up the excess from the
counter.

            These tests convinced me
that while paper towels can't perform miracles, even the lowliest
example of the species can soak up liquid and dry your hands. If you're
faced with a big, messy job, it might be worth spending the extra money for a
premium product such as Bounty Rinse & Reuse or Kleenex Viva Job Squad but,
under normal circumstances, a budget recycled product such as the ones on offer
from Natural Value or Second Nature offer good value and provide the desired
durability.

            
I drew the line at catching a cold for this
story and instead subjected six brands of facial tissues to a "spray
test." The contestants were:

            
               Premium
            

            Purely Cotton

            Kleenex ColdCare With Aloe and Vitamin D

            Puffs

            
               Middle-of-the-Road
            

            Heritage Hearth (my
local store brand)

            
               Recycled
            

            Seventh Generation 2-Ply Facial Tissue

            Envision Preference
Ultra

            Using a squirt bottle, I simulated a big, soggy
sneeze to test their absorbency. To my amazement, all the subjects survived the
soaking. While absorbency did not vary, the softness factor is significant--the
downright decadence of the Kleenex ColdCare range makes everything else seem
almost abrasive. (And ply--the number of layers of paper in the product--isn't
everything, the Envision Preference Ultra is a 3-ply "premium" product, but it
still feels like a scouring pad after touching a virgin fiber tissue.) Thicker
tissues also keep germs off your hands, which is nothing to sneeze at.

            You'll come to no harm
if you use tissues as lavatory paper, but your plumbing might--while the
strengthening cellulose fibers they contain are biodegradable, facial tissues
don't break down as quickly as toilet tissue, so flushing is not recommended.
If you're cold-free, you almost certainly don't need the mattressy softness of
an ultra brand (and you can't clean your spectacles with the aloed
hankies).

            
Americans are sheet scared of running out of
toilet tissue --the average family stash of eight rolls doesn't even take
Y2K hoarding into account. Scanning the supermarket shelves, there's a vast
price difference between the budget brands and the premium products, but are
the latter worth the extra? The contestants were:

            
               Premium
            

            Ultra Soft Quilted Northern

            Kleenex Cottonelle
Ultrasoft

            
               Middle-of-the-Road
            

            Heritage Hearth Ultra Soft

            Kleenex Cottonelle

            Charmin

            MD Twin Quilted

            
               Recycled
            

            Seventh Generation

            Natural Value

            
               Novelty Papers
            

            Purely Cotton

            Cottonelle Moist Wipes

            Blue Label

            I didn't conduct any
fiendish experiments on loo paper--I figured that the product's purpose is
specific enough that a trial "in the field" would tell me all I needed to know.
All contestants went through the rotation in my bathroom. For novelty value, I
also tried Cottonelle Moist Wipes, which offer "a fresher clean than with
bathroom tissue alone." The packaging promised that that I'd "feel cleaner,
more refreshed, and confident," but somehow using the adult equivalent of baby
wipes failed to enhance my self-esteem. In the interests of internationalism, I
imported a package of "smooth" Blue Label toilet paper--the medicated, waxy
retro-wipe so beloved of government offices--from Britain. It's a harsh wipe
and seems completely unsuited for contact with one's soft bits, but drape a
sheet of it over a comb and it makes a wonderful kazoolike musical
instrument.

            The latest marketing angle in toilet tissue is the double
or triple roll. There doesn't appear to be any agreement on what constitutes a
standard roll--so-called double rolls measure anywhere from 187 square feet to
280 square feet, and the Charmin triple roll is a giant 462 square feet (though
we're assured it "fits almost all standard dispensers"). The implied economies
don't pan out--in my local supermarket the perfectly adequate single-roll store
brand (Heritage Hearth) was considerably cheaper per square foot than any of
the double or triple rolls (only half the price of the most expensive premium
brand I tried, Kleenex Cottonelle Ultrasoft Double Roll), and it doesn't take
up as much room in my Y2K storeroom.

            Recycled toilet tissues
have improved since the sandpaperlike sheets of the early '80s, but they just
can't compete on the softness front. The recycled ingredients include rough
stuff like cardboard boxes as well as office paper. Still, the case for
recycling is persuasive. The packaging for Seventh Generation toilet paper
claims that "[i]f every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 500
sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissues with 100% recycled ones, we could save:
297,000 trees; 1.2 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to 1,400 full
garbage trucks; 122 million gallons of water, a year's supply for 3,500
families of four." Since most Americans get through 48 to 55 rolls of TP per
year, that's a lot of trees, trash, and water.

            The mainstream brands base their sales pitches on
descriptors such as "gentle," "plush," and "cottony softness," but although
names such as Cottonelle trade on the image of cotton, the products are
wood-based, whereas one relative newcomer to the market is actually made from
the fluffy plant. Purely Cotton bathroom and facial tissues are made from
"cotton linter"--what's left over when fibers and cottonseed oil have been
harvested. As a byproduct, cotton linter is considered 100 percent
recycled/recovered and, although it is bleached to make it snowy white, the
process doesn't produce dioxins as with wood pulp bleaching.

            After my experiments, I'll probably stick with
Purely Cotton, which costs no more than the premium brands, is environmentally
sound, acceptably soft, and appropriately absorbent. Even the cheapest toilet
paper gets the job done, so if you want to impress guests or if you don't want
to keep paper hankies in the bathroom, buy the expensive stuff, but I'll bet
your delicate bits won't notice the difference.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I don't know if that was my son-in-law Dan
Jacob hrumphing about in-laws who won't visit, but let's say it wasn't. Still,
let me tell you my story: I am a father-in-law who gets along nicely--I
thought--with his daughter and her husband, but who refuses to enter their
apartment because they have hung a lewd picture of themselves, er, copulating
in the living room. They call it art, I am sure, but it is almost medical in
its detail.
            

            
               I like them, I like
their values, but I just cannot stand to see that picture. They must know how
it can bother a father to see such a graphic representation; even if the
behavior is encouraged-- grandchildren, bring them on!--I don't have to see it.
And if they don't know it, they should. I thought I was avoiding a
confrontation but evidently not. I guess I will tell them ... even if that
wasn't Dan hrumphing. Thank you.
            

            

               --Greg Garman
            

            Dear Greg,

            Whether or not and his wife are your children,
these young people certainly march to a different drummer ... perhaps one who
owns an adult bookstore.

            Prudie is in your corner, and she is blushing. Art
it may be, but in such poor taste that one wonders what this young couple is
thinking and where is their judgment. Since you like your children but do not
wish to see the image you describe, by all means articulate your discomfort and
suggest they throw a blanket over the "art" when you come to call, or
temporarily substitute a nice still life.

            By the way, this drama makes Prudie feel
clairvoyant, because she answered the young man who wrote that his in-laws
would not step foot in his home: "There is some little missing piece here." The
piece is that picture.

            Prudie hopes your
children outgrow their need to shock and that you can enjoy visits in each
other's homes soon.

            
--Prudie, properly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I have a question about a man I recently started
dating. I am an attractive single woman, and he has spent a fair amount of time
getting to know me and taking me to nice dinners, dancing, etc. We laugh and
have great fun together and share many of the same interests. He has kissed me
and I feel that he is physically attracted to me. My concern is that he seems
to have nearly all the characteristics of most gay men that I know.
            

            
               This man was born in
Germany, is wealthy, educated, well-traveled ... so I don't know if he is
exhibiting the lifestyles of the rich and famous--European style--or is gay.
First of all, he has more clothes than any woman I know and loves to shop. He
doesn't like to watch sports. He doesn't like violent movies, just the sweet
Disney ones. He stays tanned and gets his hair colored. HE DRIES FLOWERS! He
drops names of clubs and restaurants that he likes, and a lot of them are
frequented by the gay community. (I know this because my late brother was gay.)
I know he is open-minded and has gay friends, so surely, if he were gay or
bisexual, why would he hide it? I don't want to come right out and ask him
about his sexuality because if he hasn't "come out," then my asking him will
not be answered honestly by him anyway. I really like this man, but my inner
voice is telling me he must be gay.
            

            

               --Masculine Mystique? From the Twin Cities, Minn.
            

            Dear Masc,

            Your gentleman friend could be straight or gay, but
he is definitely effeminate. He could be highly repressed, he could want to use
you as cover, he could be in denial about being one of nature's bachelors, he
could see you as a soul mate, or he could genuinely want to build a
relationship with you.

            Since you do not want to
ask him outright (which you may want to reconsider) there is a piece of
furniture that could go a long way toward answering your question. It is called
a bed. If he shows no interest in going there with you, that's a pretty strong
indicator of where things are. That you felt he was physically attracted to you
from his kiss is something to consider. Your task now is to decide if you wish
to have him in your life as any of the following: a bisexual partner, a
platonic friend, or a straight though swishy companion.

            
--Prudie, empirically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am often greeted with the salutation: "Hi,
how are you?" when I meet my patients in a crowded psychotherapy office waiting
room used by many of us. I learned quickly not to reply with: "Fine, how are
you?" Some people would launch into their troubled lives no sooner than the
last word escaped my mouth.
            

            
               At any rate, now I
have trained myself to answer with "Fine," or "OK." Would you advise on a more
appropriate reply please?
            

            

               --Busted Confidence
            

            Dear Bust,

            Your noncommittal
response "Fine" or "OK" is just right, in that it does not invite an answer. In
other words, your one word reply is the perfect verbal package ...
shrink-wrapped, as it were.

            
--Prudie, psychologically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I'd appreciate your views on when it's time to
settle down and when it's time to settle. I'm 31, no looker, but reasonably
attractive, in good physical condition, well educated, and employed in a
challenging position that pays well. I regularly attend cultural events,
contribute to my community (both monetarily and through volunteering), and read
voraciously.
            

            
               Not surprisingly, I would like to meet someone
with similar characteristics. When I actually do meet such a person, I am not
afraid to express my interest. Unfortunately, I find my interest is almost
invariably unreciprocated. Equally unfortunately, I find the people expressing
interest in me do not possess the qualities I seek in a partner.
            

            
               I am quite
comfortable as a single person, but I would prefer to develop a personal
relationship with someone who can share my interests and characteristics. My
question to you is, at what point (if ever) does it make sense for someone to
abandon, wholly or partially, his or her search for an ideal partner and settle
for someone with a less than complete set of assets?
            

            

               --Settlement-Minded in Our Nation's Capital
            

            Dear Set,

            What a thoughtful problem to bring to Prudie. You
sound extremely desirable, if not perfect, but obviously something is wrong. It
might be useful to ask a good friend, of either gender, from whence your
difficulty springs. Explain that it would be an act of helpful friendship to be
totally honest.

            The idea of settling is an interesting one. This
probably depends on how badly you wish to be part of a couple. Prudie's
instinct is to tell you to wait for someone who does seem just right. Prudie
also understands your wish to make a life à deux (which is why she has
rice marks, herself, from her various tries).

            It was comforting to read
that you are comfortable as a single person. Until someone wonderful comes
along, Prudie hopes that, to quote Mauriac, you will "revel in the pleasure of
the unshared bed."

            
--Prudie, uncompromisingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Surely I am not
alone in my complaint: weeknights and weekends, if there is any kind of game on
television, my husband is watching it. We have no children, so I can't stick it
to him that he's ignoring the little ones, but I feel he is ignoring me--and
might better spend his time reading or socializing or going to different
events. What would you do?
            

            

               --Annoyed in Pound Ridge
            

            Dear Ann,

            Prudie would make popcorn. If women can have PMS,
why can't men have ESPN? Your spouse sounds as though he's not particularly
interested in doing other things, so your best bet is to suggest something
you'd like to go do and ask if he's inclined to go with. If not, make your own
fun ... go out with the girls, start a project, read a book.

            If it's a no-hoper and
the darling jock continues to park himself in front of the tube, get into the
spirit of things. Don't cook. Order out. In fact, you could lay this blessing
on him: Domino Vobiscum (The pizza guy's here).

            --Prudie, poppingly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 201: &quot;No-Stick Finish&quot;

            

               Fill in the blank. Ending her China trip yesterday, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright was disappointed with that nation's position on human rights
but has few ways to alter it, says Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution.
"The Administration has got only one carrot--that is
_____________."
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 200)--
                  "Boyish or Goyish":
               

            

            

               In the '60s it happened to 95 percent of American boys; today it's down
to 60 percent, and a policy just announced by the American Academy of
Pediatrics is meant to make it happen even less. What?
            

            "Having
sex with Alan Ginsberg. (As for the precipitous drop-off, Ginsberg said, 'Come
on, I'm dead. Sixty percent still ain't bad.')"-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            
"Getting through elementary school without a Ritalin
prescription."-- Michael Connelly
            

            
"Circumlocution. From now on, boys will be obligated to get to the point.
Immediately."-- Winter Miller ( Lois C. Ambash had a similar
answer.)

            
"Circumcising newborns by having members of the NYPD shoot 41 bullets at the
foreskin."-- David Rakoff
            

            "Being
covered by health insurance."-- Jack Barth
            

            Click
for more answers. 

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            There was a sweet and
goofy nostalgia in many of today's responses, recalling boyish sexual stirrings
in a nonexistent time without today's easy access to pornography. In those
days, a trembling boy who yearned to see a naked woman had to see her on the
radio, and that took imagination. If he lacked imagination, he'd need an older
sister whose friends slept over, plus a homemade periscope, assembled at a
scout meeting during those interludes when he wasn't being fondled by the scout
master, Father O'Finian. Such were the days. Or perhaps they weren't. Wasn't
nostalgia one of the things in Pandora's box? What about Marlboros, handguns,
and malt liquor? Were they in there? And a tiny Pat Buchanan? In the box? I
remember.

            
               Abbreviated
Answer
            

            Circumcision, as you all knew.

            Announcing its third
penile policy in as many decades, the 55,000 member AAP says there is no
"medical indication" for the routine circumcision of infants. While the group
does not oppose the procedure for religious or cultural reasons, the new policy
calls for the use of pain reducing creams or injections.

            
               Augmented
Quotations Extra
            

            Each final sentence added by News Quiz.

            

               "I am truly grateful that we are able to bestow this priceless gift on
generations to come. And so I proudly dedicate Trump's Sequoia
Casino!"--President Clinton, not discontent with a $480 million plan to protect
giant redwoods from giant lumber companies.

               "There are several inaccuracies in what was printed, and that's of more
concern than what it might do to the ratings. And another thing: I can
fly!"--Eileen Murphy, ABC spokeswoman, not convinced that the Washington
Post 's reporting on Monica Lewinsky maintains the high standards of the
Barbara Walters interview.

               "Richard Nixon was a wartime commander in chief. We were in a culture war
then. And we're in a, oh, call it a haircut war now, so die, you shaggy
bastard, die!"--John Taylor, executive director of the Nixon Library, not
criticizing the former president for trampling the constitution.

               "We are absolutely serious about making this a terrific place to work for a
variety of diverse groups. Hey, ladies, pink curtains!"--John Steffens, vice
chairman of Merrill Lynch, not encouraging women employees to join a
class-action sex discrimination suit against the brokerage firm. Nearly a third
of those eligible have joined the case, far more than the 3 percent response
typical in similar actions.

               "We have heard that only one percent of the
college population is over 5 feet 10 inches with over 1400 S.A.T. scores. And
we'd like to welcome each of you to Fashion Model University , a major
motion picture from Miramax."--Darlene Pinkerton, not embarrassed to have
placed an ad on behalf of an infertile couple, offering $50,000 to a leggy,
brainy egg donor.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Youthful erotic
awakening.

             

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Agony of Victory

            Online auctions are the
Internet flavor of the moment. The best-known auction site, eBay, went public
in September 1998 at $18 and shot up to $47 by the end of its first day. It's
now at about $150, which means that investors value the company at around $20
billion despite only $47 million in sales over the last 12 months. Traditional
businesses want in on online auctions as well. You have until March 21, 1999,
for instance, to bid on the pink satin eye mask Faye Dunaway wore in Mommie
Dearest (current high bid: $650) at Universalstudios.com.

            A technology that allows
you to bid on a 1970 Château Lafite-Rothschild (Wine.com, $205) without leaving
your study is impressive. But it cannot repeal the laws of economics. One such
law is dubbed the "winner's curse" and holds that the winner of an auction
almost always overpays. As an understanding of this law makes clear, online
auctions make the winner's curse even worse.

            Auctions are often thought of as models of economic
efficiency, uniting buyers and sellers at just the right price to maximize
their mutual satisfaction, put resources to their highest and best use, and so
on. But three petroleum engineers writing in the Journal of Petroleum
Technology explained in 1971 why this is not the case.

            Suppose several petroleum
firms are bidding on the drilling rights to a piece of tundra. No firm is sure
how much oil is underneath the property, so they hire a team of engineers to
poke at the surface rocks and make a guess. The guesses will likely range from
too low to too high. Some firm's engineer will probably guess right, but that
firm won't win the auction. The winner will be the firm whose engineer was the
most overoptimistic. The winning firm won't ultimately get as much oil as their
engineers promised, meaning the firm paid too much. In short, the auction
"winner" is ultimately a loser.

            This is a particularly clear example because the thing
being auctioned will have a definite value in the future that is unknowable at
present. But the winner's curse afflicts auction bidders whenever there is
uncertainty over the current or eventual value of the item on the block. This
is true even when bidders have no intention of reselling the item and when its
innate value seems inherently subjective.

            For example, bidders for
Faye Dunaway's pink eye mask must make some judgment on how much they care
about Faye Dunaway. If that were all, the winner would likely be the person who
cared the most. That would be economically efficient in two senses: 1) the
utility of Dunaway's eye mask would be maximized by placing it with the person
who can extract the greatest pleasure from it (just as, uncertainty aside, the
highest bidder for an oil field will be the person who can extract the most oil
from it); and 2) that person would pay no more for the eye mask than the
pleasure of owning it was worth to him.

            But the course of love is as uncertain as the petroleum
content of a pile of rocks. Bidders must also try to guess how much they'll
care for Faye Dunaway in, say, 10 years. The more you overestimate your undying
affection, the more likely you are to win the auction--and the more likely you
are to feel like an idiot in 2009.

            Economists have pointed
out that if bidders were truly rational, they'd simply reduce their bids to
correct for the winner's curse. There is even a mathematical proof that a
perfectly rational actor can avoid the curse. But experimental evidence
suggests that even experienced bidders don't reduce their bids by enough. For
instance, a study of oil field auctions shows that even seasoned firms
typically pay far too much for drilling rights given the amount of oil they
eventually recover. The same phenomenon has been observed when corporate
takeover wizards bid on other companies--the "winner" often overpays. In other
words, oil firms and corporate takeover specialists keep on getting burned in
auctions but persist in bidding too high. They simply don't learn.

            Irritatingly, a rational person who understands the
winner's curse can't do anything about it so long as the other bidders continue
to bid irrationally. If you bid rationally (lower), you won't win any auctions;
if you bid what it takes to win auctions (higher), you'll lose money because of
the winner's curse. Economist Richard Thaler wickedly suggests a solution:
Explain the theory to your competitors. He posits that this is exactly why the
three oil engineers published their article explaining the curse in 1971. Their
hope was to induce other firms to reduce their bids. If so, it didn't work,
since oil firms continue to overpay.

            Online auctions worsen
the winner's curse by increasing the number of bidders. The craziest poor
sucker in a group of 20,000 bidders on the Internet is likely to be crazier
than the craziest one among 200 in a Burbank hotel ballroom. That's another
thing that experimental economists have confirmed--the larger the group, the
bigger the winner's curse. There's no satisfactory way to buy rare or one of a
kind items, but online auctions are a particularly bad method.

            On the other hand, if buyers at online auctions are
persistently disappointed, it's possible that after a while they'll stop
bidding. It's also possible that experience will lead them to approximate
"rationality," and they'll reduce their bids. Either way, sellers would find
their inflated profits eroded. But auctions have survived the winner's curse
for millenniums, and even the Internet is unlikely to change that.

            To be sure, not all auctions are rip-offs. Remember,
there is no danger of the winner's curse if you are sure about the value
of an item to you . In that situation, the auction device serves its
proper purpose of putting the item in the hands of whoever values it the most.
For instance, suppose you are buying a Beanie Baby for your little brother or a
discounted airline ticket to Cabo San Lucas. Most folks have a pretty clear
idea of how much pleasure they'll get from their brother's smiles or a few days
of sand and surf. And sane consumers won't bid more than these respective
pleasures are worth to them--meaning that they can't feel cheated.

            The winner's curse also doesn't apply when there are
many identical items being auctioned off. In those cases, where there is enough
quantity available to satisfy most bidders, the going price will be set by the
sensible middle of the pack rather than by the most overoptimistic extremist.
The leading example of such an auction is the stock market. So the winner's
curse can't explain the extravagant price of shares in eBay itself. Unless, of
course, when it comes to Internet shares there is no sensible middle. If
everyone's gone crazy, economic theory isn't much help.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , March 13
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
March 13, 1999)
            

            The cover story foretells the possible demise of the
"Euro-American partnership that repeatedly saved the 20 th century
from disaster." Europe calls American political and economic power overbearing,
and the United States is wearying of its protector role. Even so, the two will
probably ally themselves against brewing trouble in China, Russia, and the
Islamic states. ... The secretary-general of NATO defends the alliance's policies against charges of
incoherence. In order to preserve post-Cold War relevance, the alliance needs
1) tight European-American cooperation; 2) beefed-up European responsibility
for security; and 3) continued expansion of membership to Eastern European
nations. ... The magazine calls Libya's expected settlement in the
Lockerbie bombing case a triumph of diplomacy. After being lobbied by the likes
of Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan, Muammar Qaddafi may finally concede to the
extradition and trial of two terrorists. In exchange, the West would lift its
sanctions against Libya.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , March 29
            

            
               (posted Friday, March
12, 1999)
            

            A cover package on
science and race. One cover story applauds the long-term investments that some
Silicon Valley companies and historically black colleges are making in training
minority students for high-tech jobs. The programs, which start early and
feature intensive mentoring and peer support, are a limited but meaningful step
in reversing black underrepresentation in high-tech industries. ... The
other, more alarmist, cover piece decries the underrepresentation of young,
U.S.-born scientists in American graduate school labs. Foreign degree
candidates don't speak English well enough to teach effectively, edge their
American peers out of the field, and may eventually return to their native
lands, brain-draining American research. ... The "TRB" column says
George Stephanopoulos is feigning innocence and false injury in his new book.
The columnist has not actually read the book. He does, however, criticize
Stephanopoulos' 1982 college graduation speech.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , March 14
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
March 11, 1999)
            

            The cover story calls
Amazon.com a carefully crafted mirage. Founder Jeff Bezos has promised
investors and employees a retail revolution, but Amazon's stock price and lofty
ideals may be deflated by competition, overvaluation, and all the old-economy
difficulties of the retail trade. ... The magazine profiles Zinedine
Zidane, French soccer star, son of Algerian immigrants, and symbol-elect of a
newly heterogeneous France. Zidane's "cooler," "more modern," and "more
inventive" style of play is supposed to be a metaphor for France's blossoming
multiculturalism, but he is reluctant to be a French hero, and French racism
runs very deep. ... A long piece chronicles the harrowing experience of
a family who unknowingly adopted a schizophrenic son. The son struggled to find
his birth mother's medical history, which had been withheld by the adoption
agency, and committed suicide when he learned of her terrible mental illness. A
generation ago, adoption agencies considered mental illness to be strictly a
product of poor upbringing, and too private and unpleasant to disclose to
prospective parents.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and Newsweek , March 15
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
9, 1999)
            

            The covers of Time and Newsweek
feature tell-alls by Clinton insiders about their bruising stints in the White
House. Newsweek 
               excerpts George Stephanopoulos' new book, which repeats the
standard criticism of the president ("a complicated man responding to the
pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and
appalling"). Stephanopoulos is kinder to the first lady, whom he depicts as
passionate and strong. Among the juiciest scenes: Mario Cuomo refusing a
Supreme Court seat 15 minutes before Clinton officially offered it to him and
National Security Adviser Tony Lake teaching the president how to salute
properly.

            
               Time 's White House insider: Monica
Lewinsky. There is a soft-focus Monica on the cover, and there are softball questions inside ("You signed your first book yesterday.
What was that like?" "Is it easier to be anonymous in New York City than in Los
Angeles?"). When asked if she believes Juanita Broaddrick's allegations,
Lewinsky opines that it was a mutually consensual but "unpleasant" encounter
for Broaddrick: "Twenty years ago, women were not apt to say no." A sidebar says Monica combed Gennifer Flowers' autobiography
for tips on how to seduce the president.

            Speaking of White House
advisers, Time excerpts Henry Kissinger's account of his years as Nixon's secretary of state. Without
even a passing reference to the current president, Kissinger calls his former
boss "politically astute yet prone to self-destructive acts; deeply patriotic
yet wont to hazard his achievements on tawdry practices." Nixon's reputation
for double-dealing came from his fear of confrontation, and Watergate stemmed
from his tendency to give wildly impractical orders that he never really wanted
implemented.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , March 15
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
9, 1999)
            

            
               U.S. News '
cover analyzes the ever-accelerating presidential candidacy of George W. Bush.
Time and Newsweek run Bush stories, too. All three have the same
take: Bush's greatest liability as a candidate is his air of inevitability,
which exposes him to an upset in the primaries. When asked to comment on
Elizabeth Dole, Bush tells 
               U.S. News , "I think Bob Dole is really one of
the really good men." U.S. News also surveys the rest of the Republican
field, calling Dole "a superachiever ... who battled sexism ... and lived
out feminist ideals perhaps even more consistently than women who wear feminism
on their sleeves like, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton."

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , March 15
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
9, 1999)
            

            A reverent profile of
John le Carré defends him from the lowly designation of "spy novelist" and
bemoans his under-recognition in literary circles. ... A piece describes
how Eric Rudolph, the fugitive accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympics and
several abortion clinics, has become a folk hero in the rural North Carolina
mountains where he is being sought. Fundamentalist locals identify with and may
even be protecting Rudolph because they view his pursuit as part of a
government conspiracy to oppress them. ... An article recounts the
murder of a Guatemalan bishop and human rights activist, committed just after
the publication of his damning report on the army's record of political
killings. In a campaign to discredit church-led human rights investigations,
government and army authorities spun the murder as a homosexual crime of
passion, resulting in the arrest and (finally abandoned) prosecution of one of
the bishop's colleagues.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
                
               , March 15
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
9, 1999)
            

            For the second week in a
row, the lead
editorial calls for an investigation of and attention to the Juanita
Broaddrick story. ... A conservative pundit argues that feminism is dead
and that the president is to blame. He has dealt a mortal blow to the women's
movement by forcing Democratic and feminist leaders to ignore his commission of
sexual harassment and rape. ... The magazine profiles California
congressman and former House Manager James Rogan, a possible contender for Sen.
Diane Feinstein's seat in 2000 and the savior-elect of California's Republican
Party.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 203: &quot;Gloat, Little Gloat Worm&quot;

            
               Mattel, Al Gore,
Landry's Seafood Restaurants, and Cruel Intentions can all make the same
boast. What?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               

                  Thursday's Question (No. 202)--"Death Sentence?": Under pressure from
the Federal Trade Commission, R.J. Reynolds will add a single sentence to each
print ad for Winston. Saying what?
               

            

            "Banned
in California, but now qualifies as an assisted-suicide device in
Oregon."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "Due to
interference from the Federal Trade Commission, R.J. Reynolds regrets to
announce that it will no longer include a free toy in every pack of
Winstons."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "No
cartoon camels were used in the marketing of this product."-- Matt
Sullivan ( Ian Henley and Kate Powers had similar
answers.)

            "These
fine tobacco products can be comfortably smoked through a tracheotomy
hole."-- Larry Amaros (similarly, Stephen Golub and Meg
Wolitzer)
            

            "Smoke
up: Delaware needs a new capitol building!"-- James Poniewozik
            

            Click
for more answers. 

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            After smoking a pack of Camels a day for a dozen
years, I gave it up in 1985. I still miss it. Cigarettes stimulate thought,
distract from woe, and require playing with matches. Cigarettes promote
intimacy: What could be sexier than sharing a smoke, passing that small fire
from hand to hand? Cigarettes impose form on your day; they are a means of
demarcation: You smoke one after something and before something else. And they
look so cool. I'd be smoking right now if it weren't for the part about the
hideous respiratory illness and coughing away my life in a painful and
protracted demise.

            I intend to resume the
habit as a delight of old age; my first Social Security check will just about
cover the cost of a carton. Smoking will offer a reliable indoor pleasure that
I can enjoy seated, much to be desired in my decrepitude. And malignancy
develops slowly. With a little luck, by the time I contract a fatal disease,
I'll already be dead. You'd think instead of messing around with Winston, RJR
would produce a brand it can market to old folks. Call it Golden One Hundreds.
Use the slogan: "Hey, Granny, feeling lucky?"

            
               Delightful Double
Negative Answer
            

            "No additives in our tobacco does not mean a safer
cigarette."

            Winston's "no bull" ads
proclaim that the cigarettes are 100 percent tobacco with no additives. RJR was
shocked--shocked!--to learn that some might interpret this as a health claim.
In the 18 months since the campaign began, Winston's market share rose from
4.86 percent to 4.93 percent.

            
               Sunday's Sermons in
Review Extra
            

            All preached yesterday in New York City; none
actually heard by News Quiz.

            "Better Than Evian" (Rev. Sharon Blackburn, Plymouth
Church of the Pilgrims, Congregational)--Promotional fee paid by Perrier. At
last, sacred product placement.

            "Thirsty?!" (Rev. Dr. Dale D. Hansen, St. Luke's,
Lutheran)--What would Jesus drink? Or the Rev. Sharon Blackburn?

            "Are There Any Rats in Your Cellar?" (Rev. Dr.
Thomas K. Tewell, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church)--Either that's a metaphor
or the church has started a pest removal sideline.

            "The Divine Maitre d'..."
(Dr. J. Barrie Shepherd, First Presbyterian)--Would you ask the divine wine
steward what goes with rats? And send over a bottle of Perrier.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Winsomely toxic
products.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Wild Turkey

            Commenting Wednesday on
Turkey's capture of the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, the press across
western Europe made two principal demands: that Ocalan should not be executed,
as Turkish law allows, and that Turkey should seize this opportunity to reach a
peaceful settlement of its Kurdish problem. It was also generally accepted in
both Europe and the Middle East that U.S. intelligence was deeply involved in
Ocalan's mysterious delivery from the Greek Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he
had been sheltering, to an island prison near Istanbul.

            
               El Mundo of Madrid ran
a front-page story on the CIA's involvement in Ocalan's "kidnapping,"
quoting a Turkish government source as saying that "the North American secret
services alerted us to his whereabouts." The same paper carried an exclusive
interview with Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, who said it
is entirely up to the judiciary to decide if Ocalan should receive a death
sentence.

            The paper led its front page with Ecevit saying that he
hopes there will now be a solution to the Kurdish problem, though in the
interview he spoke of achieving this not through greater political autonomy, as
the Kurds demand, but through economic improvements in the southeast region of
Turkey where they live. In an editorial Tuesday in the English-language paper,
Turkish Daily News , Ilnur Cevik wrote that Ecevit and Iraqi Vice
President Tariq Aziz recently agreed to a resumption of oil sales and border
trade between southeast Turkey and Iraq, which had been interrupted by the
American and British bombing campaign. Cevik said Turkey should now press for a
lifting of sanctions against Iraq, and called on Baghdad "to utilize our unique
position as a friend and neighbor of Iraq to be able to integrate back into the
international community."

            Mohammad Noureddin, a
leading Arab expert on Turkish affairs, told the London-based Mideast Mirror
news service Tuesday that Ocalan's "handover to Turkey by Greece via U.S.
intelligence suggests that Washington may be poised for a major operation in
Iraq in which it needs to enlist Ankara." Reporting the Israeli government's
denial that it had been in any way involved, Ha'aretz said
Wednesday that the denial was in response to Kurd suspicions based, in part, on
a column written earlier this month in the New York Times by William
Safire, who had said that "U.S. and Israeli intelligence and diplomats" were
helping to track down Ocalan.

            The rioting of Kurds across Europe Tuesday, with burnings
and hostage-takings at Greek and Kenyan diplomatic missions, alarmed European
newspapers and generated countless pages of comment and analysis. These
included much self-criticism. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Wednesday in a front-page
editorial that Germany, which has a large Kurdish immigrant population, has
damaged both its own constitution and international agreements on terrorism by
refusing to request Ocalan's extradition from Italy last month, when it had an
international arrest warrant out on him. The paper also warned of the influence
the affair will have on Germany's highly charged debate about the integration
of immigrants into German society.

            The Rome newspaper
La Repubblica
accused Germany of breaking European Union accords, with the result that "the
whole territory of Germany is in a state of siege by the Kurd intifada." The
editorial went on to say that Europe should take a common position toward
Turkey, "clarifying that its aspirations to membership of Europe will be
strictly dependent on the way it manages Ocalan's destiny. ... A country that
doesn't respect the rights of defendants and which practices the death penalty
doesn't have the right to be part of Europe." In Paris, Le Figaro said that Ankara
should "judge Ocalan with all the guarantees due to him, to prove that Turkey
is a state founded on the law." It added, "This is an essential condition for
any settlement of the Kurd question." Libération called for "a political solution that
necessarily requires a radical decentralization. ... It is here that the role
of the United States, which played a big part in Ocalan's arrest and which for
the moment can only see him as a terrorist, could be decisive."

            
In an interview with the British youth magazine
the Face , supermodel Kate Moss revealed that she hadn't walked sober
down the runway for 10 years. Moss, 25, who last year checked into a London
rehabilitation clinic, said that she and her fellow models drank champagne from
early in the morning and smoked pot all day.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 230: &quot;Whoooo's Johnny?&quot;

            

               "Johnny has been such an effective spokesperson for us because he truly
believes in the power of our products," says the president of New Jersey's
Franklin Electronics. Who is endorsing what?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 229)--"Don't Think So":
            

            

               
                  Fill in the blank in this quote from cognitive scientist Bruce
Bagemihl: "We shouldn't have to look to __________ to see what's normal or
ethical."
               
            

            
"Story of O ."-- Jeff Hoover
            

            "The
gun control laws of the world's civilized nations."-- Eric
Donaldson
            

            "Our
friends, clergy, or family. 'We should be able to get all our ethical input
from television, movies, and popular music,' Bagemihl added. 'Can I get you
anything? Coffee, tea, heroin, prostitute?' "-- Tim Carvell ( Dale
Shuger had a similar answer.)

            
"Giraffes. Likewise, there's really not much point in turning to Quentin Crisp
for advice on browsing in the tree canopy of wooded grasslands."--Jennifer
Miller
            

            "Pamela
Anderson. 'But now that she's back to a C cup we can,' continued a smiling
Bagemihl."-- Beth Sherman
            

            Click
for more responses.

            
               Randy's
Self-Reference Wrap-Up
            

            Today's question, a cunning trap set by guest host
Daniel Radosh, forces me to acknowledge authorship of a column in the New
York Times Magazine , "The Ethicist," a sort of jumped-up "Dear Abby,"
responding to ethical queries from readers. I'm meant to analyze each question
and extract a general ethical principle, a rule--i.e., to apply the skills of
the lawyer. This, of course, is the least interesting approach. We all know you
shouldn't shoot the guy. It would be more entertaining to consider mixed
motives, mitigating circumstances, conflicting social pressures, complicated
histories, and then find that in this unique situation you really should shoot
the guy. It's the difference between the lawyer and the dramatist, between the
general and the particular. (That, and the fact that show people have it all
over lawyers when it comes to parties and shoes.)

            What compels the lawyerly approach is not
priggishness on the part of the Times (well, not entirely) but
limitations of space. While the lawyer needs only a brief summary of the case,
the dramatist needs a richly detailed scenario. Alas, the column permits only
400 words for each letter and response, so I necessarily take an approach that
might generously be called concise but is frequently called (via reader e-mail)
cursory (actually, "cursory, you idiot").

            The oddest thing about the job is not its
limitations but the curious caricature that illustrates each column. This
sketch of a pensive moralist, the personification of the column, the Uncle Ben
of ethics, the Betty Crocker of morals, looks not at all like me. It does,
however, bear a striking resemblance to Michael Kinsley. Is that ethical?

            (Send questions to
ethicist@nytimes.com.)

            
               Don't Tell Pat
Answer
            

            "We shouldn't have to look to the animal
world to see what's normal or ethical."

            Bagemihl is the author of Biological
Exuberance , a new book about homosexual behavior among animals, in which he
writes that same-sex shenanigans have been documented in more than 450
different species, including goats, dolphins, elephants, and bonobo apes.
Penguins and geese maintain same-sex matings for life. Homosexual bears raise
offspring together. Gay male trout move in with their straight female best
friends and then the fun begins.

            But in the current issue
of Time , Bagemihl warns that beyond a vague statement that "diversity is
part of human heritage," it's inappropriate to make claims about human behavior
based on his findings. And yet, just look at that adorable picture of two boy
giraffes with their necks entwined, and tell me you're not dying to turn it
into a movie starring Rupert Everett as the one on the left and anybody but
Nathan Lane as the other one.-- Daniel Radosh
            

            
               Randy's Return
Extra
            

            Everybody's got a jury duty story, so I won't go on
and on about mine except to mention two highlights--Anne Meara and a bomb
scare. You'd have thought it would discourage her but, jeez, she just kept
coming back. Of course, you'd have thought she'd discourage us, but we kept
coming back, too. State law.

            I'm grateful to Daniel
Radosh for filling in with disconcerting skill and to all of you for
attenuating the pranks while he was the substitute. Now I'm going to leave the
room for a few minutes, and while I'm gone I expect whomever took it to return
Mr. Radosh's prosthetic head. Just put it on my desk, and we'll say no more
about it.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Preachy cognitive scientists.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            American Guns Stun Europeans

            The school massacre near
Denver supplanted Kosovo as the lead story in the late editions of almost all
the British newspapers, which carried the usual expressions of European
bewilderment over the lack of serious gun control in the United States. In an
editorial Wednesday, the London Evening
Standard said that even the mass murder at Columbine High School was
unlikely to lead to any change in the law. "[S]o extravagant is the American
concept of 'freedom,' and so deep-rooted is the pollution of firearms of all
kinds throughout the country, that there is little prospect that even this
latest monstrosity will provoke a meaningful shift in public attitudes," the
paper said. It noted that President Clinton had "mouthed the necessary words of
horror and condolence," but commented that it was "hard for the rest of the
world to take these entirely seriously, when repetition seems almost
inevitable." The Evening Standard splashed the story on its front page
with the headline "They Did It for Hitler's Birthday."

            The Times of London observed
in a report from Washington that Americans are "frankly disbelieving" when told
how Britain outlawed hand guns in the wake of a school massacre in Dunblane,
Scotland. "They argue, rightly, that no such sweeping legislation could be
passed in America," it said. The Times also noted that the National
Rifle Association faced "the considerable embarrassment" of holding its annual
convention next week in Denver, very close to the scene of the tragedy.

            NATO's war with Yugoslavia remains the other main story
around the world. Wednesday's coverage included an interview with Italy's
La Repubblica
by Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister, to mark his arrival in Rome
for the first informal annual meeting of past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He wrote that he had been asked to be available to mediate in the Kosovo
conflict but had replied that he would only do so "if and when the parties are
truly determined to seek a political solution." He said, "It doesn't seem to me
that this is the mood at the moment, but it might be very soon." Peres called
the war an "absurd" one that should never have started, but added, "One can't
deny that its purpose is fundamentally of a moral character. It is not a
political or a power game. The civilized world is simply tired of racism,
discrimination and atrocities."

            In an interview in
Corriere
della Sera of Milan, Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema offered
rather qualified praise of Clinton. He is "an intelligent leader," D'Alema
said, but "I don't know if he saw all the traps that had been set for him in
the war." The prime minister, whose coalition government is divided about
Kosovo, said that once the war was over there should be reflection about "the
criteria for NATO intervention. ... The right of humanitarian interference is
legitimate, but we must ask ourselves about its limits."

            Turin's L a Stampa
                led its front page with an appeal for
peace in Belgrade by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexis II. It said the
patriarch has criticized NATO but has asked "the leaders of Yugoslavia, like
those of the Atlantic alliance, to halt military operations." Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic has expressed the hope that the efforts of Russia
and its Orthodox hierarchy "may lead to peace and the end of aggression."

            
               Die Welt complained Wednesday
in its main front-page story that in western Europe only Germany is keeping its
promises toward Albanian refugees. "Of the 13,824 refugees who had arrived in
Europe by Monday morning, 9,937--more than two-thirds of the total--have come
to Germany," it said. In an accompanying front-page comment, the paper said:
"Typically German. Two weeks ago the federal government said it would take
10,000 Kosovo refugees--and today they are here. German generosity? German
efficiency? Or stupidity, a continuing feeling of anticipated guilt that other
countries quietly smile at and exploit?"

            In France Wednesday, Le Monde led its front page with a question: "A month
of war, with what results?" Its answer, in summary, was that the offensive has
weakened Serbia's military potential but has failed to deter Milosevic or
prevent "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. "A third of the population has been
driven out, and diplomatic initiatives are at a dead end," it said. The British
press focused again on the prospects of a ground war, with the conservative
tabloid the Daily Mail splashing the claim that Prime Minister Tony
Blair is now planning for one. It said that for the first time since the
bombing began Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook "held out the prospect of
British soldiers going into Kosovo before a ceasefire has been agreed with
Belgrade." But it added the rider that "this will only happen when the back of
Serb resistance has been broken by Nato's air power."

            The Times of India
Wednesday condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for its ecological effects.
The paper said in an editorial: "There is
nothing humanitarian or liberating about the intense bombing of Yugoslavia,
which has created even more refugees and resulted in widespread ecocide." The
paper devoted its second editorial
to the diplomatic significance of Madeleine Albright's jewelry. Under the
headline "Lapel Diplomacy," the paper said that "her sparklers--the brooches
she wears while negotiating knotty issues of geo-politics--are as much a
statement as the press releases after various meetings with, say, the Iraqis,
Serbs, Russians, or Israelis." It went on: "The American eagle brooch says
without a word being exchanged that she is in hawkish, combative mood; the
cherub brooch betokens the spirit of innocent accommodation; and the red and
gold balloon brooch denotes a festive moment. On all other counts, Ms Albright
is thought prone to tough-talk, but her brooches seem to tell a different, more
nuanced story."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 229: &quot;Don't Think So&quot;

            

               Fill in the blank in this quote from cognitive scientist Bruce
Bagemihl: "We shouldn't have to look to __________ to see what's normal or
ethical."
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 228) "Still Not Sure"
            

            

               At yesterday's ceremony honoring the Teacher of the Year, Bill Clinton
recalled that his sixth-grade teacher once told him, "If you don't learn the
difference, I'm not sure whether you're going to be governor or wind up in the
penitentiary." What difference?
            

            "None,
apparently."--Ellen Macleay
            

            
"Between 'Voulez vous couchez avec moi, ce soir ?' and 'Kiss it.'
"--Norman Oder
            

            "The
difference between 18 and 17 is 20 years."--Brooke Saucier
            

            
"Between 'principal' and 'principle.' As we know, the school principal is our
'pal' and 'principle'--well, President Clinton is still having trouble with
that one."--Leslie Goodman-Malamuth ( Kathryn Wetherbee had a
similar answer.)

            "Sorry,
but I am not going to give aid and comfort to Slobodan Milosevic by lampooning
our president during wartime. At least not until John McCain gives me the
go-ahead."--Greg Diamond
            

            Click
for more responses.

            
               Daniel's
Wrap-Up
            

            Teacher of the Year Andrew Baumgartner is the kind
of educator who has delighted his kindergarten students with a wedding for
Sleeping Beauty, complete with limousine and cake, teaching them, I suppose,
that nothing is worthwhile unless it is entertaining. By that standard, I owe
more than I thought to my junior high-school social studies teacher. I'm still
not clear what "social studies" are, exactly, but I'll never forget his stories
about the UFO that sometimes hovered outside his window, conducting experiments
through a metal cable attached to his neck (he showed us the marks). I'm more
conflicted about my high-school writing teacher, who announced that his lessons
were so valuable that he deserved 10 percent of the profits from our first
books. At the time I agreed, but now he goes around saying he learned more from
us than we did from him, and I still haven't seen a dime from Angela's
Ashes .

            The Teacher of the Year
program is sponsored by Scholastic Inc., best known among impressionable school
children for distributing cool magazines whose exclusive advertiser is the U.S.
Armed Forces.

            
               Indiscreet
Answer
            

            The difference between
"when to talk and when to keep quiet." The teacher's name was Mary Kay
Letourneau.

            
               Long Shot
Extra
            

            In the following quotations from Tuesday's New
York Times , the italicized sentences were spoken by scientists discussing
the search for extraterrestrial life. The nonitalicized sentences were spoken
by Bill Bradley and others discussing Bradley's run for the White House.

            

               "I'm at the top of my game. I'm going to run for President of the United
States. The idea that we're not going to live to see it is not one that's
holding us up in particular."

               "I don't get into it unless I can see my way through 270, which are the
electoral votes needed to be President. Scientists know it's a worthwhile
pursuit, but this makes it known to the wider public."

               "Will we find intelligent life in space in my lifetime? The answer
is, 'Absolutely.' "

               "Now the question is, 'Can you win?' It's a very remote
possibility."

               "The University of California doesn't provide chairs to little green men
from Mars. Too Eastern, too liberal, too intellectual."

               "Now I'm out campaigning for the Presidency, and it's the ultimate
exhilaration. There is a general belief that while it is a difficult
pursuit, this is so important that it is worth the time."

               "It's Al Gore and I, one-on-one, for 11 months. I've pretty much reached
the conclusion that the occurrence of technological life is an extremely rare
occurrence."

            

            
               Farewell
Extra
            

            After four days of deliberation, Randy Cohen voted
with 11 other jurors in favor of lethal injection. There's one New Yorker
who'll never walk his dog off the leash again. Finishing my week as guest host,
I'd like to thank you all for making me feel welcome. Your inspired
contributions over the last few days are all the gratification I require. There
is no need to e-mail me with praise, nor to cc: jackshafer@msn.com.

            Now please welcome back
the master--Obi-Wan to my Anakin--Randy Cohen. Believe me, this job isn't as
easy as he makes it look.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The elusive meaning of "is."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Matt Groening

            I have before me the
current issue of The Comics Journal , which features a list of the 100
greatest comics of the century, from Prince Valiant at the bottom to
Pogo, Peanuts , and Krazy Kat at the top, with room for everyone
from R. Crumb to Captain Marvel in between. There is no place in it, however,
for Matt Groening's Life in Hell . Groening's friend Lynda Barry (whose
work often shows up next to his in the pages of alternative weeklies across the
land) gets the nod for her brilliant Ernie Pook's Comeek (No. 74).
Up-and-coming comics superstar Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate
Photographer checks in at No. 56. But those anxious bunnies Binky and Bongo
and their sidekicks, the deadpan fez wearers Akbar and Jeff, are conspicuous
(to me, anyway) in their absence.

            This is a shame, since
Groening, better known as the creator of The Simpsons , and now of the
much-hyped Futurama , is also an important figure in the world of
pen-and-ink serial cartooning. He is the link between Jules Feiffer (who earns
two spots on The Comics Journal 's list) and Dilbert (who earns
none). He is also part of the explosion of brilliant graphic work that began in
the early 1980s and has so far produced an array of permanent contributions to
American culture---the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets , Joe Sacco's
Palestine , and Art Spiegelman's Maus , to name only a few. Unlike
these artists, Groening is not interested in rigorous draftsmanship or extended
narration, but he is, like them (and like Barry and Katchor), committed to
using cartoons as a way of addressing reality. Life in Hell hits us
where we live: under the thumb of well-meaning, rational, but ultimately
psychotic and abusive authority. Hell is other bunnies--bosses, parents,
teachers, co-workers, boyfriends, girlfriends. We (I mean all us bunnies, fez
wearers, and miscellaneous snaggletoothed, pop-eyed, four-fingered creatures)
seem hard-wired for sadomasochism. Even the exuberant, indistinguishable lovers
Akbar and Jeff spend panel after panel devising new ways to baffle, dominate,
and mind-fuck each other.

            To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau: When reality becomes
cartoonlike, the only place for a realist is in cartooning. It's no accident
that the rise of serious comics (or "graphic novels" as some publishers chose
to call them) came at a moment when American fiction was relatively moribund.
For its part, The Simpsons arrived at what was a relatively bad period
for Hollywood movies and was part of what will be remembered as an explosion of
inventive network television programming: thirtysomething ,
Roseanne , My So-Called Life , Twin Peaks and, of course,
Seinfeld .

            
               The Simpsons ,
now midway through its 10 th season, has outlasted them all. It began
as a series of fill-in segments for The Tracey Ullman Show . (Oh, for the
Fox network of yesteryear! Of 21 Jump Street and Shannen Doherty-era
90210 , of Alien Nation and Roc ! Where have you gone,
Keenen Ivory Wayans?) These crudely drawn mini-episodes were like Raymond
Carver stories optioned by Hanna-Barbera. They featured the grind and
humiliation of lower-middle-class family life, and they centered not on the
children Bart, Lisa, and Maggie but on the beleaguered patriarch Homer. The
early Homer was hardly the sweet-natured oaf who quickly replaced Bill Cosby
and Ronald Reagan as America's favorite dad. His voice was growlier, his temper
quicker, and his shaky masculine pride always on the line. The first bit I
recall seeing involved Homer falling for the aggressive sales pitch of an RV
salesman, and his willingness to bury his family under crushing debt in order
to look like a big shot in the salesman's eyes, and theirs. (The current Homer,
in contrast, is a creature so utterly without pride as to qualify for a kind of
sainthood.)

            In early 1990, Fox, a fledgling outfit with nothing to
lose, put the half-hour Simpsons in its Thursday, 8 p.m. slot, up
against The Cosby Show , then the No. 1 program in America. The upstart
did not just so much challenge Cosby as envelop it: In perhaps the most
sustained of the winking pop-culture references for which it has become famous
(and on which it came to depend rather too heavily as time went on), The
Simpsons soon featured an avuncular African-American physician with a
penchant for multicolored sweaters.

            
               The Simpsons is
justly celebrated for the density of its cultural allusions and the rich detail
of its visuals. The best episodes project two dimensions into three better than
any animation since Disney's features of the 1940s or the great Chuck Jones
Merrie Melodie shorts for Warner Bros. But the show's real achievement is in
its characters, a range of comic types as vivid as any in Dickens or
Shakespeare. While Bart is the franchise and Lisa the feminist-intellectual
icon, the heart of The Simpsons is the extraordinary marriage of Homer
and Marge, a marriage that has had its tests (Remember that slinky French
bowling instructor? That country-and-western diva? The six-foot hero sandwich?
The nervous breakdown on the freeway?), but has endured since the end of the
disco era. When George Bush sneered during the 1992 campaign that America
needed more families like the Waltons and fewer like the Simpsons, you knew it
was over for him--and not only because he seemed to be wishing for an end to
electricity and indoor plumbing. The Simpsons are our truest, best selves:
stupid--maybe; lazy--you bet; suspicious of authority--always; willing to do
anything about it--not really; but above all, loyal to our spouses, our
children, our little sisters, our friends, our hometowns, our bad haircuts, and
our favorite brand of beer. The Simpsons may be hip and ironic, but
unlike, say, South Park or Ren & Stimpy , it has never been
cynical.

            Its success resulted from the unlikely collusion between
Groening, a left-wing populist (and self-described hippie) from the Pacific
Northwest, and Rupert Murdoch, a right-wing populist from Australia. While
Groening has always insisted on (and been granted) freedom from network
interference, his show is still a creature of contradictions. It pokes endless
fun at the corporatization of all aspects of life (think of Duff Gardens, a
mind-numbing, totalitarian theme park; or the robotic Schwarzenegger clone
known as McBain; or Malibu Stacy, the Barbie-like doll Lisa Simpson lives for)
even as its characters have become among the most recognizable icons of
corporate culture. This January, the spiky hair and bulging eyes of Bart
Simpson mysteriously found their way into a photograph of soldiers patrolling a
street in Hebron that accompanied a New York Times Magazine essay by
Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. An "Editor's Note" the following week
explained that the photographer in question signs all his pictures by holding a
Bart Simpson mask up to his lens--and that the editors erroneously assumed that
the mask had been held by a passing Palestinian child.

            "As much as I love the
Simpsons show," Groening recently told Wired magazine, "I also
love the Simpsons figurines. To me the figurines are part of the
creative product." Groening's willing, if somewhat ironic, embrace of the
marketing bonanza his creation has unleashed may have cost him his rightful
spot in the The Comics Journal 's highbrow/subculture pantheon. I'm sure
he's not as upset about it as I am.

            In the decade since its debut, The Simpsons has
spawned a raft of imitators and has launched a boom in prime-time animation.
Some of the products of this boom have been unsurprisingly dreadful (Remember
The Critic ? Duckman ?). But others have been pretty good--the
tragically misunderstood Beavis and Butt-head , for instance, and its
creator's subsequent King of the Hill . And now Fox, ever eager to flog
its winning formulas to the point of exhaustion, has come up with The Family
Guy , The PJs , and Groening's own Futurama . The critics have
been generous to Futurama , confident that it will pick up steam as it
goes along. I'm not so sure. Visually, it's stunning. The screen is packed with
puns for the eye and teasers for the brain. But the writing is slow and
stilted, and the situations already seem tired and didactic. This week's
episode was as cuddly as an episode of Full House , and the previous one,
in which it's discovered that the moon has become a vulgar tourist trap, seemed
recycled from Simpsons outtakes right down to the "Whalers on the Moon"
singing panorama. Perhaps Futurama will pick up. I make no
predictions.

            Except one. A thousand years from now, if robot
historians want to know what life was really like in
late-20 th -century America, they will look to Life in Hell and
The Simpsons . No, there were no talking rabbits, and human hair was not
sculpted into yellow spikes or blue pylons (well, not that often anyway). But
everything else is pretty much accurate.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Morning in Japan?

            The winter of 1981-82 was a
grim one for the U.S. economy. After a nasty recession in 1980, there had been
a brief, hopeful period of recovery--but by early 1982 it was clear that a
second, even worse recession was underway. By late that year the unemployment
rate would rise above 10 percent for the first (and so far only) time since the
1930s. So bleak was the prospect that in February the New York Times
Magazine ran a long article (by Benjamin Stein) titled "A Scenario for a
Depression?" which suggested that "the nation has arrived at a new spot on the
economic map where the old remedies--or what we thought were remedies--have
lost their power and the economic wise men have lost their magic." Stein and
many others worried that after nearly a decade of disappointing performance,
the U.S. economy might simply fail to respond to monetary and fiscal policies,
that a self-reinforcing downward spiral of pessimism and financial collapse
might already be out of control.

            Fortunately, however, it
turned out that the old remedies were just as powerful, the nostrums of the
economic wise men just as magical, as always. The Federal Reserve Board, which
had been following a strict monetarist rule, reversed course in mid-summer and
opened up the monetary taps. Interest rates came down, the stock market rose,
and by early 1983 the economy was unmistakably on the mend. Indeed, as the
workers and factories left idle by the slump went back to work, output soared:
Real GDP grew almost 7 percent during 1983, and in 1984 Ronald Reagan was
triumphantly re-elected under the slogan "It's morning in America." It wasn't:
Once the slack had been taken up, growth slowed again, and over the '80s as a
whole the economy actually grew a bit less than it had in the '70s. But the
surge in 1983 was a spectacular demonstration of the way that a sufficiently
expansionary monetary policy can reverse a depressed economy's fortunes.

            The biggest single question now facing the world economy is
whether the same magic can work in today's Japan.

            In some important ways,
Japan today bears a strong resemblance to the United States in that frightening
summer of 1982. Like the United States then, Japan has some serious long-term
problems: a slowdown in productivity growth, an ossified management culture, a
troubled financial sector (Stein's article talked at length about the looming
problems of the savings and loan industry). But overlaid on these long-term
difficulties is a severe recession. Japan's unemployment statistics notoriously
understate the true extent of joblessness, but even so the current 4.4 percent
rate is the highest in the 45 years the number has been published. Depending on
whose estimates you believe, the economy is operating anywhere from 6 percent
to more than 10 percent below its capacity. That means that Japan's "output
gap" is probably comparable to that of the United States 17 years ago. So if
Japan can somehow persuade its consumers and business investors to start
spending again, there is room for several years of rapid growth--even if the
"structural" problems remain unsolved.

            There is, however, one big difference between America then
and Japan now. Japan can no longer use conventional monetary and fiscal
policies to get the economy moving. Whereas U.S. interest rates in early 1982
were in double digits--and could therefore be sharply reduced--Japanese
short-term interest rates have been below 1 percent for years, apparently
leaving little room for further cuts. And Japan's government is already deeply
in debt, already running huge deficits. The experience of the past few months
(in which the prospect that the government would have to sell vast quantities
of bonds to finance its deficits temporarily led to a tripling of long-term
interest rates) suggests that any attempt to stimulate the economy with even
bigger deficit spending will do more harm than good. So it might appear that
there are no easy answers, that nothing short of a total restructuring of the
Japanese economy can turn it around.

            But over the past year a
growing chorus of Western economists has argued against this fatalistic view.
On one side, they have worried that unless something dramatic is done to
increase demand Japan may go into a deflationary tailspin; that the expectation
of falling prices will make consumers and businesses even less willing to
spend, worsening the slump and driving prices down all the faster. On the other
side, they have argued that radical, unconventional monetary policy can
still be effective--that even if short-term interest rates are near zero,
massive monetary expansion can still push up demand. Some economists--namely,
yours truly--have even argued that Japan should try to get out of its
deflationary trap by creating expectations of inflation .

            Until very recently, these arguments seemed too outlandish
to receive support from more than a handful of Japanese officials. But the
events of the last few weeks suggest that there has been a sea change of
opinion inside the Bank of Japan--a change similar to, but even more striking
than, the abandonment of monetarism at the Fed during 1982. After years of
warning about the risks of inflation and the importance of sound policy, the
BOJ has suddenly begun flooding the market with liquidity. The overnight rate
at which banks lend to each other--the equivalent of our "Fed funds" rate--has
been driven down literally to zero. Banks now charge each other only for the
administrative costs of making the loan. And still the expansion continues.
It's still a bit hard to believe, but it looks as if Japan's central bank has
been radicalized--that is, it has finally seen the light, has finally
understood that in Japan's current state adhering to conventional notions of
monetary prudence is actually dangerous folly, and only monetary policy that
would normally be regarded as irresponsible can save the economy.

            There are, of course, big risks in any such radical
policy departure. My own view is that the biggest risk is that the new policy
will not be radical enough, for it is a characteristic of deflation-fighting
that half-measures get you nowhere. Suppose, for example, that the Bank of
Japan were to try to convince the public that the future will bring inflation,
not deflation. But that the target inflation rate is too low, so that even if
everyone believed that target would be achieved, the Japanese economy would
remain seriously depressed. Then deflation would continue--and the policy would
ignominiously fail.

            But if the BOJ is determined enough--and if people
like me have analyzed Japan's plight correctly--then six months or a year from
now Japan may be on the road to an economic recovery more dramatic than anyone
would now dare to forecast. By sometime next year, the Land of the Rising Sun
may, at least for a while, live up to its billing. You heard it here first.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Source

            To hear the poet read
"The Source," click .

            There
in the fringe of trees between
the upper field and the edge of the one
below it that runs above the valley
one time I heard in the early
days of summer the clear ringing
six notes that I knew were the opening
of the Fingal's Cave Overture
I heard them again and again that year
and the next summer and the year
afterward those six descending
notes the same for all the changing
in my own life since the last time
I had heard them fall past me from
the bright air in the morning of a bird
and I believed that what I had heard
would always be there if I came again
to be overtaken by that season
in that place after the winter
and I would wonder again whether
Mendelssohn really had heard them somewhere
far to the north that many years ago
looking up from his youth to listen to
those six notes of an ancestor
spilling over from a presence neither
water nor human that led to the cave
in his mind the fluted cliffs and the wave
going out and the falling water
he thought those notes could be the music for
Mendelssohn is gone and Fingal is gone
all but his name for a cave and for one
piece of music and the black-capped warbler
as we called that bird that I remember
singing there those notes descending
from the age of the ice dripping
I have not heard again this year can it
be gone then will I not hear it
from now on will the overture begin
for a time and all those who listen
feel that falling in them but as always
without knowing what they recognize

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Speeding While Sober

            On March 15, John Stokes piloted his
tractor-trailer in front of an Amtrak train at a rail crossing in Bourbonnais,
Ill. In the ensuing collision, 11 people were killed. His commercial license
was suspended for all of two months. His right to drive his car for
noncommercial purposes was unaffected. Even this wrist slap only happened after
it came out that Stokes had had at least nine moving violations since
1991--three of them last year.

            So why is he allowed on the road at all? Answer:
because he broke the law while stone cold sober. Had Stokes been cited even
once for driving drunk--even without an accident, even without violating any
traffic rule--he automatically would have lost his right to drive for six
months. A second offense would have cost him a year's driving, and a third
would have sent him to jail.

            Why the difference? Alcohol is the leading cause of
traffic fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, contributing to more than 16,000 deaths each year, making up 30
percent of all fatalities on the road. But speed comes in a very respectable
second, killing 13,000 Americans annually.

            Today, drunken drivers
rank as one notch above child molesters in the popular mind. But attitudes
about driving while intoxicated were not always so negative. Twenty years ago,
it was still widely accepted as harmless high jinks. Only in the 1980s, thanks
to campaigns by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, did Americans come to recognize
the vast toll of drunks on the road. As a result, we've stiffened penalties,
raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, mandated license revocation for minors
caught driving after drinking any amount of alcohol and, in 16 states,
tightened the blood-alcohol standard for drunkenness. Deaths in alcohol-related
crashes fell 32 percent between 1982 and 1997.

            When it comes to speed, though, the attitude is: Party on!
In 1995, Congress dropped all federal restrictions on highway speed limits
(first imposed during the 1970s energy crisis), letting states set the maximum
wherever they pleased. Radar detectors, whose sole purpose is to help motorists
break the law with impunity, are legal for cars in 49 states. (Virginia is the
exception.) How long would legislators tolerate the sale of a device to foil a
Breathalyzer?

            The Insurance Institute
for Highway Safety reports that after the repeal of 55-mph speed limits,
fatalities rose by 17 percent on interstate highways where the limit was
raised. More people driving faster means more slaughter on the roads. But the
bloodshed by speeders doesn't evoke the same emotional revulsion as the
bloodshed by drunks.

            Why not? One explanation is that most people don't ever
drive while intoxicated, while most do exceed the speed limit from time to
time. Any movement for social reform is more effective if it pillories a small
minority and leaves the majority unaccused and unaffected.

            People don't believe that excessive speed is as
risky as excessive drink. They think it is possible for an experienced and
competent driver (such as themselves) to go fast without hurting anyone. This
is, in fact, possible. It is also possible to drive drunk without causing an
accident. Every night the vast majority of drunken drivers get home safely. But
we don't accept that as a defense. We understand that however able the driver,
the risk of this type of behavior is serious and intolerable. We treat the
culprits as potential killers who need to be restrained from endangering the
innocent.

            Our attitudes about serious speeding have yet to
come to grips with simple reality. Car magazines and auto commercials continue
to not merely excuse but celebrate behavior that kills almost as many Americans
annually as died in the Vietnam War during its bloodiest year, while maiming
and injuring thousands more. If we were to crack down on speeding as vigorously
as we did on drunken driving--by mandating license suspensions for repeat
offenders, imposing jail time on incorrigibles, and outlawing radar
detectors--we could make the roads far safer. The drunken driving crusade
reduced alcohol-related deaths by a third. A comparable commitment on speed
could save more than 4,000 lives every year.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 199: &quot;Thirds&quot;

            

               He's done it twice, and he announced on the radio that if it were legal
to do it again he would. Opponents say this desire indicates "a strange
psychological state." Who wants to do what?
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Thursday's Question
(No. 198)--"Chat and Argue Choo Choo":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 Next month, hoping to
re-establish cordial relations, more than 140 congressmen will board a
chartered Amtrak train bound for Hershey, Pa. What will they do when they get
there?
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               "The
same thing everyone does after getting off an Amtrak train: attempt to wash
that vague uriney smell out of their clothes."-- Tim Carvell
               

               "Let
Mary Bono out of the bathroom."-- Michael Gerber
               

               "I'm
not sure, but if Bob Barr is going, I'll bet he doesn't touch any 'Special
Dark' chocolate."-- Rich Harrington ( Alex Balk had a similar
answer.)

               
"Hershey? Train? Congressmen? Is it just me, or is it a little homoerotic in
here?"-- Larry Schnur
               

               "Bang
on drums and try to get the talking stick away from a weepy Tom
DeLay."-- Molly Gabel
               

                

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Beyond a preschool visit to a local dairy, my first
assembly line was at the Hershey's chocolate factory, and it was
perfect--incredibly loud and with a cocoa aroma as thick as a fist. There were
ordinary items--candy bars and Kisses--in infinite multiples, and ordinary
objects in gigantic versions--mixing bowls, ladles, boxes. But you'll never see
it.

            Hershey no longer runs a factory tour. Instead it
has a visitors center--Candytown or The Chocolate Work Shoppe or Fattyland,
something like that--pathetic, fake, Disneyfied. It's the same at most
factories. Fear of lawsuits has superseded pride in the product.

            One delightful exception, should you like your kids
to see something made, and an easy drive from Hershey, is Mack Truck in
Macungie, Pa. While it's an assembly plant, not a manufacturing plant, they do
start with a pile of parts in the morning and roll 50 of those big boys out the
door by the end of the day. You get to see people building something that's not
idiotic, a great treat for one who's worked in television.

            It's interesting that the
Dem-Rep safari is at the site of a pseudoexperience rather than the real thing.
But if you're trying to inspire artificial amity, that's not such a bad
choice.

            
               Randy's
Recantation
            

            Several of you chided me
for calling the travelers "congressmen," omitting the women representatives.
Quite right. My mistake.

            
               Touchy Feely
Answer
            

            They're going to pretend that Sam Waterston is
Lincoln.

            As they did in 1997, the representatives are
attending a retreat. Leaders of both parties are expected, including Dennis
Hastert and Richard Gephardt. Among the speakers will be historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin and John Hume who, along with David Trimble, won the Nobel Peace Prize
last year for his work in Northern Ireland. Waterston, supported by a troupe of
actors and historians, will present selections from the Great Emancipator.

            The Pew Charitable Trust
is providing $700,000 to underwrite the event.

            
               Month of Junk
Extra
            

            I received 35 unsolicited e-mails in February, not a
huge number, but it's a short month, and I use a local Internet service
provider. Most of this trash, 19 pieces, proffered business
opportunities--dubious investments, credit card schemes, home employment.
Eleven involved retail sales (dental care, computers, divorce lawyers, online
auctions); four announced some sort of performance; one was an ancient chain
letter scam.

            Each investment scheme began with a lie. Ask to be
removed from the list, and you learn that the return address is bogus. I
suppose I'll never get my money back. Or earn enough to buy that solid gold
hat.

            A few highlights:

            From: clinical14b@gmc.edu

            Subject: CBSNews:1st Aphrodisac Drug Apr

            "The announcement of this scientific breakthrough
has set off a media fire-storm."

            If this is an investment
opportunity, it's unconvincing. If it's a personal suggestion, it's
impertinent--like I'm not doing fine with Nyquil and Kahlúa cocktails.

            From: marketwatchernow1999sb@he.com.br

            Subject: RE: "STRONG BUY" HI-TECH MEDICAL

            "PDCID has announced priority production of their
proprietary Hypo-Sterile 2000 which render medical contaminants harmless."

            Tempting. But my money's
tied up with Rumplestiltskin's process, which renders straw into gold.

            From: aoolw@prodigy.net

            Subject: Earn 2-4k Per Week from Home!!

            "What have you done with your dreams?"

            My dreams rarely involve
becoming a travel agent, but they frequently include an enormous cartoon
swan.

            From: Laura.Hunter@Cwix.Com

            Subject: Next Networking
Events@Cheetah,Limelight

            "After work Networking Events For Young
Professionals."

            It's difficult to decide
which word in the above phrase is the least attractive.

            From: BrwBier1@aol.com

            Subject: A Bit About Your Family's History

            "Do you know WHO your ancestors are and WHAT they
did?"

            I already employ a system
for addressing these questions; it's called psychotherapy.

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            The dangers of an underfunded rail system.

            The joys of erotically
applied chocolate.

            
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               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I Dream of Julia

            Imagine that you're a modestly ordinary fellow
invited to a humble dinner party, that you ask if you can bring a date, and
that you show up with Julia Roberts: "Hi, this is Julia. Where do we put our
coats?" Jaws drop; people fall all over themselves; buddies, goggle-eyed, take
you aside: "How did you manage that ?" What a shallow, empty, and
pathetic reverie: having one's worth enhanced by a gorgeous celebrity. And how
irresistible.

            The scene described above is the heart of
Notting Hill , except that Julia Roberts is called Anna Scott--great
actress, magazine cover girl, object of worldwide idolatry and scrutiny. The
modestly ordinary fellow, meanwhile--the owner of a struggling travel-book shop
in the eponymous London neighborhood--is impersonated by Hugh Grant, who has
made a specialty of teasing ordinary modesty into extraordinary adorableness.
The film, directed by Roger Michell from a script by Richard Curtis ( Four
Weddings and a Funeral , 1994) is a brainy weave of satire and fantasy; it
would take a neurosurgeon to unwind its trenchant observations of our
celebrity-infatuated culture from its masturbatory, People
magazine-worthy pipe dreams. In this, I suppose, Notting Hill is
remarkably in tune with the Zeitgeist .

            The movie isn't simply a
fantasy of a commoner winning a princess, however; it's also a fantasy of a
princess publicly electing to be with someone below her station. Since Hugh
Grant doesn't fall below too many stations, this goes down more smoothly than
it would if he were, say, Danny DeVito. But if Grant speaks through jaws
aristocratically locked, his William Thacker is meant to embody a scruffy,
downwardly mobile lifestyle; as a consequence of his integrity, he must share a
flat with a cretinously vulgar couch potato called Spike (Rhys Ifans) and face
a stream of dim customers who refuse to accept that his bookshop carries
neither Dickens nor Grisham.

            The script gives Grant a series of deadpan one-upmanships;
what saves him from seeming like an utter snob is his habit of drawing
attention to his own foolishness with a lovably self-deprecating stammer. When
Anna Scott--with her sunglasses and strong "don't touch" vibe--appears from
amid his shelves to ask about a particular guide to Turkey, his recitation
dribbles off hopelessly: "There's also a very amusing incident with a
kebab--among ... many ... amusing ... incidents." His look of panic may be
translated as: "Oh, God, don't I sound like a prat. Kiss me." How can she
resist those floppy locks, that sheepish grin?

            
               Notting Hill
spins such comic awkwardness into scenes of amazing charm. Summoned to the
star's suite for an impromptu date, Thacker finds himself in the middle of a
press junket for her latest film and ends up posing as a journalist from
Horse and Hound --a bit that at once lampoons the idiocy of celebrity
interviews and forces the pair into a witty (and sexy) collusion. You also get
a taste of the world from which Anna is fleeing when Alec Baldwin (unbilled,
never funnier) shows up as her equally famous boyfriend, radiating narcissistic
entitlement as he paws his celebrated squeeze and bids Thacker--forced this
time into impersonating a room service waiter--to "adios those dirty dishes."
Scenes in the hero's middle-class milieu skirt the sentimental: One friend
(Gina McKee) is confined to a wheelchair to remind us that life is full of
unhappy, as well as happy, accidents. But the movie recovers its high spirits
whenever Emma Chambers appears as Thacker's raucous, toothsome sister, who
blurts out when she meets Anna that the two could be best friends.

            The screenwriter, Curtis, began his career with the
hilariously acrid BBC sitcom Black Adder before writing The Tall
Guy (1989) and Four Weddings and a Funeral --a movie that irked me,
possibly because Grant passed up the alluringly neurotic Kristin Scott Thomas
for the vapidly bovine Andie MacDowell, possibly because its dizzy romantic
badinage was interrupted for easy pathos involving a fatal heart attack and
other real-world calamities. Curtis is ingenious in his slapstick farce and
spoof mode, less assured when the emotional ante is upped. In Notting
Hill , he hasn't really thought through the character of Anna Scott. He must
know how lucky he is that Julia Roberts arrived with so much astounding
baggage.

            A friend of mine once worked for a big movie star.
When I asked if that star was "a nice guy," he looked at me the way Stephen
Hawking might if you asked whether a black hole was a "nice place." "Uh ... I
suppose he's nice," said my friend. "He's nice for a star. But when you're a
star and you go to restaurants, for instance, the waiters and owners fall all
over you and send you drinks and food, and eventually you take that kind of
attention for granted--and pretty soon you expect everything to revolve around
you, and then you get upset when it doesn't.

            "Stars," he concluded,
"sometimes bestow their favors graciously, but they're never 'nice.' Being a
star precludes niceness."

            The best thing to be said about the Anna Scott of
Roberts--an actress certainly capable of playing nice--is that she isn't nice
for a second. In fact, Roberts seems to welcome the opportunity to be as flat
and guarded--as shut down--as possible while still giving an ingratiating
performance. According to a profile in Vanity Fair , Roberts protested
the script's depiction of Anna's distraught reaction to the release of a nude
video: She argued that Anna would have learned not to let tabloid scandals get
to her, because that way lies madness. The director reminded her--as one might
a small child--that she was playing Anna, not Julia, but I side with the
actress here. Whatever depth this character has is the upshot of Roberts'
attempt to communicate something about her own celebrity: to say that it has
made her overdefended, and that it's a constant battle to stay human in the
face of so much attention.

            Roberts began her career
with a supernatural amount of charisma and sometimes wobbly technique: She was
a skittish thoroughbred who needed to be handled (i.e., directed) with care. As
she has become more self-sufficient, she has become more interesting. She
wasn't afraid to embrace the more heartlessly grasping side of her character in
My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), and her turn as a strange, Medusa-like
seductress on a recent Law & Order was a tour de force. (I missed
her in last year's Stepmom --my raccoon had hepatitis.) She doesn't need
her Pretty Woman laughing shtick to hold your attention: She trusts her
features, which are huge and nearly clownlike in their dimensions but which
somehow coalesce into a heart-stopping symmetry. (Is it my imagination, though,
or have those lips become even more pillowy? Leave them alone, Julia.) In
Notting Hill , Roberts takes rejection with a frozen smile. Thus
shielded, she has never looked so exposed. Her Anna is such a cauldron of
unresolved impulses--rage, petulance, fear, deceptiveness, promiscuity--that
it's no wonder that the filmmakers had to tack on a corny, too-pat coda that
spells out the couple's happily-ever-afterhood. There's no way we could
otherwise picture a stable future. Roberts has left the movie's cozy romantic
fantasyland in a pile of jagged shards.

            N otting Hill opens with an superfluous voice-over
that sets the scene and makes certain that the audience is oriented. In
contrast, Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged , from a script that the
director wrote with Clare Peploe, has no narration and little dialogue: The
intent is to keep the audience disoriented. It works, maybe to a fault. The
film opens in Africa, where the husband of Shandurai (Thandie Newton) is seized
by soldiers for insolence toward the country's authoritarian ruler. When we
encounter the young woman again, she has taken a job as the live-in domestic at
a huge and crumbling Roman townhouse belonging to an English loner named Jason
Kinsky (David Thewlis). All day, this gangling, bug-eyed oddball plays Scriabin
on his grand piano while Shandurai dusts, vacuums, sews, irons, and launders.
Then he sends a ring down the dumbwaiter to her basement room by way of
proposing marriage.

            I frankly don't know what to make of
Besieged , which attempts to forge a complicated relationship between its
protagonists through "pure cinema," and has won admiration for being allusive,
elusive, elliptical, and other words that begin with "a" and "e" (enigmatic,
ambivalent, evocative, etc.). In one sequence, Kinsky struggles to compose a
piece while Shandurai vacuums. The camera swings from side to side with
Shandurai and her vacuum cleaner, then from side to side with Kinsky and his
chords as he becomes increasingly inspired. Is this satire, or does Bertolucci
really mean to suggest a higher communion? (I fear the latter.) And are
Kinsky's rippling, Philip Glass-like progressions meant to suggest profundity
or empty pretentiousness? (I fear the former.) The movie has virtuoso passages:
Bertolucci is one of the few filmmakers whose technique is simultaneously
sweeping and probing. His camera sweeps and then stops to probe--it fixes on an
object and holds it up for scrutiny--and then goes back to sweeping. But what
he means by what he shows is anybody's guess. It's possible that
Besieged is meant to be vaguely allegorical: The African is seduced by
the crumbling decadence of Europe while the European falls for the childlike
simplicity of Africa. But I sure hope not.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Monsters in Masks

            The European press was
softening up public opinion Monday for airstrikes against Serbia with gung-ho
editorials and grueling eyewitness accounts of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo.
Even a liberal paper such as the Independent of London ran an editorial headlined "The time has come to show that Nato's
threats aren't empty." The bombing of Serbia was "a grim duty, but as in Iraq,
it must be done," it said. Another liberal British paper, the Guardian , led its
front page with a story beginning: "The Serbs did not want us to see it, but
there was no mistaking the hellish fires raging in Kosovo yesterday as ethnic
Albanian villages were torched by Serbian security forces."

            All the world's major
newspapers seemed to have reporters on the spot. In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald carried
a report from Kosovo headlined "Masked boogiemen drive children
into the snow." The report began, "Wailing children stumbled alone out of
Srbica, wearing only jumpers in the wind-whipped cold, not knowing which way to
turn on the main road. Shoes lay scattered along the road as if their owners
had just stepped out of them, together with scraps of clothing. Fleeing
civilians spoke of summary executions on the street. ... The international
community's worst fears have been realised."

            The image of monsters in masks was common to the reporting
both from Kosovo and from Borneo where, according to the Sydney Morning
Herald , "masked men, some in Indonesian military uniforms, attacked the
village of Ritabou, looting and vandalising homes and firing on civilians."
Describing Indonesian military intervention in West Kalimantan, an
Indonesian-controlled territory on the island of Borneo plagued by ethnic and
religious conflict, the paper said that "armed mobs paraded the severed heads
of their victims through villages" and that "the bridges in one town had been
hung with the dismembered parts of the victims' bodies." It explained, "The
fighting in West Kalimantan was sparked by a local dispute over a bus
fare."

            The same story led
the front page of the Independent of London under the eight-column
headline "Cannibal warriors feast on bodies of their victims." The paper's
reporter on the spot, Richard Lloyd Parry, wrote that "warriors carrying
spears, rifles and machetes displayed a severed ear and a human arm and offered
me lumps of hearts and livers torn from the bodies of ethnic Madurese, who have
become the target of a large-scale ethnic purge. ... One man displayed and then
ate a piece of cooked flesh, which he claimed to have cut from the body of a
murdered man."

            A more pleasant story was the first successful
circumnavigation of the world by two men in a balloon, the Breitling Orbiter 3.
Their achievement was generally received with enthusiasm--the Times of London said
mankind should rejoice and El País of Madrid that it had been the world's last great
adventure--but there were also dissenting voices. The Independent said
that "travelling around the world by balloon does not herald any wonderful
technological breakthrough to benefit humankind," and the Sunday Telegraph of London
gloated over entrepreneur Richard Branson's failure to achieve this ballooning
record after four attempts. It said that the Virgin boss could now perhaps
focus on the bigger challenge of getting his British train service to run on
time. "If you did that, Mr Branson, you would have broken all your own
records," it said. In the Paris evening paper France-Soir , a direct
descendant of Jules Verne, of Around the World in 80 Days fame,
complained about people saying that the author's dream had finally been
realized. Jean-Michel Verne wrote that the author's vision had nothing in
common with this technological and commercially sponsored feat.

            The European press was
also much preoccupied with the choice of a successor to disgraced Luxemburger
Jacques Santer as head of the European Commission in Brussels. A consensus
seems to be building around Romano Prodi, the centrist former Italian prime
minister, with Germany's Die
Welt coming out Monday in his support. "The name of Romano Prodi is a
synonym in Italian for integrity and economic competence," the paper said. It
claimed in its main front-page story that German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
has also pledged Prodi his support.

            The Oscars came too late for Europe's Monday morning
papers, but Alexander Walker, veteran film critic of the London Evening Standard , wrote
in an op-ed piece that the Academy Awards encourage Hollywood's
overheated, overhyped obsession with blockbusters, which is strangling the
creative spirit. He also criticized "the collusive relationship of Hollywood
and the media." The volume of movie advertising has never been so high, he
said, and there is also "an unprecedented plethora of news about movies and
moviemakers. Most of it is uncritical, otherwise journalistic access to the big
names in the casts and the films with big numbers in their budgets is denied by
the gatekeeper publicists." The Standard 's front page carried a photo of
weeping Gwyneth Paltrow under the banner headline "Shakespeare Cleaneth Up." In
a similar Shakespearean wordplay, the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia
captioned a picture of Paltrow "Gwyneth winneth."

            In an interview with the
British broadcasting weekly Radio Times , Woody Allen insisted he bears
no grudge against Mia Farrow, who won a long and bitter custody battle against
him. "I had a 13-year relationship with Mia and found her to be very bright,
beautiful and a fine actress," he said. "She's not a monster. She has many
positive qualities, but people in crises do desperate things. I wouldn't define
her personality or her life by that dark period." Allen said that he always
books two rooms when he checks into a hotel with his third wife, Soon-Yi, so
that he can have a bathroom to himself. He also said he is mystified by his
films' lack of success in the United States in comparison with their reception
in Europe. "It's a big mystery to me why my work isn't popular [in America],"
he said. "I'm typically American: born in Brooklyn, like baseball, go to
basketball, play jazz. It doesn't depress me, but I'm bewildered."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 235: &quot;Pork Quoi?&quot;

            

               A big half-page ad running in many papers today features a photo of
four piglets vigorously suckling a sow's teats. An ad for what?
            

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 234)--"I Can't Kuwait":
            

            

               You give the lead, I give the headline from the Kuwait Times :
"Tips To Reduce 'Burden' of Students."
            

            
"Hussein could hardly believe his ears. 'You'll give me half a dinar a month?'
the 13-year-old Palestinian said. 'And all I have to do is your son's
homework?' " -- James Poniewozik
            

            
"Offering controversial advice to overwhelmed teachers, the NRA unveiled a new
motto: 'It's not a setback, it's an opportunity.' "-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "Koran
Cliff's Notes now available."-- Al Petrosky
            

            "In an
effort to give young students more time to study, Kuwait City officials today
began enrolling women in the 'Carry Your Sons to Class' program."-- Bill
Cavanaugh
            

            "In a
new twist on the controversial practice of 'redeeming' Sudanese slaves from
bondage, Kuwait's education minister is proposing to buy up the whole inventory
in order to provide every Kuwaiti high-school student with a personal bearer.
'You wouldn't believe how heavy those backpacks are,' he told a reporter. 'No
wonder test scores are down.' "-- Katha Pollitt
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Why Even Bother To Read the Paper II: If you've
ever attended an event that was covered in the press--a ball game, a
demonstration, a series of seemingly motiveless break-ins at Tom Cruise's
house--you know how little the newspaper version resembles your experience. Oh,
it often gets the least important things right, the facts, the small "t" truth.
But the tone, the texture, the feel of the event is never correct, and that's
where you find the capital "T" truth. Here's how Dr. Johnson put a similar
problem, on April 18, 1775: "We must consider how very little history there is;
I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles
were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the
philosophy, of history is conjecture."

            To more vividly convey that coloring, many
newspapers encourage their reporters to wield the tools of the novelist,
opening a story with an evocative detail, such as these leads, both from the
front of today's New York Times : "Ana Estela Lopeze dreamed of saving
enough money to return to El Salvador to open a clothing store and build a
three-bedroom house"; and "Rani, an illiterate woman from the washermen's
caste, changed into her prettiest sari one recent morning."

            When this technique
works, you get a powerful story, albeit one whose subject is not revealed until
around the third paragraph. When it doesn't, you get Rick Bragg and a queasy
feeling in your stomach. And when both news and coloring are avoided, you get
the Kuwait Times and a nice afternoon nap.

            
               Unburdened
Answer
            

            "KUWAIT--Experts have advised children to stick to
their daily timetable and carry only those books needed for the day besides
taking extra care to sit straight while studying. This advice is significant
taking into consideration the fact that children of today are faced with a
pressing problem--backaches. The culprit here is the school bag which every
student carries to the school crammed with books and they end up with various
back-related problems, such as backaches or backbone injuries. Addressing a
issue of such importance concerning the younger ones of society, Kuwait
Times met with a number of experts and sought their opinion."

            My favorite expert
opinion comes from Dr. Dina Al-Refai, family medicine expert: "All these aches
may instill in the child a hatred towards the school and finally have a
negative impact on his academic performance, she remarked."

            
               Andrew Staples'
Kuwaiti Fun Facts Extra
            

            From the State
Department's Annual Human Rights Report, Feb. 26, 1999:

            

               Amirs, or princes, from the Al-Sabah family have ruled Kuwait in
consultation with prominent community figures for over 200 years.

               The Constitution, adopted in 1962 shortly after independence, provides for
an elected National Assembly. It also permits the Amir to suspend its articles
during periods of martial law.

               The Amir twice suspended constitutional provisions, from 1976 to 1981 and
from 1986 to 1992, and ruled extraconstitutionally during these periods.

               Citizens cannot change their head of state.

               The government bans formal political parties, and women do not have the
right to vote or seek election to the National Assembly.

               According to government statistics, 92 percent of the indigenous work force
is employed by the government. Foreigners constitute 98 percent of the private
sector work force.

               Domestic servants are not protected by the Labor Law, and unskilled foreign
workers suffer from the lack of a minimum wage in the private sector and from
failure to enforce the Labor Law.

               Males must obtain government approval to marry foreign-born women.

               The government restricts freedom of assembly and association.

               Public gatherings must receive prior government
approval, as must private gatherings of more than five persons that result in
the issuance of a public statement.

            

            Really, a country worth
going to war for ...

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Kuwaitis are rich lay-abouts waited on by
impoverished foreigners.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 250: &quot;Musa vs. Ake&quot;

            
               On Wednesday,
Musashimaru defeated Akebono to become the 67 th yokozuna. Why is
this noteworthy?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Monday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 249)--"Cam Com Can Gal":
            

            

               
                  The list includes cameras, laptop computers, canvas bags of
tools, and 665 gallons of water. List of what?
               
            

            "Award
inducements to Belgrade telephone users who are ready to switch to MCI local
service."-- Marshall Efron
            

            
"Things used as stand-ins for Liam Neeson while Star Wars was being
filmed."--Justin Warner
            

            "To
the horror of environmentalists, soon the Yangtze River will be composed
entirely of these items."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            
"Once-hidden details of Da Vinci's The Last Supper , now clearly visible
beneath the table."-- Peter Carlin
            

            "Robot
punch. Serves 10,000."-- Chris Kelly
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Large
Intestine Wrap-Up
            

            Although many of you submitted enema jokes, I ran
none--an aesthetic not a political decision, if such a distinction is possible.
Some laugh at colonic humor, some don't. I have no doubt that several entries
were particularly fine examples of rectal comedy. These I have passed along to
my London counterpart, Sophie Rhys-Cohen, who plans to run them in "Naughty
Scamp," the English edition of News Quiz, along with many comical pictures of
men in women's clothing and a terrific photograph of Queen Elizabeth's left
breast. (At least they said it was hers when Sophie R-C handed over £100,000 of
Bill Gates' money.)

            Incidentally, Naughty
Scamp is still encouraging participants to suggest better things to do with
fresh fruits and vegetables than eat them.

            
               Five Americans, a
Canadian, and a Russian Walk Into an Answer
            

            All are packed in the cargo bay of the Space
Shuttle Columbia for a scheduled Thursday launch.

            And if it does take place, that launch will end a
string of six consecutive failures. The unmanned six-failure record was broken
Tuesday by the Thaad anti-missile system, when the rocket that was to serve as
its target, in the words of Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon,
"tumbled chaotically out of control." I guess we've all done that. The Thaad
project, incidentally, has already cost more than $3 billion. Neither Congress
nor the Defense Department is discouraged by its unbroken record of failure. I
call that plucky.

            If the Columbia does get off the ground, its
crew of five Americans, a Canadian, and a Russian will transfer those supplies
to the Russian-American space station, in one of the 160 space walks on 86
flights needed to complete the station--and no doubt worth every penny.

            Canvas? Can that be
right--canvas tool bags in outer space? Shouldn't the tools be stowed in
something spectacularly light and strong and expensive--Kevlar or woven Tang or
something? But that's what Beth Dickey reports in the New York Times ,
and that's good enough for me.

            
               Chris Kelly's
Medical Extra
            

            I don't know if this
counts as an "extra" or anything, but what the hell is going on with George
Lucas' neck? I mean, you'd think a guy with all that high-tech know-how could
do something about that sucker. It's less like a wattle and more like a Siamese
twin. Maybe he could computer-animate some paisleys on it and claim it's a
scarf. Am I the only person this unsettles? Am I just jealous?

            
               Headline
Haiku
            

            Local Press Looking
human experimentation lab
Barak and Arafat
Promote Good Citizenship?

            -- Charles
Waugh
            

            Ex-Cons Find
A Drag Racer
Touching and Fondling
NRA's Favorite Hobbyhorse

            
               Wall Street Journal , May 25, 1999

            -- Tim Carvell
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Colonic discomfort.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            &quot;Slobba Sinks to a New Evil&quot;

            The war in Yugoslavia
continued to eclipse all other news across Europe Wednesday, with the
Guardian of London leading its front page: "Day 21: more
bombs, more death, more despair." The paper said the war "showed ominous signs
of widening" with the Serb incursion into Albania Tuesday. In the British
tabloids, though, the dominant war issue was rape. "The Rape Factory" was the
main front-page headline in the Sun , which added the rider, "Slobba
sinks to a new evil." "The rape camps" was a headline in the Daily
Mail .

            The reports were based
on a statement Tuesday by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook that young
ethnic Albanian women are being herded into an army camp in Kosovo and
subjected to systematic rape by Serbian security forces. In the London
Evening Standard , conservative historian Andrew Roberts
warned against the demonization of Slobodan Milosevic, because it would
increase his support among the Serbs. He is, of course, "a vicious, ruthless
tyrant, but so are many people in the world whom Nato has chosen not to bomb.
To equate him with Hitler, who really did threaten the West in a way Milosevic
never could, can only flatter and strengthen him."

            The Daily Express of London splashed an exclusive report on its front page that the British Conservative
Party had received "substantial" donations in the 1997 election from a
Serbian-owned company with close links to the Milosevic regime. Two payments of
about $14,500 each were made by Metalchem International, "a British-registered
metal trading company which was under United Nations sanctions and remains on a
U.S. blacklist because of its financial ties with Serbia." In an editorial, the
Express said the Conservative leadership should "immediately and without
question repay to Metalchem or to the Serbian government the money they
gave."

            In other British press
editorials Wednesday, the conservative Daily Mail said that "public
opinion is swinging in favor of an invasion" and that "the launch of a ground
offensive seems likelier every day"; the Times "that it may take
ground troops, backed by massive air power, to drive them [the Serbian forces]
out of Kosovo"; the Daily Telegraph that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair should rapidly
sanction "the Nato ground offensive that would be required to bring Serbia to
heel"; and the Guardian that the West was sending a signal to Belgrade
"that ground action is becoming an available option for Nato, should the air
campaign bring no acceptable result, but that an opportunity remains for
settlement before a decision on ground action is made." The Financial Times , on the other
hand, devoted an editorial to the argument that "the US should engage Russia
more. That means accepting more than a token Russian presence in the
international force that may accompany the refugees back to Kosovo. Failure to
do this risks turning a split over Yugoslavia into another cold war."

            Meanwhile, a report in the Independent said that the United States might offer Iraqi
Kurds full military protection against President Saddam Hussein if they allowed
the Iraqi opposition to base itself in the area they control. The story quoted
Hoshyar Zibari, a leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls
western Kurdistan, as saying, "We would need to have a no-fly, no-drive zone
protecting our cities from Iraqi government retaliation if we were to
co-operate with the Iraqi opposition." U.S. officials are "seriously
considering" the matter, he claimed.

            In Iceland, the daily Morgunbladid reported
that a plan to sail an Icelandic Viking ship to North America as part of next
year's millennium celebrations is in jeopardy because lack of funding has
delayed the preparations. The original plan was for a crew of nine or 10 people
to take the Vlkingur , a replica of a Viking vessel, to Newfoundland,
Canada, and to New York "to commemorate the 1,000 th anniversary of
Leifur Eiríksson's discovery of North America." the paper said. But now, if the
voyage goes ahead at all, the ship will sail only to Halifax, Nova Scotia. A
final decision will be made this week.

            The Irish Times of Dublin carried a front-page picture caption,
"The Lord God omnipotent raineth on choir in Fishamble Street." This was above
a picture of members of Our Lady's Choral Society in pink raincoats and
waterproof hats trying to sing Handel's Messiah outdoors in a hail
shower. The first performance of the Messiah was held in Fishamble
Street in 1742.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Kissinger's Dream Comes True

            Peace
hopes run highest in Germany, where Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung both led Wednesday with upbeat
reports on the new flurry of diplomatic activity over Kosovo. Die Welt
quoted German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer as saying the next few days will
be "decisive." The paper also reported strong speculation that German Defense
Minister Rudolf Scharping will be the next secretary-general of NATO,
succeeding Spaniard Javier Solana, who is expected to be appointed this week as
the first foreign policy supremo of the European Union. His official title will
be "high representative" for European foreign and security policy, but
according to the Financial
Times of London, he is already colloquially known as "Mr. Pesc" after
the French acronym for the job.

            In an
editorial Wednesday, the FT described Solana as an excellent choice for
a position that requires "both a sure-footed diplomat and a super-salesman." It
said, "Mr. Solana will be the European on the end of the telephone to take
calls from Washington--a figure whose absence was always bemoaned by Henry
Kissinger." A front-page report
in the International Herald
Tribune of Paris said U.S. officials are confident that Solana "would
help guarantee that EU military cooperation fits with NATO and does not
challenge the Western alliance's primacy in European security."

            Having
apparently forgotten that only last week they ruled out Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic as a negotiating partner because of his indictment for war
crimes, most British newspapers were taking this week's Belgrade talks very
seriously. "Crunch talks on Kosovo" was the main headline in the liberal
Guardian ,
which said the discussions will decide whether NATO halts the bombing or
launches a ground war. "Vital hours for Kosovo peace" said the Times . The Daily
Telegraph noted
that the European Union's negotiator, Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, is
the first Western leader to visit Belgrade since the start of the bombing
campaign March 24 and that "hopes were higher than at any time." But the
Independent 's Kosovo lead
was the killing of Yugoslavia's deputy air force commander, Gen. Ljubisa
Velickovic, in a NATO air raid. It called this a "success" to be weighed
against NATO's continuing "blunders."

            
Another military blunder made the front page of the South China Morning Post of
Hong Kong. This was the death of 10 pupils during Indian shelling of a school
in Kashmir. As India's efforts to evict Pakistan-backed Muslim guerrillas from
the disputed territory entered the seventh day, the daily Dawn of Pakistan led on
Pakistani troops repelling three cross-border raids that India denied had taken
place. In New Delhi, the Asian Age led on a much-criticized statement by Indian
Defense Minister George Fernandes that India would consider granting the
guerrillas safe passage back to Pakistan. But Fernandes insisted that "all
those who have been pushed into our territory by Pakistan, including their
troops, have to go back, dead or alive." The Indian press has generally advised
against any escalation of the war, and the Times of
India ran an editorial Wednesday discounting a much-reported remark by
the Pakistani foreign minister that "we will not hesitate to use any weapon in
our arsenal to defend our territorial integrity." Pakistan was "crying nuclear
wolf," the paper said. The nuclear gap between the two countries has widened in
India's favor: "Pakistan's generals may not mind sacrificing a few hundred of
their soldiers and Afghan mercenaries to Indian air strikes, but they are not
going to expose their own cities to needless risk."

            Back
to Kosovo: The conservative National Post of Canada ran a tough editorial Wednesday saying that acceptance of Milosevic's
position on the implementation of the G-8 peace plan would be "little better
than a surrender in stages. ... Rather than attempting to dictate the niggling
terms of peacekeeping, Mr. Milosevic should be obliged to negotiate on the
broader subject of Kosovo's future as an independent state--which has not yet
been discussed at all," it said. The Times of London was equally tough.
Milosevic's "purported acceptance" of the G-8 "general principles" is
"meaningless in itself, notable only as a hint of desperation," it said in an
editorial. The only reason for the Finnish president going to Belgrade was "to
spell out exactly what Yugoslavia has to do to meet NATO's own clear demands in
full." But if Milosevic "still needs more clearly to be told, the truth is best
conveyed by bombs and by the speedy reinforcement of NATO troops on the
ground."

            In
Europe, the other main stories were to do with food. Le Soir of Brussels led with
the resignation of two Belgian government ministers after a food scare over the
sale of chickens and eggs containing high levels of cancer-causing dioxins. The
story was given wide coverage throughout Europe, with Corriere della Sera of
Milan reporting on its front page that European Union authorities were planning
the destruction of chickens and eggs from 416 Belgian farms and possibly also
from some farms in France, Holland, and Germany that used contaminated Belgian
poultry feed pellets. In Britain, a long-running controversy over genetically
modified (GM) crops took on aspects of a constitutional battle after Prince
Charles defied Prime Minister Tony Blair by publishing an article Tuesday in
the Daily Mail criticizing the regulations governing their production.
Blair has repeatedly insisted that genetically modified foods are safe, but the
heir to the throne attacked the lack of independent scientific research and
said the regulations were not tough enough. The Times reported that
Prince Charles is "infuriated" by government efforts to portray anti-GM
campaigners as hysterics. As a patron of the Soil Association, which campaigns
for organic food, the prince is also said to be upset by an article written by
the government's chief scientific adviser saying the Soil Association was run
by "ayatollahs" as a "theological movement."

            China's Wenhui
Daily reported Tuesday that Sang Lan, the Chinese gymnast paralyzed at last
year's Goodwill Games in New York, has accused CNN of failing to help her. Sang
said the organizers, Turner Sports, assured her they would cover all costs
after a highly publicized vaulting accident July 21 left her with severe spinal
cord damage. "In the end, they didn't produce a penny," she told the paper.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             How Big a Safety Net?

            Why do we have a social safety net? It depends on
whom you ask. Some say it's a matter of political prudence (e.g. "The
alternative to a safety net is a revolution"). Others say it's a moral
imperative.
       Among the latter, the most influential is Harvard University professor
of philosophy John Rawls. Rawls likens the safety net to an insurance payout.
Here's his argument: Back before you were born--in fact, before you were even
conceived--nobody knew you were going to develop into the sort of sophisticated
individual who reads 
                  Slate
               . For all anyone knew, you might have
been born without enough skills to boot up a computer--or to earn a decent
living.

            If your unborn soul
could have bought an insurance contract, then you'd probably have snapped up
some kind of "skill insurance" in which everybody pays premiums, and those who
land in the shallow end of the gene pool split the pot.
       Of course, you didn't buy insurance. But that's only because
there are no telephones in the world-before-birth, so the insurance salesmen
couldn't contact you. According to Rawls and his followers, you would have
bought the insurance if you could have, and that creates a moral obligation
upon all to pay the premiums.
       That's a very powerful argument, but it's incomplete. Here's why: It
offers no estimate of how much insurance your unborn self would have
wanted. Rawls says we should enforce a bunch of hypothetical insurance
contracts, but you can't enforce a contract if you don't know what it says. So,
to convert the Rawlsian argument into a concrete policy, you first have to
determine what terms we'd have written into those pre-birth agreements.

            
Here's how the philosophers solve that problem:
They guess. Most of them guess that our unborn selves would all have cheerfully
signed on for a pretty substantial welfare state. Being an economist and not a
philosopher, I am inclined to think about such questions a little more
deeply.
       How much insurance would an unborn soul want to buy? We already know a
lot about the demand for insurance from available data on how much of it (fire,
life, disability, auto, etc.) people in the real world buy.
       Some people demand more insurance than others do because they face more
risk. So before we can estimate how much skill insurance your pre-birth self
might have purchased, we must first estimate how much risk you were facing when
God was handing out the brains.

            
The right way to measure risk is to measure the
statistical variance of the possible outcomes. In this case, that means
measuring the statistical variance of human talents. You can't measure talent
directly, but you can measure it indirectly--say by observing people with
similar education and training, and measuring the variance in their earnings.
After you've controlled for education and training, earnings are at least a
rough measure of talent.
       Once you've measured that variance, you've measured the risk, so you can
go back to the insurance markets and observe how much insurance people choose
to buy when they're facing similar risk levels. That gives at least a rough
estimate of how much we should all be paying into the general welfare pool.

            
Economists James Kahn (of the New York Federal
Reserve Bank) and Hugo Hopenhayn (of the University of Rochester) recently
sacrificed a lunch hour and the back of an envelope to computing that rough
estimate. The bottom line turns out to be astounding: If you take the insurance
metaphor seriously, then 23 percent of the population--the 23 percent with the
fewest skills--should be permanently unemployed and on welfare. In other words,
the present-day welfare state is not nearly as large as it ought to be. So, if
the Rawlsian philosophers had bothered to do a little arithmetic, they might
have discovered that their arguments are a lot stronger than they dared to
expect.
       But Kahn and Hopenhayn's arithmetic leaves something out. They
implicitly assumed that it would be costless to identify the people with the
fewest skills so that we can put only those people on the dole. That assumption
becomes invalid if highly skilled people can hide their abilities in an attempt
to defraud the system. Policing such fraud can make social insurance policies
considerably more expensive, and when insurance is more expensive, people want
less of it. Factor that into the equation, redo the calculations, and
you end up concluding that the fraction of the population on welfare should be
just 0.6 percent--in other words, practically zero.

            
The truth probably lies somewhere in between 23
percent and 0.6 percent: We can't costlessly observe each other's skills, but
we can't costlessly hide our own skills, either. In other words, maybe the
social net should be drastically expanded, and maybe it should be drastically
slashed. Not too definitive a conclusion. But it's the result of just one
afternoon's work, and it's more precise than anything the philosophers have
come up with in the quarter century since Rawls first made his argument.
       Personally, I'm not sold on the insurance metaphor to begin with, for
reasons that could fill a separate column. But the broader point is that if
your argument is based on metaphors, you should be prepared to treat those
metaphors with respect. If the safety net is really just like insurance, then
we should be buying it in quantities commensurate with our other insurance
purchases. And we should be making an honest effort to calculate what those
quantities are. The philosophers don't seem willing to meet that
responsibility. That's why we need economists.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Leak and Load

            Nostradamus apparently
works in the Pentagon. According to the April 12 U.S. News & World
Report , this is what the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded before the
Kosovo operation: "If we bomb ... we will eliminate Milosevic's domestic
opposition, and he will become a hero. He will go into Kosovo and slaughter
thousands of Kosovar Albanians and create thousands of refugees. Air power or
bombing cannot stop any of those things."

            The front page of
Monday's Washington Post confirmed the prophecy, revealing that the
Joint Chiefs had "expressed deep reservations" in advance of the proposed
bombing. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had warned the
administration that "Milosevic was likely to strike out viciously against
Kosovo Albanians."

            These wise men who saw in their crystal ball exactly what
would happen in Kosovo are truly prophets without honor. These
prognostications--divulged anonymously by "senior military officials" and
"Pentagon planners" and "officers who know [the Joint Chiefs'] thinking but
decline to be named"--represent a particularly demoralizing aspect of modern
war-making: leaking as Pentagon policy.

            Covering your ass is, of
course, a time-honored military tradition, enshrined with its own acronym. But
what is remarkable about the Kosovo leaks is that they are covering something
that is not being shot at. No one--literally no one --is blaming the U.S.
military for the shortcomings of the Kosovo mission. All fault has been
deposited on the doorsteps of the White House and the State Department.
Politicians, not generals, made the risky decisions, and politicians, not
generals, are getting reproached for them. But no matter. As soon as it became
clear that the mission had gone awry, Pentagon brass began leaking
profligately: In the span of a few days, anonymous quotes appeared in the
Post , New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Washington
Times , Wall Street Journal , and all three newsweeklies. The gist of
the leaks: The Joint Chiefs knew this would happen, they told the
administration this would happen, so don't blame them.

            The leaks stem from a basic military practice:
worst-casing. During Vietnam, generals insisted to their civilian bosses that
we could win if we just had a little more time and firepower. Today's armed
forces won't make the same mistake. "They don't want to be put in a hopeless
position and get blamed for it. This is a product of Vietnam," says George
Washington University military historian Ronald Spector.

            So even as the brass announces incessantly that
"America has the finest fighting force the world has ever known," it responds
bleakly to any presidential proposal to actually deploy that force. A top
Pentagon officer from the Gulf War describes the generals' standard procedure:
"They tell the White House, 'You are going to need an overwhelming amount of
stuff. It's a bad idea. There will be terrible casualties. We recommend you
don't do it.' "

            "You always make
sure you have protested before," says American University Professor Amos
Perlmutter. In Kosovo, for example, the generals said that a ground invasion
would require 200,000 troops (a number they knew was impossibly high) and that
bombing wouldn't work. This worst-casing has two results: 1) The politicians
are left wondering whether to believe the generals, since they say this
every time; and 2) the military assures itself a victory in the war that
matters in Washington, the PR war.

            If the pols overrule the generals and the mission goes
sour, the generals are safe, on-the-record with sensible objections that can be
leaked at an opportune moment (as with Kosovo). If the pols overrule and the
mission succeeds, the generals still harvest the credit. No one remembers their
poor-mouthing. Who recalls that Gen. Colin Powell predicted horrible casualties
in the Gulf War?

            It's worth noting that
the Joint Chiefs probably did not warn against the mission as emphatically or
prophetically as the leaks claim. Clinton, after all, is incredibly deferential
to his Joint Chiefs because of his own history of nonservice: It's impossible
to believe that he would have overruled the chiefs if they were as absolute as
the leaks suggest. Most experts also doubt the Joint Chiefs were unified in the
view that bombing wouldn't succeed: It's Air Force doctrine that bombing
will succeed in such circumstances, so Air Force advisers almost
certainly predicted a bombing triumph. Moreover, the generals' public behavior
casts doubt on the claim that they foresaw what Milosevic would do if we
bombed. The only public concerns the generals voiced before bombing were that
pilots would be vulnerable to Yugoslavia's missile defenses: They did not
discuss the possibility that Milosevic would respond by accelerating his
slaughter of Kosovars.

            There is nothing wrong with the Joint Chiefs warning the
administration privately that bombing was folly. In fact, it would be derelict
for the generals not to warn the administration of that. But
after-the-fact anonymous leaks are corrupting. The military is
(theoretically) a nonpolitical institution, but as soon as the operation went
south, the military abandoned its nonpolitical façade to protect itself. From
four-stars to privates, the armed forces loathe and distrust Clinton, and the
generals certainly weren't going to risk being associated with his Kosovo mess.
So they leaked to guarantee that they would not be blamed for a quagmire or be
punished at budget time--and to ensure that Clinton would suffer. The backdoor
sniping has become so pernicious and prevalent that even retired Gen. George
Joulwan, NATO's military commander in the early '90s, pleaded on CNN's
Crossfire for the Pentagon to stop leaking and "pull the team
together."

            The principal reason the leaks are troubling is not
that they sabotage the relationship between the administration and the
Pentagon; that relationship is always shaky. They are troubling because they
may sabotage the mission itself. The leaks suggest to our NATO allies that the
U.S. military isn't seriously engaged in the operation. And the leaks suggest
to our own troops that their commanders secretly believe their mission is
dangerous, useless, and possibly doomed. No inside-the-beltway PR victory is
worth that kind of demoralization.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Winners and Losers

            The
world's newspapers filled their front pages this weekend with what now appear
to be premature post-mortems on the Kosovo conflict.

            
Britain's Independent on Sunday compiled a list of the war's winners and losers. The winners: British Prime
Minister Tony Blair ("[His] reputation as a strong leader on the international
stage will be enhanced. And his commitment to the morality of the conflict will
win him several saintly points."); Jamie Shea ("Each week the Nato press
spokesman with a Cockney accent has been forced to explain away an array of
Nato mistakes--in English and French. While his rhetorical denunciations of
Milosevic got more extreme, ... he rarely lost his temper."); Albania ("The
West owes it a debt of gratitude and it stands to gain economically from
long-term international commitment to the area."); and construction companies.
The losers: Slobodan Milosevic ("Some suspect Slobo and his wife may emulate
his parents, who both committed suicide."); Apache helicopters; Ibrahim Rugova
("How can the bookish head of Kosovo's independence movement live down the
shame of being shown on Serbian TV with Milosevic? ... [H]e could be bumped off
as a traitor."); Macedonia ("It has suffered from loss of trade with Serbia,
and most of the refugees are unlikely to leave for some time."); and the
Treasury ("The costs of putting peacekeepers on the ground will be a major
drain on resources. Then there is the cost of reconstruction: like the troops,
most of the money will have to come from the European Union. Ultimately, that
means from our pockets."). No mention was made of the estimated 5,000 Yugoslav
troops killed in the conflict nor of the more than 1,200 civilian
fatalities.

            Others
given victor's laurels included NATO, described by the London Observer as having "saved its reputation and credibility,
gaining time to improve its effectiveness as a guarantor of peace"; and the new
world order celebrated in Andrew Marr's column in the Observer , "What
has happened is a decisive and perhaps terminal defeat for an older Europe, a
place of tribal hatreds, double-headed eagles, flaming swords and obscure
martyrs. A better world order survives, symbolised by those Asian, African and
Chinese faces looking after Europeans in the UN camps."

            An
op-ed
column in the Jerusalem Post drew parallels between the plight of Kosovar
Albanians and "the Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the Jewish displaced
persons ... in Germany after the Holocaust." The lessons learned from these
groups are that "[t]he allies must begin reconstructing Kosovar society now,
without delay, even before they make or find their way into Kosovo itself and
face the immense task of rebuilding the province's decimated infrastructure and
housing stock. ... The most important goals are to encourage self-help and to
heal shattered identities. Both are crucial for preventing dependency and
building self-confidence." (See 
                  Slate
               's on how the
Kosovar/Palestinian parallel disturbs Israel.)

            
Meanwhile, Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo expressed disappointment at Japan's failure to play a significant
role in international diplomacy. The paper said, "[T]he development has served
as a sobering reminder of Japan's inability to play a meaningful political role
in the ethnic dispute." A foreign ministry official attempted to save face by
claiming, "There is no reason to feel belittled because I don't think, for
example, France has played a major role, either."

            
Today's voting in Indonesia, the first free elections in that country since
1955, got an optimistic boost from the Sydney Morning Herald 's correspondent in Jakarta. "Despite predictions of chaos, the
campaign period has been festive and relatively free of violence. And the mass
media, remarkably free to report on shortcomings in election administration,
have been reasonably effective in their role as watchdogs. The bureaucracy ...
is not obviously trying to manipulate the electoral results, and the military
appears to be acting in a neutral manner. ... Hundreds of social groups are
actively involved in voter education and election monitoring, an unprecedented
mobilisation of civil society."

            The
multiculti redesign of British Airways' 300-plane fleet has been scrapped. Two
years ago, the airline commissioned artists from around the world to provide
abstract "world images" for the rudders to replace the British flag. The
designs (click here for samples), which included images based on Delft
pottery, Chinese calligraphy, Japanese waves, and a Polish cockerel (but not
British fish and chips--a design glorifying the national dish was rejected by
BA), were popular with everybody except the people at home, according to
London's Sunday
Times . "[D]esign changes need to be introduced sensitively. Most
travellers have a keen instinct for survival when it comes to flying and BA's
traditional image helped to underline its reputation for reliability," said a
Sunday Times editorial. "The flag signalled that Britain's reputation
was on the line, that the wings would stay attached to the fuselage and there
would be enough fuel to complete the journey. The ethnic tails suggested an
altogether trendier image." The rebranding campaign, which cost BA more than
$95 million, will be scrapped and the tail fins repainted with a design based
on the original "Union Jack" flag used by Adm. Horatio Nelson at the Battle of
Trafalgar in 1805.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Typos and
IPOs
            

            Snobs that we are, we like to pretend that we don't
think much about Salon , the only roughly comparable magazine on the Web.
But the truth is that it does cross our radar screens from time to time. Do we
regard Salon as our competition? Yes and no. We are somewhat direct
competitors for advertising dollars, but for readership the question is more
complicated. The real competition for any publication in any medium is the
clock: There are only 24 hours in a day. Strangely, the least competitive rival
claimant for those hours is likely to be a similar publication. Print
magazines, which depend on direct mail for generating subscriptions, usually
find that their best prospects are subscribers to magazines they most closely
resemble. Harper's does best with the mailing list of the Atlantic
Monthly , and so on. This isn't because people are persuaded to switch, but
because someone who has already eaten a blueberry bagel is more likely to eat a
strawberry bagel than the average person is to eat a fruit bagel of any
sort.

            In a fledgling medium,
similar publications are even more interdependent since the viability of this
sort of enterprise is unproved. The cold, hard fact is that we need
Salon to prosper and vice versa. The warm, throbbing fact, however, is
that we are only human. And rumor has it that they are as well. Human emotions
like Schadenfreude --and there must be a German word for reverse
Schadenfreude : distress at other people's happiness--inevitably
complicate rational business judgment.

            Despite our best efforts, we couldn't help noticing lately
that Salon has announced an IPO. That stands for international poetry
Oktoberfest. Just the thing for a political-cultural magazine. No, actually,
IPO stands for initial public offering. That is, they're selling stock, a more
unusual enterprise for a political-cultural magazine. Two and a half million
shares will be offered at about $12 a share. That will raise $30 million, if
they pull it off (minus a few million for the midwives). And this is for less
than a quarter of the company. At $12 a share, the value of the whole
enterprise would be almost $130 million. The editor in chief's shares would be
worth more than $6 million.

            That $130 million would be an astonishing figure
for a political-cultural magazine even if it made money. It's about what the
queen of the genre, The New Yorker , went for in 1985, when it was still
profitable. But Salon is losing money at a rate of $6 million a year and
admits that this figure will probably increase. ( Salon also claims to be
much, much more than a political-cultural magazine, and we intend no insult by
describing it as such.) Martin Peretz, the owner of the New Republic ,
has joked for two decades that he'll only sell TNR for "20 times
losses." The owners of Salon are asking even more, and it's no joke. Or
at least, it's not only a joke.

            (Marty Peretz,
meanwhile, is seeing his own joke come almost precisely true as co-owner of
TheStreet.com, which is losing $16 million a year and is going public at a
price that would value the whole company at $300 million.)

            And what do we at 
                  Slate
                think about this? If
we had any sense, we'd be delighted. After all, if Salon is worth $130
million, 
                  Slate
                must be worth ... well, a lot. Maybe more, maybe
less, but same ballpark. As a division of a big company, we can't go public
ourselves. But a successful Salon IPO certainly will help when it's time
to ask Dad for our allowance. Also, our goal is to become profitable. If the
Salon IPO works, "the market"--America's answer to the Oracle at
Delphi--will have declared its judgment that this sort of thing can become a
real, profit-making business.

            Trouble is,

                  Slate
                has been ridiculing the Internet bubble all along. (See
almost any random item for the past six months, or Bruce Gottlieb's recent
piece on ".") How can we convince ourselves that this one particular IPO is a
rational reflection of actual economic potential if all the rest are a
reflection of something closer to clinical insanity? The truth is that we
can't. The deeper human truth is that we don't especially want to. The good
fortune of other people is annoying enough (however good your own fortune may
be). At least let us cling to the belief that it is unjustified.

            Now that we've made our general attitude toward
Salon and its IPO perfectly unclear, let us take a look at that IPO
prospectus. We were alarmed to discover that it is riddled with typographical
errors! Typos are an athema to any high-qualidy publcation. Careless
proofreading is a shure sign of inner wroght. Although we certainly do not wish
to discourage anyone from investing in Salon , we feel an obligation to
inform our readers about these troublesome lapses. They are especially shocking
in a formal government filing, vetted by lawyers, in which inaccuracy can
result in disastrous lawsuits. And yet:

            

               The prospectus reports revenues of $2,058,000 in
the nine months ending Dec. 31, 1998. (And $300,000 of that in advertising
barter--an ad for an ad--leaving cash revenues of about $1.7 million.) This
cannot be right. It is clearly far too low, since David Talbot, Salon 's
"chairman of the board, editor-in-chief and director," told Newsweek
last September that revenues "this year" were $6 million. It might be
mathematically possible that Salon had $4 million in revenue during the
first three months of 1998 and $2 million in the last nine months, thus $6
million for the year--except that the prospectus also reports revenues of $1.1
million for all 12 months ending March 31, 1998. It is unthinkable, of course,
that Talbot--a journalist, as well as commander, grand high executioner, and
maximum leader--would have lied to Newsweek . Especially when
Salon "executives" gave the same $6 million figure to the Los Angeles
Times in June. So, clearly the $2 million figure is a typo.

               Talbot also told Newsweek that "profits
won't come until 1999." This was barely three months before 1999 began. So, the
prospectus is surely mistaken in saying that Salon lost $4.3 million
from April through December of 1998, and "We expect these operating losses to
increase for at least the foreseeable future." Of course, "profits won't come
until 1999" doesn't necessarily mean that profits will come in 1999. It depends
on what you mean by "until." But Salon told a trade publication called
Link-Up in November 1998--just two months before the dawn of bliss--that
"Salon is slated [ sic ] to turn a profit in 1999." It's a
disgrace. How could Salon be so sloppy as to report large and growing
losses in its prospectus when it actually is already profitable?

               The prospectus states: "Our revenues depend on a
limited number of advertisers and sponsors who are not subject to long-term
agreements." And, "We anticipate that our financial results ... will continue
to significantly depend on revenues from a small number" of advertisers. The
problem here is probably the classic misplaced "not." They mean to say: Our
advertisers are subject to long-term agreements, and our financial
results will not depend, etc. After all, the January/February
Columbia Journalism Review cites Talbot as saying that Salon has
"more than 120 advertisers, half long-term." Or maybe CJR is the sloppy
one here. Did it omit Talbot's explanation that all those long-term advertisers
will contribute insignificant revenues?

               Here's a real puzzler. Back in 1997, Salon
told PC Week that it "gets $60 per 1,000 page views, compared with $20
to $30 for Yahoo" from advertisers because its readership is so classy. And yet
Salon 's 1999 prospectus refers to "Salon 's average CPM [cost
per-thousand] of $23"! Has Salon 's advertising CPM actually sunk by
two-thirds? More likely that $23 is supposed to be an $83 or a $123.

               On a subject of particular interest to

                     Slate
                  , the prospectus says this about Salon 's paid
membership program: "As of March 1999, there were approximately 1,050 members
enrolled in the Salon Members program." One or two zeros probably were dropped
here, as 1,000 members at $25 each would be merely $25,000, and yet Talbot told
Columbia Journalism Review in January that revenues from the program
were "above what our projections were." Were they projecting fewer than a
thousand members? Unlikely. So the truth must be that they have 10,500 or even
105,000 members, since it goes without saying that Talbot could not have been
trying to mislead the Columbia Journalism Review .

            

            Let us, though, just for the heck of it, consider the
possibility that perhaps the prospectus is accurate and all these quotations
and citations from Talbot and others at Salon are in error. Is such a
thing possible? Although highly unlikely, it's possible, we suppose, that all
these distinguished publications repeatedly misheard the same individual in the
same way, although he has no speech impediment that we know of. Surely, though,
it is impossible to imagine that the Salon folks themselves have been
lying, spinning, and covering up. Journalists, after all, expose these
practices--we do not commit them.

            David Talbot has had
inspiring things to say about journalists and the truth. In particular, he has
spoken of Salon 's dedication to a mission of exposing important facts.
And he has made pointed comparisons to other Webzines that are allegedly
content to sit on their fannies and analyze or summarize. Last fall
Salon published the important fact that Henry Hyde had an adulterous
affair 30 years ago. Many could not see the importance of this fact, but
Salon said it revealed President Clinton's chief congressional accuser
as a hypocrite. Those who go around exposing unpleasant facts about other
people had better be truth-tellers themselves. Buckling his swash on CNN,
Talbot declared: "Fearless journalists, true journalists shouldn't be worried
about perception or spin. They should be worried about the truth and concerned
about the truth, and that was Salon 's guiding principle here."

            Let's not be sentimental. Let's consider this as a pure
business matter. Here is a chairman of the board, editor in chief, and director
who is marketing his company as what might be called a "truth play." Truth is
his company's Unique Selling Proposition, its market niche, its core
competency, its brand value. It would be sheer folly for such a company to
invent preposterous lies and spins and feed them to the nation's most prominent
publications. That's why the only logical explanation is typographical errors
in the prospectus.

            Thank goodness we don't hav these poblems at

                  Slat
               .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Pissed Off About Off <EM>Piste</EM>

            The top international story
is that the Kosovo peace talks ended Tuesday without a signed agreement. Talks
will reconvene in mid-March, and NATO has apparently agreed not to bomb Serbia
in the interim. No agreement was reached because Serbian delegates refused to
accept any plan enforced by NATO troops. Albanian delegates, on the other hand,
pledged at the last minute to sign the proposed peace agreement--they will
finalize their decision after consulting with advisers back home. Most
international newspapers focus on the Serbs' intransigence and call the peace
talks a failure. This is in contrast to, for instance, the New York
Times , which focuses on the Albanian delegates' pledge to sign the
agreement and concludes that the talks were a "limited success."

            The Irish Times calls
Slobodan Milosevic "the undisputed winner" of the Rambouillet summit and NATO's
credibility "its first casualty." The paper's main complaint is that Milosevic
faces no serious consequences for his unwillingness to compromise. If anything,
he's learned that NATO lacks the political will to punish him. The paper
predicts that "killing in Kosovo is not likely to stop." Britain's Daily
Telegraph
agrees, saying: "No one has gained from the chaotic 'peace conference.'... No
one except Slobodan Milosevic, who has been given a few more weeks to kill
Kosovo Albanians before there will be any more talk of unleashing Nato on him."
The same editorial also says that Albright's "humiliating climb-down" will hurt
her credibility in future international crises. London's Independent
listlessly concludes that "triumph was not on the agenda at Rambouillet
yesterday, only weariness and relief that the show had been kept on the road
after 17 days of discussions at which the two antagonists did not once
negotiate with each other directly."

            Many European papers give prominent coverage to news that
another avalanche roared through a village in the Austrian Alps Tuesday.
Sixteen people were killed, and more than 20 are missing. Recent avalanches in
France, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland have killed dozens of people. An
estimated 20,000 tourists are currently stranded in snowed-in resort towns
throughout the Alps.

            The Times of London reports
that three Britons are being tried in a French court for recklessly endangering
rescuers' lives by going "off piste " (off the marked trail) at a ski
resort near Albertville. The lost Londoners contacted the authorities on a cell
phone and were brought to safety without injuries to skiers or rescuers. The
trial is attracting attention in English papers because some of the Alpine
avalanches this winter have been attributed to irresponsible off piste
skiers. (Astonishingly, the brief Times story finds room to list each
defendant's income, as in "Mr Fairley, a father of two, earns about £46,000 a
year as European sales manager for a medical equipment firm.")

            
A Ugandan paper, the New Vision, has
scored the first interview with deposed dictator Idi Amin in over a decade
("An Audience
With Big Daddy Idi," reprinted in South Africa's Daily Mail & Guardian ). The profile
sketches "Big Daddy" as a playful old duffer--e.g., "to punish the Ugandan
media for running false stories that he eats dozens of oranges a day, [Amin]
refuses to have his picture taken." The interviewer notably refrains from
asking any hard questions about, say, the 200,000 Ugandans thought to have died
under Amin's rule. Perhaps this is because before the interview Amin told the
reporter that "his people" in Uganda "say they know you, the place you stay and
when you get home." Amin lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a Saudi pension; he
has five satellite dishes, drives a white Cadillac, and enjoys fishing in the
Red Sea.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Valid
License
            

            As a Berkeley resident who still insists he's a
Chicagoan, it's nice to see a Royko remembrance (see ""). But one point that
Weisberg raises about Slats Grobnik and Royko's occasional fictionalizing and
whether readers understood it bothers me. It doesn't give enough credit to
readers, for one thing, and it neglects the implicit bargain columnists strike
with their audiences to be on the level.

            It seems like everyone I knew who read his
column--and that's nearly everyone I knew growing up, even in the
suburbs--understood that Slats and others were inventions. And everyone, I
thought, knew the difference between the columns in which Royko would create a
situation to make a broad point and the columns in which he was talking about
flesh-and-blood people and life-and-death matters. When he got someone real on
the spit, you could smell it.

            One of the big
differences between Royko on one hand and Mike Barnicle and similar truants on
the other is that Royko himself didn't confuse his fictions with reality, and
he didn't promote confusion about them. Whatever license he had was earned over
a long, long time by drawing a clear line between his creations and his
journalism, and by scrupulously honoring an unarticulated deal with his readers
that he wouldn't lose track of which was which, so they wouldn't, either.

            -- Dan Brekke
            

            
Berkeley, Calif.

            
               Brooks
Brothers
            

            In his "Assessment" of ,
A. O. Scott says the success of The Simpsons "resulted from the unlikely
collusion between Groening ... and Rupert Murdoch." Not really. The real
creative story is the collusion between Groening and James L. Brooks, former
Mary Tyler Moore Show staffer and creator of flicks such as Broadcast
News and Ordinary People . Brooks (and his protégé, Sam Simon)
brought with him the story discipline that made The Simpsons such great
television. (For the first few years all three men shared the "created by"
credit, but that has since changed.) The staff of talented, bitter ex-Ivy
League writers, led for years by Conan O'Brien, is responsible for the show's
lasting greatness. Groening's a genius and all that, but any moving picture is
a collaboration, especially in weekly comedy TV. Writers covering televison and
movies should tell their readers that the auteur theory isn't really relevant,
especially when a new episode (complete with perfect three-act story
structure!) needs to be cranked out once a week.

            -- Ben Swett
            

            Santa
Monica, Calif.

            
               Lack of
Resolution
            

            To Michael Kinsley's
on-the-mark "" about linguistic dodges served up by "thoughtful" commentators
on the conflict in Kosovo, let me contribute the following, perhaps the
grandest of them all--the congressional resolution of "support for our troops."
I've never been on the receiving end of such support but, at the risk of
appearing ungrateful, I would probably rather know whether Congress also
happened to support the mission I was being asked to risk my life for.

            -- J.B. Howard
            

            
Baltimore

            
               Affirmative
Reply
            

            I read Jacob Weisberg's that J.C. Watts Jr. attacked
as racist. I'm no fan of Watts. I think you are right that the Republicans
place him in the forefront because he's black. The party is trying to appear
inclusive when it really is not. However, to say that is his position is a
result of affirmative action is offensive. Your premise that affirmative action
promotes or gives positions to people of color who don't deserve or are
unqualified for these positions is what I find racist.

            It's the promulgation of ideas and derogatory
comments such as yours that debases affirmative action, and misleads and
misinforms people about affirmative action policies. Affirmative action is just
that--affirmative. It gives people who are qualified and knowledgeable an
opportunity to display their skills. It opens doors that might have otherwise
been left closed because of race. It promotes the inherent value of diversity
in any given organization or business.

            Call J.C. Watts Jr. a
front man, or say that he's being prostituted, or whatever. But don't say he's
a result of affirmative action.

            -- Karen Archia
            

            Carrboro, N.C.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 217: &quot;Unlisted&quot;

            

               Up until Tuesday, Texan Robert White was No. 4 on a list of 3,600.
What's the list and how did he get off it?
            

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 216)--"Yin and Yang?":
            

            

               
                  
                     In Belgrade, one group includes the American Center,
the British Council, the Goethe Institute, and the French Cultural Center; the
other group includes the Original Levi's Store and You've Got Mail .
What's the distinction?
                  
               
            

            "Oh,
like we need to know something about a place before we bomb it."-- Daniel
Radosh
            

            "The
first group got the lamb's blood 'X' on the door."-- Beth Sherman
            

            "Things
that were burnt down and things that should have been burnt down."-- Kenton
A. Hoover ( Katherine Hobson and Chris Thomas had similar
answers.)

            "The
latter contain no copies of The Sorrows of Young Werther ."-- Greg
Diamond
            

            "Aw,
jeez, have Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan sided with the Serbs already?"-- Tim
Carvell
            

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            News Quiz goes to war. And damned uneasily. If we
neglect the war, the quiz is marginalized into News of the Weird ; if
we refer to it, we risk trivializing genuine suffering. Catch 22 was
funny about war by blasting the Army's bureaucratic madness. M*A*S*H --at
least the TV version--offered a pseudo-anti-war stance while enjoying frat boy
high jinks: I believe their contract with CBS required that in every third
episode the entire camp would see Loretta Swit in the shower and then Alan Alda
would wring his hands sensitively. My father (infantry, World War II) had a
favorite scene in a service comedy: in No Time for Sergeants , when Andy
Griffith made those toilet seats stand at attention. Not strictly speaking a
war picture, but it was very, very funny.

            I suppose it is better
for News Quiz to risk being overly dark than to risk being overly Stephen
Ambrose, who seems to find war, at least World War II, so thoroughly enjoyable
that we should do it again and again. The millions died delightfully.

            
               Evil of Banality
Answer
            

            Group 1: bad NATO stuff. Group 2: good NATO
stuff.

            While cops stood idly by, mobs trashed the buildings
listed above, but they spared the Levi's outlet across the street from the
American Center, and rentals of that marvelous Nora Ephron movie remain high,
notes Steven Erlanger in the New York Times , so some good has come from
these tragic events.

            The worst part of the
bombings? They're boring and there's nothing on television. Erlanger quotes one
Serb: "There is a deepening sense of boredom--the war is really very boring,
especially with this monotonous war propaganda on the news. My son is bored; he
can't go out, except to visit friends in their shelters, where it's boring. My
little one is bored, because all her favorite cartoons like Power Rangers have
been replaced by those interminable news programs."

            
               Either/Or
Extra
            

            

               "They deny everything. They essentially say to their very best customers
that you get what's coming to you for believing us."-- lawyer William Gaylord
refers either to the ad campaign for The Mod Squad that lured hundreds
of Americans to theaters, or to Philip Morris, which was just ordered by an
Oregon jury to pay $81 million to the family of a dead Marlboro smoker
               

                "They are important when they bring in tourists. If not, they are
not."-- Ignatius Byamugyisha refers either to Cher's breasts, which could
attract hundreds of people to the Universal Studios Tour, or to endangered
Ugandan gorillas whose habitat is coveted by local farmers
               

               "Man, if I can continue to do that good, who knows? The sky's the
limit."-- Rudolph Giuliani is either cheerfully befuddled about his
plummeting approval ratings or gigglingly mean about the support he's reaped
from an anti-Hillary Clinton Web site
               

               "This is the first time in all my visits that they've given me a hopeful
sign."-- Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Jack Valenti refers
either to his midnight break-ins at the Baldwin brothers compound or to his
trip to China to promote American movies
               

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The odd misconception that NATO would bomb the
American Center.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               My husband and I have been together for more
than four years and married for two and a half. He has a child with an
ex-girlfriend. My mother-in-law has told me that the ex confessed to planning
the "accidental" pregnancy because my husband was talking of leaving her, and
she hoped it would keep him around. I was quite disturbed by this, and now more
so since a woman friend of his ex told me she has done the same thing to
another unsuspecting man.
            

            
               I feel that someone
needs to put this woman in her place but don't know if it's any of my business.
I think if I don't ... no one will. (She's a bad person to have mad at you, by
the way.) It just doesn't sit well with me to see another child used in this
way, and another good man being manipulated like this. For some reason I just
can't forget about this. 
               Thanks.
            

            

               --J.T.
            

            Dear J.,

            Prudie understands why this issue presses your
buttons. It is not, however, your job in life to put people in their places.
Another reason for butting out is that you say this latest trapper is a bad
person to have mad at you. People can get knocked down, as well as up, you
know. What I mean is that by confronting this woman with something that is
really none of your business, you run the risk of incurring her enmity and
making yourself a target for social unpleasantness.

            There are times when a
dearly held principle makes interjecting oneself acceptable: when you can
affect the outcome. In this situation, however, the man is already trapped (and
presumably committed to child support) and the woman is not about to undergo an
integrity makeover. Prudie suggests you go to the gym to work off some of this
(understandable) hostility.

            
--Prudie, athletically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Is it proper to make your bed in a hotel room at
the end of your stay? More to the point, is it considered impolite to not make
the bed?
            

            
               I was brought up to make the bed before leaving,
but my friends say it is just more work for the maid--who has to strip the
sheets anyway.
            

            
               Your
thoughts?
            

            

               --Wondering in Mass.
            

            Dear Won,

            You have slipped a stitch somewhere. Making one's
bed in a hotel is like whipping up your own souffle in a restaurant. Other
people have been employed for just those purposes.

            You perhaps are confusing staying in a hotel with
being a guest in someone's home, where it is good manners to make your bed. The
wild card, however, is when your stay is over. Prudie finds it useful, and
mannerly, to ask the hosts how they wish the bed to be left. Some people want
it stripped, others left as is for their housekeepers to deal with.

            Prudie applauds your
thoughtfulness, however, and is sure you are one of those considerate people
who, when ending a hotel stay, leaves a tip for the maid.

            
--Prudie, tidily

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I have been in a relationship now for about two
years with a most remarkable person. He and I have been going through many
growth and development phases. We have realized that I am somewhat conventional
and that he is non-. The differences in our values are sometimes trivial,
sometimes important. None of the differences, however, interfere with our trust
or love. The differences have to do with issues such as saving/spending money,
independence, and socially expected behavior.
            

            
               How does one know
when you are giving, expecting, or hoping for too much? Is there an answer to
this? Thank you.
            

            

               --Questioning
            

            Dear Quest,

            A lovely Zen quotation comes to mind: There is no
solution, seek it lovingly.

            Using the word
"remarkable" bodes well for your future together, as does your understanding of
your differences. There are no guarantees, of course, about how differences
will play out, so all you can do is try to look ahead and imagine if you both
will adopt the other's ways, carry on comfortably with distinct approaches, or
wind up killing each other.

            
--Prudie, philosophically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               How should young children address adults? My
wife and I believe that Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. are in order. For very close
friends, perhaps "Aunt" or "Uncle." Most of our (yuppie) friends have their
kids call my wife and me by our first names. Not a big deal, but we think this
is a bad example for our children. What do you say?
            

            
               Sincerely,
            

            

               --E. in Toronto
            

            Dear E.,

            As a rule, children should address adults in the
manner in which the adults ask to be addressed or, alternatively, in the way in
which their own parents instruct them. The real example for the children ought
to be what is comfortable and polite. With luck, they are the same thing. It
sounds to Prudie as though you and your spouse are a little more formal than
the times. Perhaps you might take a social inventory of who is calling whom
what in your circle and then make a standard ruling for your children. If,
however, you are seriously unhappy with youngsters calling their elders by
first names, no one could take affront with the "Aunt" or "Mrs." form of
address. It might make your children stand out, however.

            As you said, not a big
deal.

            --Prudie,
conversationally

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Missoula Winter: the Thaw, the Ice Floes, and the Boy<BR>

            
               Every valley shall be
filled, and every
mountain and hill shall be brought low.
In the middle of its long white sleep,
our world begins to thaw. Streets flood.

            The ice around the house
goes to water
which finds its own level
in my basement lodging. I lug
wet rugs up stairs that lead
to the world of air, up and down
the steps I go, dragging sodden things
to light. Tonight on the news they show
ice floes moving like dreamships
up the Clark Fork, silent and serene,
knocking out bridges, destroying homes
along the verge. A boy
from the university, track star goofing
with his girl at river's edge, slips he
falls in and she watches him carried away
in silence, arms outstretched like wings, not
a word or sound or sign of struggle:

Neither could I move or scream, the cold
was everything, it owned us, only our eyes
were free once the rapids had him
and we locked gazes then, as if seeing
            

            
               could save us, as if
it were believing.
In days our world has turned to ice again
and the search for the boy is called off.
Everything hardens. At night underground
I imagine him nearby somewhere, long limbs
caught quickfrozen in a runner's pose,
fingers reaching, hard as marble-- I am
poured out, O Lord, poured
out like water --all night I dream him
in that posture of longing, held
and stilled beneath the motion
and the industry, the unimaginable
weight of our living world.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Larry Levis Visits Easton, Pa., During a November Freeze

            Click
here to visit Poet
Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project.

            To hear
Gerald Stern read this poem, click .

            I said, "Dear Larry," as I put down his book,
Elegy ,

            across the street from
the Home Energy Center

            and its two embellished secular Christmas trees

            and its two red wreaths
over red ribbon crosses

            enshrining a thirty inch stove in one of its
windows

            and a fifty gallon water
heater in the other,

            knowing how wise he would have been with the parking
lot

            and the tree that refused
against all odds and all

            sane agreements and codicils to let its dead
leaves

            for God's sake fall in
some kind of trivial decency

            and how he would have stopped with me always beside
him

            to watch a girl in a
white fur parka and boots

            build the first snowball on Northampton Street she
collected

            from the hood of a Ford
Fairlane underneath that tree

            and throw it she thought at a small speed limit
sign

            although it landed with a
fluff just shy of the twin

            painted center lines inducing the three of us,

            her lover, Larry, and I
to make our own snowballs

            from the hoods and fenders of our own Fairlanes
although

            she threw like none of us
and to add to it

            she was left-handed, so bless her, may she have

            a good job and children
and always be free of cancer

            and may the two of us scrape some roofs before
the

            rain relieves us, and may we find gloves for our
labor.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Point and Clique

            Gaze around the sprawling Washington High campus at
lunchtime, and the social geography is clear. High on the Hill, the Jocks and
the Poms are eating in style, elbows up on linen tablecloths. "You wouldn't
dare come here if you didn't know the people," chirps Mary Martha Corinne
"Cokie" Roberts, head of the pompom squad (hence: Poms) and a leading contender
for prom queen. "Once you're in with the girls and guys on the Hill, everyone
is really nice. Once I made ABC, it was like I was just in ."

            One table over, her close friend John
McCain--nicknamed the "General" for his aggressiveness on the football
field--echoes Roberts' sentiments. "All the Jocks and Poms party together, and
everyone cares what we think about stuff. It may be unfair, but that just the
way Washington is."

            But down the Hill, deep in a basement cafeteria,
the tables are Formica, the eyeglasses are thick, the ties are clip-ons, and
the hair isn't quite coiffed. Here's where you'll find the Badgers, who
are--and there's no nice way to say this--Washington's losers. "We have nothing
against the Hillies," says Jacklyn, a GS-11, as she taps her ubiquitous
identity badge nervously on the table. "But they have something
against us. One day they pass a law that says raise seed-corn allowances. The
next day they pass a law that says lower seed-corn allowances. Then, no matter
what we do, they make fun of us and call us names like 'bureaucrats' and 'paper
pushers.' It's not fair. It really hurts."

            Never have such social divides seemed so
unbridgeable--and so alarming--as they have since the tragedy last month at
Columbine High School. Littleton has focused the public's attention on just how
bewildering and even dangerous this maze of social hierarchy can be. Americans
are realizing that our schools are fraught, filled with feuding social groups
and organized according to unforgiving Darwinian principles. Beneath the
gleaming surface of winners is a seething mass--the anti-social, the alienated,
and the exploited.

            Consider Washington
High, a wealthy, self-important institution inside the Beltway. It's like any
high school anywhere in the United States. A few days' wandering its marble
halls reveals homogeneity on the surface--where did they find so many identical
dark suits?--but alarming divisions below.

            "After Littleton, I immediately thought of Washington,"
says pompom squad co-captain Timmy Russert. "We have outcasts like the Badgers
and the Wingers. A lot of the victims in Colorado were in popular groups. I'm
kind of scared that popular groups here might get targeted."

            "Washington isn't immune to the pressures that have
spoiled the rest of America," says longtime Washington High civics teacher
Robert Strauss--"Old Mr. Strauss," as everyone calls him. "Of course everything
was better 40 years ago, when youngsters listened to their elders and helped
each other out."

            Washington High, like
Columbine, has an absolute social hierarchy. The apex of the pyramid--a world
away from the lowly Badgers--is student body president Bill Clinton, a
fun-loving kid who transferred to Washington just a few years ago. He and his
sidekicks, especially Al Gore and Bobby Rubin (treasurer, math whiz, and "Most
Likely to Succeed"), mix easily with almost everyone. (Because they hang out
smoking and whistling at girls behind the school's white administration
building, they're called White Housers.)

            Besides the White Housers, the two other leading cliques
are the Jocks and the Poms, who have a friendly rivalry about which group is
more important. The Jocks--aka the Players--include "General" McCain and
"Leader" Trent Lott. They're stars on the field in the only sport that matters
in Washington, political football. They lay down the social law. "We rule!"
shouts Lott, gleefully. The Poms, by contrast, are Washington's cheerleaders.
They tell everyone else about what the Jocks have done and why:
"Everyone knows who we are," gloats Billy Kristol.

            There are two
challengers to these top dogs. One is the Band, sometimes called the House
Republicans. They play and talk in unison. The leaders of the Band socialize
with the Jocks--before he was expelled last year, Band leader Newton Gingrich
briefly challenged Clinton for Most Popular--but rank-and-file Bandits detest
the Jocks and Poms. Gingrich has been replaced as Band leader by percussionist
Tommy DeLay. (DeLay also calls himself a Goth, in honor of his historical
heroes.)

            The other challenger is the Townies, who loathe Clinton.
The Townies have been going to school in Washington forever, and they hate the
popular newcomer who has displaced them in prestige. "Bill Clinton is just
so tacky. Have you seen the way he hits on girls? Did you hear about
him and that girl Monica? It's gross," says Sarah Quinn, as she loiters in the
parking lot of the Four Seasons with her longtime boyfriend Ben.

            The Jocks, the Band, the
Townies, and the President don't agree on much, but they all love the
Gulchers. The Gulchers--Bob Livingston, Haley Barbour, Tommy Boggs--are
Washington High's most successful graduates. They work on K Street, but drop by
the old school every day to cruise the parking lot, pick up girls, tell
shaggy-dog stories, and deal tobacco, liquor, and guns to current students.
They drive fabulous cars and pick up every check. "The Jocks say they rule
Washington. But we own Washington," says Gulcher Vernon Jordan,
flashing a smile and a wad of Ben Franklins.

            But for those who aren't so popular, Washington High is a
forbidding place. The popular kids, for example, mock the Wannabes, the mobs of
freshmen and sophomores who aspire desperately to become Jocks. The Wannabes
will do anything for the Jocks, and the Jocks exploit them mercilessly, forcing
them to write briefing papers, answer mail, field phone calls, fetch dry
cleaning, and play chauffeur. In exchange for this drudgery, the Jocks
occasionally deign to nod in their general direction. If a Wannabe gets paid a
small stipend for this work, she belongs to the Staffers. If she's not paid,
she's an Intern. Staffers are cooler than Interns.

            The Nerds, who hole up
in the economics and computer classrooms, have an even more hopeless position.
They're entirely ignored by the popular Washingtonians--except when Jocks or
White Housers need someone to do their homework for them. Then, the Nerds do
what they're told. Jacob Lew, who runs the Management and Budget Club, sighs
about this injustice. "I mean, it's totally unfair. I spend months figuring out
exactly how much money they have and what they can spend. I'm the one who does
all the work, and what do I get in return? They laugh at my charts, and they
don't even know my name." ("Jacob Lew? Who's Jacob Lew?" asks Clinton.)

            Some Washingtonians try to disappear from the social
hierarchy. The Badgers hide in their cafeterias. The Drama Club meets in Dupont
Circle, far from Washington's social center. Led by arty kids such as Chris
Hitchens, "Mo" Dowd, and Leon Wieseltier--who also edits the Washington
literary magazine--the Dramatists profess disgust with everyone on the Hill and
in the Gulch. "They're so stupid and hypocritical and fake," snorts Dowd. "We
keep our distance from their pointless little world." 

            The debate team, likewise, avoids social
intercourse. "We choose not to consort with others," declares team captain Bill
Rehnquist, known as the Chief. "Frankly, it would just waste our time and
embarrass them."

            No matter where you go on
this beautiful but troubled campus, Timmy Russert's question echoes: Is
Washington another Columbine? Nowhere does it resonate more than on the edge of
campus, in a dark corner of a building known as the "Courthouse." The
Courthouse is the home to Washington's proudest outcasts: The Wingers. "They
think we're freaky. They harass us because they think we're
freaky," mutters Laurence "Larry" Klayman, the most garrulous of the Wingers.
"They harass us. Well, we'll show them what harassment really is. Does
Bobby Rubin know what a deposition is? 'Cause I'm gonna show him ..."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Thank Heaven for Little Boys

            It is, of course, every politician's fantasy to
discover that an opponent molests children. But since such pedarastic
revelations are (surprisingly) rare, pols sometimes must settle for the next
best thing: pretending that their opponent coddles child molesters.
(Click for a spectacular example from the 1998 election.)

            The political benefits of pedophilia have not been
lost on Washington's Republicans, who have ginned up not one but two child
molestation controversies during the past few weeks. These tempests do not
arise from any actual disagreement over pedophilia. Rather, they are perfect
case studies in how politicians fabricate, then profit from, an inflammatory
issue. (See also: Democrats and Social Security, Democrats and Medicare,
etc.)

            The first controversy begins with a July 1998
article from Psychological Bulletin , the journal of the American
Psychological Association. Researchers Bruce Rind of Temple University, Philip
Tromovitch of University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Bauserman of University of
Michigan re-examined 59 studies in which child sexual abuse victims had been
surveyed as college students. They concluded that victims, especially boys,
typically do not suffer "intense psychological harm" from childhood sexual
abuse. The researchers also recommended changing the terminology of sexual
abuse: An encounter between a "willing" child and an adult should be called
"adult-child sex," not "child sexual abuse."

            The study and its
revolting linguistic suggestion moldered away in the great bibliographic
graveyard until it was brought to the attention of radio nag Dr. Laura
Schlessinger in March. The article was an easy and deserving target: It
promoted the notion that an 8-year-old child could consent to sex. Author
Bauserman, it turned out, had published in Paidika: The Journal of
Pedophilia , a Dutch journal that favors the legalization of sex with
children. And the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was
trumpeting the article on its Web site.

            Dr. Laura's crusade against the APA study enlisted the
legions of the Christian right: the Family Research Council, the Christian
Coalition, Dr. James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and the Traditional Values
Coalition. The APA distanced itself from the study, noting the association's
long record of fighting pedophilia and insisting that the article does not
mitigate the illegality and immorality of pedophilia.

            In early May, Hill
conservatives deployed the APA article as a political weapon. Led by House
Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, 19 Republican members of Congress have
introduced a resolution to condemn the article and to demand that President
Clinton do the same. The House is expected to vote on the measure in mid-June.
Supporters of the resolution say congressional condemnation will discourage
child molesters from citing the article in their legal defenses--not that
there's any evidence that anyone has done that.

            The Republican National Committee saw its opportunity on
May 12, when White House spokesman Joe Lockhart skirted a question about the
APA study by saying the White House had not reviewed it. (The White House has,
of course, denounced pedophilia.) A week later, when Lockhart still had not
commented on the study, the RNC blast-faxed a press release congratulating the
GOP for its brave stand and slamming Clinton. Its headline: "White House Still
Spinning 'Sexual Relations'--As GOP Protects Minors From Pedophiles."

            The Christian right's
political exploitation of the APA squabble ranges from the Traditional Values
Coalition's criticism of "liberal political advocacy ... laying the groundwork
for the permissibility of child molestation" to the Family Research Council's
loopy accusation that the president is fronting for pro-pedarasty gay-rights
activists. "There is an eerie silence from the White House. I think they are
afraid of offending their allies in the homosexual ranks, since there is a
strong element of support among homosexual activists for lowering the age of
consent," says FRC Senior Director of Cultural Studies Robert Knight.

            The mainstream press has ignored the pedophilia flap, but
Dr. Laura, other talk radio hosts, and Christian activist publications have all
trumpeted the GOP's courage to the party's conservative base.

            The conservatives have
managed to cast themselves as the scourge of pedophiles, insinuate that the
president is soft on pedophilia, and link Clinton to a sub rosa campaign to
lower the age of consent--and all this is based on a report that no one noticed
until the Christian right uncovered it, that no one in the White House seems to
have read, and that no one remotely linked to the Democratic Party or the White
House has ever endorsed.

            The second pedophilia scare has served a more pragmatic
purpose: legislative blackmail. During the past few weeks, the Ways and Means
Committee has been considering a $2.3 billion bill for the U.S. Customs
Service. Federal employee unions, Democratic members, and the White House
strongly opposed a provision that would limit certain kinds of overtime pay for
customs officers. In the face of this opposition, Republicans played the
molester card. They added $10 million to the legislation for customs to
investigate Internet kiddie porn traffickers. They also added money for drug
interdiction.

            Democrats on the
committee endorsed the child-porn and drug funding but voted against the bill
in subcommittee because of the overtime provision. Trade Subcommittee Chairman
Phil Crane, R-Ill., immediately accused the minority party of giving aid and
comfort to molesters. "This bill protects our children from drug dealers and
pedophiles, and it's unfortunate that the Democrats have put special interest
pressures ahead of our children's safety," Crane said.

            Democrats, unwilling to take another beating, folded,
voting unanimously for the bill in full committee. It passed the House Tuesday
by 410-2.

            A Democratic staffer gripes, "There is not a single
member of the House who objects to the funding to fight child porn, but
Republicans constructed the vote in such a way that a vote against the bill can
be framed as a vote to say Democrats favor pornography. They added on the
child-porn provision and the drug provision simply to force us to vote for
them. And we had to."

            (Which raises an
intriguing notion: Why aren't Republican members of Congress attaching
anti-pedophile measures to every bill? What are they afraid of?)

            Now that they have conquered the House Democrats with bogus
pedophile charges, House Republicans are siccing the tactic against the White
House, which still objects to the overtime provision. "Our children are under
attack by child pornographers who prey on them over the Internet. Couple that
with the constant peddling of narcotics to our children and you have a deadly
combination that we must do everything we can to stop. This is not a time for
partisanship or special interest influence," Committee Chairman Bill Archer,
R-Texas, warned the president this week.

            The president, who doesn't want to be called
squishy on molesters, will probably cave. Once he does, perhaps the two parties
can abandon this imaginary controversy and tackle the scourge that actually
plagues Washington--not child sexual abuse, but child sexual abuse abuse.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 248: &quot;Re Place&quot;

            
               According to
Justice Anthony Kennedy, it's a place where people "practice newly learned
vulgarities, erupt with anger, tease and embarrass each other, share offensive
notes, flirt, push and shove in the halls, grab and offend." Where is this
wonderful, magical place?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 247)--"Does This Look Inflected?":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 The author of a new
book charges that a prominent American not only betrayed him, but also "[h]is
mocking pronunciation of my name ... sounded like a jeering mob." Who is this
insensitive American, and how did he mispronounce the author's
name?
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Tom
Selleck. And he was complaining about the insinuating way that little English
guy used to call him 'Magnum' on Magnum P.I. Just between you and me,
this Selleck seems pretty sensitive for a he-man."-- Chris Kelly
            

             

            
"Aren't we all insensitive Americans when we say 'NetanYAHOO'? Or worse,
'NetanLOSER'?"-- Molly Shear Gabel ( H Nelson had a similar
answer.)

            "The
author in question was self-help guru Rajesh Ajeerinmob, who should really be
less sensitive, in my opinion."--Bill Wasik
            

            "It's
Bob Dole, and he pronounced the author's name as 'Liddy.' "-- Mark
Craven
            

            
"Randy, I've been rethinking that 'he-man' stuff I said about Tom Selleck. It
wasn't fair. Some of butchest guys around go all atwitter when ladies ask them
about their guns. Remember that time you and Gary Cooper and I were having
fondue at Hedda Hopper's house and she just wouldn't let up on Coop about the
hunting? That was the fourth- or fifth-worst time I ever saw him
cry."-- Chris Kelly
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            A Wang, a Dong, a Pun, and not just a Pun, a Big Ho
Pun--such is the provincial, infantile, cross-cultural fun available to anyone
with a Manhattan phone book and a cold heart. Imagine the torments of Robert
Fatty, Charles Fatone, Jennifer Bigham, or Antonio Bigas whose schooldays must
have consisted largely of correcting his teacher as she called the roll.
There's Brook Sissay (that's Sissay , like a really rich French sissy)
who we can only hope finds sympathy and comfort in the arms of page-mate Gerald
Shittko.

            What recourse is available to these sufferers?
None. Tolerate those boorish mispronunciations and look like a sap. Or say
something--You're doing that on purpose! Quit it! I'm telling Mom!--and look
like a bigger sap. Hopeless.

            Of course, no sophisticated person would indulge in
this kind of childish mockery. And so I'm going to make a long overdue phone
call of apology right now, to Ms. Helene Lickdyke.

            Now we are 6.

            
               Treacherous
Back-Stabbing Answer
            

            President Clinton deliberately mispronounced it
"Boo-trus, Boo-trus," just to mock him, charges former U.N. Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

            The pink bellies, the short-sheeting, the midnight
deliveries of two dozen pizzas he didn't even order--had any of these actually
been mentioned in Boutros-Ghali's book they too would have been part of
Clinton's plan to deny him a second term as secretary-general during Clinton's
own 1996 campaign, out of fear for Bob Dole, who was accusing the
administration of cooperation with international bodies. Bastards!

            And that liar Madeleine Albright was even worse. In
Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga , Boutros-Ghali asserts that the wily
secretary of state sought to unseat him "with determination, letting pass no
opportunity to demolish my authority and tarnish my image all the while showing
a serene face, wearing a friendly smile and repeating expressions of
friendships and admiration through the poutiest ruby lips I have ever beheld.
Except, of course, for the part about the lips, which look though you may, you
will not find in this book, for I did not write such nonsense. Aiee, this
paradox makes my head ache. And I didn't write that either. Or that last
bit."

            (Note: The actual book
quotation ends with the word "admiration.")

            
               Ads Up
Extra
            

            Which of the following
are from those twee little ads in The New Yorker , and which are
two-bedroom apartments with WBFP, RivVu, SWM, and ... no wait, sorry--which are
crude travesties?

            1. Adopt Me! I'm a smart,
charming, rare Gloucestershire Old Spots Pig. Adopt me for $25 and help fund
...

            2. Swim at Home ...

            3. Swim in other people's
homes while they're summering in Tuscany, out for the evening, or just sleeping
soundly ...

            4. Adopt Me! I'm a portly
old fool from Hampshire. Adopt me for $350,000 and help fund the whiskey and
...

            5. A different kind of
Khaki ... price $350

            6. Superb Handmade
Tie--"Petrol" Crisp, elegant black & white puppytooth. $95

            7. Sock Garters Handmade
in England--"Sir Ankleton" ... $85

            8. Upton Tea
Importers--purveyor of the World's Finest Teas

            9. Unabridged AudioBooks
Read in plummy English accent ...

            10. Lighthouse Pin a
beloved coastal beacon made by James Breakell in sterling silver $30. 14k gold
$200

            11. Discrete Unattractive
Jewelry ...

            12.
The Inn on Princess Margaret's Lap ...

            
               Actual
Ads
            

            
               1, 2, 5, 6, 8,
10.
            

            
               Mark Gibbens'
Headline Haiku
            

            Wary Iowans
not socked
G-string flashers
Boost disaster.

            
               --Madison Capital Times , May 20, 1999

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Thinking Outside the Box Office

            Except in Japan, the world economic crisis seems to
have gone into at least temporary remission, and those who have been obsessing
about the subject are turning their attention back to other matters. In my
case, that means making a big push on my introductory economics
textbook-in-progress. And so a little while ago I found myself redrafting the
chapters on, yes, supply and demand.

            Now, my textbook is a
labor of love; but it is also a commercial venture (or at least I and my
publisher hope it is!). So, the first draft was tested on a focus group: people
who are successful teachers of introductory economics at the sort of schools we
hope will adopt the book. I learned a lot from the focus group. Among other
things, I learned that what a middle-aged college professor thinks of as
down-to-earth examples of economics in action might not always sound quite so
down to earth to the ordinary college freshman, and that I had to have more
examples the clientele could relate to--which means, in particular,
sports . One focus group member suggested that the market for "scalped"
sports tickets was a good example of supply and demand in action. So, I did
some background research and found some very interesting stuff. But perhaps it
is an indicator of my state of mind that what I saw during that research made
me think, once again, about .

            Ticket scalping is nothing new, though it continues to pose
something of an economic puzzle. The fact is that there are a number of public
events--most notably sports, but also concerts, plays, museum shows, etc.--for
which tickets are consistently sold below the price that would limit demand to
the available supply. Exactly why the owners of stadiums and theaters do this
is a matter of some dispute. One theory (due to Chicago economist Gary Becker)
is that tickets are underpriced because those who sell them believe that it is
crucial to their image to have sold-out houses. Beyond this, many stadium and
theater owners seem to believe that as an overall marketing strategy it is
important that access to their most popular events be available to enthusiasts
at moderate prices. For example, why doesn't George Lucas allow theaters to
offer special preview showings of The Phantom Menace at astronomical
(galactic?) prices, when surely they could find tens or even hundreds of
thousands of people able and willing to pay? Presumably because so blatant a
statement that wealth hath its privileges would alienate the tens of millions
of nonwealthy moviegoers he counts on to turn the film into a megahit. Whatever
the precise reasoning, what is clear is that when it comes to big games and big
shows, private sector entrepreneurs themselves often feel that it is a bad idea
to let market forces rule.

            Enter the scalpers. If
they can, scalpers will buy up large numbers of tickets directly from the box
office and resell them at a profit. If the box office refuses to sell in bulk,
they will offer to buy spare tickets from people who have come by them
legitimately and perhaps hire people to stand in line. What's wrong with that?
Well, the people who run the box office are attempting to pursue social
goals--albeit in the ultimate name of profit--which require that tickets go not
only to those who can afford to pay a lot but also to those who really care and
are willing to book early and/or stand in line. If tickets sell out long in
advance not to enthusiasts but to speculators, or if the long lines consist not
of dedicated fans but of hired proxies, this attempt to pursue a long-term
agenda is defeated. And so there is a running conflict between the long-run
thinking represented by the box offices and the short-run market forces
represented by scalpers--a conflict that seems increasingly to be running in
the scalpers' favor.

            Why does scalping seem ever harder to control? One reason
is that because of the rising inequality of income and wealth, there are more
people out there able and willing to pay extraordinary sums. This is above all
true in New York, where there are thousands of people who will not blanch at
paying $10,000 to see and be seen at a Knicks game. But scalping is also on the
rise because of an interaction between technology and ideology.

            It's clear that technology has made scalping much
more efficient than in the past. Once upon a time it was a hands-on business.
Shady characters would hang around stadiums offering to buy tickets at a
premium or to sell them at an even larger premium. Those shady characters are
still there, but you can also look up big-ticket brokers on the Web, call their
800 numbers, and comfortably conduct your transaction from home or office. This
makes it easy for the out-of-town visitor to line up tickets for that special
evening or for the hard-driving executive to impress his clients. It also means
that everyone who has bought a ticket at the box office knows that the true
cost of going to the show is not the sum he actually paid but the much larger
sum he could make by reselling that ticket.

            Still, the technology
would not be as effective as it is were it not for a favorable ideological
climate. While there are anti-scalping laws in many places--such as New York
City--there are also a growing number of places, such as New Jersey, that
believe in letting the market rip and therefore allow tickets to be freely
resold at any price. And given modern communications technology, New Yorkers
need not physically visit New Jersey to do an end run around the local
regulations.

            And so the pressure on box offices steadily intensifies.
Box offices do fight back. A couple years ago Madison Square Garden,
discovering that many of its season ticket holders were reselling them to
brokers, revoked thousands of tickets in a stroke. And the people spending
weeks in line to see The Phantom Menace are, as far as anyone knows,
genuine fanatics rather than hirelings. Still, it is hard to escape the feeling
that these are rear-guard actions. We seem to be heading for a future in which
the crowd at a Knicks game will consist mainly of businessmen on expense
accounts--and, so the management of Madison Square Garden fears, a longer-term
future in which serious Knicks fans, finding that they can't afford tickets,
lose interest, and therefore so do the businessmen. Short-run market pressures
may eventually leave everyone worse off; and yet they seem to be getting harder
and harder to defy--which brings me to global finance.

            To my mind, at least, there is a sort of family
resemblance between the phenomenon of ticket scalping and the problem of
hot-money flows in the world economy. In both cases there is some efficiency
case to be made in their favor. Ticket scalping does allow some people who
badly want to see a game or show to do so. Short-term capital flows do
sometimes provide badly needed finance or liquidity. In both cases, however,
there are also costs--whether to the social mix that sustains a team's fan base
or to the macroeconomic stability that sustains long-term economic growth.
Stadium owners have judged these costs to be large enough to warrant serious
attempts to limit scalping; and given the experience of the last two years, you
don't have to be an anti-market fanatic to argue that some limits on hot money
would also be a good thing, if feasible.

            But the trouble is that between technology that
makes it easier for markets to run rings around local regulations, and the
reluctance of governments to agree on the sort of cross-border enforcement that
might let them keep up with that technology, efforts to limit the market . Oh,
mavericks such as George Lucas or Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir bin
Muhammad may try to fight the trend and even achieve some limited success, but
they are swimming against the tide. Indeed, as this article was being written,
Lucas--under intense pressure from theater owners--gave in to the dark side of
market forces. Some tickets to The Phantom Menace will, indeed, be sold
in advance--and no doubt be snapped up by scalpers.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 244: &quot;When IRS Eyes Are Smiling&quot;

            
               Fill in the blank
on this tax tip from a Washington state IRS collection officer. "If you don't
want to pay your taxes today all you have to do is say two magic words:
_________ _________."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 243)--"A Crush on You":
            

            

               
                  
                     "All great leaders since Moses have known that feared
enemies must be crushed completely." Who served up this baloney on Sunday, to
inspire whom, to do what?
                  
               
            

            "A
leader of the Makah tribe, inspiring 600 men armed with pointed spears and
high-powered rifles to tear into the 'feared enemy,' who was, at that moment,
peacefully sorting baleen."-- Dale Shuger
            

            "The
'voices' telling Joan Van Ark to liberate France from the English, in yet
another strange twist on Knots Landing ."-- Matt Sullivan
            

            "A
government spokesman explains why the federal government is funding research on
the Crushinator 6000, an alternative to the Crushinator 9000."-- Jane
Bu
            

            "Cat
leader, to all the other cats, to finally get those dogs. (The head cat learned
about Moses from a very cool Bible.)"-- J. Kamensky
            

            
"Martha Stewart, on using the proper blender setting for pulverizing 'those
f**king tomato skins.' She gets a little obsessive about her sauce."-- M.
Koegel ( Norm Oder had a similar answer.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            With the glorious
exception of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V , there is nothing
more demoralizing than an inspirational address. That sort of thing generally
entails a coach or an east regional sales manager exhorting you to do something
pointless, painful, or profitable to someone else. Physics has few
inspirational speeches: Unify that Field Theory! Writing novels, performing
surgery, preparing a light and elegant soufflé--each must be done without
rousing declamation. Sex sometimes includes a heartening oration, but usually
toward the end, urging you on to mutual victory; such remarks are rarely
delivered at halftime, when you're lurking in the locker room, glum and
battered. (The exception here is phone sex, where the inspirational speech
pretty much is the sex.) "For the Senate and the Roman People"--that's what
gladiators used to say. Not too many people today seek inspiration from the
Senate, although a surprising number do seek sex there, frequently for money.
But they think themselves accurs'd and hold their manhoods cheap. Poor
bastards.

            
               Motivational
Answer
            

            Coach Pat Riley tried to
inspire his Miami Heat to beat the New York Knicks. They didn't.

            
               From Bad to Verse
Extra
            

            Below, a new form of cut and paste poetry.

            The rules:

            

               Four lines, each with the same number of words.

               The words in each line must originally appear adjacent to each other in a
newspaper headline.

               The headlines must all come from a single edition of a single paper.

            

            

               Two samples:
            

            Daredevil soprano
Cow valve
Heart boy
Smart toilet

            
               --New York
Times , May 18, 1999

            New Jersey rabbi
Dutch mental patient
Crack, not ping
Pittsburgh awaits fate

            
               --New York
Times , May 18, 1999

            Participants are invited to submit similar
poems.

            Also welcome--a good
name for this verse form.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Personification of uncompromising
belligerence--Bill Gates.

            Close second--Eisner/Katzenberg.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Altman's Gold

            I don't want to project too
much onto Robert Altman's bluesy charmer Cookie's Fortune --to argue, for
instance, that it's the work of an old master summing up. But it sure feels
that way. The screenwriter, Anne Rapp, has provided Altman with a blueprint not
only for an ensemble comedy but also for a comedy that honors the very idea of
an ensemble. It's no wonder Altman fell on it. As early as M*A*S*H
(1970), the director seemed more taken with the ebb and flow of groups than
with the isolated treks of individuals. It's not just that he likes to tell
stories with multiple strands, or that he gets bored easily with one
consciousness, or even that he cherishes some '60s utopian fantasy of the
collective. What Cookie's Fortune suggests is that for Altman order in
the universe can't be discerned in the comings and goings of lone heroes but in
the interactions among vast and disparate collections of people. This time out,
he transforms the bad vibes of his other films into a vision that's positively
serene. He celebrates a universe that has found its equilibrium and the easy
way in which it rights itself when a nasty bit of flotsam threatens to throw it
out of whack.

            The movie takes place in
the Deep South, which was also the setting for Altman's edgy, disharmonic
thriller The Gingerbread Man (1998). The opening is teasingly
misleading, as if to make you think you're seeing The Gingerbread Man
II : In Holly Springs, a small, Mississippi cotton town, Willis Richland
(Charles S. Dutton) staggers out of a blues joint semi-drunk, then drops his
bottle of bourbon when a police car glides ominously past. So he heads back
into the bar, steals a fifth of Wild Turkey, then ambles past the railroad
tracks and peeps into a van where a young woman (Liv Tyler) has been
undressing. Then he climbs in the window of a big, antebellum house and takes
some guns from a glass cabinet at the foot of the main staircase.

            So far, so Southern Gothic. Except that Willis, it turns
out, is the town's gentlest spirit, loved even by those passing police, who are
his fishing buddies. He's a caretaker at that house--he couldn't find his keys.
The girl he was spying on is the runaway niece of the elderly widow, "Cookie"
Orcutt (Patricia Neal), he works for. He'd promised to clean those guns before
he went to bed. And, the next afternoon, Willis buys a fifth of Wild Turkey and
surreptitiously slips it behind the bar of the blues joint to replace the one
he'd swiped. The owner (Rufus Thomas) pretends not to notice, but when Willis
leaves he turns to his chesty singer (Ruby Wilson) and says, "Willis is even
again."

            That's the core of
Cookie's Fortune : "Willis is even again." It suggests a community in
which everything is in balance, in which people accept the good and the bad, in
faith that it will all even out in the end. The picture sits vaguely in the
comic-mystery genre, but it's more of a relaxant than a thriller. There's a
violent death and a cover-up, and the police have to figure out what really
happened before an innocent person is condemned to prison--or worse. But Altman
doesn't let the audience's outrage mount. The act that kicks the movie into a
higher gear comes nearly half an hour in, and Altman is in no hurry to get to
his narrative point. That's probably because he has to eliminate Cookie to do
it, and Patricia Neal isn't someone you want to get rid of. The actress, now in
her 70s, has shrunk in physical stature but has otherwise swelled--I don't
remember her having such power in her lungs. When she sucks on her pipe and
stares at the gun cabinet and upbraids her late husband for leaving her behind,
Altman clearly wants her to take all the time in the world.

            How do you convince young directors to watch and emulate
Altman? It's so much easier to push a filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, whose
brilliant sequences you can screen and dissect in a cinema studies class.
Altman uses a distinctive color palette here--a lot of neonlike primary colors,
as if the whole Mississippi town were a blues joint--but his mastery is in his
offhandedness, in how he conceals his own storytelling. There's always a sense
that his characters are living even when you're not watching them, maybe
because the actors don't seem "on" the way they do for other directors: Altman
catches them in his gaze and gives them the once-over and then they go about
their business. Actors I didn't think I'd want to see again--Ned Beatty and
Donald Moffat--I wanted to see more of, and Chris O'Donnell is positively
reborn as a bumbling young policeman who only wants to make out with Liv Tyler
against the station house soda machine. Courtney B. Vance shows up as an
officious homicide detective from a nearby city who finds Holly Springs' lazy
informality irritating, but none of the women wants to answer his queries: They
want to flirt with him, and he can't help falling into their easy rhythms.

            Glenn Close plays Camille Orcutt, Cookie's
histrionic niece and the director of the church theatricals (currently Oscar
Wilde's Salome ), whose hysterical obsession with hiding the
"disgraceful" truth throws the town into an uproar. I was surprised to find
Close in the movie, since her clenched, overly controlled acting seems at odds
with what Altman usually goes for. But this might be her best performance ever.
Her Camille is like a steely, demented temperance activist who keeps charging
into otherwise relaxed settings and throwing them into chaos. ("You'd think the
police could take their stupid crime tape with them when they leave!") She
pairs beautifully with Julianne Moore as Camille's simple-minded, vaguely
schitzy sister, Cora, who's so browbeaten that whenever she's called on to
talk, the Scripture comes flowing out of her mouth like lava.

            The truth in Cookie's
Fortune isn't ferreted out à la Murder She Wrote ; it emerges in
dribs and drabs--a witness here, a piece of evidence there--as if by natural
law. You might even say that the truth emerges as a consequence of chaos and
not from some misguided pursuit of order. What seems, on the surface, as
ingratiating a movie as Altman has ever made, is actually packed with
subversive ideas. It ends on a note of blithe miscegenation--just the sort of
punch line to send the Camilles of the world screaming from the theater swiping
at invisible bugs.

            As a young movie critic, I made the wrong sort of name for
myself by swooning in print over many a nubile actress. Yes, I was often
promiscuous in my praise and, yes, my affaires de la tête were often
sadly short-lived. But I've practiced the critical equivalent of abstinence for
many years now, and it's time to reassert what can never be forgotten: It is
the right, nay the duty, of a critic to fall and fall hard. I see no point in
writing about Never Been Kissed --a pleasant but annoyingly insubstantial
teen comedy--unless I can pull out the stops and say it's worth seeing, it
demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most
magically poised comedienne in movies today.

            Barrymore plays a frumpy
newspaper copy editor who's ordered to go undercover as a high-school student
by a nuttily competitive publisher (Garry Marshall). Is Drew a convincing
frump? Surprisingly so. She hits her slight speech impediment harder than usual
and further relaxes her already shlumpy posture. Trying to fit in with the
"cool" kids, she seems heartbreakingly defenseless. You could mistake her for
an ordinary, unaffected nerd, except that the genius Barrymore timing is in
every breath, every screwy inflection, every pratfall. After an hour, I thought
that Never Been Kissed might be the most fun teenpic since
Clueless , but ultimately the movie takes too many shortcuts even on its
own dumb, formulaic terms, and it can't make up its mind whether it wants to
pander to teen-age fantasies of good looks and popularity or to scold
teen-agers for being so shallow. No matter. The picture would have to be a hell
of a lot worse to keep me from going back to watch Drew bite her lower lip and
that shy smile spread meltingly across that sweet, eternally girlish face and
...

            Wait, maybe I'd better switch to The Matrix , which
made $37 million in its first week and seems poised to become a phenomenon.
Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, it's a mishmash of Hong Kong
sword-fighting ghost epics, Kafkaesque virtual reality fantasies, Cronenbergian
visions of cybernetically enhanced flesh, Alice in Wonderland
surrealism, post-apocalyptic urban grunge, Terminator -like battles of
man vs. machine, and portentous lumpen-Zen posturing ("I can only show you the
door. You have to walk through it"). It shouldn't make a lick of sense, let
alone feel all of a piece, but The Matrix is actually one of the more
lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love
slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies. Keanu Reeves makes a lean,
strikingly beautiful tabula rasa hero, twisting out of the way of bullets that
elongate like silver beads of mercury, and he's partnered by the equally hard,
blank, and androgynously gorgeous Carrie-Anne Moss. Walls and pillars explode
around them but the sleek, geometric lines of their bodies never soften. The
machines, in comparison, seem fuzzy.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Death Stamps

            Not content, apparently, with Oregon's pioneering
status as the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide, the Oregon
state government has decided to be the first in the country to offer
financially assisted suicide as well. Last year the state agency in charge of
determining Medicaid assistance for the poor included assisted suicide among
the approved uses of the state's health-care dollars.

            So, how much does it cost to kill yourself, anyway?
Under the Oregon Death With Dignity Act you must consult with a physician and a
psychiatric counselor before imbibing the $45 cup of hemlock (actually
Phenobarbital D). It turns out to be quite hard to get a price quote for this
service over the phone. Medical academics I talked to said you would probably
need at least five professional visits at $60 each, for a total bill of $350 or
more. But the two individuals for whom claims have been made so far cost the
state a total of only $99, which suggests that not a lot of handholding was
going on.

            Since death itself costs
$45, the two-for-$99 figure suggests that the poor of Oregon who claim this
benefit are getting only $4.50 worth of dignity. On the other hand, how many
people are there in Oregon who would like to die but have to go on living
because they can't scrape together $49.50?

            But here's the killer. Before expanding the definition of
"health services" to include intentional death by overdose, Oregon was known
for another kind of health-policy sang-froid. A few years ago the state
expanded medical benefits to cover more people but fewer ailments. A Health
Services Commission was set up to consider all illnesses and the treatments
available and to prioritize them on a cost-benefit basis. This year's list
identifies 743 different conditions and treatments. There was only enough money
to treat the top 574 conditions. Venereal warts just made the cut. Uninsured
sufferers from condition No. 575--anal fissures--are out of luck. Ditto Nos.
576 through 743.

            After hearings last year,
the commission decided that, since Oregon voters had approved of
physician-assisted suicide in not one but two referendums, it was appropriate
to include this service under the category of "comfort care" for the terminally
ill. "Comfort care" entered the chart at No. 263 with a bullet, just below
acute ischemic heart disease and delirium tremens, nosing ahead of various
mental disorders, Tourette's syndrome, and rectal polyps.

            The Oregon legislature is reconsidering all this. People
afflicted with illnesses that have not made the funding cut (particularly a
group with the Monty Pythonesque name of Not Dead Yet) are irate that a
lifesaving operation in the territory around No. 570 can depend on the annual
appropriating whims of the legislature, while a free barbiturate consolation
prize is safely ensconced at No. 263. Defenders of the commission counter that
it would be unconscionable to deny poor people a right as fundamental as
death.

            It sounds like classic
big-spending liberalism. But is that what is really at work here? Aiding and
abetting a suicide--even at $350 per--is cheaper than just about any other
serious medical treatment. Anyone dying in a modern hospital will quickly cost
more by staying alive than by exercising the right to die, dignity and all. The
commission declined to estimate the cost impact of fatal "comfort care." It
could easily be positive, a money saver. If I were an Oregon Health Plan member
who suffered from anal fissures (No. 575), my first reaction would be
bitterness that by putting assisted suicide at No. 263, the commission had
bumped me and my suffering off the list. But my second reaction would be that
the more people who take advantage of No. 263, the more likely it is that there
will be money enough for No. 575 after all.

            Given the harrumphing by legislators that Oregon voters
never intended to fund suicide when they approved the 1994 referendum, the era
of government-subsidized death will probably soon be over. A federal bill
sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, would forbid the prescription of drugs
for assisted suicide, presumably taking doctors out of the death-assistance
business for all patients.

            This is too bad. Oregon led the country in facing
the health-care rationing issue head-on. And now, perhaps unintentionally, it
has taken the next logical step: bribing people to go early and save the system
a bit of money. To the agonizing issue of health-care costs for the terminally
ill, Oregon has stumbled onto a kind of answer, heartless though it may be.
Those who attack it will have to come up with something better.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I work in a small office (10 people). Two
employees (married male, unmarried female) are spending an inordinate amount of
time together during office hours. People are beginning to talk. These two
spend at least an hour a day in closed-door "meetings," another 15 minutes here
and there during the day chatting and occasionally whispering. They go out to
lunch together, and she even came into the office on a Saturday just to talk to
him. (They went into her office, shut the door, and emerged a half-hour later.
Then she left.)
            

            
               Neither of them has any business reason that
requires "meetings." It is at the point now where other employees are making
comments about this relationship. These two monopolize each other's time, and
the bad part is that now he is telling colleagues he is too busy to do some
tasks.
            

            
               Prudie, I don't think this is anything more
than a flirtation (I guess I'm an optimist). But my colleagues and I cannot
figure out a way to tell him (or her) that this is affecting the work
environment, their reputations, and our morale.
            

            
               I'm writing because I need to know who should
talk to him or her. My colleagues don't feel close enough to either of them to
say what needs to be said, but neither do we want to make a big thing of it by
telling his manager. He is the senior of the two people involved. How should we
handle it?
            

            
               Thanks,
            

            

               --Anonymous
            

            Dear An,

            Let's review: He is married, they have no business
reasons to get together, the whole office is chirping about their lengthy
closed-door "meetings," they whisper, leave to have lunch together, and you
think there is no more than a "flirtation." This is like imagining that a
dinosaur died in a standing position at the museum of natural history.
Of 
               course they're having an affair, but Prudie compliments you on
your high-minded and generous assessment of the situation. Now, what to do
about it?

            You and your colleagues must rethink your reticence
about not saying anything to anybody. The fact that you are an office of only
10 people, and Lothario now finds himself too busy for some tasks, means the
involvement has begun to impinge on the workplace.

            Do you have a human
resources department? It is pledged to confidentiality and could intervene.
(Prudie agrees that speaking directly to the parties would probably not be
useful.) If your company is too small to have an HR unit, then a designated
representative must go to the man's superior--he being senior to the woman--and
lay out the situation. Prudie is all for romance (she doesn't even mind it in
the office), but when it complicates the lives of co-workers something needs to
be done. Please note that we are not dealing with the fact that the man is
married because that is none of our business.

            
--Prudie, proactively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Your response to ""--recommending that a
soon-to-be-married couple break off relations with highly unsupportive
soon-to-be in-laws--struck a deep, dark chord in me. My problem is similar
except that my fiance doesn't always realize the extent of his mother's
manipulations or their possible effect on our relationship. Mostly she tries to
make him feel like hell via barbed remarks and/or the silent treatment for
"deserting his family" in order to be with me. (She has always relied heavily
on him for emotional support following her divorce from his father.)
            

            
               Obviously I can't
point out what a horror his mother is, but it's very difficult to watch him
take these unrelenting guilt trips. Plus, I worry that this ever so slightly
Oedipal situation is going to get in the way of his commitment to me. Is there
any hope?
            

            

               --Do Tell
            

            Dear Do,

            There is not only hope, there is a strategy. Prudie
will now give you the roadmap.

            Do not point out that the beloved's mother is a
witch. He already knows. This is a wonderful opportunity to cement your
relationship as partners: Be his ally, not his attacker. In the interest of
seeing the big picture, Prudie hopes you can get him to talk about what he is
feeling when Jocasta does a number on him. Discuss, in general terms, the
nature of guilt and point out--as sympathetically as you can--that her divorce
had very unhappy consequences for her. For that is the crux of her acting out:
She has made your intended into a husband-substitute.

            You also might try
killing the old girl with kindness. Include her when you can, and let it be
your suggestion. It will disorient her totally. Just know that her
neurosis has nothing to do with the love you and the beloved have for each
other ... and then see to it. You can do an end run around her by understanding
the game and by not responding in a destructive way.

            
--Prudie, strategically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I truly like my wife's sister's husband, but is
he technically my brother-in-law--as her family insists--or--as I believe--a)
my sister-in-law's husband or b) my wife's brother-in-law? The polite answer
is, of course, call him whatever he wants to be called, but we are all curious
as to which appellations are technically correct.
            

            
               Yours
faithfully,
            

            

               --Genealogically Confused in New York
            

            Dear Gene,

            Though Emily Post is long gone, her answer to your
question has been preserved. She relied on the dictionary, which said, "A
brother-in-law is a brother of a husband or wife, a sister's husband, or
loosely, a wife's sister's husband."

            So ... your wife's
sister's husband is a "loosely," and Prudie is sure he's a swell guy.

            
--Prudie, Postally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Recently a friend of mine posted something
untrue about me--using my real name--on an electronic bulletin board. The
subject of his posting has caused me real embarrassment and discomfort. What
should I do?
            

            
               Thanks for your
help.
            

            

               --Good Golly
            

            Dear Good,

            Prudie is thinking of the
forest ranger's adage: Fight fire with fire. Make your own posting on the same
bulletin board refuting the erroneous message. Prudie would also question your
appellation of the person as "a friend."

            
--Prudie, correctively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My girlfriend wants
to have sex even though we have only been going out for four weeks. I feel that
this will change our relationship and make it more complicated. She says that
if I were a real man I would have sex with her. Should I hold out until I feel
the time is right or give in now?
            

            

               --Luke
            

            Dear Lu,

            If your dilemma is
genuine (though Prudie feels a faint pull on her leg) by no means should you be
maneuvered into bed. Tell your shy violet that if she doesn't approve of your
timetable you're certain she can find someone who will accommodate her.

            --Prudie, suspiciously

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 234: &quot;I Can't Kuwait&quot;

            

               You give the (brief) lead; I give the headline from the Kuwait
Times : "Tips To Reduce 'Burden' of Students."
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 233)--"Courtly":
            

            

               
                  
                     "I couldn't do my current job without them," said
Justice Antonin Scalia yesterday as he waved something in the air.
What?
                  
               
            

            "Four
of the world's tiniest Harvard-educated law clerks."-- Winter Miller
( Cliff Schoenberg had a similar answer.)

            "These
two videotapes: Birth of a Nation and Mandingo ."-- Jon
Hotchkiss
            

            
"Federalist Society lickspittles."-- Jack Hitt (similarly, Norm
Oder )

            "The
various remote controls for Clarence Thomas."-- Noah Meyerson (similarly,
Michael Wilde , Jennifer Miller , and Ken Novak )

            "Penal
implants (cc: New York magazine competition No. 1108, 'Misspellings we'd
like to see')."--Bill Scheft
            

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Given: News Quiz
participants respond with particular enthusiasm to questions about the Supreme
Court. Given: The law is a particularly unhappy profession. That is, a
remarkably high percentage of lawyers are discontent with their jobs.
Therefore: Most News Quiz participants are lawyers who take out their
frustrations on a poor Supreme Court justice just because he is a coldhearted,
reactionary bastard with dubious views about race and little understanding of
American life. I have no legal training, but isn't there some kind of logical
error in this paragraph? Because, aside from the dubious propositions, the
unsupported assumptions, and the illogical conclusion, I can't figure out where
I went wrong--just like Justice Scalia.

            
               Courtly Love
Answer
            

            Justice Scalia waved his glasses.

            The court was hearing the first of three cases that
seek to define disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, in
particular, whether the act applies to a person who can restore normal
functioning by, for example, taking medication or wearing glasses. And it's as
neat a Catch-22 as you're ever going to see, even through those disposable
contact lenses. In one case, American Airlines declined to hire two workers
based on their uncorrected vision--i.e., glasses off--but argued that the women
couldn't sue because with their vision corrected--i.e., glasses on--they are
not disabled.

            If the court goes with
the broadest possible definition, most Americans would be considered disabled,
ill-mannered, and unattractively dressed, and would rarely be asked out by
people from more stylish countries. If the court goes with the broadest
definition actually under consideration, most Americans could indeed be
considered disabled, but their attractiveness wouldn't be relevant. I blame the
system.

            
               Greg Diamond's Life
in These United States Extra
            

            This is apropos of
nothing, but I've noticed an Internet ad for Bell South using the slogan "The
Real White Pages." Is it a good idea nowadays for any Southern institution to
go around proclaiming itself as "real white"?

            
               Kate Wing's
American Wonderland Extra
            

            Driving through Ted
Turner's bison ranch out near Big Sky (there's an easement through the property
so you can get to a state park on the other side), I saw one of my favorite
warning signs ever. It reads, approximately:

            
               Warning! Bison have sharp horns!
They can run faster than you!
They are not tame! Do not attempt
to pet the bison!
            

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            Scalia as regressive; balls as metaphor; Clarence
Thomas as ventriloquist's dummy.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             China Crackup

            For the past two weeks,
Republicans have raised a ruckus over President Clinton's failure to promptly
remove a suspected Chinese spy from the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Making the
GOP's case on Face the Nation , Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blamed the spy
fiasco on "six years of inattention and a feckless photo-op foreign policy."
But when asked how he would treat China, McCain sketched a policy hardly
distinguishable from Clinton's. And when asked about Russia's loose nukes, he
conceded, "I don't know the answer to this. Maybe it's inappropriate for me to
come on this program."

            It's painful to watch
Republicans discuss foreign affairs these days. No doctrine binds together
their complaints about Clinton's actions. While calling him soft on China, many
quietly espouse the same Clinton-Bush policy of trade-plus-scolding. While
demanding boldness abroad, they have opposed military action in Kosovo, Iraq,
Sudan, and Afghanistan. And while falling back on Cold War rhetoric, they
ignore Russia's nuclear garage sale. Winning a presidential election on foreign
policy will be hard enough. Winning it without a coherent message will be
impossible. The Republican identity crisis is fourfold.

            1. The Cold War
               . Many Republicans
see the spy scandal as an opportunity to revive Cold War rhetoric. They allude
constantly to "Los Alamos" and "the Rosenbergs." On Meet the Press , Pat
Buchanan accused Clinton of failing to "clean out a nest of spies in America's
atomic laboratories who've stolen the most vital secrets since the Rosenbergs
went to the electric chair." At a Senate hearing Tuesday, another presidential
hopeful, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., compared the Chinese spy case to past Soviet
espionage and warned that it might precipitate another "arms race."

            Other Republicans, however, realize that nuclear
threats are now diffuse rather than concentrated in one enemy. Appearing on the
same show with Buchanan, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., rejected the Cold War
model: "I accept the fact that [the Chinese] spy on us. Many people do." At
Tuesday's hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va.,
tried to broaden the discussion from China, which has 24 missiles that can
reach the United States, to Russia, whose 7,000 such weapons could end up on
the black market.

            The missile-defense
debate highlights the Republican dilemma. The original Strategic Defense
Initiative was supposed to defend the United States against a massive nuclear
strike by the Soviet Union. By contrast, the missile-defense program approved
by the Senate Wednesday is designed to stop one or two missiles fired by a
rogue nation such as North Korea or Iran. If Buchanan and Lugar can't agree on
which kind of threat China poses, they won't be able to agree which kind of
anti-missile system the GOP should stand for.

            2. Capitalism. The GOP has been the party of free
trade. President Bush made this the linchpin of U.S. China policy. Over the
past two years, the Republican Congress has renewed most-favored-nation trade
status for China, approved legislation enabling U.S. companies to sell China
nonmilitary nuclear technology, and killed a proposed ban on satellite sales to
the Chinese. More than 100 House Republicans signed up last month to sponsor
legislation to relax restrictions on exports of encryption technology, despite
Clinton's objections that this technology might be passed to terrorists. This
week, the Republican-leaning business community launched a lobbying blitz to
remind "hawks" in Congress that China "will be the second-largest computer
market in the world by the year 2000."

            Yet the GOP's best-known
hawk, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., is leading the charge to restrict trade with
China as punishment for its spying. "The continuing problems with Chinese human
rights violations, espionage, and possible technology transfers suggest that
this is not the appropriate time for China to enter" the World Trade
Organization, he says. Like-minded strategist Bill Kristol denounces
Republicans who have sided with Clinton's policy of "trade above all else in
China."

            3. Constructive engagement. Having ripped Bush's
engagement policy in 1992, Buchanan is already locking and loading the same
critique for 2000. "The policy of engagement has devolved and degenerated into
a policy of appeasement," he declared this week. Many conservatives say
engagement has led to nuclear proliferation, deterioration in human rights, and
now laxity against espionage.

            Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich avidly defended
engagement, however, and his successor, Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., agrees.
"The more we're involved with China, the better off we are--for us and for
China and the Pacific area," Hastert said last week. "It's also important that
we stress our views on human rights. If we aren't engaged, we can't do that."
Likewise, Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., rejected his colleagues' fierce response
to the spy story: "I've never supported the idea that every time China does
something we don't like we ought to submit a thing to the Senate and get after
them."

            The GOP's identity crisis
over engagement is almost comic. When Sam Donaldson pointed out on This
Week that two Republicans, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, had pioneered engagement in the Shanghai Communiqué, George
Will exploded: "I was for impeaching Nixon over the Shanghai
Communiqué!" Clinton's spokesmen have learned to brush off Republican critics
of engagement by quoting the policy's Republican defenders.

            4. Clinton. Republicans aren't sure whether to blame
the spy case on ideology or corruption. Some want to paint Democrats as soft on
defense. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark., calls the case "symptomatic of the casual
attitude with which the Clinton administration views issues of national
security." Others want to blame it on Chinese contributions to the Democrats.
McCain, for example, demands an investigation of "the allegations about
technology transfer [and] all these campaign contributions that came out of
China."

            Nor have conservatives figured out whether to blame
Democrats in general or Clinton in particular. Many have grown more disgusted
with Clinton's triangulations than with congressional Democrats'
straightforward liberalism. "The Clinton China policy from the first has been
subsumed into the permanent campaign," says the Wall Street Journal ,
citing objections to that policy "from Democrats and Republicans alike."
Moreover, given the political damage the GOP has suffered by unilaterally
impeaching Clinton, Republican leaders fear that the merits of their arguments
will once again be drowned by charges of partisanship. Sure enough, this week
Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart accused the GOP of using the spy case for
"partisan point-scoring."

            To beat the partisanship rap, several Republican
leaders are invoking Democrats as their allies against Clinton. House Majority
Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, cites "a growing unrest" over China "on both sides
of the aisle," and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, accuses Clinton of
trying to "cover up" Congress' "bipartisan" findings of laxity in Clinton's
China policy. When ABC's George Will tried to goad Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif.,
into blaming Democrats for suppressing those findings, Cox shot him down: "It
is not a Democratic party position, because Democrats and Republicans have
worked very closely together on this issue."

            If Clinton's approach to
world affairs has been aimless and inconsistent, assailing his China policy
from all directions is hardly the way to make that point. The opposite of
inconsistency is principle. And the GOP has yet to figure out what its
principle is.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I'm wondering if I
am nuts. I am considering marrying again. (If you're thinking second marriage,
keep going.) I am no kid--52--and think my steady is the perfect partner. He
wishes to tie the knot, while I am on the fence. What say you?
            

            

               --Blushing Bride ... Maybe
            

            Dear Blush,

            Well, at 52 you do not need to marry in order to
have a family. (Please don't anyone write me about petrie dishes.) And Socrates
did die from an overdose of wedlock.

            On the other hand,
Prudie, herself, was never a bridesmaid but always a bride. It all boils down
to what feels right for the two people involved. Do not let the heroic numbers
stand in your way. And if you do choose to walk down the aisle one more time,
Prudie wishes you mazel ton, which of course is tons of luck.

            
--Prudie, matrimonially

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I just wanted to ask a quick question. I went
wedding ring shopping with my fiancee today. We have lived together for six
years, and we really love each other. The whole time, her parents have never
said anything about me. And they refuse to pay for the wedding, as they do not
approve of me. Apparently, I am a bad person (read: not a Jewish doctor). It's
a real strain on our relationship to have her parents and grandparents letting
her know that they think I am unworthy.
            

            
               I'm in graduate school and have always treated
her well. We split the rent right now, but when I get my degree I intend to pay
for rent and let her handle the money. Her parents want me to quit school and
"get a job." I wrote them and told them that the job I can get with a B.A. is
likely to pay only half as much as the job I can get with a Masters, but they
don't seem to care.
            

            
               This is all very distressing. They have now cut
off all financial aid to her and refuse to pay for her wedding unless we have
it at their house. (I'd rather wed in hell, and so would she.) Her parents did,
however, have a $15,000 wedding for her sister, and then bought them a $400,000
house after they got married. Now they are claiming they have no money and
can't afford a wedding.
            

            
               Would it be
considered rude to shoot her parents?
            

            

               --Bummed Out in San Francisco
            

            Dear Bum,

            Though Prudie has the fondest feelings for Jewish
doctors, she has a hunch you are a fine young man, your little firearms joke
notwithstanding. Because you state that you and your beloved are in agreement,
the sad but best thing to do is deep-six the relationship with her parents.
They sound controlling and manipulative and demonstrably unfriendly.

            Prudie recommends that
you end the discussion about a parent-sponsored wedding and do something simple
and meaningful ... and inexpensive. Purse strings can be strangling, so make
your own way and revel in the freedom.

            
--Prudie, independently

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I write regarding your response to "" who did
not want to complain about the misdated baby blanket. What is it with people
who always complain about gifts? The flowers are wilted, the can is dented, the
blouse has no sleeves, or my personal favorite, told to me when I sent special
bagels and varied cream cheeses, "I prefer margarine."
            

            
               Is something else going on? I like my friend
Sue's advice: Say you love it, then hide it in the closet. Anyway, keep up your
wonderful work.
            

            
               Sign me,
            

            

               --Tired of Being the Complaint Department in Conn.
            

            Dear Ti,

            Feel better now? Prudie is always here for people
who need to vent. As for something possibly underlying seemingly trivial
complaints, there need not necessarily be a repressed anything. Some people are
just graceless.

            Prudie hopes, by the
way, that the recipient of the bagels and cream cheese is not also a friend of
Sue's, because the cream cheese in the closet would be a disaster.

            
--Prudie, olfactorally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I have noticed a recent rambling of rhetoric
regarding "personal responsibility." Missing from all the talk is exactly what
personal responsibility is, and what it means to "accept personal
responsibility."
            

            
               It seems to me that, as of late, one can hide
from fallout by stating, early on, "I accept personal responsibility."
Period.
            

            
               Does personal responsibility mean I am
responsible for myself and thus immune from criticism? I am afraid that if I go
on I will become more befuddled.
            

            
               Sign me,
            

            

               --Personally Responsible in Phoenix
            

            Dear Pers,

            Personal responsibility in some cultures means
falling on your sword, either by resigning or ... by falling on your sword.
Prudie agrees with you that some people these days announce that they are
"responsible," then expect the subject to be closed. This is a little like
rapping oneself on the knuckles and then continuing on with business as usual.
Like much behavior-babble, certain phrases and concepts have become empty of
meaning.

            You clearly are inclined
to evaluate things philosophically, an approach for which Prudie has
admiration.

            --Prudie, responsibly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
NBC finally
aired Juanita Broaddrick's accusation that Bill Clinton forced himself
on her 21 years ago. The segment examined problems in her story: 1) She said
"no" at first but later stopped resisting; 2) she didn't report the crime; 3)
she can't remember when it happened; and 4) she filed an affidavit in the Paula
Jones case denying she had been assaulted. Her explanations: 1) she was
"panicky"; 2) she was "in denial"; 3) she thought "it was my fault"; and 4) "I
didn't think anyone would believe me." Clinton's lawyer denies the allegation,
but the White House refuses to say where Clinton was on the day in question.
The spins: 1) Broaddrick has no motive to lie. 2) But she ruined her
credibility by changing her story twice. 3) Her credibility can't be as bad as
Clinton's. 4) What's scary is that the allegation is plausible. 5) Democrats
are cowards for ignoring it. 6) Republicans are cowards for secretly using it
as a basis for their impeachment votes. (For more on the Broaddrick spins, see
Michael Kinsley's ".") (2/26/99)
            

            

               John
William 
               King received the death penalty for chaining James Byrd
Jr. to a pickup truck and dragging him to his death. King would be the first
white executed in Texas for killing a black since the 1850s. The jury of 11
whites and one black rejected the defense's argument that poor conditions in
the Texas prisons in which King had served time had caused his racism.
Optimists and pessimists debated whether the case showed 1) the persistence of
racial violence or 2) a growing resolve to prosecute it. Liberals debated
whether the sentence was 1) bad because the death penalty is always wrong or 2)
good because the death penalty has been applied in a racially discriminatory
manner. (2/26/99)
            

            
Washington,
D.C.'s top DJ, Doug Tracht (a k a "The Greaseman") was fired for joking
about the Texas racial murder . Shock jock Tracht played a song by a black
hip-hop artist and then joked, "No wonder people drag them behind trucks."
Listeners and black radio stations protested and Tracht apologized, but his
station fired him, saying it "cannot be associated with the trivialization of
an unspeakable act of violence." The spins: 1) He's a good DJ who made a "slip
of the tongue." 2) He's a racist who joked on the air in 1986 about Martin
Luther King Jr.'s birthday, "Kill four more and we can take a whole week off."
3) The scandal is that only a comment this offensive can get a shock jock
fired. (2/26/99)
            

            
Radical
feminist scholar Mary Daly refused to let two male students enroll in
her Boston College introductory course on feminist ethics. She says 1) she has
offered to teach male students separately, but having them in a class with
women would dampen debate among the women; and 2) one of the male students was
a conservative who was just trying to score a political point. The college
administration, citing gender equality law, told Daly to admit the male
students or stop teaching. Daly is taking a leave of absence in the hope that
the dispute will blow over. She accuses the college of "caving in to right-wing
pressure and depriving me of my right to teach freely and depriving [female
students] of the opportunity to study with me." (2/26/99)
            

            
Attorney General
Janet Reno and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr agreed to work together in
Reno's investigation of Starr's investigation of President Clinton. To
recap: Reno decided to launch an inquiry into Starr's conduct in the Monica
Lewinsky case. Then a conservative legal group asked the three judges who had
appointed Starr to intervene. The judges ordered Reno and Starr to file briefs
on whether Reno had authority to launch the inquiry. The conservative spin:
Reno is conspiring with Clinton to get Starr. The liberal spin: Starr is
conspiring with the three judges and the conservative legal group to hide their
conspiracy to get Clinton. The cynical spin: Let's get rid of the independent
counsel law so we don't have to listen to any more of this garbage.
(2/26/99)
            

            
The Kosovo
peace talks made progress . The ethnic Albanian delegation, which is seeking
independence from ethnically Serbian Yugoslavia, agreed to the peace deal in
principle but asked for two weeks to convince its armed allies to abandon their
rebellion against the Serbs in exchange for limited self-rule. The talks
recessed until March 15. The scenarios, in order of ascending cynicism: 1) The
ethnic Albanians will approve the deal, enabling NATO to threaten Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic with bombing unless he goes along. 2) The Serbs
will use the recess to attack the ethnic Albanians. 3) Ethnic Albanian
hard-liners will use the recess to attack the Serbs in the hope of persuading
the ethnic Albanian population to back the war instead of the peace talks. 4)
The Serbs will attack the ethnic Albanians in the hope of persuading them to
back the war, which the Serbs would win, instead of the peace talks, which the
Serbs would lose. 5) The ethnic Albanians will approve the deal, NATO will
threaten Milosevic, Milosevic will ignore the threat, and NATO will once again
do nothing. (2/24/99)
            

            
Twelve
Republican governors threw their support behind Gov. George W. Bush ,
R-Texas, in the 2000 presidential race. Bush's supporters expect at least three
more governors to add their support soon. Meanwhile, GOP Chairman Jim Nicholson
announced that he would publicly castigate any Republican presidential
candidate who "sowed division" in the party by attacking other candidates
personally. Nicholson's allies translate this as a warning against further
attacks on Bush. This comes amid news that Pat Buchanan is taking another leave
from CNN's Crossfire to explore a third presidential bid. The pro-Bush
spin: It's amazing how early Republicans are uniting behind tomorrow's leader.
The anti-Bush spin: It's not surprising that the governors are backing one of
their own. The Democratic spin: Republicans are in deep trouble and are
desperately hoping Bush can save them. (2/24/99)
            

            
Election news:
1) Chicago Mayor Richard Daley won re-election with more than 70 percent
of the vote. Several black politicians backed Daley despite assertions by his
opponent, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., a former Black Panther, that Daley had
neglected poor people. The rosy spin: It's a victory for racial unity. The
cynical spin: The Daley machine lives on. 2) Johnny Isakson, a former
Republican state legislator, won the special election for Newt Gingrich's
House seat . The media had a field day contrasting the "moderate" Isakson
with the "combative" Gingrich, noting that Democrats "see Isakson as a pleasant
change" and that Isakson thrashed second-place finisher Christina Jeffrey, the
historian whom Gingrich had fired in 1995 over her comments on the Holocaust.
(2/24/99)
            

            

               Johnnie 
               Cochran said he will assemble a dream
team of lawyers to hold the New York police "accountable" for the death of
an African street peddler . The victim, Amadou Diallo, died after
plainclothes policemen fired 41 bullets at him in the vestibule of his
apartment building, hitting him 19 times. The racial controversy has consumed
New York. The officers have been placed on administrative duty while a grand
jury examines the case. At the same rally at which Cochran spoke, the Rev. Al
Sharpton said, "The U.S. itself is on trial before the world."
(2/22/99)
            

            
Movie critic
Gene Siskel died at 53 . He had been recuperating from surgery to remove
a brain tumor. Obituaries fondly recalled his on-air debates and "two thumbs
up" salutes with fellow reviewer Roger Ebert on their eponymous syndicated TV
show. Siskel was the skinny one. The pessimistic spin: There's only one thumb
left. The optimistic spin: There's still one thumb left. (2/22/99)
            

            
The prime
ministers of India and Pakistan signed agreements to reduce their tensions.
They pledged to alert each other to nuclear weapons tests or accidents. They
also promised to try to solve their border dispute over Kashmir. This comes
nine months after both countries showed off their nuclear arsenals by
detonating bombs underground. The spins: 1) They've agreed to give peace a
chance. 2) What agreement? They've only agreed to keep talking. 3) Coming from
India and Pakistan, that's nothing to sneeze at. 4) It's amazing that they've
relaxed their enmity after showing each other their nuclear weapons. 5) They've
relaxed their enmity precisely because they've shown each other their nuclear
weapons. (For more on the meeting, see ".") (2/22/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 212: &quot;Bad Chubbies&quot;

            

               Fill in all three blanks with the same word in this remark by Rudolph
Giuliani: "There is no __________ ... I know what _______ is. There is no
________ going on in the city."
            

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 212)--"Bad Chubbies":
               

               

                  
                     
                        Monday in federal court, Itsy Bitsy lawyers told a
judge that Bubbly Chubbies must be destroyed.
Why?
                     
                  
               

               
"Because they refuse to sign the Kosovo peace agreement."-- Brooke
Saucier ( Robert Rothman had a similar answer, but with sufficient
whimsy to distract from the stench of death.)

               "Old
Yeller bit them."-- Chris Thomas
               

               
"They're much too butch."-- Jennifer Miller
               

               "That
monologue writers might live."-- Chris Kelly
               

               
"Because Bubbly Chubbies are made by exploited East Asian children, while Itsy
Bitsies are made by exploited East Asian adults."-- Norm Oder
               

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            By rights, this story should have taken place in
Japan, the most cuteness-loving country on earth and, coincidentally, the most
pornography-laden nation on the planet and hence a popular destination for
vacationing animated space monsters. With perky breasts. And huge, adorable
eyes. Whose crazy adventures are recounted in comic books available in vending
machines on the platforms of every Tokyo train station. So what are we to make
of this Hello Kitty-porn juxtaposition?

            Betty Boop. That was the
American manifestation of a big-eyed, baby-talking erotic ideal, a sexual
fashion that's come and gone. (It is gone, right? Poppin' Fresh--he's a whole
other thing, right?) Perhaps in Japan the cute and the concupiscent do not
coincide but coexist as two distinct phenomena. Like here in the United States
with sex and the pizza. Still separate, right? Could I have that with
pepperoni?

            
               Telechubbies
Answer
            

            Bubbly Chubbies must be destroyed because they're a
knock-off of Teletubbies.

            The suspiciously cuddly and maybe just a little too
adorable dolls, on sale in Wal-Mart's 2,435 stores, threaten the
$800-million-a-year business generated by the originals. Even the name was
chosen "deliberately to rhyme with Teletubbies," charged lawyers for the Itsy
Bitsy Entertainment Company, the Teletubbies' owners.

            "The company would never
knowingly infringe anyone's copyright," said Wal-Mart spokesman Michael Maher.
"Can I offer you a drink--a Croaka-Cola, or maybe something stronger, like a
shot of Jack Spaniels?" he didn't add.

            
               Arthur Stock's
Extra
            

            Other real life trademark cases:

            

               Bozo the Clown vs. Bozo Steakhouse

               Wisconsin Cheeseheads vs. Wisconsin Cheesetops

               and now pending in almost every country in Europe, Budweiser the Evil
American Conglomerate vs. Budweiser the Small town in the Czech Republic Where
They Make Beer

            

            
               Ikea/Valhalla
Extra
            

            Which of the following is
a well-designed yet inexpensive CD rack sold at the popular Swedish furniture
store, and which is a figure in Norse mythology?

            
               God or
Furniture?
            

            1. Stiltje

            2. Adhumbla

            3. Rätt

            4. Skallid

            5. Sleipnir

            6. Golif

            7. Ymir

            8. Moppe

            9. Solna

            10. Hela

            

               Answers
            

            1. CD holder, wicker, $59

            2. Huge cow in Norse creation myth

            3. CD rack, wood & metal, $9.95

            4. CD tower, wood, $34.95

            5. Odin's eight-footed steed

            6. CD tower, pine, $14.95

            7. Giant formed from condensed fog who lived on
Adhumbla's milk

            8. CD chest, plywood, $29

            9. Neither; it's a town near Stockholm

            10. Goddess of the
dead

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Gay Teletubbies.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Stalling for Time

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               When behind the
wheel of a car, I would never consider parking in a spot designated for a
fellow driver with disabilities, as I don't belong to this group. However, when
shopping or recreating and in need of a public restroom, I always opt for the
bathroom stall designed for my fellow citizens with disabilities. (They are
uniformly more spacious, better stocked, and I like the handrails.) I have yet
to emerge from such a spot to find someone more deserving of such amenities
cooling their heels (so to speak), and since my caffeine intake is too high,
these pit stops are more or less regular events. Am I being callous and
insensitive, or appropriately opportunistic?
            

            

               --Doubting
            

            Dear Doubt,

            Funny you should bring
this up. Prudie does exactly the same thing, preferring, as you do, the larger
space, along with the private mirror and sink. Like you, Prudie has never seen
a disabled person waiting, though that would not be the end of the world.
Considering the length of time one may park vs. the time needed in the
restroom, the issues are clearly different. Prudie often sees women take the
handicapped stall simply because it becomes available first. (Prudie is hardly
ever in the men's room ... unless, of course, it is an individual bathroom, and
the girls' room is taken.)

            
--Prudie, practically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am surrounded by exercise nuts, both in my
family and at work. Almost everybody I know is either coming from or going to
the gym. I am a size 10, feel fit, and make it my business to walk wherever I
can--sometimes skipping the elevator or the escalator.
            

            
               Could it be that
I should be engaging in a more formal kind of exercise? My health is
good, by the by.
            

            

               --Black Sheep
            

            Dear Black,

            This must be Prudie's
week for identifying with her correspondents, for she could not agree with you
more. Too many people are too involved with lats and pecs and excessive
sweating. The important thing is just to move ... somehow, somewhere. Prudie's
philosophy is the same as the very wise Carol Leifer's: "No pain, no pain."

            
--Prudie, cautiously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               A longtime friend is
getting married to a guy of whom I am not a big fan. This is my friend's second
marriage, but at her fiance's insistence, she is once again having a full-blown
formal affair--including all the gift registries. I do not want to get them a
gift (or at least an expensive one). I gave my friend a very special and
expensive gift for her first marriage, and I know the first time around she
received every gift one might give to a newly married couple. What is my
obligation here? Am I letting my feelings for her fiance influence me too
much?
            

            

               --TH
            

            Dear T,

            Prudie's instinct tells
her your feelings are less about her fiance and more about your finances. And
this is all right. Prudie's rule for the serially married may be roughly stated
as One Knock-Your-Eyes-Out Gift Per Bride Per Lifetime. There are people, by
the way, who feel that two full-dress blowouts is pushing it a little.
Of course you must crash through with something, but it can be both modest and
in good taste. And for your own tranquility, when you write the card have your
ladyfriend in mind, not the groom, so that your warmer feelings will be read
between the lines.

            
--Prudie, festively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My daughter's March
wedding was beautiful. The reception was lovely, too, and when the time came
for my daughter to toss her bouquet, all the single women gathered. So did the
children at the wedding, my four nieces. They range in age from 10 to 13, but
the 10-year-old is an especially energetic child--and tall for her age, too.
So, before the toss, I dashed over to whisper in her ear that there were older
ladies right behind her and to take care not to trip them. One of those ladies
was my daughter's new mother-in-law, who is my age, which is to say, not old
... just not agile enough in high heels to compete with an athletic little girl
who may not know her own strength. My niece did indeed catch the bouquet, and
no one was hurt. My question is this: Should children not old enough to date,
much less marry, be included in the bouquet toss? I don't think wild horses
could have kept those girls away, but I'm wondering if this is a new
custom.
            

            

               --Bride's Mom
            

            Dear Bride's,

            The catch-the-bouquet
custom is meant as symbolic fun. No one really thinks the catcher is destined
to become the next bride. And certainly no one expects an injury to result,
meaning, of course, that decorum should be maintained at all times.

            
--Prudie, traditionally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               You and your
correspondent "" should both read the recently published Silicone
Spills , by Mary White Stewart. Anyone with a bit of scientific or legal
knowledge of implants (whether silicone or saline) would never dream of having
them. Factual knowledge is important in making any decision, especially one
like this.
            

            

               --PG
            

            Dear P,

            Ah, yes, the old
conundrum of dueling scientific findings. Without wishing to become
Amazon.Prudie, you and any other interested parties might wish to read the
authoritative book Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the
Law in the Breast Implant Case , by Marcia Angell.

            --Prudie,
informationally

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Qaddafi's Peace Initiative

            Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic's elder brother Borislav, Yugoslavia's ambassador to Russia, told
La Stampa of
Turin Friday that his country has no plans for acts of terrorism in NATO
countries but that "if the war gets worse, I don't know what will happen." In
the interview, he cited the example of Israel as a country that has struck
outside its borders when attacked. Borislav Milosevic said his brother will
never surrender and that NATO might well give in first. "We can count not only
on our forces and our friends but also, in the long term, on Western public
opinion," he said. The Italian papers, like the German ones, put the main
emphasis Friday on peace initiatives, with Corriere della Sera of
Milan reporting "a notable rapprochement" between the positions of Italy and
Russia. The paper also said that former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi,
now president-designate of the European Union, was called by Muammar Qaddafi of
Libya with peace proposals which Prodi urged him to pursue.

            Opinion polls published
Friday in the British press showed public support rising for NATO attacks on
Yugoslavia, despite civilian casualties. A Gallup Poll conducted for the
Daily Telegraph showed 72 percent in favor of the war, compared
with 58 percent a month ago. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of Germany led on a NATO bomb
hitting the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. On this theme, the Times of London
published a cartoon showing NATO supreme commander Gen. Wesley Clark asking a
smart bomb, "What's the capital of Yugoslavia?" and the bomb replying, "Sofia."
The Guardian
led on intensified security at the BBC after death threats against senior
executives and broadcasters by telephone callers claiming to be Serbs
responsible for the murder earlier this week of Jill Dando, the country's most
popular TV presenter.

            In an interview with Le Monde of Paris Friday, Foreign Minister George
Papandreou of Greece, where 97 percent of the public opposes the NATO
bombardment of Yugoslavia, said that sending in ground troops before a peace
agreement would have terrible consequences for the coexistence of the peoples
of the region. He also criticized proposals to strengthen the economic embargo
on Yugoslavia. "That could have been a good idea at the beginning, but today
it's more a historical than a practical question. Now, we have to look for a
solution," he said. Papandreou expressed mild optimism about the Russian peace
initiatives. "The Serbs are now saying yes to an implementation force--not
armed, certainly--but the Russians think there are various possibilities," he
said. "On the NATO side, two points are important: first, the inviolability of
frontiers has been forcibly reaffirmed--in other words, there won't be a
partition of Kosovo; and second, after having talked of a force 'under NATO
command,' they are now talking about a force directed by the United Nations
'with a NATO kernel.' This new flexibility doesn't mean there will be a
solution tomorrow, but perhaps soon."

            In Hong Kong, the weekly
Far Eastern Economic
Review reported Thursday that the chief executioner of Cambodia's
Khmer Rouge has become a born-again Christian and is willing to face an
international tribunal. Kang Kek Ieu has admitted to being "Duch," the director
of the Tuol Sleng detention center in Phnom Penh, where at least 16,000 people
were executed during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 "killing fields" reign of
terror, the magazine said. Duch, who disappeared into the jungle after
Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh in 1979 and has long been presumed dead,
was found living in the western part of Cambodia by a Review
reporter.

            Opinion polls in Friday's Israeli papers showed that Labor
Party leader Ehud Barak would defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by
around 8 percent in the second round of next month's general election. A Gallup
Poll, for Maariv , gave Barak 48 percent against 40 percent for
Netanyahu. The Dahaf Institute's poll, for Yediot Aharanot , put Barak at
50 percent against Netanyahu's 42 percent. In both polls, Center Party
candidate Yitzhak Mordechai is slipping: He gets 8 percent from Gallup and 10
percent from Dahaf although--paradoxically and theoretically--he would still
beat Netanyahu in the second round.

            The current clamor in
the West for Yugoslav war criminals to be put on trial for crimes against
humanity should be used to demand the prosecution of Israelis for atrocities
and massacres committed against Palestinians during and since the 1948
Israeli-Arab War, according to Palestinian writer Mohammad al-Az'ar in
Thursday's Pan-Arab al-Hayat . In Egypt, the semi-official daily
Al-Ahram published an article Thursday by commentator Salaheddin Hafez
warning that what NATO is doing in Yugoslavia could be replicated against one
or more Arab countries. The Arab world has good cause to be deeply apprehensive
about the way NATO has taken to posing as the world's policeman and projecting
its power beyond its borders in a nondefensive role, he wrote. "Even the
world's sole superpower, with its unique responsibilities, is increasingly
seeing violence and the use of overwhelming force as an easy option for
achieving its ends as the most violent century in human history draws to a
close."

            Britain's Daily Telegraph reported Friday that the
House of Lords split over a point of grammar in a bill to abolish its
hereditary members. The issue is whether to say "a hereditary peer" or "an
hereditary peer." The first version appears in the bill but was disputed in a
debate by Conservative hereditary peer Earl Ferrers, who moved an amendment to
change "a" to "an." He pointed out that Fowler's Modern English Usage
cites "an hereditary title" as a correct example. But a government spokesman
responded with a quotation from a second edition of the same reference book: "
'An' was formerly usual before an unaccented syllable beginning with 'h' and is
still often seen and heard (an historian, an hereditary title). But now that
the 'h' in such words is pronounced, the distinction has become anomalous and
will no doubt disappear in time." Their lordships voted 63-31 against Earl
Ferrers' amendment.

            British papers reported
Thursday that Derek Laud, a London venture capitalist, has been made England's
first black master of foxhounds. He told the Times that his appointment
as joint master of the 210-year-old New Forest Foxhounds has nothing to do with
the color of his skin. "We don't want to put distance between us and anyone
that wants to participate in this sport. It doesn't matter if they are a woman
or a man, gay or straight." The chairman of the hunt club said Laud was chosen
because "he's just a bloody nice bloke."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Divide and Rule

            

               China
Daily said Friday in an editorial that behind America's "barbaric air
strikes against Yugoslavia" lies a plan to divide Europe and dominate the
world. The United States' secret strategic objective is to keep Russia and
Western Europe apart, it said. The United States fears that Russia and the
European Union are trying to get closer together and eventually might unite to
compete with it in international trade. "The most urgent strategic task for the
United States in Europe is first to contain Europe and prevent it from becoming
powerful enough to threaten U.S. hegemony in the world," the paper said. Then
it will try to deepen Russia's economic crisis with a view to destroying its
nuclear capability. If this works, the United States might then target China to
eliminate its nuclear capability.

            In
Hong Kong, the South China
Morning Post reported that Beijing has sent diplomats and foreign trade
officials to Europe to lobby for an end to airstrikes. "Beijing is exploiting
its status as an aggrieved party to weaken the unity of what it calls the Nato
war machine," the paper quoted an unidentified diplomat as saying. It also said
that Chinese foreign trade officials have indicated that European countries
that dissociate themselves from Washington's "hawkish" policies will stand the
best chance of reaping benefits from the vast China market. Even so, Beijing
has signaled its willingness to separate politics and business by instructing
the media to cool their anti-U.S. rhetoric. The media have been told that
criticism of the United States should be confined to the specific issues of
Kosovo and the embassy bombing. "The leadership wants to contain popular
hostility even against American businesses and products," a Beijing source told
the SCMP . The paper also reported Friday that President Rexhep Meidani
of Albania will visit Beijing this month for talks on the Kosovo crisis,
despite the fact that the Albanian Embassy, like the embassies of the United
States and Britain, was attacked by demonstrators Sunday and Monday, apparently
because Albania is considered an ally of NATO.

            
Despite editorials around the world expressing alarm about the deteriorating
political situation in Russia (including an especially strong one in Asahi
Shimbun of Tokyo), Le Figaro of Paris led Friday with French President Jacques
Chirac declaring after talks in the Kremlin that he doesn't believe that Russia
will withdraw from the Kosovo peace process and that he expects the next few
days to show "that things are moving in the right direction, that of peace."
The German press led on the deal struck at a stormy meeting of the Green Party,
a member of Germany's ruling coalition, by which the government of Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder is permitted to hold to its existing war policy.

            The
Italian papers were dominated by the election of former governor of the Bank of
Italy Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as Italy's next president at the age of 78. The easy
victory of this former wartime partisan and European enthusiast was welcomed by
La Repubblica
of Rome in a front-page comment as "a fine moment for Italian politics and for
the whole country." Kosovo was replaced on the front pages of several British
newspapers by the start of a new campaign by Prime Minister Tony Blair to put
an ambivalent Britain at "the heart of Europe," and by the threat of huge
disruption to the country's secret intelligence services by the publication on
various Web sites of a list of 117 British secret agents. The Guardian , in its main front-page lead, said that frantic
government efforts to purge the Web of this sensitive information are "doomed
to failure."

            In
Canada, the conservative National Post accused Janet Reno of "dereliction of duty" for failing to
investigate China's theft of a half-century's worth of nuclear secrets from Los
Alamos, N.M., "the most damaging case of spying against the United States since
the Rosenbergs passed along the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union." It said
Friday in an editorial that U.S. scientists informed the Energy Department that
as early as 1995 they suspected China had stolen the design of the United
States' most advanced nuclear warhead, the W-88. Yet it looks as if Reno chose
not to investigate all this "on the old principle: 'if something smells bad,
why put your nose in it?' When that something is the theft of the development
codes for the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, however, such discretion shades into
dereliction of duty of the worst kind. It must now receive the fullest and most
open inquiry--and any resistance to such investigation will unavoidably look
like evidence of guilt."

            The
Times of
London led its front page Friday with the news that the parents of Louise
Woodward, the English nanny convicted two years ago in Boston of killing
9-month-old Matthew Eappen, have been arrested in England over fraud
allegations relating to a trust fund set up to pay their daughter's defense
costs. Sue and Gary Woodward, who have separated, have been released on bail
until July 1, the paper said. The Daily Telegraph gave
front-page treatment Friday to the death in London of a 7-month-old baby who
had been put in a clothes drier by his 3-year-old sister, who thought she was
being helpful when he woke up crying with a soiled diaper. The
Guardian 's front page reported that British teen-agers have the worst
record for sexual disease, pregnancy, and abortions in Europe.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Go
                (Tri-Star Pictures). A few critics adore the
film--"the one truly thrilling movie I've seen this year" (Owen Gleiberman,
Entertainment Weekly )--but most say director Doug Liman
( Swingers ) does well but misses greatness. Biggest complaint: The film
is overly Tarantinoesque. Some say the results are good: Sure, it's "Pulp
Fiction Jr.," but "the intoxicating brashness of youth--and not graphic
gore, language and violence--is what keeps Go moving" (Susan Wloszczyna,
USA Today ). The highlights of the film are young actors Sarah Polley and
Taye Diggs, as well as the breakneck pace of the three intertwining plot lines,
each full of vigorous thrill-seeking youngsters. On the down side,
Newsweek 's David Ansen writes, "Clever as parts are, Go doesn't
add up to much," and several other critics agree (Peter Rainer of New
York magazine says, "There's nothing much to this movie except a lot of
funky attitude"). Janet Maslin likes the film: "[D]erivative as it is,
Go has a powerful personality of its own. ... [Liman] does not merely
appropriate the familiar, he takes it by storm." (This Sarah Polley fan
site has pictures, information, and links to other Polley sites.)

            
               
                  The
Dreamlife of Angels
                (Sony Pictures Classics). Full-throttle raves
for this first feature film for French director Erick Zonca: "Frank, intimate,
touching, with an emotional immediacy that is killing" (Kenneth Turan, the
Los Angeles Times ); "brilliant" (Jack Mathews, the Daily News ).
The film follows the trajectory of an intense friendship that develops between
two young women who meet at a sewing factory. The two leads, Élodie Bouchez and
Natacha Régnier, were widely honored in France. (They shared Best Actress at
Cannes and each won a César.) American critics concur with the French
enthusiasm: Maslin calls it a "beautifully acted drama, as raw and immediate as
it is heartfelt" (the New York Times ), and Stanley Kauffmann calls it
"completely absorbing, almost rudely poignant" (the New Republic ). (For
a biography, filmography, and news on Bouchez, click here.)

            
               
                  Never Been
Kissed
                (20 th Century Fox). Critics agree that the plot
(a reporter goes back to high school undercover) is trite but say the dreamy
Drew Barrymore makes it all worthwhile: The "screenplay is contrived. ... but
Barrymore illuminates it with sunniness and creates a lovable character. I
think this is what's known as star power" (Roger Ebert, the Chicago
Sun-Times ). A few are immune to the Barrymore charm: The New York
Times ' Stephen Holden calls it "the latest and dumbest in the deluge of
high school comedies," and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly says
Barrymore is trapped in "goofy oopsadaisy behavior that does justice
neither to her talents nor to her fans." But this is a minority view. Most find
her irresistible, sometimes to the point of over-sharing: "You just want to
wipe away the tears from her baby-fat cheeks and give snookums a big old hug"
(Michael O'Sullivan, the Washington Post ). (
                  Slate
               's David
Edelstein is one of those smitten: "It's worth seeing, it demands to be seen,
for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised
comedienne in movies today." Read the rest of his review .)

            

               
                  Metroland
                (Lions Gate Films). Mixed reviews for this
British film about a suburban family man who looks back wistfully at his
footloose days after a wild 'n' crazy friend from the old days comes to town.
Contrary to expectation, the film ends up celebrating his marriage; it's a
"no-fuss movie that casts a rich, tranquil spell" (Gleiberman, Entertainment
Weekly ). High marks go to Emily Watson in the role of the staid but smart
wife who manages to make humdrum domesticity appealing. "The odd aspect of the
film is that, though we quickly realize we have seen this story before, it's
being done so intelligently that we're enjoying it" (Kauffmann, the New
Republic ). Those who aren't caught up in the story call it bland; some find
the ending forced. (Edelstein writes, "Watson is such a diabolical minx that
she makes the prospect of a life amid those metros and under those gray skies
more seductive than an endless luau." Read the rest of his review .)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  The Ground
Beneath Her Feet
               , by Salman Rushdie (Henry Holt). Mixed reviews
for Rushdie's latest, a sprawling tale of rock 'n' roll mixed with ancient
mythology. Several critics take Rushdie to task for what they see as his
sloppiness: Michiko Kakutani calls the novel a "loose, baggy monster" and "a
decidedly disappointing performance" (the New York Times ). A.O. Scott
writes in Newsday that it is "a very bad novel about rock and roll."
Some are not put off by the mishmash: Michael Wood's windy positive review in
the New York Times Book Review is nothing more than a long plot
description with a single sentence of critical response: He calls it "exuberant
and elegiac ... his best since Midnight's Children ." Interesting tidbit:
Carla Power notes in Newsweek that Rushdie got an eye lift last month.
(Gerald Marzorati and A.O. Scott the book in 
                  Slate
               , and this site has an
impressive listing of links to articles on Rushdie's books, life, and the
fatwa .)

             

            

               Theater
            

            
               
                  The Iceman
Cometh
               , by Eugene O'Neill (Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York
City). Raves for this London import, directed by Howard Davies and starring
Kevin Spacey. Critics' only complaints are about the play itself, which they
call heavy-handed and overlong. Spacey as Hickey, the slick-talking salesman
who punctures the pipe dreams of a pack of sad sack rummies in Harry Hope's
bar, "gives the performance of his life," says Time 's Richard Zoglin:
"A potentially grueling evening becomes a breathtaking experience." Jack Kroll
in Newsweek : "Never have these four and a half hours in hell raced by
with such Einsteinish speed." Charles Isherwood in Daily Variety :
"[M]akes a startling case for the reexamination of this landmark play ... a
magnificent achievement." Ben Brantley writes in the New York Times
that the play "manages to entertain even at its darkest and preachiest."
Strangest line in a review: About Spacey, John Simon of New York
writes, "On the move, he is a panther in pants; when still, a coiled cobra."
(This site has
photos, cast bios, and ticket information.)

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  The Matrix
                  ;
               

               
                  Movie--
                  10 Things I Hate About You ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Cookie's Fortune ;

               
                  Movie -- A Walk on the Moon ;

               
                  Movie- - The Out-of-Towners ;

               
                  Book--
                  Morgan: American Financier , by Jean
Strouse;

               
                  Book--
                  The Times of My Life and My Life With the

                  Times , by Max Frankel.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Mod Squad ;

               
                  Movie -- EdTV ;

               
                  Movie -- 20 Dates ;

               
                  Television -- Futurama ;

               
                  Book -- All Too Human: A Political Education , by
George Stephanopoulos;

               
                  Book -- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges , by Nathan
Englander.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  True Crime ;

               
                  Movie -- The King and I ;

               
                  Movie -- Forces of Nature ;

               
                  Television--
                  The Oscars ;

               
                  Book--
                  Years of Renewal , by Henry Kissinger.

            

             

            

               
                  
                     Movie--
                  
                  The
Deep End of the Ocean ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The
Corruptor ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The Rage: Carrie
2 ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Wing
Commander ;

               
                  Death-- Stanley Kubrick;

               
                  Book--
                  Black Hawk Down: A
Story of Modern War , by Mark Bowden.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 217: &quot;TK&quot;

            

               In Belgrade, one group includes the American Center, the British
Council, the Goethe Institute, and the French Cultural Center; the other group
includes the Original Levi's Store and You've Got Mail . What's the
distinction?
            

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 215)--"Here's the Pitch":
            

            

               
                  Fill in the blank. After creating the highest-rated movie ever
made for Showtime, Warren Weideman is about to make four sequels, but the
project was a tough sale. "Most producers' eyes would glaze over as soon as I
said the words, '____________.' "
               
            

            
"Highest-rated movie ever made for Showtime."-- Daniel Radosh ( Bruce
Brown and Bruce Oberg had similar answers.)

            
"Emmanuelle, but with clothes."-- Ananda "Getcher Cheap Astroturf Here"
Gupta
            

            
"Baruch ataw adonay ..."-- Larry Amaros
            

            "Union
crew."--Stephen Frick
            

            "My two
kittens and my new laser pointer."-- Andrew Reynolds
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            What I hadn't realized
when I posted this question was that two different types of responses were
possible--those that mock the idiocy of Warren Weideman for proposing truly
stupid movies, frequently involving an abstruse philosopher, and those that
mock Showtime for making truly stupid movies, frequently involving
Shannon Tweed with her shirt off. These are both worthy goals, and that's what
I admire about News Quiz participants: that the Weideman mockers and the
Showtime mockers can respect each other and work together to mock various
members of the Bush family, the anti-missile system, and maybe some kind of
monkey--that's why the anti-missile system doesn't work, see, because of his
crazy antics, and then Gov. Bush has him executed, and all of America and the
Lockheed board of directors can sleep peacefully! Tonight on Showtime: Shannon
Tweed in Fry His Monkey Ass, Governor Hero . Oh, like you wouldn't
watch.

            
               First-Class
Answer
            

            "Most producers' eyes would glaze over as soon as I
said the words 'post office .' "

            The postal service did not directly finance The
Inspectors , starring Louis Gossett Jr. as a two-fisted postal inspector,
but it did spend millions promoting it--printing 5,000 commemorative envelopes,
hanging movie posters in 40,000 post offices, and putting Gossett's voice on
its phone system so you hear a movie promo when you're on hold.

            The idea for the movie emerged when the postal
service hired Weideman, an ad man who was very big in product placement, to
improve its image.

            While ludicrous on the
face of it, there have been less likely government heroes. Richard Widmark
played a two-fisted health inspector tracking down a pneumonic plague carrier
in the 1950 Panic in the Streets , directed by the odious but talented
Elia Kazan; it won an Oscar for best story. And I believe Gene Hackman once
played an FBI agent who supported the civil rights movement and battled robot
dogs on Neptune.

            
               Silver Lining
Extra
            

            Yesterday in New Mexico, for the sixth time in six
tests, an anti-missile missile missed its target. But that's really a good
thing, according to both the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, which built the
system.

            

               "It was a very close miss."-- Jennifer Caniff, Pentagon
spokeswoman
               

               "We came very close to hitting this target ... and we're very encouraged by
that."-- Thomas Corcoran, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin
               

               "Much of the operation was as it should be."-- Thomas Corcoran
               

               "Our technicians were courteous and neatly dressed."-- Thomas Corcoran,
or perhaps that was me
               

               "And lunch. That went well, especially those spicy shrimp, mmm
mmm."-- Thomas Corcoran, or was that me too?
               

               "Oh, right, so you're so perfect, Mr. Perfect,
Mr. Goddamned Big Nose Perfect Sissy Boy Stupid!"-- Thomas Corcoran; oops, me
again
               

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Some Unlikely Old Bore in Love.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Janet Maslin

            
               The Phantom Menace : A film with half a
plot, no engaging characters to speak of, and actors who speak in
inhibited-zombie monotones as if the director had warned them to keep quiet
while someone on the set took a nap. A film that introduces the noxious sci-fi
creature Jar Jar Binks, whose bug eyes, lazy shuffle, and minstrelly speech
suggest an alien Stepin Fetchit. A dull and annoying and occasionally rather
offensive film, in other words. Yet here was the New York Times ' lead
reviewer, Janet Maslin, almost alone among major critics in showering praise:
"[I]t sustains the gee-whiz spirit of the series and offers a swashbuckling
extragalactic getaway ... jubilant ingenuity ... sweetly, unfashionably benign
... no better tour guide for a trip back to the future."

            Maslin did acknowledge,
in passing, the film's ethnic stereotypes, the overstuffed plot, Ewan
McGregor's blandness, the foolish spectacle of Liam Neeson acting opposite
robots, and Natalie Portman's resemblance to a costumed block of wood. But in
her inimitable way, Maslin folds all these complaints into an overall rave. It
was a bad piece, and a telling one. For more than a decade Maslin has stood out
among critics for being what critics, those curmudgeons, so rarely are: She is
upbeat and forgiving, often to a fault. As the Johnny Mercer song instructs,
she accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative. Or, as in the case of
the latest Star Wars episode, she buries her list of negatives so late
in the piece that it barely registers. This habit of combining compensatory
praise with dismissals makes it difficult to know what Maslin actually thinks.
(Her pan of Forrest Gump , for example, was dead-on and brave in its
criticism but also packed to the gills with compliments.)

            The question (not burning, perhaps--except for the poor
dupes who suffered through the charmless Phantom because the
Times recommended it) is how Maslin comes by this generosity. The
paranoid explanation is that the paper's growing dependence on movie ads
compels her, in some oblique and unconscious way, to be an industry booster. Or
it could be that Maslin is a little too well connected for a film critic, as
some detractors have charged, and afraid to hurt her friends' feelings. Or
maybe she is just, as people who know her tend to comment, exceptionally
nice.

            The question grows more
curious when you look back at Maslin's career and realize that she once had a
strong voice. She started off in the '70s writing about rock 'n' roll for
Rolling Stone and especially for the Boston Phoenix . At the time,
the Phoenix and the now-defunct Real Paper were at the epicenter
of alternative journalism--a training ground for critics and reporters who
would graduate to big city dailies and the slicks. Joe Klein passed through the
Phoenix / Real Paper scene, as did The New Yorker 's David
Denby, the Times ' Frank Rich, Newsweek 's David Ansen, film critic
turned Vanity Fair / New Yorker profiler turned Lolita
screenwriter Stephen Schiff, journalist/wonk Sidney Blumenthal, and

                  Slate
               's own David Edelstein, to name just a few.

            It's unfair but true that a woman who started out at such a
time and place, in such an atmosphere of heady debate, pot, scant female and
plenty of male colleagues--such a woman will inevitably be noticed and talked
about. So let's get the gossip out of the way: Maslin was attractive; early on
she dated Steven Spielberg; she got married to Jon Landau, a fellow rock critic
who attended a small concert by a dynamic young man from New Jersey and wrote a
famously prescient piece announcing, "I saw rock and roll future last night,
and its name is Bruce Springsteen," and eventually quit his writing job to
manage the Boss. In the '80s, Maslin married Benjamin Cheever, son of John
Cheever and also a novelist.

            What's interesting here
isn't Maslin's personal life but the fact that her youthful writing on Joni
Mitchell, say, or Elvis Costello carries more conviction, and therefore more
weight, than her mature work on the movies. Maslin had a voice: As gung-ho as
she is today but more deeply felt, more confident while still refreshingly free
of the insider smugness of so much writing on rock. But, for some reason, when
she migrated from music to movies, first for the Phoenix , then briefly
for Newsweek , and since 1977 for the Times , she seems gradually
to have inched away from her personal reactions. The pattern was set long
before she became the Times lead critic in 1993. A 1988 Sunday "think
piece" on a rash of Anglophilic "white flannel" costume dramas was typical. For
much of the piece Maslin seemed to criticize the way films like A Handful of
Dust distorted the novels they set out to adapt, the way they reeked of
snobbery and voyeurism, the way they substituted rarified Ralph Lauren décors
for content. Then she turned her argument upside down, praising a trifle called
A Summer Story precisely because of its cynical, empty
decorativeness.

            To read a Maslin piece can be a disconcerting, at times
even haunting experience. One senses her scrambling to fill the piece with
everything but her own analysis. More often than not she leads with a lengthy,
detailed visual description of a scene or a character. For paragraphs at a time
she leans on plot summary of the timid undergraduate-book-report variety. She
relies heavily--very heavily--on adverbs, which serve to pepper her
noncommittal reviews with small emphatic bursts and to jack up her celebrations
(from a 565-word review of Velvet Goldmine : "dazzlingly surreal,"
"brilliantly reimagines," "spectacularly reborn," "dramatically presided,"
"stunningly pretty," "fabulously charismatic," "hilariously decadent,"
"typically wicked").

            When she does give the
thumbs up, especially for an anticipated blockbuster, certain key words and
phrases, such as "audience appeal" and "escapist fun," suggest that she is not
writing from her own point of view so much as she's gauging in advance the
public's reaction. The lead to her review of Twister called the film "a
gale-force movie with the energy to blow audiences right out of the theater."
This sounds more like publicity copy than criticism; what it expresses is the
impression the studio hopes the film will have on an audience.

            To be fair, there is much to be said in Maslin's defense.
She is hardly the first good writer to be slightly stifled by the Times
nor, by any means, is she the first frustrating critic to work there. On the
contrary: Vincent Canby wrote from high atop a pedestal, panned The
Godfather Part II , and indulged in an inexplicable love of Blake Edwards.
Before Canby, Bosley Crowther ruled the roost for three decades. He wielded
immense power, but who recalls a single thing he wrote today, especially
compared with the memorable work of James Agee or Andrew Sarris or, above all,
Pauline Kael?

            And these are tough times for reviewers in general.
David Denby has expressed the disappointment of a generation of critics who
entered the field during the feverish, Kael-inspired '70s: Once upon a time
they wanted to grab readers by the hand and lead them to passionate works of
art, but no one would aim so high today. Great movies are fewer and farther
between (at least in this writer's opinion--at least for the time being), and
these days even the media that employ the critics measure a movie's success not
by the critics' reaction but by opening weekend gross. Critics just don't
matter as much as they used to, and Maslin--though she's still at the top of
the heap, influence-wise--is no exception. Very much to her credit, she hasn't
become bitter about her shrinking influence; she's not stuck in whiny nostalgia
for the way things were. But she has developed a disembodied, ghostly way of
writing about movies--a criticism of lowered expectations. Her main defense of
the disappointing Phantom Menace ? It's "only a movie." Exactly--and
while we're at it, Maslin is only a critic who asks for too little.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
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             The Wages of Spin

            A seemingly honest woman,
partially backed by circumstantial evidence, accuses the president of having
raped her two decades ago. The president denies it but refuses to say where he
was that day. The public believes her but seems not to care. The opposition
party declines to press the issue, and the media concede it will go away. How
has such cynicism come to pass?

            This is a lesson in the
consequences of spin. For more than a year, Clinton's friends and enemies
played a game. His enemies conspired to drive him from office. His friends
conspired to protect him. Each side did and said whatever it deemed necessary
to capture public opinion. The game ended, but the spins remain engraved in our
consciousness. Now they are clouding our perception of Juanita Broaddrick's
accusation.

            1. It's just more politics.
            

            Clinton's enemies, like his apologists, care more
about politics than about truth. Together, they have ruined his accusers'
credibility. His apologists have dismissed every charge against him as the
product of a right-wing propaganda machine, and his enemies have done
everything possible to prove that theory right. Rather than let each woman
decide whether to come forward, Clinton's antagonists dragged her onstage.
Paula Jones said nothing about sexual harassment until the American
Spectator outed her three years later. Conservative activists financed and
managed her lawsuit. Linda Tripp taped Monica Lewinsky, tricked her into saving
the stained dress, and ultimately fed her to Jones' attorneys and to
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

            Likewise, anti-Clinton
activists didn't start pushing Broaddrick onstage until he ran for president in
1992. Eventually, they fed her to the Jones lawyers, who sent private
investigators to her home, subpoenaed her, and dumped her name and story into
the public record based on hearsay, disregarding her denials. Even after Starr
chose not to pursue her story, House Republicans used her secret FBI
interview--which Clinton had been given no chance to rebut--to persuade their
colleagues to vote for impeachment. Jerry Falwell and Matt Drudge pressured NBC
to air its interview with her. Fox News Channel, the New York Post , and
the Washington Times pushed the story into the public record, and the
Wall Street Journal editorial page blew it open. To prove that Clinton
had used Broaddrick against her will, his enemies used her against her will.
Why did she finally tell her story? Because "all of these stories are floating
around," she said, "and I was tired of everybody putting their own spin on
it."

            With equal cynicism, Clinton's surrogates used these
conservative associations to distract the public from his treatment of women.
They dismissed Jones as a right-wing stooge and discredited Starr's
investigation as a political "war." While Democrats discounted impeachment as a
partisan jihad, the GOP locked arms to prove them right. In so doing,
Republicans squandered their credibility. Now that Clinton stands accused of
rape, they sit helplessly mute.

            Meanwhile, Clinton's
allies are burying Broaddrick's story under the usual political dirt. On
Meet the Press , National Organization for Women President Patricia
Ireland scoffed that the public wouldn't heed attacks on Clinton "from a Bob
Barr, who's been married three times and lied under oath." On This Week ,
former bimbo-leak plumber George Stephanopoulos argued, "Gennifer Flowers
starts out in the Star tabloid, Paula Jones [in] the American
Spectator , Monica Lewinsky with Matt Drudge, and now this on the Wall
Street Journal editorial page. ... We have a history of right-wing pressure
tactics to push these into play without verification."

            2. It's just more sex.
            

            Clinton's alleged sexual offenses have progressed
along a spectrum of violence, from consensual adultery (Flowers) to unwanted
solicitation (Jones) to unwanted groping (Kathleen Willey) to rape
(Broaddrick). But his enemies, intent on proving a pattern of behavior and
destroying him with whichever scandal was at hand, lumped them together and
overplayed the lesser charges. Their latest gaffe was to spend a year
prosecuting Clinton for lying about consensual adultery, while the Willey
investigation remained offstage.

            The point of the rape
charge is that it's different. Yet once again, Clinton's critics are lumping it
into a "pattern." "Broaddrick's story is believable because of its wretched
familiarity," wrote columnist Michael Kelly, citing Clinton's "piggish
behavior" with Lewinsky as evidence that he could be a "brute." On Meet the
Press , ham-fisted moralist Bill Bennett huffed, "How many times does this
kind of thing have to come up? ... We have heard, seen this pattern before."
ABC's George Will chimed in, "Is this out of character? Please." On Fox News
Sunday , host Tony Snow touted a poll showing that 60 percent of Americans
"think the allegations represent a pattern of behavior."

            Clinton's apologists are content to subsume the allegation
of violence into a pattern of sex and thereby dismiss it as immaterial.
Stephanopoulos rephrased the rape charge as a question about the relevance of
candidates' private lives. Sen. James Jeffords, R-Vt., dismissed the story as
"a private matter," though he later apologized. "I'd like to see us get on to
the issues," replied Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., when asked
on This Week about Broaddrick's allegation. Sen. Paul Wellstone,
D-Minn., used the same dodge on Fox News Sunday : "Can't we focus on
issues that are important to people?"

            Already, the media are
dissolving Broaddrick's story into a pattern of philandering. The Chicago
Tribune called it another allegation of "boorish and immoral sexual
behavior." CNN Late Edition panelist Steve Roberts cited its "uneasy
familiarity." And This Week co-host Cokie Roberts worried that in
pursuing it, the press would again be accused "of asking too many questions ...
about the candidate's life." Framed this way, the story is dying.

            3. It can't be proved.
            

            Not content to disgrace Clinton morally, his
adversaries tried to inflate his cover-up of the Lewinsky affair into crimes
and impeachable offenses. Not only did this weak poison fail to kill him, it
strengthened his immune system. It raised the threshold for inquiring into
Clinton's personal behavior and for obliging him to answer questions. If an
offense can't be prosecuted and proved in court, it no longer matters.

            This mindset has crippled
Broaddrick's story in four ways. First, it has induced a sense of helplessness
about charges that can't be legally proved. "There is no way we'll ever know
what all the facts are," Daschle argued on This Week . "What we have to
do now is move on." Crossfire co-host Bill Press agreed: "There's no way
to prove she's telling the truth. ... We'll never know." New York Times
Managing Editor Bill Keller added: "The merits of the allegations are probably
unknowable. Legally, it doesn't seem to go anywhere." This notion that the
charge "doesn't go anywhere" legalizes and objectifies the investigative
process, absolving the speaker of responsibility to pursue the question.

            Likewise, the word "unknowable" disguises the fact that the
merits of the charges are not only knowable; they are known by two people.
Broaddrick has now spoken. Shouldn't Clinton? When asked this question, Daschle
replied: "I don't think you're going to hear anything from him, nor do I think
it's going to lend any new information. Let's move on." Thus the passive
prediction that Clinton will successfully lie, stonewall, or evade the question
glosses over whether the media have a duty to ask it and Clinton has a duty to
answer it.

            Second, the legal
framework shifts the burden from Clinton to his accusers. When asked on Late
Edition whether Clinton was obliged to respond to Broaddrick's allegation,
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said that was "up to the president" and called the
charge "effectively unprovable." On Meet the Press , Susan Estrich fumed
that those who dared to pursue the question would "tear people's lives apart
based on a plausible allegation." Estrich demanded "a higher standard" for such
an inquiry. On Fox News Sunday , Steven Brill defended Clinton's silence
as a legal tactic to avoid a libel suit.

            Third, this framework lends a high-minded legal cast to a
low-minded excuse for ignoring the story. Instead of admitting to scandal
fatigue and fear of exasperating the public, reporters and politicians observe
that the "statute of limitations" on the rape charge has expired. A legitimate
reason not to prosecute Clinton thus becomes a bogus reason not to question
him. "It's not that we're tired, and it's not that we're lacking in moral
outrage," Estrich asserted. But "unless you're ready to reopen the impeachment
process ... the country wants to move on." The bipartisan movement to kill the
independent counsel law provides additional legal cover for this exit. "The
time has come for us to close the books," Daschle argued.

            Fourth, the notion that the courts are responsible
for all inquiry lets politicians and journalists pass the buck. Upon leaving
office, Clinton "will be subject to criminal prosecution just as any other
citizen would be," observed Wellstone. On This Week , Rep. John Kasich,
R-Ohio, refused to say whether anything should be done about Broaddrick's
story: "I'm really not involved in that at all. ... The proper authorities
ought to handle it." Conversely, Steve Roberts predicted that the story would
die "because Republicans don't want to touch" it, and fellow Late
Edition panelist Susan Page added, "There's no legal process continuing
with it. There's no impeachment process. I don't see what keeps this story
alive."

            Maybe Bill Clinton was
never in that room with Juanita Broaddrick. Maybe they had consensual sex.
Maybe what seemed coercive to her seemed merely rough to him. Maybe he lost
control and has regretted it ever since. But the bottom line is that he's
giving no answers, and a nation jaded by spin is giving him a pass. It's less
and less clear that actions have consequences. And it's more and more clear
that ideas do.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Excuses, Excuses

            Last
August, after finally admitting to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand
jury that he had carried on and covered up an inappropriate relationship with
Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton went on national TV to apologize. He began
by calling his behavior "wrong" and taking "complete responsibility" for it.
But within seconds, Clinton tarnished his apology by lapsing into excuses,
self-justifications, and blame-shifting. This week, as he tries to explain
NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, he's doing the same
thing.

            How
did the bombing happen? According to Secretary of Defense William Cohen, NATO
"attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an
outdated map," which "inaccurately located the embassy in a different part of
Belgrade." Henceforth, said Cohen, "the State Department will report to the
intelligence community whenever foreign embassies move." In other words, people
in the U.S. government who knew the embassy had moved hadn't bothered to tell
their colleagues who were deciding which buildings to bomb. There's nothing for
the United States to say about this except that we perpetrated a moral outrage
through inexcusable stupidity and recklessness. But as usual, Clinton is
finding plenty of other things to say.

            

               1) I've already apologized. Last year, when asked to
apologize, Clinton repeatedly insisted that he had already done so. But saying
you have already apologized is the opposite of apologizing. The latter is a way
of accepting criticism; the former is a way of deflecting it. Saturday, in his
initial remarks about the bombing, Clinton expressed "regret" and "condolences"
to China but never used the word "apologize." Two days later, he declared, "I
have already expressed our apology." When asked about American responsibility
for the tragedy, Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and State
Department spokesman Jamie Rubin reiterated that Clinton had already
"apologized."

            

               2) My actions were minimal. In his speech last August, Clinton
used weasel words and passive verbs to minimize his deceit. "While my answers
were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information," he allowed. "My public
comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression." To minimize
this week's embassy bombing, Clinton called it a "mistake," "accident," and
"tragic event" (other U.S. officials called it "regrettable" and an "error"
entailing "loss of life"). Clinton used the passive voice to obscure his
responsibility ("the Chinese Embassy was inadvertently damaged and people lost
their lives") and offered good intentions as an excuse ("We're doing everything
that we can to avoid innocent civilian casualties").

            

               3) Everybody does it. In 1992, Clinton smothered questions
about his adultery by confessing to "causing pain in my marriage," refusing to
say more, and pointing out that many American couples were in a similar
position. In his August 1998 speech, he offered the same defense. Likewise,
Clinton suggested this week that in war the occasional embassy bombing is to be
expected. "This will happen if you drop this much [ordnance]," he argued
Saturday. Cohen echoed that line Monday ("In combat, accidents will happen"),
as did White House spokesman Joe Lockhart ("Mistakes happen").

            

               4) It's the economy, stupid. Unable to convince Americans last
year that he was truly sorry for offending their values, Clinton appealed
instead to their material interests, vowing incessantly to "keep working for
the American people." This week, having bombed the Chinese Embassy, Clinton is
making a similar appeal to China's prudence. On Monday, he reminded China of
his "commitment to strengthen our relationship," while Albright and Lockhart
emphasized that "good relations are manifestly in the interest of both nations"
and that "a broad-based relationship ... serves both our interests."

            

               5) It's my enemy's fault. Clinton ruined his speech last
August by blaming Starr and Paula Jones' lawyers for forcing him to shade the
truth to fend off Starr's investigation, which had "gone on too long, cost too
much, and hurt too many innocent people." This week, Clinton again buried his
apology under a recitation of his enemy's wrongs. He even used the same
word--"proportion"--to deflect scrutiny. "We need some sense of proportion" in
evaluating the bombing, Clinton pleaded. "This was an isolated, tragic event,
while the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo ... is a deliberate and systematic crime."
Albright, Rubin, and other U.S. officials reasserted that distinction, and
Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon pointed out that the other guy started
the fight: "This was not a fight that NATO sought. It was a fight that could
have been avoided, but Mr. Milosevic decided not to avoid it."

            It's
true that the Serbs' crimes dwarf NATO's in scale and malice. It's true that
China's financial interests are best served by stifling its anger. It's true
that wars always cause unintended civilian casualties. It's true that NATO is
trying to avoid such casualties. And it's true that Clinton has apologized.
These are all perfectly good spins. But the point of an apology is to accept
responsibility for what you did and otherwise to shut up. To apologize, in
short, is to abstain from spin--one of the few feats of which Clinton seems
incapable.

            
               Photograph on Table of
Contents by Sasa Stankovic/AFP.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             A Taxing Woman

            Do taxes really drive
Americans crazy? Amity Shlaes thinks so. Her new book, The Greedy Hand: How
Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What To Do About It , argues that America is
on the verge of a civic tax revolt. Voters, she writes, "cry out for tax
relief," and when tax breaks are given to them they "discover the puny size of
the break" and "turn angry." But the book demonstrates only that taxes have
driven Shlaes crazy. The notion that citizens must pay some price for
government has rendered her incoherent, irrational, and convinced that
everybody else shares her obsession.

            This kind of pathology
is a job requirement for Shlaes, who writes on tax policy for the Wall
Street Journal editorial page. Shlaes' book is a longer exposition of the
Journal 's supply-side theology, which holds that tax cuts for
upper-income earners can produce almost magical economic results. The book
preaches this now familiar creed to the multitudes; Shlaes uses folksy lingo
and homespun anecdotes to give her message a warmly populist glow.

            The problem, of course, is that the ever-rising tax burden
is not driving Americans crazy. One reason for this disappointing stoicism may
be that for the middle class the tax burden isn't in fact rising. All credible
sources (the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for instance) agree that
the median tax burden has fallen in recent years--that is, middle-income
taxpayers are paying less. And opinion poll after opinion poll shows that only
a tiny minority supports using the budget surplus for tax cuts. So, like the
Journal editorial dogma it recycles, The Greedy Hand must resort
to distortion, hypocrisy, and illogic to create the illusion of incipient tax
revolt.

            To do so Shlaes trots out
the same phony numbers used by anti-tax members of Congress. The book relies on
dodgy statistics from the Tax Foundation that supposedly show a rising average
tax burden but are based on inflated estimates and miscounting (to review the
many egregious flaws in the Tax Foundation study, see a previous ).

            In fact, Shlaes cites only one nonphony piece of
evidence--but even that doesn't mean what she thinks it does. Americans are
suffering, she writes, from "real bracket creep." Bracket creep used to be a
problem: Before the 1980s, tax brackets were based on fixed income thresholds
that didn't account for inflation. So when prices and wages rose quickly,
taxpayers were pushed into higher tax brackets even though their real wages
weren't rising at all. President Reagan fixed this by indexing tax brackets for
inflation.

            So bracket creep doesn't exist anymore. But Shlaes
tries to resurrect it by discussing "real bracket creep"--the process of people
shifting into higher tax brackets as their real income climbs. This has
happened recently; the strong economy and booming stock market have produced
big gains in income and, hence, in income taxes. To dramatize this point,
Shlaes recounts the Beatles song "Taxman," written in 1966, just as the group
was beginning to enjoy its greatest success. Their financial situation is a
representative sample--"we are all Beatles now," she writes mournfully.

            But Shlaes doesn't
explain why this is a problem . Yes, when the Beatles sold a skillion
albums a year, they paid higher taxes than they did when they struggled in
anonymity. And yes, some people are paying tax rates they "never expected would
apply" to them, but only because they're earning more money than they ever
expected. Tax rates are marginal. When higher income moves you into a higher
tax bracket, you pay the higher rate only on the extra income. If Microsoft
accidentally added a few extra zeroes to the end of my paycheck, I would end up
paying a higher tax rate than I had anticipated, but you wouldn't hear me
complaining about it.

            Shlaes' analysis is also full of astonishing omissions. She
denounces the payroll tax as regressive, which it is. But she doesn't mention
that its effect is partly offset by the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax rebate
for low-income workers. Indeed, she takes several swipes at the EITC, writing,
for instance, that it "has morphed into a $30 billion project that shapes
millions of Americans' lives." It has shaped their lives by reducing or
eliminating their taxes. Amity, this is what you're supposed to be for ,
remember? Unless, of course, she is for reducing taxes on the rich but not on
the working poor and near poor who benefit from the EITC.

            Shlaes claims that the
entire notion of a progressive tax code is a fraud. "Progressivity," she
maintains, "doesn't do what it says it does: tax the rich." This is because the
wealthy use loopholes to avoid their nominal rates. For instance, she notes,
the super-rich can take their salary in the form of stock options, which are
taxed at a lower capital gains rate. Technically, she's wrong about that. In
most circumstances, employee stock option profits are taxed as ordinary income.
But her broad point that special breaks for things such as capital gains
undermine the tax code's progressivity is true enough.

            This is hardly a sincere indictment of the current system,
however. The Wall Street Journal editorial page lobbies for lower
capital gains rates on an almost daily basis and has been doing so for more
than two decades. Shlaes and her colleagues have long championed the loopholes
that have compromised the tax code's progressive structure. Despite the
Journal 's best efforts, though, the tax code is progressive. That
is, the effective rates--the actual taxes paid as a proportion of income--on
the rich are higher than those on the middle class.

            What explains the stunning logical inconsistencies
and misrepresentations in this book? Is it hypocrisy? Confusion? Or just a
philosophy of "any weapon to hand"? Probably a bit of all three. Shlaes hates
progressivity not because it fails but because it succeeds. Of course, Shlaes
could honestly argue what she really believes: Making the rich pay higher tax
rates than the poor is just not fair, dammit. But most Americans don't agree,
and that is what really drives Amity Shlaes crazy.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <STRONG><EM>Slate</STRONG></EM>, Version<B><I> </B></I>2.0

            As 
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            Heads Up! 

            With the millennium
looming, the list-makers seem to have inherited the earth. First, the American
Film Institute drew up a register of the 100 greatest American
films ever made. Random House's Modern Library chased the idea a few
months later with its own list of the 100 best works of fiction of the century, and next month it
promises to name the 100 best works of nonfiction . Last month, the Freedom Forum's
Newseum compiled a roster of the 100 top stories of the century , and this week New York
University's journalism department pegged the century's 100 best works of American journalism .

            Not to be left behind, we've plundered the
extensive newspaper archives at the Columbia University School of Journalism,
our Nexis account, and even Peter Jennings' new best-selling book to assemble a
more compelling--and concise--look at the 100 high points of the century.

            Your mileage may vary, so if you've come across an
important headline that we've overlooked, please send it to 100TopHeds@slate.com.

            
               Click to read
the best of the nominations.
            

            
               1901:
Near-Sighted Teddy Roosevelt Bags President McKinley on Safari

            
               1903:
Wright Brothers Announce 3-Second Meal Service on All 12-Second Flights

            
               1908:
President Taft Calls for Federal Legislation To Enlarge Doorways, Railway
Seats, Bathtubs

            
               1912:
Albania Lapses Into Anarchy 85 Years Too Soon

            
               1912:
Shipping Magnate Declares Titanic -Iceberg Merger Successful

            
               1913:
Congress Creates IRS "To Unite Nation Against Common Enemy"

            
               1914:
Panama Canal Opens New Era of Global Trade in Panama Hats

            
               1914:
Fighting Breaks Out Between War Correspondents

            
               1915:
German Submarine Fires Warning Torpedo Into Lusitania
            

            

               1916: Army Physicians Laud Mustard Gas as First Inhalable
Condiment

            
               1917:
President Wilson Vows To Make World Safe for Robber Barons

            
               1918:
Lenin Orders Pictures of Czar's Family Put on Milk Cartons

            
               1918:
Wife's Honeymoon Antics Give Gandhi Idea of Passive Resistance

            
               1919:
Congress Votes for Prohibition, Celebrates With First Toast in Congressional
Speakeasy

            
               1919:
Senate Rejects Treaty of Versailles for Having Suspicious Foreign-Sounding
Name

            
               1920:
Women Experience Futility of Voting Firsthand

            
               1921:
Humane Loophole in Immigration Quotas Lets Some Foreigners Enter U.S. as
Livestock

            
               1925:
Heisenberg Says Uncertainty Principle May or May Not Be Greatest Discovery
Ever

            
               1927:
Parisian Hijacker Forces Charles Lindbergh To Make Nonstop Transatlantic Flight
at Gunpoint

            

               1927: Supreme Court Rules Films Do Not Have Right To Remain
Silent

            
               1928: Babe
Ruth Seldom Gets to First, Admits Wife

            
               1929:
Stock Market Crash Linked to Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Radicals, Foreigners, and
Anyone Who Looks Funny

            
               1929: Al
Capone Denies Murder for Profit Allegations, Insists Gangland Slayings "Purely
for Fun"

            
               1933: U.S.
Goes off Gold Standard, Adopts Moldy Crust of Bread Standard

            
               1933:
FDR's "The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Eleanor" Speech Calms Nation

            
               1933: New
Deal, Same Deck

            
               1933:
First Woman Cabinet Member, Frances Perkins, Celebrates by Getting Coffee for
Other Cabinet Members

            
               1934:
Newborn Ralph Nader Files Suit Against Mother for Ejecting Him Into Hostile,
Unsafe Environment

            
               1935:
Alcoholics Anonymous Sells First Mailing List to Smirnoff

            
               1935:
National Labor Relations Act Recognizes Workers' Right To Be Fired
Collectively

            

               1935: Remaining Chinese Communists Receive "I Survived the
Long March" T-Shirts

            
               1936:
Moscow Show Trials Notably Lacking in Good Show Tunes

            
               1936:
Spanish Civil War Erupts as Bullfighters, Flamenco Dancers Clash Over Limited
Supply of Tights

            
               1937:
Jobless Rate Tops 110 Percent With Many Unemployed at More Than One
Occupation

            
               1937:
Over-Excited Hindenburg Announcer Explodes

            
               1938:
Chamberlain Calls Hitler "The Nicest Totalitarian Maniac I've Ever
Appeased"

            
               1939:
Poland Invades Itself

            
               1939: Lou
Gehrig Has Lou Gehrig's Disease; "With My Name, I Figured It Was Only a Matter
of Time," Says Yankee First Baseman

            
               1940:
Millions of Women Enter Work Force for Lower Pay, Longer Hours; "It's the
Greatest Thing Since Slavery!" Say Industry Leaders

            

               1940: Leon Trotsky Dies in First Ice Pick-Assisted Suicide

            
               1941:
"Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be" Clause Added to Lend-Lease Act

            
               1941:
Japanese Stir-Fry Pearl Harbor

            
               1942:
French Resistance Waiters Bravely Refuse to Refill Nazi Officers' Coffee
Cups

            
               1943:
Oklahoma! Admitted to Union; Sprightly Musical To Replace Boring Actual
State

            
               1944:
Allied Soldiers Hear of Nude French Sunbathing, Storm Normandy Beaches

            
               1945:
Stalin "Genuinely Touched" by Gift of Eastern Europe at Potsdam Surprise
Party

            
               1947: FAA
Charges Drunken UFO Pilot in Roswell Crash

            
               1948:
Truman Defeats Dewey; Huey and Louie Have Yet To Concede

            
               1950: U.S.
Blamed for Starting Hopeless Asian Land War 15 Years Too Soon

            
               1954: Some
TV Couples May Be Sleeping Together, Say Insiders

            

               1956: U.S.S.R. Asks Hungary if It Has Parking Spaces for
10,000 Tanks

            
               1956:
Thousands of Innocent Soviet Corpses Thrilled by Posthumous Rehabilitation

            
               1958:
First Hospice Allows Patients To Die in Homelike Setting--Surrounded by Greedy,
Hateful Relatives

            
               1959:
Congressional Quiz Show Investigators Stunned by Revelation That Not Everything
on TV Is Real

            
               1960: U-2
Shot Down Over U.S.S.R.; Infant Bono Unhurt

            
               1961: CIA
Markets Bay of Pigs Blooper Reel

            
               1962:
Thousands of Innocent Trees Die To Make Silent Spring a Best Seller

            
               1963: JFK
Accidentally Struck Down by Flying Zapruder Lens Cap

            
               1964:
Rockefellers, Kennedys Conscientiously Object to War on Poverty

            

               1966: Marshall McLuhan Caught Reading

            
               1966:
Robert McNamara Commended by PTA for Applying New Math to U.S. Casualty
Figures

            
               1968:
Martin Luther King Jr., RFK Assassinated Separately but Equally

            
               1968:
Hippies, Beatniks Sign Historic Personal Hygiene Ban

            
               1968:
Nonproliferation Treaty Strictly Limits Nuclear Weapons to Nations That Can
Afford Them

            
               1969:
Teddy Kennedy Charged With "Leaving the Scene of a Successful Cover-Up"

            
               1970:
Near-Perfect Neil Young Guitar Solo Ruined by Addition of Second Note

            
               1972: J.
Edgar Hoover Buried in Simple but Elegant Black Dress

            
               1973: Liz
Taylor Will Use New Bar Code Technology To Track Husbands

            
               1973:
Entire Consumer Product Safety Commission Dies in Pinto Explosion

            
               1974: Ford
Pardons Nixon for Plaid Trousers

            

               1974: Good News: Smelly Ozone Layer Disappearing

            
               1977: IBM
Monopoly Threatens Free Market, Warns Head of Tiny Start-Up Microsoft

            
               1979:
U.S. Embassy in Iran Under New Management

            
               1981: MTV
Brings Western Civilization to Official Halt

            
               1981:
Reagan Shot En Route to NRA Fund-Raiser

            
               1981:
Sandra Day O'Connor Receives Congratulatory Pat on the Behind From Fellow
Justices

            
               1984:
"Mondale Fever" Sweeps Minnesota, District of Columbia

            
               1985: "We
Are the World" Gives Hope to Rock Has-Beens Starving for a Hit

            
               1987:
Ollie North Wins Daytime Emmy

            

               1988: Democratic Platform Not High Enough To Make Dukakis
Visible

            
               1989:
Chinese Authorities Kick Off "Keep Tiananmen Square Clean" Week With Special
Tank Sweepers

            
               1989:
Scientist Achieves Cold Fusion on Honeymoon

            
               1991:
Iraqi Army Stages Spirited 3/8-of-a-Second Counteroffensive

            
               1993: "For
God's Sake, Use a Decent Camera!" Pleads Extraterrestrial

            
               1994:
Abstinence TV Spots Boost Teen Celibacy to a Record 0.0002 percent

            
               1996:
Desperate Postmaster General Tries To Hand Deliver E-Mail

            
               1997: AOL
Offers 50 Hours of Free Downtime

            
               1998: Wave
of 1970s Nostalgia Drives up Oil Prices

            
               1998:
Primitive Amazon Tribe Still Using Apple IIs

            

               1998: Visa To Assume National Debt for 5.9 percent, No Annual
Fee

            
               1998:
Hair Club for Men Must Admit Women, High Court Rules

            
               1998:
"Bad Luck Gene" Identified

            
               1998:
China's Abacuses Still Reeling From Year 2000 B.C. Problem

            
               1999:
Internet Fills up Last 3 percent of Terrifying Void of Existence

            
               1999:
ACLU Targets Lactose Intolerance

            
               1999:
Harvard To Accept Mortal Kombat Scores in Place of SATs

            
               1999:
Western Union Introduces Singing Mammogram

            
               1999: FDA
Approves Nicotine Eye Patch

            
               1999:
Drugs Win Drug War

            

               1999: Turnout for Apocalypse Lighter Than Expected; Most
Prefer To Be Elsewhere When World Ends

            Is there an important headline that we've
overlooked? Please send your nominations to 100TopHeds@slate.com.

            
               Click to read the best of the
nominations.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            That's a Wrap!

            If the rowdy and facetious new film The
Mummy suggests anything, it's that we've come to what Francis Fukuyama
might call "the end of horror movies." The horror genre lost its life's blood
when filmmakers began to worry about being laughed at by teen-agers who'd seen
it all before, and to incorporate kids' imagined responses into their
pictures--so that you got the movie and the Mystery Science 
               Theater
3000 burlesque of the movie at the same time. Forget about the vague fear
of the nameless, otherwise known as "dread." Forget about awe, too, unless it's
short for "Awesome, dude!" in response to some pricey special effect. Bring on
the ironic one-liners and the slapstick ghoul-bashing kung fu--and let's
party!

            Postmodern jokiness can only undermine the mummy
subgenre, which has at its heart the most ancient of scary ideas: If you
presume to violate an alien culture and make off with its sacred objects,
you're going to be visited by a monster that's beyond the power of your own
culture to combat. There's a big dollop of xenophobia here--old mummy pictures
are full of stilted English actors pretending to be icily vengeful
Egyptians--but there's also a less chauvinistic implication: a rebuke to our
Western-imperialist sense of entitlement. For all its nonsensical trappings,
the mummy narrative is serious business, because when other peoples'
passionately held taboos are casually flouted it is serious business.
Just ask Salman Rushdie. The invasion of a mummy's tomb results in a
fatwa made flesh--or, if not flesh, then bandages and bones rendered
really really nasty by righteous wrath.

            Some of these ideas can
be found in the new The Mummy , but they have been stripped of their
weight and cultural resonance. In their place is a lot of sub- Raiders of the
Lost Ark swashbuckling, plus sight gags pilfered from Sam Raimi's 1993
Army of Darkness (the last of his The Evil Dead trilogy) and
genre-deflating banter that's like an untalented sophomore's stab at Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). (The juvenile script is by the
director, Stephen Sommers.) There isn't a mummy at the center of The
Mummy , exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.
Under it, supposedly, is Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), an ancient priest
discovered--in the movie's prologue--in a compromising position with the
Pharaoh's mistress, who kills herself in an act of feminist defiance. ("My body
is no longer his temple!")

            When Imhotep goes to Hamunaptra--the City of the Dead--to
revive her, he is stopped by the Pharoah's guards, shorn of his tongue, then
wrapped in gauze and buried alive with a swarm of scabrous beetles. Legend has
it that if he's ever revived, he'll visit the 10 plagues of Egypt upon the
world. Legend has it right, as it turns out, but it's a long hour before
roguish adventurer Brendan Fraser can transport dimwitted 1920s Pandora heroine
Rachel Weisz to Hamunaptra so that she can open the Book of the Dead and start
stupidly incanting. It takes another hour to search for the Book of the Dead's
opposite number, which will theoretically send Imhotep back to the cosmic soup
from which he sprang before he can transfer the heroine's soul to the embalmed
remains of his lady love.

            The Special Effect (a k a
the mummy) reminded me of the Ghost of Christmas Future in the Bill Murray
comedy Scrooged (1988). It's tall and mottled and has a wiggly mouth
that can suddenly distend itself and emit a Jurassic Park -style roar. It
has all manner of superpowers, turning itself into a puff of smoke, a
hurricane, and a swarm of ravenous locusts. It can appropriate pieces of its
victims' anatomies in an effort to reconstitute itself (an idea cribbed from
Clive Barker's 1987 Hellraiser --but less gorily executed, for the sake
of a kiddie-friendly PG-13). It can also revive its mummified fellow priests
and send them into battle against our heroes. The Special Effect can do almost
anything--except look scary. It's not solely the fault of Industrial Light and
Magic: Slapstick and horror aren't an easy mix. Sam Raimi might be the only one
who can pull it off--when his spastic, hyperkinetic ghouls come at you they
seem genuinely invasive. The ghouls of lesser artists just bash into one
another like Keystone Korpses.

            T he Mummy isn't as inept as last year's
Godzilla --it more or less hits its marks, and some nonindustry people at
the preview I attended claimed to have been entertained. The cast is certainly
game. Fraser has a long, rangy body and a gee-whiz openness that makes him
perfect for a comic-book hero, and the lovely Weisz--whose eyes are so far
apart that they're almost in different time zones--brings a screwball aplomb to
the dizzy distaff Egyptologist. As her brother, John Hannah (Gwyneth Paltrow's
love-struck Scottish lapdog in last year's Sliding Doors ) is too
stridently the Comic Relief in a movie in which the hero and heroine are
already busy comedically relieving themselves, but he's a hard chap to dislike.
The villain is another kettle of leeches. I adored Vosloo as Lance Henriksen's
black-garbed, femininely insinuating henchman in the John Woo-Jean Claude Van
Damme action picture Hard Target (1993). But Vosloo doesn't have the
physiognomy for a role incarnated variously by the gaunt Boris Karloff (1932)
and the totemic Christopher Lee (1959). Bald and round-headed, he's about as
imposing as Curly of the Three Stooges.

            T he Mummy is a debauchery but not a true
defilement: Mummy movies don't constitute an especially glorious cinematic
legacy. Only the Karloff original, directed by Karl Freund, qualifies as a
classic, with its sleek Egyptian-Deco décor and its matchlessly eerie scene of
the mummy's awakening. (Bramwell Fletcher's hysterical laughter in the
creature's wake--"He went for a little walk!"--echoes in the annals of horror
film history.) Still, I have a soft spot for all those dreary Lon Chaney Jr.
sequels that ended with the lurching, half-blind golem lugging a slack blonde
through the swamps while George Zucco in a turban hisses something like,
"Faster, Kharis! Before the torch-wielding infidels converge on the sacred tomb
of Ananka!" I can't make a case for the dim Hammer Films remakes, either,
although it's always fun to watch Peter Cushing get strangled by Christopher
Lee. No, Sommers hasn't blasphemed. He doesn't deserve to have his eyes and
tongue sucked out, his brain dashed against the side of a tomb, or to be
consumed by scarab beetles or flayed by locusts. But he has put another nail in
the horror genre's sarcophagus. He should at least lose a hand.

            In some cultures, they cut off hands (and even more
vital body parts) when they find out you're gay. Steven Carter (Ben
Silverstone), the stringy English hero of Get Real , merely faces
parental disapproval, social ostracization, and a dishy jock lover (Brad
Gorton) who doesn't want to acknowledge him in the halls of their high school.
Still, it's enough. The strength of this agreeable comedy, directed by Simon
Shore from a screenplay by Patrick Wilde, is that it makes even the tiniest
sexual encounters seem emotionally momentous. They would be anyway, at this
age, but Steven has fewer avenues for self-expression than his heterosexual
peers, and the pressure builds. Despite its gay subject matter, Get Real
is rather wholesome and didactic: Steven writes an essay for the yearbook
called "Get Real," and the film climaxes with a speech about wanting to be
recognized and loved for who you really are. There's nothing glib about
Silverstone's performance, though. At times, he's believably stricken, at
others believably affectless--as if every emotion has been wrapped up so
tightly for fear of discovery that there's no such thing as a "natural"
response. He's in danger of becoming a true mummy.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               The Academy's
Awards
            

            Thanks to Michael
Kinsley for buying into our list at the beginning of his recent "." But his
later point about "gratuitous meritocracy" did not seem up to his usual level
of argument. Of course we evaluate (unscientifically) the merit--the relative
merit--of novels, paintings, Dylan songs, New Yorker editors, etc. Could
there be art without such evaluations? (This is a philosophical, not an
economic, question--and a serious one.) Top 100 lists and Oscars are simply a
rather formal, inevitably somewhat pedestrian method of evaluation. Our list
certainly has a target or two on it for everyone (including us list makers).
Still, I thought the whole thing was worth doing because journalism is rarely
compared across decades; because such comparisons make for enlightening
discussions (like the one you, all too briefly, embarked upon); because our
memory for good journalism tends to be awfully short; because most of the work
on our list (like that in item No. 67) deserves to be honored; and because in
so doing we hope to inspire more gutsy, eye-opening journalism. Could a similar
case be made in support of the Cable Ace Awards? Perhaps. But our list does
have the advantage of including Hersey, Carson, Tarbell, Steffens, Murrow, and
that Lemann fellow.

            -- Mitchell
Stephens
            

            Chair, Department of
Journalism, New York University

            New
York City

            
               The (Little) Girls'
Room
            

            As a female musician, I found the in "The Music
Club" on women in rock fascinating. Bill Wyman asserted that Liz Phair is
trying to maintain an indie sensibility while flirting with mainstream
commercial music. This seems to be a time-honored argument leveled at women
from all walks of life. It seems that if a woman shows any duality in her
opinions and/or her career endeavors, she is either confused about what she
wants (and therefore weak), or she shouldn't be venturing out into the big, bad
world of rock 'n' roll. Ooh, too scary!

            I find the whole issue of
"Women in Rock" a bit off-putting as well. There shouldn't be a delineation
between where one creative process ends and another begins. It is a universal
language, or should be in an ideal world. I am constantly amazed at the number
of people (yeah, they've been men) who have told me that my musical career
would be bolstered if I would just be willing to "work the sex angle."

            -- Hudson
            

            San
Diego

            
               Everybody's Got a
Hungry Heart
            

            The argument in "" seems really stretched,
particularly to anyone who's ever done something like lock his refrigerator (I
don't, but I keep it empty for a similar reason). The irrational act isn't
"locking the fridge," it's "snacking at midnight"--you gain weight, use up
food, and get less sleep. The momentary pleasure isn't remotely worth the
drawbacks.

            So why do it? Because of
an irrational urge to eat, doubtless a holdover from some ancient time when
eating whenever possible was a survival trait. As long as you're positing an
evolutionary urge with no present-day benefits, why assume the most complicated
explanation is correct? Or that people are too stupid to realize what's bad for
them?

            -- Aaron
Mandelbaum
            

            
Redmond, Wash.

            
               The Ron
Around
            

            I note one glaring
omission from the "" item in "Chatterbox." Juanita Broaddrick's story arrived
in the press after Bill Clinton had established a pattern of behavior toward
women and of soon-to-be-inoperative denials. But prior to the Walters
accusation in the Kitty Kelley book, no one had ever accused Ronald Reagan of
anything remotely approaching the sort of behavior alleged. There was no
pattern to match the behavior and, therefore, the press did not pursue it or
demand a forceful denial. To add further injury to the premise that the
Broaddrick and Walters accusations are "remarkably [a]like," the Broaddrick
story was exhaustively researched by NBC News' Washington bureau and its
reporter Lisa Myers, whose reputation for honest, nonscandal reporting is
unquestioned. The Walters accusation was "reported" by Kitty Kelley (whose
reputation for veracity is questionable at best) and People magazine.
Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein, is it?

            
               --Robert Laing
            

            
Seattle

            
               Core
Values
            

            Jacob Weisberg's "" is in many ways a sophisticated
look at the University of Chicago, the best exemplar of American higher
education. But it does repeat a few inaccuracies.

            The University has only one name, under which it
was incorporated in 1890. That is "The University of Chicago." Weisberg may
have been misled by a poorly reported story in a local newspaper that confused
discussions about the various shorthand versions of our name.

            The new curriculum does not dilute the general
education Weisberg lauds. It provides a strong foundation in all the large
knowledge domains of humankind and in analytic thinking skills, a bit more
choice to explore the ideas and fields introduced in students' first two years,
and a series of courses taught by full faculty in a small, focused discussion
style that has long been Chicago's hallmark. The "core" curriculum will now
constitute 15 courses plus a year of foreign language, of the 42 required for
graduation. This is three fewer than the 21 required since the latest
curriculum revision in 1984, but it also means students will take three more
courses in their concentration(s) (or major) or in other areas. Additionally,
the curriculum is under constant scrutiny by the faculty, and is revised
regularly (typically at intervals of about a decade) in a process that
culminates in a vote of the college faculty. Their vote in March 1998, by a
3-to-1 margin, approved the new curriculum.

            Education at the
University of Chicago will continue to be great fun, in the traditional,
Chicago sense in which our students have always found some of life's greatest
satisfactions in the enthusiastic, unbridled pursuit of the life of the
mind.

            
               --Larry
Arbeiter
            

            
Director of Communications, the University of Chicago

            
               Brownian
Emotion
            

            In "The Best University in America," Jacob Weisberg
writes: "Consider Brown, whose undergraduates have a higher average SAT score
than those at Chicago, and which gets three times as many applications
precisely because it has a reputation for being a blast and lacks any real
requirements."

            Your one sentence
explanation of Brown's attractiveness to prospective students is an insult to
Brown alumni and alumnae, to those who have applied to Brown, and to

                  Slate
                readers who hate seeing arguments built on unsupported
stereotypes instead of facts.

            -- Daniel Flynn ,
Brown '96

            Boston

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 194: &quot;Unaffordable&quot;

            

               After a call from Ford Motors, Greg Bradsher of the National Archives
said, "You have to think in terms of corporate memories. There is probably no
one around who knows anything about this stuff." What stuff does Ford need help
remembering?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 193)--"Whoa, Canada":
               

               
                  The Poitras Report,
recently released in Montreal, describes an inept organization that routinely
broke the law, lacked ethics and professionalism, and embraced a code of
silence that thwarted whistle-blowers. What organization?
               

               

                  ( Question courtesy of Matthew Singer.)
                  
               

               
"Leonard Cohen's old girlfriends."-- Chris Kelly
               

               
"Whoever it is, it's not the Church of Scientology. Now please give me back my
daughter."-- Greg Diamond
               

               "The
New York Police Department. But I'd like to see ya come down here and release
that report, tough guys."-- Daniel Radosh
               

               "Sounds
like the International Olympic Committee, but any group that could find hookers
in Utah seems far from inept to me."-- Alex Balk ( Lara Williams ,
Andrew Reid , and Eddie Haskins had similar answers.)

               "Who
cares? It's Canada!"-- Tim Carvell (similarly, David Ballard )

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's 3,000 Miles
of Unguarded Wrap-Up
            

            According to the old
Canadian clichés, a diet of back bacon and access to excellent health care lead
to Neil Young boring everyone silly by singing about hockey in two languages.
The new Canadian cliché, judging by News Quiz responses, is just hockey, and
it's now broadcast on Fox. It's a different sort of coverage from the days when
Peter Puck appeared between periods to explain the game to us unsophisticated
Americans. That animated black rubber cylinder provided a surprisingly lucid
exegesis of offside, icing, and the undesirability of Quebec separatism, along
with some disturbing Toronto sex techniques. But I may be misremembering. In
those days we played without helmets, and I was regularly high-sticked in the
head, just like Neil. Hey hey, hi hi.

            
               Answer
Québecois
            

            Le Sûreté du Québec.

            The 4,100 member provincial police force, more a
sort of regional FBI than state troopers, accepted the scathing criticism
delivered by a public inquiry last month and will undertake sweeping reforms,
reports Monique Beaudin in the Montreal Gazette . "We are taking this
very seriously," said SQ chief Florent Gagné.

            The investigative commission headed by former Chief
Justice Lawrence Poitras was set up in 1996 to look into allegations of
cover-ups and threats after a botched drug investigation.

            "They have been notorious
thugs since the turn of the century," adds Matthew Singer.

            
               Augmented
Quotations Extra
            

            Each final sentence added by News Quiz.

            

               "I think it's absolutely ludicrous to completely
wipe out something so many people are in favor of. Just like with
slavery."--Sorority gal Jennifer Coup detests Dartmouth's plan to eliminate
single-sex fraternities and sororities.

               "It would be much nicer to have real ones. My dad
said he was disappointed too. You need the noise and the smell. It's as
disappointing as those robot lap dancers."--New Yorker Benny Chang hates the
mayor's ban on Chinese New Year firecrackers.

               "I've got so much real work to do, I can't do this
very often. After lunch, I launch myself into a low Earth orbit to battle giant
space monkeys from Neptune."--Lawyer Johnnie Cochran sets aside time from his
busy schedule to appear on Guiding Light .

               "We're getting the speed of light so low we can
almost send a beam into the system, go for a cup of coffee and return in time
to see the light come out. We can also see Jay Leno making up gags about the
post office."--Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau and her team have devised
a way to slow light from 186,00 miles a second to 120 feet an hour.

               "We do not know where he is. He made us all close
our eyes, spin around three times, and count backwards from 100."--Taliban
diplomat Abdul Hakeem Musjahid has looked everywhere for Osama bin Laden, but
just can't find the guy.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Hockey.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Maureen Dowd

            Two of this year's Pulitzer
Prizes were awarded for wit: one for Margaret Edson's play of that name, about
a scholar of 17 th -century English poetry facing ovarian cancer, and
another for the quality most evident in the writing of New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd. Newspaper commentary, a dying art (see Jacob Weisberg's
on its last great), is nowadays dominated by sententiousness, not satire. On
the flat, windy landscape of the nation's opinion pages, Dowd stands out for
her sharp one-liners and her brisk aperçus . Woody Allen's recent movies
are versions of The Catcher in the Rye Bread . Al Gore ("Prince Albert")
"grew up as the capital's version of Eloise at the Plaza." The Lewinsky matter
is "the first scandal with product placement." "C-SPAN has turned politics into
a TV series that nobody has the power to pull." And let's not omit Dowd's
incisive summary of the moral and constitutional crux of the Clinton sex
scandal, almost worthy of Oscar Wilde: "These are not grounds for impeachment;
these are grounds for divorce."

            Like anyone who tries to
be funny, Dowd sometimes strains for effect and falls flat: She posed a choice
between New York's Rudolph Giuliani and Washington's Marion Barry as one
between "the mayor who cracks down on crime and the mayor whose crime was
crack." At other times, her glibness gets in the way of her insight:
"Historians will long ponder how Mrs. Clinton came in as Eleanor Roosevelt and
left as Madonna." They will? Like anyone who must produce 700 words of
headline-based observation twice every week, she appears on occasion to phone
in her copy, as when she imagined a series of U.S. history documentaries
directed by Oliver Stone. ("Abigail Adams is really Lucianne Goldberg.") And
she could set a welcome example for pundits everywhere if she took a solemn,
public oath never to write another word about Ally McBeal . Still,
occasional lapses aside, no other regular newspaper columnist matches her
gimlet eye, her sense of phrase, or her unpredictability.

            One measure of Dowd's importance is that even people who
profess to despise her seem to read her religiously--and to recycle her jokes
at parties. Another is that she is subject to frequent, sometimes scathing,
criticism in publications of every ideological stripe and market niche. Her
unalloyed contempt for the Clintons managed to infuriate even as lukewarm a
Clintonite as Garry Wills, who wrote, more than a year before the Pulitzer,
that "any journalist must be super strenuous to take the vileness award from
Maureen Dowd." But Dowd's disgust with the president's persecutors and her
merciless flaying of Ken Starr, including the famous Sept. 23 column of last
year that began, "He couldn't stop thinking about the thong underwear," earned
her some brickbats from the anti-Clinton right. The National Review
called her "a writer of relentless orthodoxy," by which of course it meant
liberal orthodoxy.

            But Dowd's politics are
nearly impossible to glean from her columns. Most of her colleagues on the
Times op-ed page represent an identifiable and more or less consistent
position: Thomas L. Friedman is the voice of liberal internationalism, Russell
Baker was the voice of New Deal liberalism, Bob Herbert is the voice of liberal
populism, William Safire is the voice of libertarian conservatism, and A. M.
Rosenthal is the voice of sheer ranting lunacy. Dowd, in contrast, plays her
ideological cards close to the vest. Her published views on matters of policy
would scarcely fill a chapbook: She favors gun control, hates the tobacco
industry, and welcomes the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland.

            These positions are hardly evidence, in the Clinton era, of
a heterodox temperament. They are as likely, these days, to be held by a
Republican as by a Democrat. But it's not Dowd's views that irritate her
critics so much as her style and her attitude. The case against Dowd, taken up
lately by Michael Wolff in New York magazine ("she is derisive, mocking,
hyperbolic, bitchy") and by Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix ("Call her
our most celebrated bad columnist") was most cogently laid out in a 1992 piece
by Katherine Boo in the Washington Monthly . At the time, Dowd was still
a reporter, following the presidential campaign after having covered the Bush
and Reagan White Houses. (She was anointed a columnist in 1995, replacing Anna
Quindlen in what National Review calls the Times ' "liberal Irish
woman's seat.") Boo's brief boils down to two main charges: that Dowd's breezy,
sardonic style has inspired a flood of stilted, self-conscious imitators; and
that "the Dowd crowd" contributed to the erosion of political discourse by
placing style and personality above seriousness and substance.

            The first charge is
easily dismissed. A writer with a strong and original voice will always
influence lesser talents: Imitation is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
You might as well blame the Beatles for the Monkees or Matt Groening for The
Family Guy . But the second accusation is both more interesting and more
complicated, especially because the trivialization of politics has long been
one of Dowd's obsessions. In Clinton's Washington, according to Dowd, the
celebrity culture and the political culture have become indistinguishable.

            But the merger of politics and celebrity was one Dowd
herself helped broker. Or, to switch metaphors, she is simultaneously a
brilliant diagnostician of the political disease of our time and a symptom of
it. It was Dowd, after all, who wrote the story of Frank Sinatra's alleged
affair with Nancy Reagan, as chronicled in Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy,
on the front page of the New York Times . (Dowd protests that the piece
was an assignment and, quite rightly, that editors, not reporters, decide what
goes on Page One.)

            And it's Dowd who last
year wrote a hilarious column called "Of Frogs and Newts," which linked the
doomed speaker with, yes, Ally McBeal. And Dowd who speculates about what kind
of a president Tom Hanks would make, and who calls Al Gore "the Saving
Private Ryan of presidential candidates"--meaning that the aura of
inevitability that surrounds him now may turn out to be a curse in 2000. (Does
this make Bill Bradley Shakespeare in Love ?)

            The politics of celebrity is also a politics of
personality--of confession and "healing," of narcissism disguised as empathy.
Unlike Clinton's (but kind of like Gore's), Dowd's moments of self-revelation
are carefully rationed and, therefore, unusually effective. She recently wrote
a powerful piece about the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York City that
began with an account of her father, a D.C. policeman, killing a suspect in
self-defense. Last year, in a defense of the concept of sexual harassment, she
recalled her own humiliation, years before, by a powerful editor she had gone
to see about a job. And in a remarkable (and notorious) column from June of
1998, she detailed her encounter, at a popular D.C. Indian restaurant, with
Monica Lewinsky herself, whom Dowd had mercilessly cast as a fat, insecure,
bubble-headed Valley girl. ("You can take the girl out of Beverly Hills, but
you can't take Beverly Hills out of the girl.") "Do you mind if I ask you
something?" Lewinsky said to Dowd, "Why do you write such scathing articles
about me?"

            The fact that Dowd was
struck dumb by this question has been used against her. The Phoenix 's
Kennedy sees it as proof of her "utter disengagement" and her "detachment from
the people she writes about." But we wouldn't know about Dowd's failure to
muster a response, or about Lewinsky's poise and forthrightness, unless Dowd
herself had chosen to tell us. And while perhaps an explicit admission that
she'd been unfair to Lewinsky would have been sporting, the column as written
is at once more artful and more honest.

            Last October, in a column that featured selections from
some of the predictably misogynist hate mail she has received from both
liberals and conservatives, Dowd permitted herself to fantasize about a
parallel universe in which she could be "a champagne farmer in France in love
with a neighboring cognac farmer. Or an archaeologist in the Yucatan who flies
her own plane and owns a supper club called The Fuzzy Slipper." "Anything," she
concluded "as long as I am not a Washington journalist in the era of Clinton
and Gingrich and Starr, covering this horrible grudge match between the right
and the left that has been building since Watergate."

            Don't believe a word of
it. Dowd is the only writer on her paper's op-ed page fully in tune with the
political and cultural moment. Other pundits beam their opinions at us as
through a time warp, from the hazy days of past administrations. George F. Will
is stuck in Reagan's first term (though he tries to convince us that he's stuck
in the Madison administration). Safire's a Nixon man to the end, and Frank Rich
recalls the glorious presidency of Eugene McCarthy. But Dowd is, mutatis
mutandis, the H.L. Mencken of the Clinton era--the president's symbiotic
scourge. He may have the numbers of a lot of women, but Dowd alone has his.

            Like the rest of his most loyal supporters and his most
intractable enemies (and she has been, uniquely, both), Dowd is part of the
baby boom generation. "Historians will record," she has written, elaborating on
something Leon Weiseltier once wrote about Clinton, "that our generation's
contribution was to be the generation that worried about its contribution."
Another feature of this generation's passage through American culture--shared
by liberals and conservatives, cynics and true believers, Clinton, Gingrich,
Steven Spielberg, and Dowd herself--is a misty sense of some better, earlier
time before they came along and screwed everything up.

            The body of Dowd's work as a columnist, and in
particular the Flytrap pieces that won her the Pulitzer, is one of the most
brilliant examples yet of boomer self-castigation. The Clinton presidency is,
of course, another example. And one worries a bit about what Dowd will do when
it ends. She has been practicing for this inevitable terrible event lately,
scoring Elizabeth Dole as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest , admitting to a fondness for John McCain, and having great fun at the
expense of Al Gore and George W. Bush, the two scions likely to fight it out in
2000. But while she will no doubt be splendid on their millennial campaign,
it's hard to see how her intemperate wit will find adequate targets in either a
Gore Jr. or a W. Bush administration.

            Is it too selfish of us to ask for a repeal of the
22 nd Amendment--for four more years of Clinton and another $40
million for Ken Starr?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Peace Deal by Next Week?

            

               Kosovo update: 1) NATO hit the wrong targets again in
Belgrade. A bomb struck a hospital, the Libyan Embassy, and the homes
of several European ambassadors, killing four people. NATO's explanation: The
bomb was "misdirected for technical reasons." The Yugoslav explanation: The
sick and the newborn are "NATO's ideal targets." 2) Slobodan Milosevic has
reportedly accepted a peace plan drafted by Russia and seven Western nations,
with two sticking points: He objects to a peacekeeping force composed of NATO
troops and to the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo before NATO stops
bombing. Russian diplomats say they're "not that optimistic" about a deal, but
a Milosevic aide predicted "a political settlement in the next week." 3) NATO
consensus on the use of force splintered. Britain called for an invasion of
Kosovo. Germany threatened to veto ground troops. Italy recommended a bombing
halt for several days after a U.N. resolution is announced. 4) The New York
Times reported that NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark supports stationing
troops on Kosovo's borders. Clark's spin: Prepping for ground war will force
Milosevic to consider a deal. The counterspin: Prepping for ground war will
force Milosevic to call NATO's bluff.

            

               A 15-year-old student shot six classmates at a suburban Atlanta high
school. No one died, evidently because he aimed below the waist. He
had a pistol and a rifle but only used the latter. Afterward, he tried to shoot
himself but couldn't do it, saying, "Oh, my God, I'm so scared." Theory 1: He
was distraught because his girlfriend had broken up with him. Theory 2: It was
the last day of school, and a classmate said, "he's been wanting to do this all
year long." President Clinton cited the shooting as another reason to tighten
gun laws. The Associated Press called it "yet another school attack in a
comfortable suburban community." The reassuring spin: School shootings are
unlikely to happen in your community. The cynical spin: That's what officials
in this Atlanta suburb told parents after last month's Colorado school
massacre.

            

               The Senate passed another gun control measure. The Democratic
amendment would require background checks for all purchases at gun shows and
for anyone who tries to buy back his gun from a pawn shop. It would also extend
some background checks from one to three days. Analysts called it another
retreat for the GOP--in part due to the Atlanta school shooting earlier in the
day--and a big campaign issue for Vice President Gore, who cast the deciding
vote after a 50-50 tie. The liberal spins: 1) We're dismayed by these school
shootings. 2) We're delighted that these school shootings are discrediting the
National Rifle Association. 3) Republicans are fleeing the NRA like scalded
dogs. 4) Republicans are defending the NRA like mad dogs. The conservative
spins: 1) Gun laws are unenforceable. 2) The Clinton-Gore administration
doesn't do enough to enforce gun laws.

            

               Russian legislators approved President Boris Yeltsin's choice for prime
minister. He is Sergei Stepashin, the head of Russia's police and
security forces. This comes a few days after Yeltsin fired then-Prime Minister
Yevgeny Primakov and survived an impeachment vote in parliament. The spins: 1)
Yeltsin has broken legislators' will to oppose him. 2) Legislators blew off
their steam in the impeachment vote and had little interest in fighting over
Stepashin. 3) They worried that if they rejected Stepashin, Yeltsin would
nominate someone worse. 4) They worried that if they rejected Stepashin,
Yeltsin might call a new election, threatening their jobs. 5) They figure they
don't need to reject Stepashin since Yeltsin will fire him soon enough.

            

               The Supreme Court struck down two-tiered welfare benefits.
This affects 15 states that restrict newcomers to the benefits they had
received in their previous states, ostensibly to discourage people from
benefit-shopping. Justice Antonin Scalia joined the 7-2 decision. The spins: 1)
It's a victory for the right to welfare. 2) It's a victory for equal rights. 3)
It's a victory for liberals who want to block states from restricting civil
liberties. 4) It's a victory for conservatives who want to block states from
regulating business and restricting property rights. 5) Rather than pay more to
new residents, states will equalize benefits by paying less to old
residents.

            

               Israeli voters ousted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He
was soundly defeated by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak after other candidates
quit so that their supporters could unite behind Barak against Netanyahu. The
spins: 1) Now the peace process can move forward again. 2) The election wasn't
between a hawk and a dove; it was between a dovish hawk (Netanyahu) and a
hawkish dove (Barak). 3) The election wasn't about the peace process; it was
about Israel's tribal domestic politics. 4) The election wasn't about issues;
it was about voters' belief that Netanyahu is slimy and untrustworthy. Check
the latest election results here .

            

               Charismatic is one race away from winning the Triple Crown.
Having won the Kentucky Derby at 31-1 odds (the longest long-shot winner since
1940), he surprised the bookmakers again by winning the Preakness at 8-1. A
victory in the June 5 Belmont Stakes would make him the first Triple Crown
winner in 20 years. He was such a disappointment earlier this year that his
owners tried to sell him for $62,500, but nobody bought him. His jockey in both
races, Chris Antley, is coming back from a bout with drug abuse in the late
'80s and a weight problem last year. The spins: 1) It's "a fairy tale ride" for
"the ex-claimer and the comeback kid." ("From Nag to Riches," says the
Washington Post .) 2) It's not such a fairy tale for the horse's trainer
or owners, who have already won numerous Triple Crown races. 3) The horse loves
being disrespected, and he strutted before and after the race to show up the
bookies.

            

               The Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings controversy flared up
again. Jefferson's descendants 1) invited some of Hemings' descendants
to attend an exclusive family gathering (the "Monticello Association"); 2)
voted down a motion to eject the Hemings clan from the gathering; 3) voted down
a proposal to make the Hemingses honorary members immediately; and 4) appointed
a committee to decide whether the Hemingses are real descendants or impostors
(despite demonstrated genetic links). The spin from the inclusive Jeffersons:
The rest of the family are racist snobs who won't acknowledge Jefferson had an
affair with a slave. The spin from the exclusive Jeffersons: "We're not
racists. We're snobs."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Shattered Illusions

            The humanitarian disaster
in Kosovo and the downing of a U.S. stealth bomber in Serbia dominated world
coverage of the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia Monday. The scale of "ethnic
cleansing" in response to the NATO air attacks caused widespread alarm in
Europe, and the loss of the U.S. Air Force F117-A attack plane was seen as
further evidence that an air war is not enough to secure NATO's objectives. In
Italy, the main western European destination for Albanian refugees, the
newspapers gave far greater prominence to the NATO estimate that more than
500,000 Albanian Kosovars have been forced to leave their homes since the Serb
repression began.

            Reports from the front
were emotive. La
Repubblica of Rome began its front-page report from Djankovic on the
Macedonia-Yugoslav border as follows: "Mass executions, psychological and
physical torture, rapes, devastation, sackings, and extermination camps. Kosovo
is living through a nightmare of the greatest ethnic cleansing that has ever
been attempted. Half a million people in flight, hundreds of dead, towns and
villages completely cut out of the world without water, electricity, telephone,
or food. A humanitarian catastrophe without precedent."

            Condemnations of the air war, in which the Italian air
force has now been ordered not to participate, were multiplying in the Italian
press. La Stampa
of Turin carried two front-page comments Monday demanding the air strikes be
ended. Boris Biancheri, a former Italian ambassador to Washington, wrote that
justice for the Albanian Kosovars could now only be restored "on a field of
rubble." He wrote, "Let's end this war. But let's be careful in future not to
promise what we are not willing to carry out, not to proclaim rights if we
don't have the strength, the will, or what might be called the recklessness to
punish those who have violated them."

            The other comment in
La Stampa , by Gianni Vattimo, said it would not be dishonorable to
admit--as in other cases like Vietnam and Iraq--than an error might have been
made. "Perhaps the best we can do now is to use the resources that would be
wasted in war in an agreed humanitarian action of evacuation and assistance to
the refugees," Vattimo said. While this would risk helping Slobodan Milosevic
to achieve his objectives, it was perhaps what the Kosovar refugees now dying
of hunger and cold would want us to do, he added. On the front page of
Corriere
della Sera , Alberto Ronchey supported the Economist 's conclusion
that "the West has embarked on one of its riskiest adventures since World War
II."

            The French press gave prominence to President Jacques
Chirac's efforts to get the Russians to bring Milosevic back the negotiating
table, and an editorial in Monday's Libération suggested this should be done by greatly
reducing the area of Kosovo destined to become autonomous under the Rambouillet
proposals. This could save the face of both Milosevic and NATO, he wrote. The
air war had already had the opposite of its intended effect, he added. It
revealed "a terrible impotence" against ethnic cleansing that risked becoming a
sinister example not only for the Balkans but for the rest of the world.

            The question of what
NATO, given the current Western resistance to the committal of ground troops,
would do if 10 or even 20 days of bombing failed to bow Milosevic was raised in
the Germany's Frankfurter
Allgemeine , and an editorial in El País of Madrid concluded that the crisis is getting ever
more complicated and that we are now in a "thick fog."

            The British papers continue to be generally more gung-ho
than those on the Continent. The Times of London, urging "an immediate intensification
of military activities aimed directly at the Yugoslav army" in Kosovo, said in
an editorial Monday that it is not so evident that the "Somalia Syndrome"
"really affects ordinary Americans as much as it distracts their nervous
elected representatives." It said that "the ironic outcome is a set of aircraft
[the stealth bombers] that are so dependent on extremely sophisticated computer
equipment designed to deceive the enemy that they are extraordinarily difficult
to fly."

            The Financial Times (which led Monday
with the news that BP Amoco, the United Kingdom's largest company, was about to
take over Atlantic Richfield of the United States in an all-stock deal worth
$25 billion) carried a front-page headline "America's illusions crash with
downed stealth" and said that TV images of the wreckage have shattered "the
illusion enjoyed by Americans for years that the US military's technologically
superlative weaponry meant it could destroy unseen enemies with little or no
danger to American life or property." The mass-circulation tabloid Sun
said Britain was committed to this war because "the Butcher of Belgrade cannot
be allowed to continue his massacre of the innocents," while the London
Evening Standard said that "having come so far, and having
got ourselves into this mess--and it is a terrible and bloody mess--we must see
it through."

            

               For more Kosovo coverage, click .
            

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Endgame Over

            

               Kosovo update: Serbia approved a peace deal proposed by the
European Union and Russia. The plan mandates a withdrawal of all Serb troops
from Kosovo, to be followed by a halt in NATO bombing and the return of the
dispossessed Kosovars under the supervision of a unified, allied-led
peacekeeping force. The Kosovo Liberation Army will be "demilitarized," and
Kosovo will eventually become autonomous but not independent. Click here to read the text of the agreement. NATO's
taciturn official reaction: Bombing won't stop until the Yugoslavs actually
withdraw. NATO's jubilant unofficial reaction: Victory is ours. The consensus
political spin from newspapers both and domestic : Milosevic's capitulation vindicates
President Clinton's bombing-only strategy. The counterspins to all the huzzahs:
1) The KLA will never agree to its own emasculation or abandon its goal of
Kosovar independence. 2) By bowing out now, Milosevic will retain his hold on
power.

            

               China suppressed commemoration of the 10 th anniversary of
the Tiananmen Square uprising. The police arrested dissidents,
disbanded a public memorial service, and excised all mention of the anniversary
from the media. The Chinese spin: President Jiang Zemin made no mention of the
date's significance but stressed the importance of "stability above all else."
To survey the current American spins on China, see this week's "" column by
David Plotz.

            

               Japan legalized the Pill. Health officials approved birth
control pills after several decades of debate. Women's groups asked why it has
taken so long. Answer 1: The Japanese government is hostile to women's
concerns. Answer 2: The Japanese government is hostile to foreign medicines in
general, even Tylenol isn't on the market yet. Answer 3: Then why was Viagra
legalized after only six months?

            

               NBA playoffs news: New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing will
miss the rest of the NBA playoffs because of a torn Achilles' tendon. The
Knicks and the Indiana Pacers have split the first two games of their NBA
semifinals series. The injury deprives Ewing of his last best chance to play
for the NBA championship, which he has never won during his 14-year career. The
sentimental spin: The Knicks can't afford to lose Ewing's fire and courage.
(He's been playing hurt for months.) The realistic spin: The Knicks are
younger, faster, and better without him. The cynical spin: This is the first
interesting story of the playoffs.

            

               South Africa held its second free elections. The unsurprising
news: The African National Congress will win handily and will appoint Thabo
Mbeki, the current deputy president and Nelson Mandela's successor-designate,
to the presidency. The more surprising news: The election was free of the
racial violence that accompanied the first all-race elections in 1994. Read the
Washington Post 's two-part overview of the new South Africa here .

            

               The Federal government will investigate the marketing of violent
entertainment to children. President Clinton said the study will
explore whether or not media companies intentionally lure young customers with
violent imagery. Why the study won't be useful: The First Amendment protects
marketers from being legally forced to tone down their pitches. Why the study
will be useful: It will give Al Gore a reply to Republican accusations that the
administration is soft on Hollywood.

            

               Merrill Lynch will introduce an online discount trading
operation . Traditional trades through Merrill currently cost up to
hundreds of dollars; the online fee will be $29.95. Previously, the brokerage
house had loudly vowed to stay off-line and boasted that its customers would
cough up fat commissions in exchange for handholding and top-flight financial
analysis. Spin 1) Merrill's move proves that the Internet is transforming Wall
Street. Spin 2) Merrill's late arrival proves how slowly the Internet is
transforming Wall Street. Spin 3) By the time the operation is up in December,
Merrill will already have lost out to scrappier, more nimble competitors. Spin
4) Merrill has already lost out to scrappier, more nimble competitors. Spin 5)
Merrill's brokers will revolt at the prospect of reduced commissions.

            

               Hackers hijacked several government Web sites--including those of the
Senate, White House, and FBI--freezing or replacing official content.
(Click here to see the hackers' mischief posted on the Senate
home page.) Reportedly, the vandalism was in retaliation for FBI raids on
suspected hackers. The hacker community's reaction to the press: vigorous
denial of wrongdoing. The reaction within hacking circles: vigorous jockeying
for credit.

            

               Russia will abandon its Mir space station because the Russian space
program is broke. Set on cruise control, Mir will eventually burn up
on re-entry. The Russian reaction: dejection and wounded pride. NASA's
reaction: relief that Mir won't drain financing from the international space
station, along with the usual orbital traffic worries about a large abandoned
satellite.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 218: &quot;You Smell Something?&quot;

            

               "It stinks in God's nostrils, and I know it stinks in the law's
nostrils, and it stinks to me." Who said this about what?
            

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 217)--"Unlisted":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        Up until Tuesday, Texan Robert White was No. 4
on a list of 3,600. What's the list and how did he get off
it?
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Contemporary plagues, according to the new Renewal Movement haggada. White,
who won a spot on the list two years ago in a Tikkun contest, was
dropped along with smog, imperialism, people who spit on the subway, and 972
others in an effort to make the Seder 'not quite so long, for a change.'
"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "The
Rickey Ray Rector memorial execution list for tough-on-crime governors seeking
to be president. Like Rector (of Arkansas), White is also brain-damaged, so he
gets the chair."-- Norm Oder
            

            "List
of 'worst-dressed Texans.' He got off the list by turning in his taffeta chaps
and getting leather ones instead."-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            
"People magazine's 'Sexiest Murderers Alive' list, which he got off of
by getting offed."-- Peter Carlin ( Tim Carvell had a similar
answer.)

            "People
who've sold George W. Bush cocaine, danced with him naked as a frat prank, or
got good and puking drunk with him in a whore house. Or, oh yeah, helped him
move a body. I'd say more, but let's wait until he wraps up the
nomination."-- Chris "Contact Your Pastor for a Copy of My Videotape That
Proves Everything" Kelly
            

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Stock cars, trailers,
racism, and guns--no, not the answers to the four questions in the Theme Seder
I attended last night, but what we know about Texas. We also know football, a
narrow yet passionately held definition of manhood, and a cynical and
ill-educated governor who'll do anything to achieve even higher office. But if
you put "Texas" in the question, you get Texas in the answer. On the other
hand: Had he given us the Dallas Cowboys but not given us beer can hats to wear
to the game ... Dayanu !

            
               Randy's Not
Technically Part of the Wrap-Up
            

            The day four cops are
arraigned on murder charges in the Amadou Diallo shooting, the mayor, with
characteristic sensitivity, holds a ceremony to rename a city plaza for a
policeman. That's the routine part. But a few hours later, in a frivolous bit
of mutual assistance that involves declaring it "Out-of-Towners Day" to promote
the just-remade Neil Simon movie--oh, yes, they're remaking Neil Simon
movies--who's at city hall giggling and simpering with the mayor: Steve Martin.
You know: the playwright, the New Yorker author, the ... you think of
the word.

            
               Final
Answer
            

            The list comprises people awaiting execution,
arranged by time spent on death row; White was removed from the list by lethal
injection.

            Robert White was on death
row from Aug. 26, 1974, for killing three people with a stolen machine gun and
stabbing a fourth, a gun collector. Only three men, two in Georgia and one in
Florida, have been awaiting execution longer. White's final words were: "Send
me to my maker, warden."

            
               A Personal Moment
With David Finkle
            

            I agree with your father
about the No Time for Sergeants saluting-toilets scene. I have always
loved it. I loved it when I read the novel; I loved it when I saw the Broadway
adaptation; I loved it when I saw the movie; I continue to love it. Truth is, I
have always enjoyed toilet humor. It's my curse and my triumph.

            
               April Is the
Cruelest Extra
            

            If you like your tax tips innovative, your
conspiracy theories baroque, and your anti-Semitism classic, you can't beat the
Posse Comitatus
Web site. Their take on Kosovo: "jewish orchestrated MURDER of White Christians
using the armed forces of the U.S and others under the cover of NATO!" Their
take on U.S. politics: "THE RACIST JEWISH MAFIA CONTROL AMERICA 100%!" And yes,
there is a transcript of the Anti-Defamation League hosted "Second Centennial
Meeting of the Learned Elders of Zion." Also impressive are the dozens of links
under "Jew
Watch: Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities &
Organizations."

            One subcategory, "Jews on Stage, Screen, Musicians,
Artists, Writers, etc.," lists hundreds of names along with capsule comments,
an odd melange of minutiae, misinformation, and admiration so befuddling it's
tough to tell if the list was assembled by -phobe or -philo Semites. I quote a
few without comment.

            

               Jakob Dylan--lead singer of The Wallflowers and son of the great Bob
Dylan

               Steve Lawrence--singer, skeptic, husband of Edie Gorme

               Keith Moon--The Who (Reputedly Jewish)

               Tony Parisi--of the Village People (cowboy)

               Elvis Presley--Jewish maternal grandparent

               Marcel Proust--Second most important writer (after Kafka) this century

               Robert Redford--Actor. Describes himself as "half Jewish"

               Mark Reizen--Great Russian bass, "probably the greatest bass voice Russia
ever produced"

               Joan Rivers--Comedian/writer/jeweler/actress

               Adam Sandler--A GUY THAT WRITES SONGS FOR COOL
JEWS!

            

            Surely it's assembled
with a goofy sort of ethnic pride, but once it's on the Posse Comitatus site,
does that matter?

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Bush ambition.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Spikey's Hypocrisy

            

               Editor's Note: Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton recounts the
events of Flytrap from the perspective of a reporter who in investigating the
story became a key player in it, since news that his article might appear
in Newsweek precipitated Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's hurried
investigation into President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. This
being a book by a player, we asked another player to review it. Lucianne
Goldberg is a literary agent in New York City who served as Linda Tripp's main
adviser and put many of the key figures involved in Flytrap in touch with one
another. She was also one of Isikoff's main
sources.
               
                  
               
               
To read Isikoff on Goldberg and Tripp, click .
            

            One of the many amazing
things about "Spikey" Isikoff's new book, Uncovering Clinton , is the
dexterity of its execution. It must be difficult to type and cover one's butt
at the same time.

            Throughout this
enthralling tale, one feels a "please don't hit me" cringe coming from the
author. Nonetheless, he plunges relentlessly ahead as he details his deep
involvement in the development of the story of Monicagate and the agonizingly
slow revelation of the squalid behavior of President Clinton. On virtually
every page he risks journalistic scrotal torque as he stiff-arms his reluctant
editors and sucks up to his sources, who he wants the reader to believe are as
duplicitous and sleazy as the president and his sock-puppet mouthpieces.

            He is particularly savage to the woman the media love to
hate (a cheap and easy shot in order to provide the book with a villain).
Without Linda Tripp and her dogged documentation of the Oval Office goings-on,
Isikoff would not have had the story of his lifetime and a book that will send
his kid to college. Isikoff and Linda were performing the same task, exposing
the president. Isikoff had a powerful weekly newsmagazine and all its
resources. Linda had a cheap tape recorder, a like-minded and determined friend
in New York, and an iron will. It is not sporting of Spikey to dump on his
source to provide cover for his own deep activity as a deep player in this
drama. [Click to read Isikoff's doubts about whether he should have used Tripp
as a source, from Pages 356-57.]

            I knew of Michael Isikoff
long before I met him. He was one of my heroes, for quitting his job at the
Washington Post when his editors would not publish his reporting on
Paula Jones. When I heard he had gone to Newsweek I was saddened, for to
me that meant the end of the "Bimbo Beat" for Isikoff. The editors at
Newsweek would be no different from his faint-hearted Clinton-loving
editors at the Post . No one, in those days, wanted to publish what they
all knew--that Clinton had a long history of abusing women and threatening
people to cover it up.

            Then, suddenly, news--or, more correctly, gossip items
concerning Kathleen Willey's Oval Office gropes--began to appear, and I saw
that the Sex Beat Columbo was on the job again. In those items a name I had all
but forgotten cropped up again: Linda R. Tripp. She was telling a story I had
heard before in a book proposal she submitted to my literary agency in l996.
Subsequently, she had withdrawn the project and we parted company, a common
occurrence in the publishing business. In August of l997, Tripp was back on the
phone. She needed help. Michael Isikoff was "hounding" her about what she knew
about Kathleen Willey. Linda wanted to talk to him, but not alone. In that
first phone conversation I learned that she now had far more damaging
information about the president. Would I help her get the story out through
Isikoff and Newsweek ? Long a defender of the women I knew Clinton had
abused, most particularly Gennifer Flowers, I jumped at the chance to be
involved.

            Isikoff makes much in
this enthralling tale of the fact that I "secretly" taped those first calls
from Linda and how we "conspired" not only to "overthrow" Clinton but also to
arrange a "big-bucks book deal." A book was discussed in the first calls. I
only knew her as a possible author, and for 25 years I have looked at
everything and everyone that passes through my life as a possible book. As
Linda's tale quickly developed, talk of doing a book became a moot point that I
can say faded to the vanishing point. Note to the Irony Police: Linda never
gave me a word on paper regarding Monica and I am at this moment reviewing
Michael Isikoff's "big-bucks book." Note to anyone who calls me after closing
time: Expect to be taped. It's legal and it saves me pawing around on my night
table for paper and a pen. [Click for Isikoff's account of the first call from
Tripp to Goldberg about Monica Lewinsky on Pages 190-91.]

            A few weeks after that fateful call from Linda, I met the
crumpled, rumpled, and I was soon to learn, occasionally hysterical Isikoff. I
liked him. He had no small talk, he barely smiled, his shirt was out, his tie
was down, and he accepted a beer. At that meeting Linda produced her first two
phone tapes of Monica keening about her "soul mate" the president, and she
offered to play them for the reporter. He declined. In Uncovering
Clinton he protests a bit much on this point, for he has been criticized by
less biased observers than me. He claims he didn't want to become a part of the
story. Jeepers! I wish I had known that: I wouldn't have spent countless hours
on the phone with him after that meeting, keeping him up to speed as we worked
throughout the fall to expose the goings-on in the Oval Office. My theory, at
the time and now, is that Isikoff had a car downstairs that night to take him
to a TV appearance. I mean, first things first. [Click for Isikoff's
explanation of his abrupt departure that evening on Pages 205-06.]

            Further, he waits until Page 348, upon learning that
Revlon had withdrawn its offer of a job for Monica, to go all Sally Fields on
us and exclaim, "What do you know? It's true. It's really true."

            Huh?

            
Not once in all the often breathless
conversations I had with Isikoff over those weeks did I doubt for a minute that
he believed Linda's story and the facts I was relaying to him regarding her
ongoing documentation. But I should have paid closer attention. Right there on
Page 302, he explains. In his frantic manipulating to get hold of Linda's tapes
of Monica, he phoned me in New York and remembers it as follows:

            

               You've
got to get Moody [Linda's lawyer] to let me listen to those tapes, I shouted at
Goldberg. You've got to get Tripp to give him the go-ahead. You don't
understand how important this is. Without that, if I can't write that there is
compelling evidence backing up Tripp's allegations, this is going to blow up in
your face--and Tripp's. ...

               That, at any rate, was
what I was telling them. It is the way reporters operate: We threaten, we
cajole, we feign sympathy. But the truth for me was slightly different:
Whatever was on those tapes, listening to them, and quoting them, would make
this a much more compelling and dramatic story for Newsweek .

            

            Ah, Spikey, your sudden burst of candor, like a summer
squall, comes without warning. What he meant, of course, was that he could put
his hands back on the keyboard. His butt was covered.

            All along, Michael
Isikoff was a player in this story, and he has written a player's book. That is
what makes it so engrossing. He guarded the story with the ferocity of a mother
tiger hovering over the last shard of an impala's bloody haunch. Never mind
that a wily Internet jackal, in the form of Matt Drudge, leapt out of the
jungle of cyberspace and ran off with a juicy chunk of Spikey's hard-won meal.
The bulk of it still belongs to Isikoff. He worked for it, he earned it, and in
Uncovering Clinton he has found a medium where he can't suffer the fate
that gave him his nickname.

            It is a riveting tale written by someone who gave it
texture as it unfolded, and I doubt that any reviewer save this one will take
him to task for his ingratitude to Linda Tripp. She is an easy target. But it
does seem a tad mingy for someone as talented and resourceful as Isikoff to
take such cheap shots at the messenger.

            Isikoff ends Uncovering Clinton with a quote
of mine made during a phone call at the end of the whole ordeal. He tells me
that Clinton thinks we are scum. I reply, "Well, we are scum. If anyone ever
did to me what we did to him, I would hate them too."

            Isikoff writes, "When
that happens ... I will plan to be there, watching, listening and taking
notes."

            Spikey, tell the car you'll be right down. Neither Linda
Tripp nor I nor the handful of dedicated Americans who made up the
truth-tellers of Hillary's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy will ever be elected
president and proclaim that theirs will be the most ethical administration in
history. None of us will ever take a manipulative young intern into the Oval
Office bathroom and have her perform sex acts about which we will force an
entire Cabinet to lie.

            When, not if, the next
Linda Tripp comes to me with an amazing story that I know in my heart and gut
is true, I will simply bypass the agonizing mainstream media, the doubting
Thomases and whiners, and go directly to Matt Drudge.

            
               To read the
passages from Uncovering Clinton to which Goldberg refers, click
.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Things Fall Apart

            "All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea
rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." Perhaps Herman Melville was
not covering the removal of Pamela Anderson's breast implants when he wrote
that line, but collapse is everywhere in the tabloid world this month, from
celebrity lives, to health, to marriages, and even to body parts.

            Former sitcom child actress Dana Plato, 34, died
last weekend of what is being described as an accidental overdose of
prescription drugs, one day after declaring on Howard Stern's radio show that
she had been sober for a decade. The tabloids had been anticipating her death
for years, the National Enquirer as recently as a few months ago. Hers
was a Hollywood Babylon life with arrests for robbery and for forging
prescriptions for Valium--singer Wayne Newton bailed her out of jail on the
latter charge. Plato starred on the television show Diff'rent Strokes ,
which went off the air 13 years ago. Both the New York Daily News and
the New York Post say the show had a "curse," as Plato's two child
co-stars, Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges, have each found little work, but
trouble with the law, since the show ended.

            This week the
Enquirer continues to assert its Medusa-in-reverse powers. In Greek
mythology, mortals who looked upon Medusa's face were turned to stone. In the
case of the tabs, they put ailing celebrities on the cover in the apparent hope
of predicting a star's imminent demise. According to the Enquirer ,
former Tonight show host Johnny Carson is suffering from irreversible
lung disease and depression, which are complicating his recovery from a recent
heart attack. The New York Daily News reports that NBC, Carson's former
employer, is thoughtfully filming interviews with the TV legend's friends. A
video get-well greeting? No, they're preparing his obit.

            In their coverage of a recent on-set mishap involving
Leonardo DiCaprio, the tabs seem to be longing for another James Dean--a young
star who dies at the height of his beauty and fame. While filming a scene on
board a boat for his next movie, The Beach , in Thailand, it seems that
the weather turned treacherous. The Star reports that DiCaprio and his
co-star abandoned the boat, which promptly sank, for a rescue ship. But the
rescue ship's engines malfunctioned and DiCaprio and the others were told to
jump overboard and wait for yet another rescue vessel. Perhaps imagining the
tabloid coverage of the death by drowning of the star of Titanic was
what gave Leo the strength to keep his head above water until help arrived.

            While not in mortal
danger, many celebrities seem to be having trouble staying conscious this
month. The Enquirer reports that during a food fight scene on the set of
his latest movie, actor Ben Affleck slipped on mashed potatoes, whacked his
head on a table, and was knocked senseless. Perhaps imagining the tabloid
coverage of such an ignominious demise, Affleck recovered without incident. And
at his 73 rd birthday party, the Enquirer says, Hugh Hefner,
while dancing with girlfriends Mandy, Sandy, and Brande, collapsed and had to
be carried to his bedroom. In this case, it's safe to assume that the aged
playboy was able to make a quick recovery because he realized that when he
makes his final exit, he doesn't want to be carried to bed, he wants to be
there already.

            Both actor Mickey Rourke and singer Michael Jackson were
taken to emergency rooms--Jackson because he felt "unable to breathe" and
Rourke because he was "dizzy," according to the Globe . The publication
does not report if these attacks were precipitated by the men reviewing the
state of their careers. After sitting in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai for
two hours, Rourke began to feel better. His publicist blames the episode on
that old standby: "an allergic reaction to some cough syrup." Jackson was given
a tranquilizer and diagnosed with sleep apnea. But the Globe also
alleges he has been distraught over rumors that he's a child molester. Perhaps
it's just a coincidence that in the preceding issue, the Globe reported
on the friendship Jackson has developed with two South African brothers, ages
13 and 11. Jackson met the boys two years ago when he was visiting the country
and they asked for his autograph. Since then he's attended the bar mitzvah of
the elder and taken them both to a water park. In defending the relationship
between the singer and her sons, the mother of the two offers the quote of the
month, "We're very protective parents and if we had any suspicions about his
motives, we wouldn't be friends with him. ... He is a wonderful person who is
so normal."

            Now that the two-year
marriage of actress Brooke Shields and tennis player Andre Agassi has
disintegrated, it's possible to look back and see the end was coming. In
December she met "hunky Hollywood hotshot" Chris Henchy, a comedy writer and
producer who wrote a comic speech for her to deliver in Washington, reports the
Enquirer . Soon afterward, the two were violating taboo by taking Tae Bo
classes together. But it's the Globe that shows the marriage was doomed.
It reprints a letter Agassi paid to have published in the program for the
Golden Globe awards when Shields was a nominee. He wrote, "It is wonderful just
to watch you when you don't even know that I'm looking, and to count how many
times you smile." How humiliating for Shields to know that everyone who read
that thought in unison, "or watch as you scratch your private parts." He
miscalculated even more when he added, "In all of my excitement of growing old
with you, I will never forget this day." Andre, Andre, Andre, no one in
Hollywood is excited about growing old.

            Also over is the 13-year marriage of singer Diana Ross to
Scandinavian shipping magnate Arne Naess, who is "worth at least $700 million,"
according to the Globe . You know there's no hope of reconciliation when
your husband blurts out the news of your impending divorce on Good Evening
Norway . And according to the Enquirer , the marriage of actor Nicolas
Cage and actress Patricia Arquette is kaput. But how would anyone know? The
publication reports that the two have always maintained separate residences and
that "[f]or most of the marriage, Nic was either off making a movie or off with
another woman."

            Finally, the collapse of an era--or is it? Yes,
Pamela Anderson has had her 36DD breast implants removed, returning her to a
36C, according to the Enquirer . They quote Anderson's reason for the
reduction of the asteroid-sized breasts: "I was getting self-conscious about
it." (But, Pam, isn't having people stare at your chest the reason you get
implants like that in the first place?) The Star reports that Anderson
has deflated from 36D to 34C and says the reason for the reduction was that the
silicone sacs, which the publication says weighed 1 1/2 pounds each, were
giving her back pain. The Globe agrees the actress has gone from 36D to
34C but reports that the implants weighed a pound each. The publication also
says that Anderson's assertion that she's all natural now is suspect. A
"friend" of the actress told the Globe , "Pam got new implants called
'shapers.' Doctors had to do something because she had such big implants that
when they were removed, her breasts would have sagged."

            The attention caused by Anderson's surgery has
supposedly inspired Jenny McCarthy and Demi Moore to consider having their
implants removed, according to the Enquirer and the Star ,
respectively. They may want to consult an astrophysicist as well as a plastic
surgeon. Such a sudden collapse of so much mammary matter could possibly result
in some kind of Hollywood black hole. Not everyone is deflating however.
Besides the widely reported increase in the bust-line of teen singing star
Britney Spears, Gwyneth Paltrow is planning an expansion, reports the
Star . The possible surgery was prompted by "fashion critics [comments]
on her lack of cleavage in her pink Oscar dress." Gwyneth, there's a cheap,
painless alternative: Take the dress to the dry cleaner and have it
altered.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Sunday

            To hear
Rita Dove read "Sunday," click .

            Their father was a hunting man.

            Each spring the Easter rabbit sprung open

            above the bathroom sink, drip slowed

            by the split pink pods of its ears

            to an intravenous trickle.

            There was the occasional deer,

            though he had no particular taste

            for venison--too stringy, he said,

            but made mother smoke it up just in case,

            all four haunches and the
ribs.

            Summer always ended with a catfish

            large as a grown man's thigh

            severed at the hip, thrashing

            in a tin washtub: a mean fish, a fish

            who knew the world was to be endured

            between mud and the
shining hook.

            He avoided easy quarry: possum

            and squirrel, complacent carp.

            He wouldn't be caught dead

            bagging coon; coon, he said,

            was fickle meat--tasted like

            chicken one night, the next like

            poor man's lobster. He'd never admit

            being reduced to eating coon,

            to be called out of his name

            and into that
cartoon.

            It's not surprising they could eat the mess

            he made of their playground: They watched

            the October hog gutted with grim fury,

            a kind of love gone wrong, but oh

            they adored each whiskery hock, each

            ham slice brushed
subterranean green.

            They were eating his misery

            like bad medicine meant to help them

            grow. They would have done anything

            not to see his hand jerk like that,

            his belt hissing through the loops and

            around that fist working inside the coils

            like an animal gnawing, an animal

            who knows freedom's worth anything

            you need to leave behind to get to it--

            even your own flesh and blood.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am an American who lives in Wales, and I have
a problem with geographically challenged American friends who confuse England
(just a part of the whole) and the United Kingdom, and are constantly sending
mail addressed to me in Wales, England--instead of Wales, U.K.
            

            
               Should I make a pest
of myself and keep telling my friends that I live in Wales, not England, or
should I just shrug it off?
            

            

               --Adopted Welshman
            

            Dear Ad,

            Ah yes, a gray matter issue. But you have come to
the right person. A geographically challenged American, that is. (Prudie thinks
she was in the bathroom when other people learned these things in grade
school.)

            In any case, speaking as
one who would be on the receiving end of your "pestering," by all means offer
the mini-education. Sending mail--and wanting it to arrive--makes your little
lesson one with actual value. If, however, you find yourself having to tell the
same person more than once, then shrug it off ... and Prudie hopes you
will be compassionate.

            
--Prudie, geographically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Just a quick note of support for your reply to
"" regarding forms of address. I think your first instinct, that "children
should address adults in the manner in which the adults ask to be addressed,"
is absolutely dead on.
            

            
               Not only as a child, but even now--well into my
adulthood--this rule has served me well. Not only do people appreciate my
respect for their preferences, but I also don't have to choose to whom to cater
in mixed situations. It is one of those rare cases in which I can please
everyone. Best of all, though, I avoid the hubris of pushing my ideas of
appropriate formality on others, even those who agree with me.
            

            
               Now I just wish more
forms would allow me to omit Mr. from my name ...
            

            

               --Accommodating in Seattle
            

            Dear Ac,

            Prudie thanks you for the
vote of confidence, and doubly so because she was taken to task by some readers
who disagreed. We are kindred in another way, as well. Prudie just likes to use
her first and last name and would happily ditch the Ms. or the Mrs. or the
Miss.

            
--Prudie, gratefully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Does a bridesmaid
have to give the future bride a gift for every shower given?
            

            

               --The Professor
            

            Dear Prof,

            Certainly not. Some brides have so many people
entertaining for them that it would seem to be constantly "raining" luncheons
and teas--and etiquette calls for the attendants to be invited to every such
event.

            The bridesmaids may skip
giving shower presents, unless they simply feel they'd like to. Or a token gift
would be appropriate. And since Prudie is living in America in 1999, a small
addendum about those brides who've previously been up at bat. Emily Post wrote
this: "Those who attended a shower for the bride before she was married the
first time should not be invited to a second shower unless they are very close
relatives or very dear friends who would want to be present."

            
--Prudie, graciously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               We got to be friends with our neighbors, with
whom we had much in common. We shared tools, went to see Bob Dylan together,
cared for each other's cats while away on trips. They borrowed a bottle of wine
while we were gone, and they were doing the cat thing for us. It was not a wine
that was known to them (i.e., they didn't know if it was a gift, or special in
some other way). But they took it anyway, drank it, and told us about it as
soon as we returned. It was not, in fact, a special or expensive bottle of wine
but, not to belabor the point, they didn't know that. They also didn't replace
it in a timely fashion. When we let them know we weren't happy with the whole
thing, they were offended and have since completely severed the
friendship.
            

            
               What do you think about taking something like
this from someone's home while you're doing them a favor? If it had been a Bud
or two from the fridge we wouldn't have given it a second thought. But a bottle
of wine that may have been irreplaceable?
            

            
               Thanks,
            

            

               --Sad in Philly
            

            Dear Sad,

            First, they told you, and second, they failed to
replace it. This suggests they view things differently than you two, and their
idea of correct behavior is different from yours. There is a chance that, by
their lights, they assumed that had you been home you would have "lent" them
the wine.

            Prudie agrees with you that this was not first-rate
behavior. It could be, though, that they just didn't know any better. Should
you feel generous and lonesome for the friendship, you might make the first
move and say you wish to let bygones be bygones because the relationship was
important to you. I mean, you all went to see Bob Dylan together!

            Their severing ties
bespeaks their embarrassment at having made a social misstep and perhaps anger
that you wouldn't cut them some slack. So ... Prudie recommends that you patch
it up if you wish the whole thing had never happened. And she is certain
if relations are repaired that the neighbs will never again help themselves to
anything in your house.

            --Prudie, soothingly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Formula for Disaster 

            The 
                  Observer
                of London pulled no punches in its assessment of the first 11 days of the Kosovo campaign,
describing them as a "fiasco" in an editorial Sunday. "At this stage Nato
confronts the real possibility that Milosevic may end up with de facto control
of an ethnically cleansed Kosovo while Nato takes responsibility for a million
or more refugees. Nato would have lost before the challenge of a minor
dictator. This cannot be allowed. To lose would be to validate and entrench
Milosevic, dangerously strengthening militant Slav nationalism in both Serbia
and Russia. It would be a betrayal of more than a million people in Kosovo
whose sole crime is their race. The refugee crisis would destabilise Macedonia
and Albania. Nato would be exposed as a sham, and its military threat no more
than posturing. The security of the West and the central prop of the western
alliance would be humiliated," the paper said.

            Attacking NATO's lack of
commitment, the Observer opined that "[s]o far Nato has prosecuted the
war as if its aim was no more than to give Milosevic a salutary smack, with the
Americans in particular rating the risk of one American military life before
the lives of the thousands of civilians whose condition is the explicit reason
for the intervention. ... Nato has to raise its game, with all that implies
both in terms of acting on the ground militarily and of relieving the refugee
crisis." Surmising that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is reluctant to
pressure President Clinton to step up the U.S. commitment, the paper concluded
that "if Blair wants to be a successful war leader, like Churchill and
Thatcher, he must learn to be as ruthless."

            The 
                  Sunday Times
                of London agreed that NATO is "at risk of
being humiliated" and suggested that the only opportunity for success is the
use of ground troops. "The only way to ensure victory is for there to be
massive intervention. ... Nato will have to guarantee Kosovo's independence,
making it in effect a protectorate. The Serbs will undoubtedly challenge this
violation of what they regard as their heartland. It will be a form of peace
and justice, but it will be fragile. The West must accept that it is going to
be there for a very long time." While Spain's 
                  El Mundo
                editorialized that "Europe Must Mobilize To Help the Refugees,"
Dawn Neeson articulated a much less charitable position in Britain's
mass-circulation tabloid Daily Star : "It's hard not to be moved by the
pictures of Kosovan refugees streaming out of the war zone, especially the
terrified kids. But have you spared a thought as to where they'll end up? Make
no mistake, they're headed here. Soon you won't be able to move for
head-scarfed women clutching wide-eyed babies and holding out their hands in
your direction. Of course, the majority have been through a hell we can only
imagine, but does that mean we have to swamp our already over-burdened welfare
state?"

            An op-ed piece in the liberal Israeli daily
Ha'aretz recommended a return to the "Tito model" for the former
Yugoslavia. Columnist Teddy Preuss concluded that a "solution will only be
found if the two sides will agree to implement the one and only model that can
prevent a Balkan holocaust, the model created by Yugoslavia's great president,
which assured 40 years of peace in the whole of the Balkans: autonomous
province status for Kosovo." Nevertheless, even Preuss was pessimistic that
such an outcome would occur since "[c]ommon sense and the ability to see all
sides are qualities as plentiful in the Balkans, unfortunately, as they are in
the Middle East " In an exclusive interview with Canada's 
                  Globe and
Mail
               , Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who is due to arrive in
the United States Tuesday, said, in regard to the Kosovo conflict, that while
China respects human rights, "we do not think that we can possibly disregard
the sovereignty of a country in the world. And if military interventionism is
to be allowed in all the internal matters like a question of human rights of
any country, that will open a very bad precedent in the world." Zhu stressed
that China expects the same theory of nonintervention to apply to the situation
in Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province that must ultimately be
returned to Beijing's control.

            
Canada welcomed a new territory April 1 as
Nunavut was carved from the eastern part of the Northwest Territories. In an
editorial Saturday, the Globe and Mail said,
"At a time when the international scene offers us too many horrific images of
the intolerance and bullying that can govern relations between regions and
ethnic groups, Canada is proving once again that intelligence and innovation,
when applied with good will, can almost always permit the accommodation of
difference." The population of the new territory is 85 percent Inuit, and in
the view of the Globe and Mail , "This alone marks an important step
forward in relations between native and non-native in this country,
guaranteeing, for instance, that when federal, provincial and territorial
leaders meet, there will always be someone speaking for an aboriginal majority
somewhere in the country." Writing in the conservative 
                  National Post
                of
Cananda, David Frum was less optimistic. He theorized that the territory's reliance on federal money from
Ottawa will lead to misgovernment. "Nunavut will be misgoverned not because the
people in charge are Inuit, but because the territory has adopted the same
system of governance as Boss Tweed's New York [or] Marion Barry's Washington,
D.C. ... Revenue from outside sources minus an effective opposition plus a
co-opted population is a formula for disaster, regardless of whether the
government is controlled by Inuit, whites, or South Sea Islanders."

             

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 253: &quot;Pesca Milagrosa&quot;

            
               "It is terrible
that something so frightening should be given the name of something so pure and
beautiful," says Luz Marlene Sierra Mayorga, a Bogotá engineer, referring to
"miraculous fishing"--which is what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 252)--"Euphemism?":
            

            
               "We want to be
able to land in grandma's backyard at night, in thick fog, without hitting the
clothesline," says Jack Allison, an engineer on the project. What
project?
            

            

               
                  (This question courtesy of Jill Pope.)
               
            

            "Eww.
Just eww."-- Floyd Elliot
            

            "An
improved smart bomb, now with added bleach and a touch of lemon!"-- William
Considine
            

            
"Getting grandpa back home after the Shriners' parade."-- Ellen Macleay
( Liz Mason had a similar answer.)

            "A
very ambitious 'meals-on-wings' program."-- Herb Terns
            

            "Is
this another one of those commercials to convince women they can drive sport
utility vehicles? 'Cause, like, I want a Miata."-- Alison Rogers
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Based on News Quiz
responses, here's what we know about the world: NATO is dangerously inept, as
is Amtrack, as is American Airlines, as are the elderly when attempting to
sustain an erotic life. And incompetence is funny. Something falls on someone's
head. The hose doesn't work, then it does, then it squirts somebody in the
face. Someone tries to build something, and it collapses in a heap of rubble.
It's the myth of Sisyphus played for laughs: When the rock rolls back down the
hill, it crushes that poor bastard's toes. Of course it all depends on whose
toe we're talking about. As Mel Brooks observed, if you break your back, that's
comedy; if I break a nail, that's tragedy; if Henry Kissinger breaks his back,
that's justice. I paraphrase, of course, and no doubt incompetently.

            
               Futurific
Answer
            

            It's that flying car Popular Science has
been putting on the cover every year since 1939, only this time it's really,
really about to happen, says the BBC.

            "Earlier flying cars were simply conventional
vehicles with wings bolted on top, which had to be dismantled before they could
run on roads. But Paul Moller's Skycar M400 operates with four pairs of engines
with power fans that simply lift the car into the air.

            "Moller, a former engineering professor at the
University of California at Davis, has been working on the technology for a
flying car since 1963. His company, Moller International, has spent $100m
developing the flying car, which he calls a volantor.

            "The car would have to take off from what Moller
calls a vertiport. Noise levels and safety risks make it impractical to take
off in the middle of the street, but he believes that in the future vertiports
could be as common as corner shops.

            "The M400 will not be cheap. The first models will
cost up to a $1m, but Moller believes that a mass-produced model could cost as
little as $60,000. And the flying car is not easy on petrol either. It does
only 8km per liter."

            Next up:
superintelligent dogs that farm the ocean floor ... on Neptune!

            
               Entrepreneurial
Extra
            

            When I need shampoo or a stereo or a piece of heavy
industrial equipment, I can read up or ask a professional, but what I really
wonder is: What sort of earthmover do celebrities recommend?

            That's the idea behind endorsement.com, a Web site
that would list the product preferences of every celebrity in America. Click
Jenna Elfman (kooky star of television's Dharma and Greg ), scroll
through her categories--health and beauty aids, home electronics, medical and
dental, non-ferrous metals--click heavy equipment , click earth moving
machinery , click backhoe , and discover that Jenna is nuts about
Caterpillar. In seconds, I've got some pretty savvy advice. And Jenna? For each
person who seeks her advice she's paid a modest fee, let's say $3. Not much, is
it? But with millions of people getting Jenna's tips on billions of purchases,
she's going to become one wealthy celebrity endorser.

            Why should a corporation gamble millions on a
Michael Jordan endorsement deal when they can't be sure how influential he
really is, particularly in retirement? What if he goes nuts one day and slaps
the hell out an orphan, or even better, Trent Lott? Just goes after him with a
2-by-4. That might discourage people from seeking his advice on refreshing
noncarbontated beverages or inexpensive long-distance services. But with
endorsement.com, Mike gets paid only when someone seeks his advice. It's
risk-free.

            And everyone is a potential celebrity. Many people
go to my Aunt Rose for medical advice. (Hint: She loves those new gel caps, so
easy to swallow!) If she were always available online instead of just in the
social room after Shabbat services, she could help more people and, at $3 an
endorsement, help herself.

            Interested investors can
contact me through this magazine.

            
               This I Do for Me,
Tim Carvell, Extra
            

            Participants are still
welcome to offer a sentence from an actual publication that best conveys
ludicrously conspicuous consumption in 1999. Submissions due by noon ET,
Monday, June 7.

            
               Headline
Haiku
            

            Midlife hits Lincoln
Center
Hamptons feud and fret
and playing with pain
walk in clients' shoes

            
               New York Times , June 1, 1999

            
               --Lois C.
Ambash
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            American Airlines.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 243: &quot;A Crush on You&quot;

            
               "All great leaders
since Moses have known that feared enemies must be crushed completely." Who
served up this baloney on Sunday, to inspire whom, to do what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 242)--"Reading Is Fundamentalism":
            

            

               
                  Kicking off a $7 million ad campaign, gospel singers, children,
and evangelists poured out of a giant copy of The Book , an updated,
"cool" version of the Bible. But, says The Book 's promoter,
televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson, "Our goal is not
to sell Bibles. It is to make Bible-reading cool and American." Participants
are invited to devise other ways to achieve that goal.
               
            

            "The
cover of every Bible to bear the sacred inscription 'As seen on TV!'
"-- Barry Crimmins
            

            "Add a
few verses to Revelations describing how to make a pipe bomb."-- Paul
Tullis
            

            
"Clarify that all references to the Holy Trinity are meant to indicate Alan
Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers."-- David Duncan
            

            "Find:
'Shalt not.' Replace with: 'Shalt.' Replace all."-- Dale Shuger
            

            "Sin,
schmin: It's kegger time!"-- Tim Carvell
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            My favorite detail is
the TV commercial where they pour out of the giant Bible. That's $7 million
worth of cool right there. From Gulliver's Travels to my scout troop's
walk through the Heart Room at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, grotesque
shifts in scale have always been funny, particularly when a little thing is
made big enough to walk into. Amusing roadside Americana is basically a bad
restaurant in the shape of a big chicken. (With an added dash of cruelty--you
sit in a chicken and eat a chicken. Kind of rubbing it in.) The converse,
however, is not true: A big thing made tiny is not comic; it's cute, a
dollhouse, a teddy bear, a bonny wee Boris Yeltsin no bigger than your
thumb--he can ride to the Duma on the back of a mouse, if he's not too drunk.
The distinction blurs a bit in Fantastic Voyage , the movie where Raquel
Welch was part of a medical team shrunk to microscopic size and injected into
the body of some guy with a brain tumor. It's more scary than funny, especially
to the brain tumor guy when he finds out that his chief surgeon is Raquel
Welch.

            
               Amen
Answer
            

            Doug Knox, of publisher Tynedale House, says,
"The Book looks friendlier than your typical leather Bible. It's got a
cool title, contemporary package design and clear-reading, single-column
type."

            The leather Bible--isn't
that by de Sade?

            
               Small Problem
Follow-Up
            

            On Monday an ad for yet
another penile
enlargement clinic ran in the New York Times . I believe the masthead
now displays the slogan "The newspaper of record and small penises."

            
               Movies That Don't
Feature Adam Sandler but Should Extra
            

            Title: Done That ... Changed My Ways .

            Produced by: An "Emmy Award producer."

            Produced for: SEX RESPECT: The world's leading
abstinence education program

            Official Summary:

            
               This heart
warming true story will reach teens with two powerful messages: first, save sex
for marriage; secondly, if you have made the mistake of engaging in pre-marital
sex, you can change your ways. The film features Corey Edelman, lead guitarist
for the popular band NIV, and his fiancé Vorey Secor, a full time student.
Corey's goal was to remain a virgin and save sex for marriage. In fact, he
graduated from high school never kissing a girl or drinking alcohol. But a
snowboarding accident that nearly killed his mentor sent Corey into
rebelliousness. At a party where he got drunk, Corey lost his gift of virginity
to a girl he didn't even know. Vorey had a different past. She became sexually
active at 13, and engaged in a heart breaking cycle of sexual activity. Both,
who hated what they did, resolved to change their ways by embracing SECONDARY
VIRGINITY ... the practice where teens stop engaging in pre-marital sex, and
wait until marriage. One teen remarked, "I never understood Secondary Virginity
until I saw this film. Corey's really cool, and I related to him."
            

            
               Unanswered
Questions
            

            

               What kind of mentor rides a snowboard? Some kind
of frozen Yoda?

               What kind of parents name a daughter "Vorey"?

               If you were named "Vorey," wouldn't it compound your problems to marry
someone named "Corey." (Hi, we're Corey and Vorey!)

               Secondary Virginity--isn't that some appalling
operation the Taliban forces on women as an alternative to being stoned to
death?

            

            
               Cool Movie
Merchandise
            

            T-shirt--Don't Be Dips, Stop at the Lips, $15.

            Button--Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date, $1.

            Sticker--I'm Worth
Waiting For, $5.

            
               T-Shirt Slogan
They Don't Use, but Should
            

            Front: "I'm never having sex ... "

            Back: "... with Adam
Sandler."

            Web site: http://www.sexrespect.com/default2.html

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Replace prayer and salvation with a vulgar slogan
and a cheap giveaway.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Jews vs. Spooks

            President Clinton has made
a career of wriggling out of problems of his own making, but he may finally
have trapped himself. During last year's Wye peace talks, Clinton apparently
hinted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would free
convicted spy Jonathan Pollard--now serving a life sentence--if Israel signed
the peace deal. After CIA Director George Tenet protested, Clinton backed off
slightly, agreeing only to reconsider Pollard's clemency in exchange for
Netanyahu's signature.

            Clinton was expected to
announce in January whether he would free Pollard. That month passed with no
announcement. Another six weeks have come and gone and still there is no
decision in sight. "The president will decide when he decides," says National
Security Council spokesman P.J. Crowley.

            It's no wonder Clinton is so dilatory: Pollard presents a
dilemma with no satisfactory political solution: The entire national security
apparatus, from Tenet to the FBI to the Defense Department to the State
Department to the heads of House and Senate intelligence committees, adamantly
opposes Pollard's release. And virtually the entire American Jewish community
favors it. The spooks or the Jews: Which should he choose?

            Clinton finds himself in
this swamp because the dynamics of the case have vastly changed during the past
few years. A civilian Navy intelligence analyst, Pollard was arrested in 1985
and quickly pleaded guilty to selling secrets to Israel. In 1984-85, he had
given 500,000 or more pages of highly classified documents to his Israeli
handlers. In the plea agreement, prosecutors promised not to seek a life
sentence, but the judge, after reading a secret account of the damage Pollard
had done, sentenced him to life anyway.

            Until recently, Pollard's cause had been championed mostly
by a small, vocal, paranoid, inflammatory, dishonest group of supporters,
principally extremely pro-Israel, right-wing American Jewish groups. Their
primary claims are that: 1) Pollard did no real harm to national security; 2)
he was well intentioned in spying for our friend Israel; 3) he was unfairly
deprived of a trial; 4) he never saw the evidence against him; and 5) the
government broke his plea agreement by asking for a life sentence.

            All these assertions,
which are made incessantly and at high volume, are false. Pollard did enormous
damage to U.S. national security, thoroughly compromising
intelligence-gathering in the Middle East and elsewhere (more on this below).
He also spied (or tried to) for several countries besides Israel. He had no
trial because he chose to plead guilty. He did see the evidence
against him, and so on. (Pollard's perfervid supporters repeat these canards
despite all evidence: Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist
Organization of America, told me that prosecutors "promised they would be very
lenient on him ... then asked for a life sentence." In fact, prosecutors told
Pollard they would ask for a "substantial" sentence and then didn't ask
for a life sentence.)

            Pollard devotees also demagogically appeal to Jewish
sentiment. They liken the "Pollard Affair" to the Dreyfus Affair, and assert
that Pollard was sentenced to life because he is Jewish. They claim that
Pollard's arrest caused an "outpouring of Jewish bloodletting" in national
security agencies, "quoting" top national security officials as saying they
don't need any more "Jew-boys like Pollard." They have portrayed anti-Pollard
Jewish groups as lapdogs trying to ingratiate themselves with mainstream
America.

            As long as these kooks
were Pollard's principal support, it was easy for Presidents Bush and Clinton
to ignore him. But then Pollard got lucky. In the early '90s, the Israeli
government, which had distanced itself from Pollard, embraced him. And during
the past three years, mainstream Jewish groups have started coming around.
Almost every significant Jewish organization now supports Pollard's release,
from the World Jewish Congress to B'nai B'rith to the Conference of Presidents
of Major Jewish Organizations. Elie Wiesel, Edgar Bronfman Sr., and Alan
Dershowitz--a holy trinity of North American Jews--recently implored the
president to grant Pollard clemency.

            Mainstream Jewish groups had ignored Pollard in the '80s
and early '90s because they concluded that anti-Semitism had nothing to do with
his arrest or sentencing. Their new Pollard advocacy is moderate and
muted--low-key constituent service. They have given Pollard's cause new
credibility by avoiding the preposterous claims of his loyalists. They insist
that his behavior was loathsome. They don't question the legality of his plea
or his sentence. They don't claim that an Israeli spy deserves special
treatment. But, they say, Pollard has shown remorse for his wrongdoing. He
deserves freedom on "humanitarian" grounds: He has served far longer than
anyone else convicted of spying for an ally. Other such spies spend 2 to 4
years in prison: Pollard is closing in on 14 years.

            But the mainstream
arguments, too, are wrong. Pollard does not, in fact, seem to be terribly
remorseful. He took Israeli citizenship in 1995, and he recently called the
United States a "foreign country." He has said, "I would rather be rotting in
prison than sitting shiva for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who
could have died" had he not spied. In 1993 he was caught trying to smuggle
classified information out in his prison letters.

            More important, the mainstream groups are downplaying what
Pollard did. Pollard is not just some confused, well-meaning, basically
harmless spy who was railroaded by an overzealous judge. In the Jan. 18 New
Yorker , Seymour Hersh assessed the damage caused by Pollard to America's
national security. It is vast, arguably as much as all-star snoop Aldrich Ames
did in his spying for the Soviet Union. According to Hersh, who was leaked
information that had been kept secret since Pollard's arrest, Pollard not only
compromised America's Middle East operations, he also gave away tons of
American classified data about the Soviet Union. Pollard handed over
information about how the United States tracked Soviet subs. He gave the
Israelis the bible of American signals intelligence, a manual that shows
exactly what foreign (that is, Soviet) signals the United States has
intercepted. He gave away documents that could have helped the Soviets identify
American moles. He may have even given away the United States' attack plan for
a war with the U.S.S.R. This information was probably traded to the U.S.S.R. by
Israel in exchange for Soviet Jewish émigrés. Pollard may have spied for a
"friendly" country, but he did a traitor's work.

            Pollard's supporters have reacted to these
revelations with skepticism. None of the Jewish groups has reversed its support
for Pollard's release. His absolutist followers smear Hersh as a fabricator.
Mainstream groups, not unreasonably, question the timing of Hersh's story. For
14 years, the intelligence community has refused to release this damage
assessment on the grounds that it would harm national security. The only reason
to release it now is political, and national security officials shouldn't play
politics. Hersh's information may be damning, they say, but it is unverifiable
and irrefutable.

            Pollard's supporters can cling to that excuse.
Clinton has no such out. He knows whether the charges in the Hersh story are
true, and that's why he's in such a quandary. Usually, Clinton finds a way to
reconcile the presidential and the political. Here he cannot. If Pollard is
guilty of all that Hersh charges him with, Clinton the president knows that
freeing him is a terrible wrong, a slap at America's national security
guardians and an invitation to our allies to spy on us. But even if Pollard is
guilty of all that Hersh charges him with, Clinton the politician knows that
freeing him is a political win, a present to some of his dearest supporters.
There is only one way for Clinton to extricate himself from this dilemma: He
can commute Pollard's sentence so that the spy can't go free until 2001. That
would be the perfect Clintonian solution: Leave the mess for someone else to
clean up.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Trade Stocks by Moonlight

            

               Kosovo update: The International War Crimes Tribunal indicted
Slobodan Milosevic and four of his deputies for deporting and murdering
Kosovars. President Clinton's grudging public spin: This sends a message that
war criminals will be held accountable. The counterspins: 1) The tribunal is a
toothless body that indicts but rarely convicts. 2) It will be tougher to
negotiate with an indicted Milosevic. 3) The indicted Milosevic will become
more militant and violent. The tribunal's answer: NATO shouldn't negotiate with
war criminals anyway. The British spin: The indictments strengthen the case for
ground troops.

            

               The stock markets are adding evening trading hours. NASDAQ
will expand its trading hours next fall, and the New York Stock Exchange is
likely to follow. The upbeat spin: The current hours are relics of Wall
Street's white-shoe era; the global economy obeys no clock, and neither should
the trading floor. The downbeat spin: Longer trading hours will require
everyone from the traders to the regulators to the press to retool their
operations. The ticker-watcher spin: Late-hour trading, which will be lighter
than business-hour trading, will cause stock prices to seesaw. The night owl
spin: 24-hour trading is coming.

            

               Dolly the cloned sheep is aging prematurely. Scientists
discovered that the cells of the 3-year-old sheep are as worn as those of the
6-year-old from which they were cloned. First mystery: Does this mean that
clones assume the age of their genetic sources? Second mystery: If her cells
are 6 years old but her body is 3 years old, how old does that make Dolly?
Third mystery: Since sheep don't get gray hair, how will researchers find
physical signs of aging?

            

               Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper was unveiled after 20 years of
restoration. Experts scrubbed it of grime but also removed layers of
retouching, leaving blank spots on the canvas. The Italian spin: It's "the most
important restoration of the century." Everyone else's spin: The earlier
touchups were faithful to the original; now that they're gone, even less of
Leonardo's work remains.

            

               A congressional report accused China of nuclear
espionage
               . The gist: China filched the designs for
all seven nuclear warheads currently in the U.S. arsenal; has used the designs
to update its weapons; and has been stealing secrets from American labs for
more than 20 years. China's spin: The findings were fabricated to divert
attention from the embassy bombing. The president's spin: The most damaging
information was taken before I took office. The CIA and Energy Department
spins: The evidence is thin, and there's no way to trace what really happened.
The committee chairman's spin: Only the unclassified portions of the report
were released, and the classified findings are even more damning.

            

               John Huang will plead guilty to conspiring to solicit illegal
contributions to the Democratic National Committee
               .
In exchange for his plea, prosecutors will say that there's no evidence that
Huang committed espionage against the United States, the New York Times
reports. This does not jibe with the earlier Senate investigation, which
leveled suspicions at Huang. The prosecutors' line: The case against Huang was
shakier than they had thought. The Republicans line: It's an outrageous
cover-up. In other Clinton scandal news, Kenneth Starr dropped charges against
Susan McDougal and Julie Hiatt Steele. Spin 1) Starr is finally through. Spin
2) Wait, he's still prosecuting Webster Hubbell. Spin 3) Wait, he's still
preparing to indict the president.

            

               NYPD officer Justin Volpe pleaded guilty to sodomizing Abner Louima
with a stick
               . After fellow cops testified against
him, Volpe admitted his actions to the court in horrific detail. Volpe's spin:
He apologized to his family for hurting them, but not to Louima. Mayor Rudy
Giuliani's spin: By telling the truth, Volpe's colleagues scored a major
victory against police brutality. Activist Al Sharpton's spin: By supporting
Louima, Sharpton scored a major victory against police brutality.

            

               Israel's new prime minister and Yasser Arafat struck a tentative deal
on a Palestinian state. 
               USA Today
reports that Arafat will cede his territorial claim on East Jerusalem. In
return, the Israelis will allow Arafat's government to govern East Jerusalem's
150,000 Palestinians and to control several holy sites. Prime Minister Ehud
Barak will also allow the declaration of a Palestinian state and will permit
the Palestinian capital to be established in East Jerusalem. The triumphant
spin: Barak has already resolved the Jerusalem issue, the thorniest area of
Israeli-Palestinian relations. A niggling detail: Barak has yet to form a
ruling coalition or present the plan to the parliament.

            

               Students may sue their schools for not protecting them against sexual
harassment. A Georgia school may be forced to pay damages to a
fifth-grade girl, the Supreme Court decided, if she can prove that school
officials were "deliberately indifferent" to her torment. The conservative
spin: Schools will now be held liable for garden-variety taunting. The liberal
spin: No, they won't, because it's almost impossible to prove "severe and
pervasive" harassment.

            
               
                  The Phantom
Menace has raked in $102.8 million. The film sold $28.5 million
worth of tickets Wednesday--a new high for single-day and opening-day
grosses--but its $61.8 million weekend gross lags $10 million behind that of
The Lost World: Jurassic Park . The spin: The reviews were disappointing
and so are the returns. The counterspins: A record five-day gross of $102.8
million can't be disappointing, and the press is wailing about "disappointing"
grosses to atone for overhyping the film. The studio's explanation: We
could have shattered weekend records by releasing the film on a Friday
but chose to accommodate fans by opening on Wednesday. The studio's backup
explanation: Ticket sales were depressed by predictions of long queues and
sold-out shows.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Cody Shearer

            On Tuesday, May 11, Chris Matthews interviewed
Kathleen Willey on CNBC's Hardball , the cable program that aspires to be
to the Clinton scandals what Nightline was to the Iranian hostage crisis
and Robert MacNeil's PBS show was to Watergate. Casual viewers may have thought
they were watching some kind of "best of Monicagate" retrospective--isn't
Kathleen Willey awfully 1998? But to conspiracy theorists, Flytrap trivia
buffs, and media creatures for whom the end of the scandal is likely to mean
extinction, Willey's re-emergence yielded a small, ambiguous, but nonetheless
tantalizing tidbit.

            On Jan. 8 last year, shortly before she was to
testify in the Paula Jones trial, Willey reportedly had a frightening encounter
with a jogger near her house in Richmond, Va.--a complete stranger who
nonetheless seemed to know quite a bit about Willey's children, her car, and
her cat. Though Willey declined to identify the man on Hardball-- Kenneth
Starr's office, she said, had asked her not to--Matthews seemed to have a
pretty good idea who he was. "Is it someone in the president's family,
friends?" He pressed Willey. "Is it somebody related to Strobe Talbott? Is it a
Shearer?"

            What's a Shearer, you
ask? A Shearer is a member of a semi-prominent journalistic/political family
connected to Bill Clinton in a number of ways. To hard-core Clinton-haters,
these connections are evidence of Clinton's true political colors--the
social-democratic, New Left, McGovernite, anti-free-enterprise, America-hating
tendencies he has so brilliantly camouflaged.

            The Shearers are also the kind of people Republican
mugwumps despise most viscerally: privileged, socially and professionally
ambitious dissenters whose liberal-left politics don't prevent them from
enjoying the prerogatives of membership in the establishment. Lloyd Shearer,
the patriarch of the clan, was for many years the editor of Parade
magazine, which, during the Reagan era, interspersed its celebrity profiles and
sensible recipes with anxious warnings about the dangers of the nuclear arms
race. His son Derek, a former professor at Occidental College, served in
Clinton's Commerce Department and then as his ambassador to Finland. Derek also
co-authored a book called Economic Democracy , which served as something
of a manifesto for Tom Hayden when the former SDSer abandoned radicalism for
the California Senate in the early 1980s. Worse yet, Derek's wife, Ruth
Yannatta Goldway, was elected mayor of Santa Monica in 1981 on a
pro-rent-control ticket. To a Southern California Republican, this is like
saying she was the president of North Korea. Derek's sister Brooke worked on
Hillary Rodham Clinton's staff and is married to Deputy Secretary of State
Strobe Talbott, the president's buddy from his Oxford days, long suspected by
the right of being soft on communism. But Matthews did not suggest that any of
these Shearers were stalking Kathleen Willey in a quiet Virginia subdivision on
a damp winter morning. The Shearer in question, he declared, was Brooke's twin
brother, Cody.

            This is not the first time Cody Shearer's name has
floated to the top of the murky stew of supposition, innuendo, and sleaze that
passes for political discourse in America these days. Joe Conason, who debunks
rumors about Clinton and his circle with the same dogged zeal with which
Matthews advances them, defended Shearer in a recent Salon column.
Shearer could not have been Willey's stalker, Conason declared, because he was
in San Francisco Jan. 8. Three days later, flying home to Washington, Shearer
happened to bump into his brother-in-law's old boss former Secretary of State
Warren Christopher. And as a result of being smeared by Matthews, Matt Drudge,
and Rush Limbaugh, said Conason, Shearer had been subject to death threats and
other forms of terror. (The most disturbing instance was the appearance, a few
days after Matthews' interview with Willey aired, of an armed man on Cody
Shearer's lawn. The man, who later surrendered, turned out to be Pat Buchanan's
brother Hank. Go figure.) Matthews has since apologized for mentioning
Shearer's name on the air.

            For his part, Conason
declined to explain why the bare possibility of Shearer's involvement in the
harassment of Willey was so gleefully seized upon by Clinton's own designated
harassers. If Cody Shearer did not exist, Richard Mellon Scaife would have
given someone a grant to invent him. Or maybe, like Lee Harvey Oswald in Don
DeLillo's Libra , Shearer is both real and invented--a creature of
multiple coincidences who seems at the same time to be operating in the service
of a grand, impenetrable design. When members of the vast right-wing conspiracy
talk about their counterparts in the vast left-wing conspiracy, Cody Shearer's
name is bound to come up sooner or later.

            Is Shearer a private citizen unfairly sucked into the
vortex of public scandal? If so, the vortex is awfully good at finding him. In
published reports, Shearer is most often described as a journalist or a
free-lance writer. His byline has been rather scarce during most of the Clinton
era. Through the '80s he co-wrote, with Maxwell Glen, a syndicated column on
politics and culture, which addressed such motley topics as trucking
deregulation and the ill effects of skin magazines on the male libido. In 1989,
the column dug up several embarrassing incidents of drunkenness in the past of
John Tower, whose nomination to be secretary of defense was derailed by
questions about his alcoholism and sexual irresponsibility.

            A conspiracy theorist
might infer that in helping to sink Tower, Shearer was already acting as the
cat's paw of a Democratic dirty tricks operation--or, at least, that the Tower
affair whetted his appetite for political dirt-digging and skullduggery. In any
case, it was Shearer who, during the 1992 presidential campaign, introduced the
world--through the unlikely medium of Doonesbury --to Brett Kimberlin.
Kimberlin, you may recall, was the convicted bomber, habitual liar, and
all-around sociopath who claimed to have sold drugs to Dan Quayle. Was Shearer
acting on behalf of the legendary Clinton "opposition research" outfit, which
had floated damaging rumors during the '92 primaries about Paul Tsongas' health
and Jerry Brown's drug use? Or was he just an enthusiastic free-lancer?

            A similar question arose during Sen. Fred Thompson's long,
comprehensive, and inconclusive hearings into the Democratic Party's 1996
campaign fund-raising shenanigans. There, Shearer's name popped up in the
course of Sen. Don Nickles' angry questioning of Terry Lenzner, the private
investigator who would later, in the thick of the Jones/Lewinsky/Willey/Who
Knows Who Else matter, be accused (by Dick Morris, among others) of
coordinating efforts to smear and intimidate those women. Shearer had
apparently acted as a liaison between Lenzner's firm, Investigative Group
International, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe. The tribe had donated more than
$100,000 to the Democratic Party, hoping, according to testimony, that the
administration would intervene on its behalf in a dispute over drilling rights
on tribal land. Lenzner had been retained to uncover compromising links between
Nickles--who opposed the tribe's claims--and local oil interests. Lenzner,
while he admitted that he had accepted the tribe's retainer, has denied that
Cody Shearer had ever worked for IGI--though the firm did once employ his
sister Brooke.

            Shearer's efforts as a free-lance political fixer
have not been limited to domestic affairs. Much to the embarrassment of his
brother-in-law and the consternation of others in the State Department, details
have recently emerged about Shearer's efforts, in 1996 and 1997, to arrange for
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to surrender to the International War
Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. According to his lawyer, Shearer took less than
$25,000 from an associate of Karadzic's in France in the fall of 1997. Accounts
vary as to what happened next, but it appears that Shearer was either duped by
the Serbs or double-crossed by them. Karadzic, as the saying goes, is still at
large.

            Cody Shearer is a man
with many connections, able to convince Bosnian Serbs, Cheyennes and,
unintentionally, Washington Clinton-haters that he is a player, a person who
makes things happen. But he may just be a person who things happen to happen
to, a guy with a penchant for pretending to be what others want to believe that
he is. Every time he turns up on the scene--and even when (as in the case of
Kathleen Willey) he doesn't--people ask: What's he doing here? He probably asks
himself the same question.

            
               
                  Editor's note:
Several errors in this piece as originally posted have been corrected. Click to
read a letter to the editor criticizing the original version.
               
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  Hideous
Kinky
                (Stratosphere Entertainment). Kate Winslet's first
post- Titanic film, the tale of a British woman's journey to Marrakech in
the 1970s in search of adventure and Sufi wisdom, gets high marks on aesthetics
and so-so marks on plot: It's "better at creating a picturesque travelogue than
at building a compelling narrative and full-bodied characters" (Susan
Wloszczyna, USA Today ). The New York Times ' Janet Maslin goes
gaga for the whole package, saying Winslet's performance as the naive young
woman who drags her two daughters to the ends of the earth "perfectly captures
[her] as a well-meaning mother who has no notion that she need be anything but
self absorbed." (This Hideous Kinky fan site offers
stills from the film, a chat room, and information on the novel the film was
based on.)

            

               
                  Life
                (Universal Pictures). Eddie Murphy and Martin
Lawrence star in a "disposable vehicle for two comic superstars" that has "more
heart and soul than usual" (Ann Hornaday, Baltimore Sun ). The comedy
chronicles the adventures of two innocent men sent to prison for life. Despite
a nice turn by Murphy, "it's hard to miss the basic unfunniness of the
situation," says Maslin ( New York Times ). Makeup artist Rick Baker wins
kudos for transforming Lawrence and Murphy from young 1930s hipsters into aging
'90s geezers. (Check out this Martin Lawrence fan page, which has information on
Life as well as fun bits from Martin , including video clips of Lawrence as everyone's
favorite weave technician, Sheneneh Jenkins.)

            
               
                  Goodbye,
Lover
                (Warner Bros.). Critics say this murder-filled comedy-noir
strains to be funny and off the wall but fails royally on both counts: It has
an "offbeat eccentricity that feels like the comic equivalent of silicone
implants" (Desson Howe, the Washington Post ). The ensemble cast includes
Ellen DeGeneres, Patricia Arquette, and Don Johnson, and none performs well in
critics' eyes. The New York Times ' Stephen Holden wonders why
Goodbye, Lover didn't go straight to video and asserts that Arquette,
the film's sexpot, "exudes all the erotic energy of an inflatable doll with a
taped voice muttering potty-mouthed come-ons." The film receives an upbeat
review from Andy Seiler of USA Today , who gives it 3.5 stars and calls
it a "darkly funny, brashly cynical" thriller that "breaks every Hollywood rule
that deserves to be broken." (Try this
somewhat funny Ellen DeGeneres word lib.)

            
               
                  SLC
Punk
                (Sony Pictures Classics). Most critics like this
"surprisingly genial and affecting comedy about the trials and tribulations of
teenage rebellion during the Reagan '80s" (Jami Bernard, Daily News ).
The title refers to two Salt Lake City punks whose tentative attempts at
rebellion are more funny and halfhearted than seriously anarchistic: It's "an
absurdist coming-of-age comedy" that's "better defined by its polish than by
punk trappings" (Maslin, New York Times ). Some are not impressed with
the film's watered down rebellion: "[T]his energetic but poorly structured,
rather self-congratulatory look at spike-haired rebelliousness in mid-'80s Utah
could strike unbiased viewers as more grating than gratifying," and the film
"doesn't quite grasp how its slick, flashy package undermines any actual punk
cred" it might have (Dennis Harvey, Variety ). (Brush up on your own punk
cred by seeing how many of these bands you know.)

            

               Books
            

            
               
                  The Girl Who Loved
Tom Gordon
               , by Stephen King (Scribner). Stephen King's unscheduled
quickie novel gets a warm response. The story follows Trisha, a 9-year-old girl
who gets lost in the woods with only a Walkman and common sense to keep her
alive as she wanders for eight nights. She listens to Red Sox games on the
radio and fantasizes about pitcher Tom Gordon, her hero and crush. As she
struggles for survival, she takes a page from Gordon's book and relies on God
to get her through. "For those who have spent years of adulthood circling
around questions of faith, it may be a little jarring to witness Trisha's hasty
conversion," says Rebecca Ascher-Walsh in Entertainment Weekly . Most
critics describe it as a departure from King's usual style--it's overtly
religious and a mere 250 pages long. It is "almost old-fashioned in how
satisfyingly scary it is" (Sherryl Connelly, Daily News ). David Kipen of
the San Francisco Chronicle finds the book tedious: Nine days is "an
awfully long time to spend in the largely unrelieved company of one little girl
lost." (Find out more about Tom
Gordon at ESPN's SportsZone .)

            
               
                  A Prayer for the
Dying
               , by Stewart O'Nan (Henry Holt). Critics heap praise on O'Nan's
latest, the gruesome tale of a man who returns to Wisconsin after the Civil War
to find his hometown engulfed by a diphtheria epidemic and hemmed in at the
edges by wildfires. Dan Cryer of Newsday calls it an "urgent,
economically told novel." This "deeply unsettling and sophisticated horror
story" (Megan Harlan, Entertainment Weekly ) is "more than a brilliant
exercise of darkness," (Richard Eder, the New York Times ), it is a work
of unusual emotional impact and craft. Eder says the prose has "so much that is
implicit and hollowed out, so much emptiness between the sentences, that the
reader is called upon to enter, invent and rearrange," and with "a shivery
economy of means and a dreadful lavishness of effect, Mr. O'Nan advances the
horror on parallel tracks." (Read O'Nan's 
                  Slate
                "" and the
first chapter of his last novel A World Away [requires
free registration].)

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Go ;

               
                  Movie -- The Dreamlife of Angels ;

               
                  Movie -- Never Been Kissed;
               

               
                  
                     Movie --Metroland ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Ground Beneath Her Feet , by Salman
Rushdie;

               
                  Theater--
                  The Iceman Cometh , by Eugene
O'Neill.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  The Matrix
                  ;
               

               
                  Movie--
                  10 Things I Hate About You ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Cookie's Fortune ;

               
                  Movie -- A Walk on the Moon ;

               
                  Movie- - The Out-of-Towners ;

               
                  Book--
                  Morgan: American Financier , by Jean
Strouse;

               
                  Book--
                  The Times of My Life and My Life With the

                  Times , by Max Frankel.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Mod Squad ;

               
                  Movie -- EdTV ;

               
                  Movie -- 20 Dates ;

               
                  Television -- Futurama ;

               
                  Book -- All Too Human: A Political Education , by
George Stephanopoulos;

               
                  Book -- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges , by Nathan
Englander.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  True Crime ;

               
                  Movie -- The King and I ;

               
                  Movie -- Forces of Nature ;

               
                  Television--
                  The Oscars ;

               
                  Book--
                  Years of Renewal , by Henry Kissinger.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Ellison's Wonderland

            When Ralph Ellison died in 1994, he left behind
thousands of pages of drafts and notes for the book he had been working on for
40 years--and a terrible dilemma. Ellison's readers (and Ellison's publisher)
wanted the legendary second novel they were sure had to be buried in the papers
somewhere. But literary scholars (and Ellison's friends) would surely denounce
the publication of anything that went beyond the author's known intentions.
Because the manuscript was nowhere near to being a coherent, finished work and
because Ellison left no instructions, his literary executor John F. Callahan
had to choose between disappointing the amateurs and infuriating the
professionals.

            The griping about Juneteenth even before
publication makes it clear that Callahan has taken the side of readers.
"Ellison did not leave behind the shapely building that Callahan has given us,"
Gregory Feeley wrote last month in the New York Times Magazine . Critics
quoted in the article complain that sections of the novel published as excerpts
during Ellison's lifetime are missing, that important characters have withered
or vanished, and that 1,500 or more pages have been whittled down to 350.

            A scholarly edition,
promised for the future, will enable better-informed opinions by placing this
extract in the context of Ellison's longer manuscript. But on the basis of what
we know, I'd say that Professor Callahan, who teaches at Lewis & Clark
College in Portland, Ore., deserves to be commended, not condemned. Without
adding a word (other than the title Juneteenth ), he has culled a nugget
that gives a sense of what Ellison was up to all those years without harming
any of the alternative conceptions of the work that are bound to emerge.
Juneteenth doesn't pretend to be a definitive framework or even a
framework at all. It's merely a necessary starting point for an inquiry into
what might have been.

            In an afterword, Callahan says that he took most of
Juneteenth from Book II, the strongest and most heavily plotted part of
what were apparently intended to be three parts. The story begins in
Washington, D.C., circa 1955, when a black church delegation arrives at the
office of the Sen. Adam Sunraider on urgent, unstated business. Before the
group succeeds in reaching him, an assassin shoots the racist Sunraider from
the Senate gallery. Critically wounded, Sunraider summons the leader of the
congregation, the Rev. Alonzo Hickman, to his bedside. We learn that Hickman, a
Baptist preacher known as "God's Trombone," was the only father Sunraider ever
had. Though either white or a fair-skinned mulatto, "Bliss," as the senator was
known as a boy, was raised by Hickman to be a black minister.

            From here, the story
unfolds outward in many directions at once, jumping from the hospital bed to
various points in Hickman's and Sunraider's lives. The turning point for their
relationship was a celebration of Juneteenth Day, a holiday commemorating the
day in 1865 when slaves in Texas first learned that the Civil War was over and,
two and a half years after the fact, that President Lincoln had issued the
Emancipation Proclamation. Amid the festivities, a crazed white woman appeared
claiming to be Bliss' mother. After this incident, Bliss became obsessed with
his lost mother and eventually ran away from home. We get woozy glimpses of
Bliss Sunraider's later life as a con artist, moviemaker, and chauffeur before
he became a senator and a bigot.

            Little of this information comes in the form of
straightforward narrative but instead accumulates through murky fragments. The
language is far more complex and difficult than that of Invisible Man .
In place of a single narrator, there are at least three: The authorial voice;
Hickman; and Sunraider, who speaks in a number of distinct tongues--as the
child Bliss, in dreams, in remembered conversations, and in convoluted memories
poured into a death-reverie stream of consciousness. (Click to read a brief
excerpt describing Sunraider waking in the hospital with Hickman at his
bedside.)

            The passage is
characteristic of the book in both its lyricism and its opacity. We only find
out subsequently that Sunraider is Bliss and that "Why hast Thou forsaken me"
was his opening line at Hickman's revival service, when he would rise,
Christ-like, from a coffin.

            Only in a few places does Juneteenth attain the
narrative velocity of Invisible Man . In a thrilling climax we finally
hear the story of how Bliss came to be adopted by Hickman, and how Hickman was
transformed from an Oklahoma City ne'er-do-well into a man of God (it hinges on
a false accusation of rape, a lynching, and some amateur obstetrics). This
section indicates that Ellison could still write in the lucid, explicit vein of
his first novel but chose to do something more difficult and complex, both
thematically and stylistically, in his second. Ellison's first love was
jazz--he played the trumpet--and many of the passages in Juneteenth are
extended riffs in a kind of free-form verbal polyphony. If Invisible Man
was Louis Armstrong, Juneteenth is Charlie Parker.

            At the level of plot,
many things are never explained, among them how "Bliss," got to be Sunraider,
the story of Sunraider's own illegitimate mixed-race son (who seems also to be
his assassin), and the meaning of the message that prompts Hickman to
Washington. Future fragments may illuminate these issues. But these confusions
seem largely purposeful, not accidents of omission by author or editor. If
Ellison had finished and published his novel, the story still wouldn't be
whole. It's meant to be up to the reader to assemble the shards into a vase.
For this reason, one doesn't feel cheated by not having all the pieces. In a
curious way, the unfinished state of the novel complements the inherent and
intentional incompleteness of the underlying story.

            Think of William Faulkner, whose characters often appear
and reappear in his various novels and stories. It's as if Hickman and
Sunraider have an independent existence of which Ellison offers glimpses and
glances in the various pieces he never assembled into a single structure. For
me Juneteenth recalled especially Absalom, Absalom! in which
Quentin Compson puts together a story that rattles family skeletons and points
up the reality that white Southern culture is blacker than meets the eye.
Sunraider yearns to know who his mother is, and Hickman wants to know how Bliss
became Sunraider. The reader approaches these mysteries through the incomplete
knowledge of the characters. Crucial information is delayed and denied, which
brings us back to the motif of "Juneteenth," the day when slaves found out
they'd been free for two and a half years.

            Why didn't Ellison finish--or publish--the book?
The oft-repeated official version involves a fire that destroyed an important
manuscript in 1966. But as disastrous an event as that must have been, I find
it unconvincing as an explanation. Ellison described losing a summer's worth of
work. He had a decade of writing his novel behind him and almost three more
ahead of him. A more compelling explanation is that Ellison wanted to write a
second novel that would meet the standard of Invisible Man while being
an entirely different kind of book. This strenuous ambition was confounded by a
perfectionism that, as Ellison wrote in the introduction to his volume of
essays Shadow and Act , made it somewhat "unreal" to even think of
himself as a writer. As he puts it, "my standards were impossibly high."

            Those standards didn't keep Ellison from writing,
merely from calling it quits. Failing to finish doesn't mean he failed. Indeed,
a great, unfinished work can be more fascinating than a finished one because of
the way the reader is drawn into the artistic process. Juneteenth is a
truly interactive novel, in which readers are not an audience but
collaborators, trying to pull together strands and elements of a story that has
no final resolution. Other fragments and versions will add to what Callahan has
assembled, not overwrite it. As with Faulkner, the boundaries of Ellison's
separate texts may blur, but the mythic force of the buried story and the
stylistic virtuosity of its telling will remain.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The War in Kosovo

            In ","
William Saletan examines President Clinton's struggle between idealism and
realism. In "," he discusses Clinton's watered-down apologies for the embassy
bombing.  In "," he lambastes the hell no, we won't go Republicans; in "," he
asks who's miscalculating the belligerence level. In "," he strafes the bogus
arguments against the NATO war plans.

            In
"Strange Bedfellow," David Plotz looks at , shows how Kosovo has turned and
doves into hawks, and discusses why .

            Mathew
Cooper in "" explains there are good reasons for what we're doing in
Yugoslavia. Credibility isn't one of them.

            Massa
Gessen introduces , the minister nobody knows, in "Assessment."

            ""
says we can prevent genocide.

            
Jonathan Chait debunks the myth of the underpaid solder in "."

            
"Explainer" tells how frees prisoners; describes NATO's ; finds out who is the
; provides a ; and gives the lowdown on which way to "Kosovo," depending on
your politics.

            What
solution does history dictate for Kosovo? Good question, says David Greenberg
in the "."

            In ","
William Saletan dissects the diplomatic doublespeak for negotiating with
Milosevic. In a "," he asks: "How can we justify invading Kosovo after
promising not to?" and decides that it sounds like a job for Bill Clinton. NATO
and Milosevic are playing a head game over who's punishing whom. In "," Saletan
shows how Milosevic is winning the spin war.

            How
did Clinton win public support for bombing Serbia? By rephrasing the question,
Saletan. Some people ask, "Why bomb Serbia?" Clinton asks, "Why not?"

            says,
that's Mister Milosevic to you. he examines the justification for the
U.S. media's outrage at being expelled from Yugoslavia.

            
Michael Kinsley helps you translate the favored by politicians unwilling to
take a stand on the Kosovo bombings.

            
"International Papers" summarizes what the world press has to say about Kosovo
in the , , and columns.

            ""
tells you what's going on in Kosovo, and also what politicians say is
going on in Kosovo.

            And ""
gives you the latest from the armchair generals of the Sunday morning talk show
circuit.

            Read
what John Allen Paulosand Lisa Zeidner think about the news coverage of the
conflict in "."

            Masha
Gessen supplies "," while Eliot A. Cohen and Owen Harries debate ""

            John
Hillen and Robert Kagan discuss ""

            ""
discusses newspaper coverage of the bombings.

            does
his bit for the boys by concentrating the full power of www.anagramgenius.com on
Serbia's leader. Sample: "Slobodan Milosevic" yields "So, so vile, bold,
manic!" Also, he that Clinton will lie his way to victory in Kosovo.

            
Finally, if you're a little rusty on what exactly they're fighting about in
Kosovo, here are squibs on 1) (hint: They're not the same); 2) the difference
between ; 3) why fighting in Kosovo could spark ; and 4) . Or click for a
profile of Slobodan Milosevic.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I Have Read the Future

            Since the launch of 
                  Slate
                nearly
three years ago, we've joked about how you'd know when online magazines were
ready for mass consumption. It would be when you could take them, like print
magazines, to the bathroom. Well, I'm here to tell you: I've read

                  Slate
                on the john.

            Among the other places I
have been reading 
                  Slate
               , Salon, an electronic version of
the Wall Street Journal , and the e-texts of various novels and short
stories, in last couple of weeks:

            

               Aloud to my wife in a car at night

               In a taxi, again at night

               While brushing my teeth

               On a plane without an overhead light

               Standing on the subway

               In bed

               While eating Chinese food with chopsticks

            

            These are situations in which reading is ordinarily
either awkward or impossible. They present no challenge, however, to my new
favorite gizmo, the Rocket eBook. I'm not what you would call an early adopter
when it comes to consumer electronics. I don't have a DVD player, an MP3
player, or a Palm Pilot. But I'm ready to blow $499 on a Rocket as soon as I
have to send my demo model back. This chunky little device, which weighs just
under a pound and a half, actually deserves that overused epithet
"revolutionary," because it has the power to change something as basic to human
civilization as the way people read.

            A lot has happened since
I wrote about  last fall. You can now actually buy two different models.
One is the Softbook, which at $299 appears less expensive than the Rocket but
actually costs more because you must commit to spending $479 on books over two
years as part of the package. The Softbook is a writing-tablet-size screen with
a leather cover that gives off what someone must have imagined to be the musty
scent of an old book (but is actually the smell of a new shoe). The Softbook's
one big advantage is that you don't need a PC to use it. You buy books directly
from Softbook and download them into the reader via a phone line. But the
Softbook has two big disadvantages. The first is that it's poorly designed. The
screen is hard to read, navigating text is clumsy, and the whole device has an
unbalanced feel. The second drawback is it doesn't work. After reading a bit of
preloaded text-- The Sea Wolf, by Jack London--I couldn't download
anything else, and my Softbook soon purged its preloaded content as well. The
only other person I know who has a Softbook reports a similar failure.

            By contrast, the Rocket, which is made by a Silicon Valley
start-up called NuvoMedia, is ergonomically sound, with the pleasing heft of a
folded-over paperback. The screen is superb, and you get a choice of large or
small print as well as a variety of lighting settings. You can orient the text
horizontally or vertically and position the grip for left- or right-handed use.
And because it doesn't need to be held open, you can read the Rocket
one-handed. In fact, you can even prop it up and read no-handed if you're
eating something greasy or shaving. All you need is one clean finger to click
the "forward" and "back" buttons that move the text a page at a time. The
battery lasts for some 30 hours before needing to be recharged.

            And while the process of
getting stuff to read on the Rocket is a bit involved, it actually works
remarkably well. First, you load the Rocket software onto your PC. Second, you
register your eBook and get an ID and a password. Third, you go to the Barnes
& Noble Web site, which is (but won't be for long) the exclusive
distributor of Rocket-formatted content, and make your e-purchase. Fourth,
Barnes & Noble sends you an e-mail message with a Web link that allows you
to download what you've purchased into the "Rocket Library" on your PC. Fifth,
you transfer your book from your PC's Rocket Library to your Rocket, which has
4 mb of memory (enough to hold 20 medium-length novels). The only hitch I
encountered in this procedure was that Barnes & Noble took a few hours to
e-mail the link I needed to download books I bought. (I understand that this is
not an uncommon problem.) Instant gratification is an important part of the
appeal of e-books, and I found this delay slightly maddening.

            There are other drawbacks of the sort you would expect from
any infant technology. Barnes & Noble stocks only 524 eBook titles at
present, an unfortunately large number of them in the business and self-help
categories. You can buy Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts
Into Sales and Life Without Stress: The Far Eastern Antidote to Tension
and Anxiety (which would seem to cancel each other out) but not
Uncovering Clinton or The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Recent
publications are gratuitously overpriced. The discount price of Angela's
Ashes is $10.40 in paperback, $17.50 in hardcover, and $20 for the eBook
edition.

            This makes no sense when
you consider that the publisher has eliminated such expenses as paper,
printing, binding, warehousing, distribution, and "returns." Another advantage
for publishers is that because a book is encrypted for a single user, it can't
be copied, forwarded, or resold. So, why are publishers setting e-book list
prices so high? Because they fear e-books, even as bookstores, including a
sizable group of independent shops, embrace them. When you think about it,
though, their positions might well be reversed. If e-books become a real
alternative to p-books, publishers stand to gain by eliminating most of their
fixed costs and by being able to keep everything in print forever. They might
even envision cutting out the middleman, namely the bookstore. If I retailed
books, I'd be worried. This, however, is only one scenario. Martin Eberhard,
the CEO of NuvoMedia, thinks booksellers will remain part of the process.
"When's the last time you went shopping for a Simon & Schuster book?" he
asks. And it might be established authors who would try to do an end run around
publishers. "It's not clear who gets disintermediated," he says.

            T he really good news is that readers can disintermediate
both publishers and booksellers and get thousands of books and magazines free.
Just last week, Rocket released a beta version of software that lets anyone
upload texts to its site, creating a kind of open-source library. The site
offers Hamlet , the Art of War, and Aesop's Fables, among
other titles. But more significantly, the Rocket eBook lets you download any
text-based content from the Web or your hard drive. With the Rocket software, I
downloaded Daisy Miller , Our Mutual Friend, and some other
fiction in the public domain from the Project Gutenberg Web site before a
transcontinental flight. Another feature I love is that you can find remembered
passages by word-searching these texts. You can also highlight words and look
them up in the pre-installed Random House Dictionary, though it didn't have
"arras," which James Wood used in last week's discussion of Vladimir Nabokov in

                  Slate
               's"Book Club" (it means "tapestry"). And I figured out how
to download the full weekly text of 
                  Slate
                in one go by converting
the 
                  Slate on Paper
                Microsoft Word file to the HTML
format. (Late-model word processors allow you to use the "Save As" function to
save documents in HTML.)

            E-books are going to evolve. They will get lighter,
their screens will get more legible, and their batteries will last longer.
Soon, they may do what a related device called the Audible can do, and actually
read to you, either via sound files or text-to-voice software. E-books may
converge with other handheld devices. You can use the newest palm-sized
organizers as talking books or readers--though you wouldn't want to read a
novel on one, at least not yet. Most important, e-books will get cheaper. They
may even be given away, or sold at a token price with content purchase
agreements or subscriptions, on the model of cell phones. But I have no doubt
that they're coming. And when they truly arrive, I predict that the Rocket will
be remembered as a landmark: The first demonstration that reading a "book"
didn't require paper, ink, or even an overhead light.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 196: &quot;To Go&quot;

            

               China has already got rid of 66,000, and by year's end will remove
another 800,000. What?
            

             

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Monday's Question
(No. 195)--"Suggestive Gestures":
               

               

                  
                     
                        Last week, the British government received a letter
offering advice on an ongoing investigation. From whom; suggesting
what?
                     
                  
               

               "From
Christopher Hitchens, claiming he knows EVERYTHING."-- Fred Graver
( Chris Kelly had a similar answer, with dandruff and gin.)

               "Ken
Starr intimating Clinton knows more about Jack the Ripper than he's saying. (I
hear Vernon Jordan tried to get him a job at Revlon.)"-- Beth Sherman
(similarly, Steve Spencer and Al Petrosky )

               "Oscar
Mayer to the Brits: 'Do what we do. Grind it, spice it, case it, pack it, ship
it. Call it Crazy Dogs.' "-- Marshall Efron
               

               "Me,
suggesting that, in light of recent events, the investigators looking into
Princess Diana's death might want to see whether Kate Moss was driving around
Paris on the night in question."-- Tim Carvell
               

               "The
pope, suggesting that Gen. Pinochet not be extradited to Spain. The pope did,
however, suggest the extradition of Tinky Winky, for 'crimes against God.'
"--Alex Balk
               

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            To News Quiz participants, "investigation" is not
theological (angels?), financial (angles?), historical (Engels?), or scientific
(something about string theory and tangles?); "investigation" means crime
pursued by Ken Starr.

            In the 19 th century it meant Pinkerton's,
which yesterday agreed to be purchased by Sweden's Securitas AB for $384
million. Founded in 1850 by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, the firm ran
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid out of the country on behalf of wealthy
railroad owners, and beat the heck out of striking workers on behalf of anyone
with a few bucks. It also thwarted a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, and
thank God for that, for the entire course of history might have been different
had the Great Emancipator been cut down. (Oh, all right; they uncovered an 1861
plot, a whole other thing. But I still blame them for "Raindrops Keep Falling
on My Head.")

            "You need to do more than
post a guard with a doughnut and a nightstick," said financial analyst John
Schnelle, commenting favorably on the merger. "If you are going to enter the
global market, why not do it with a marquee name?" Like, say, Starr?

            
               Humanitarian
Answer
            

            As Alex Balk knew, the Foreign Office received a
plea from the pope to free Augusto Pinochet, reports the Times of
London.

            Lord Lamont of Lerwick,
the former chancellor who elicited the written appeal, said, "I suspect that
the representations have been made at the highest level, recognising the
General's great contribution to protecting freedom during the Cold War."
Speaking of the pope, Lord Lamont added: "Having lived in Poland, he
understands what a Marxist dictatorship is all about. As a great Christian
leader, he values human life and he understands what happened in Chile. As an
ironist ..." Well, OK, I added the final phrase.

            
               Daniel Radosh's
Anniversary Extra
            

            Part of the official celebration of News Quiz New
Year. By mayoral order, fireworks and criticism are prohibited.

            What do Web surfers think
of us here at the News Quiz? For answers, turn to the Excite search engine,
where, when you enter a phrase, the site automatically suggests "select words
to add to your search." These are words that other people who did similar
searches have included. Selected results:

            News Quiz: irony,
Canada

            
               Our
Targets
            

            Bill Clinton: disgusted, castration

            Congress: indecent

            Strom Thurmond: cowed, mobbed

            Strom Thurmond's ass: crap, missy

            Rudolph Giuliani: revitalizing

            Bill Gates: billionaire, richest, wealth, hell

            Michael Kinsley: exhilarating, lewd

            Jews: pogroms, nazis, haman

            Christians: persecution, persecutions,
persecuted

            Scientology: successes

            New York: giants

            California: crackle

            Canada: curling

            
               Us
            

            Randy Cohen: wormwood

            Larry Amaros: lazily

            Alex Balk: unoccupied

            Adam Bonin: eve

            Tim Carvell: somatosensory

            Greg Diamond: clarity

            Marshall Efron: anger

            David Finkle: philistines

            Bill Franzen: jail

            Molly Shearer Gabel: gobble

            Leslie Goodman-Malamuth: phonics

            Ananda Gupta: blissful

            Jon Hotchkiss: kitch [sic]

            Chris Kelley: flake

            Joydip Kundu: erupting

            Barbara Lippert: santa

            Noah Meyerson: fowl

            Jennifer Miller: love

            Norman Oder: intern

            Jim O'Grady: earthworm

            Alfa-Betty Olson: calliope

            Katha Pollitt: moralistic

            Sophie Pollitt-Cohen: prolife [does mom know?]

            Daniel Radosh: rusty

            David Rakoff: smote

            Carrie Rickey: thinks

            Nell Scovell: immersing

            Beth Sherman: savoring

            Andrew Silow-Carroll: devotion

            Steve Smith: liberator

            Andrew Staples: envelope

            Deb Stavin: decay

            Matt Sullivan: operas

            Colleen Werthmann: schnauzer

            Kate Wing: bombshell

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Ken Starr

            
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                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 251: &quot;Now Even Reformier&quot;

            
               Rabbi Gary Bretton
Granatoor of New York's Stephen Wise Synagogue, at the forefront of today's
Reform Judaism, says, "There is a group in the synagogue called Morei Derech,
which means role models, and they are lay people taking on responsibilities
that in the past many congregants felt professionals had to do." What
responsibilities?
            

            
               
                  (This question
courtesy of Beth Sherman.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 250)--"Musa vs. Ake":
            

            

               
                  
                     On Wednesday, Musashimaru defeated Akebono to become
the 67 th 
                        yokozuna . Why is this
noteworthy?
                  
               
            

            "No
kidding!!! Man, one of these days I'm gonna get cable TV!"-- Craig
Aranha
            

            
"Because the New York Times says so."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            
"Because Musashimaru is actually a ring-tailed lemur."-- Molly Shearer
Gabel
            

            "By
dominating sumo, the Americans have finally got the Japanese back for beating
us in manufacturing."-- Charles Star
            

            "
'Because there is no Wednesday on the Japanese calendar,' said Encyclopedia
Brown, as Taylor sputtered with rage. 'Your story's a fake. Therefore,
you're the real jewel thief!' "-- James Poniewozik
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Few things are more amusing than the national games
of other countries. Even the box scores are funny, so comical are the names of
the athletes. (Although Brazilian car soccer is brilliant: Small cars ram a
huge ball into a goal. It looks ultra-American, like demolition derby with a
higher purpose.) But for sheer tedium, nothing can rival our own national
pastime. When you are in the field, more than 50 percent of that half of the
inning is spent doing nothing: The pitcher is simply holding the ball. And when
your team is hitting, you spend nearly all that time sitting in the dugout.
Thus, for any player, 75 percent of the game is spent doing nothing at all.

            Of course, the four 12-minute quarters of a
professional basketball game take two and a half hours to televise, but at
least in the NBA they have the decency to call that downtime what it is: a TV
commercial.

            Baseball is also,
incidentally, the only sport where players can smoke during the game; you used
to catch appealing glimpses on television of some professional athlete puffing
away. It made a welcome change from the spitting. I think a lot more people
would watch figure skating if they let the athletes smoke. And diving. And
sumo.

            
               
                  Gaijin
Answer
            

            For the first time in the 300-year history of sumo,
a foreigner became grand champion by defeating another foreigner.

            Both are Americans, from
Hawaii, of Polynesian and Samoan ancestry. In 1993, Akebono became the first
non-Japanese yokozuna . Wrestlers from Argentina, Brazil, Korea, and
Mongolia are also currently active. A few foreign
rikishi --wrestlers--have become popular, but some critics charge that
they prevail through sheer size rather than agility. Musashimaru weighs 473
pounds.

            
               Neck and Neck
Extra
            

            "I just read Chris
Kelly's ad hominem remarks about George Lucas and his neck. Let Chris K. put
his own neck on the line. Is it scarf-worthy? Maybe he should have it pierced
with silver or something. We all have necks. The question is, do we stick it
out? Do we risk it? Or is it just a love item?"-- Alfa-Betty Olsen
            

            
               Tim Carvell's Can
You Top This Bloated Indulgence Extra?
            

            Participants are invited to find a sentence in an
actual publication that embodies conspicuous consumption and fatuousness better
than the following, from last week's New York Times "Home" section:

            "Today, the urinal has taken its stand alongside
the bidet and the working fireplace as the latest must-have in the
well-appointed bathroom suite."

            Submissions due by noon
ET, Monday, June 7.

            
               Headline
Haiku
            

            In Cosmic Blasts,
Clues
Of Things to Come
In Tests on People
Drug Is Found Just

            
               New York Times ("Science Times"), May 25,
1999

            
               --Chris
Hammett
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Fat jokes, Pokémon, Ono, Bono.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Gratuitous
Meritocracy
            

            It seemed too much to hope for that the list of the
20 th century's 100 greatest pieces of journalism--produced this week by
the New York University journalism department, at no one's urgent
request--would actually include The Fate of the Earth . But there it was
at No. 59. Jonathan Schell's 1982 argument against having a nuclear war may be
the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people. ( Rival claimants ? See "" for
readers' suggestions.) Schell set out, first, to prove that nuclear war really
would be a really, really bad thing that should be avoided if at all possible.
He succeeded, declaring at every stage that vast resources of courage and
imagination were required to make this point. He went on to argue that
virtually all aspects of life as we know it--including "say, liberty"--"have
become inimical to life and must be swept away" as the only hope of avoiding
nuclear cataclysm. At this he was less successful.

            You won't believe,
children, what a literary-intellectual event this overheated stew of the
obvious and the idiotic became. Many New Yorker readers actually took up
Schell's recommendation of nuclear monomania. As long as nuclear weapons
existed, he declared, to even think about anything else was deeply immoral. And
many people agreed. For a few weeks.

            Schell's manifesto is even sillier in hindsight. Not so
much because of the end of the Cold War (which Schell was not alone in failing
to predict), but because even Jonathan Schell, it turns out, cannot panic full
time about nuclear war. Lately he's been expressing alarm about the office of
the independent prosecutor. Threat to liberty or something like that.

            The Fuss Over The Fate
of the Earth was the last gasp of the old New Yorker buzz machine of
the William Shawn era. The Shawn buzz machine was just as powerful as the
much-criticized Tina Brown model that came after, and hypocritical to boot,
since it denied its own existence. Literary devices did most of the work. There
was the bullying portentous tone, which said, "This is unbelievably
important--so you, shut up." Then there was the pretense of simply presenting
the facts, which put the author on a pedestal beyond the reach of quarrel and
made his or her conclusion seem inexorable.

            Actually, the last gasp of the old New Yorker may be
this NYU list, which is laughably heavy on New Yorker golden oldies. (In
truth, the current New Yorker is a much better publication.) How could
anyone think that the pointless pointillism of John McPhee, at No. 54, should
rank higher than No. 67, a great book that happens to be by my best friend
in journalism?

            But quarreling with an
exercise like this, while enjoyable, misses the point. Such quarreling buys
into the premise that there is something socially useful about inventing
reasons to decide that some people are better than others. Call it gratuitous
meritocracy. I wouldn't say that the ever-growing profusion of prizes and
awards and lists of the best this or that are "inimical to life" or anything,
but they are a minor blot on our democracy.

            What's wrong with them? Well, of course they're
pseudoscientific or, to put it another way, dishonest. There's no objective
measure, and no hope of broad general agreement, that No. 34 is superior to No.
35 (though any sane person can see that No. 67 should be much, much higher).
This is generally true of gratuitous meritocracy, whether it takes the form of
a glossy magazine's "best-dressed" list, or a glitzy prize like the Oscar or
the Pulitzer, or the employee ratings of a large corporation, or the endless
variety of hierarchical opportunities held out to children and college
students. All of these pretend to a precision that doesn't exist. But that's
not the real problem. Even if it were possible to determine scientifically
whose performance as a supporting actress last year was better than anyone
else's, why should you want to do that?

            Human inequality is both
part of the condition of our species and a specific necessity of the
free-market economic system, which relies on incentives and differential
rewards to motivate people. Some inequality is inevitable, in other words, and
more of it is a price worth paying for a prosperity that benefits all, to one
degree or another. Looking back on the experience of the 20 th
century, most people have concluded that attempts to eliminate inequality
wholesale end in tears. But we still argue about the relationship between
greater equality and greater prosperity within a capitalist economy. Will a tax
cut have a huge productivity payoff or just line the pockets of the already
well-to-do? Will a government benefit program lift people up or just sap the
poor and sock the rich? And so on.

            But a list of who's better than other people in some aspect
or another is not inevitable and does not make the economy any more prosperous
or society any richer in other ways. I suppose you could argue that a
best-dressed list encourages women to dress more beautifully or that a list of
the greatest works of journalism of the 20 th century will motivate
those who didn't make it to try a bit harder during the next 100 years. It's a
hard sell, though. What actually inspires such lists is a love of
distinction-making for its own sake, which sits oddly with our alleged
democratic principles.

            Of course, more banal
commercial considerations are also at work, as well as the Law of Award
Entropy, which holds that awards tend to subdivide and multiply until they are
worthless. The Oscars begat the Emmys, which begat the Cable Ace Awards, of
which there are so many that any cable TV employee who actually attends the
ceremony is entitled to leave in a snit if he or she doesn't win one.
Meanwhile, on your television are the gala Bulgarian Press Association
Syndicated Sitcom Excellence Awards, hosted by Florence Henderson ...

            In principle, there is nothing tackier about an award given
by the National Association of Right-Wing Radio Blowhards than one given by the
Swedish Royal Academy. In practice, awards seem to gain legitimacy with the
patina of age. Pulitzer Prizes, for example, go to books and newspapers but not
to magazines. So, a couple of decades ago, the magazine industry created the
National Magazine Awards ("the prestigious Enema," as occasional

                  Slate
                writer Mickey Kaus calls them). A totally artificial and
unnecessary addition to civilization. And yet by relentlessly treating them as
a big deal over the years, magazine folks have succeeded in making them a
reasonably big deal. Not as big a deal as the Pulitzers yet, but in the
ballpark. (And yes, we'd like one, hypocrites that we are, thank you very
much.)

            Inevitably, come now the
Webby Awards, given by something we are asked to believe is the "International Academy of
Digital Arts and Sciences ." For a medium that prides itself on its
insurgent spirit, this is a comically egregious exercise in
faux-establishmentarianism. But like all such operations, this one traps its
victims in a conspiracy of mutual hype. They hype you by giving you an award.
You hype them by bragging about it.

            The folks at L'académie Internationale des Arts et des
Sciences Numériques have innovated a clever variant on this trick. They
give a separate set of awards based on how many votes your site gets in a
reader poll they're running on their site. As a result, the Web is now littered
with links to the Webby "People's Voice" page. (Why, what a coincidence: Here's
one right here .) Despite some press-release malarkey about
democracy in action, the true spirit of the Web, and blah, blah, the connection
between this and any valid expression or measurement of Web popularity is about
as close as Die internationale Akademie digitaler Künste und
Wissenschaften is to the National Academy of Sciences.

            Small type at the bottom of the home page confesses
that L'accademia Internazionale degli Arti e delle Scienze Digitali is
"an affiliate of IDG Conference Management Company." Said company seems to have
copyrighted all the materials, so I think it's clear what's going on. But
everyone is pretending this is some sort of real industry honor. (The BBC is
throwing a cocktail party to celebrate the fact that its Web site was
nominated !) And in a few years it will probably be just as real as all
the others. And just as pointless.

            On behalf of all my colleagues at

                  Slate
               , thank goodness we don't have the strength to resist.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 227: &quot;Vile&quot;

            

               Fox TV is planning to fill hundreds of plastic vials. With what?
Why?
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question--(No. 226) "It Depends":
            

            

               
                  "This is quite controversial," said Kevin Sparkman of
Pennsylvania. "Until now, we have always depended strictly on altruism." What
is he talking about?
               
            

            
"Sparkman, head of the area chapter of panhandlers, is discussing the group's
decision to go from simple requests for change to armed assault. 'Frankly,' he
noted, 'the can-you-spare-a-dime thing has got worn out, and it only works
about 5 percent of the time. Our studies have confirmed that "can you spare a
dime, and by the way, I have a gun" has a response rate in the mid-70s, and you
just can't ignore numbers like that.' "-- Tim Carvell ( Tim
Liebler , William Considine , Dianne Carter , Mac
Thomason , and Dwight Lemke had similar answers.)

            "The
recent bids for mouth-to-mouth resuscitations on eBay. Sparkman, a pool guard
in Scranton, was asked his opinion."-- Ross Levatter
            

            
"Lancaster drug dealers' recent decision to start charging the Amish for their
rumschpringes* methamphetamines."-- Gina "Gaining No Benefits of Nepotism"
Duclayan
            

            
"Following the designation of 'ugly' as a diagnosable sexual dysfunction,
Pennsylvania Blue Cross has agreed to cover prescriptions for
Rohypnol."-- Charles Star
            

            
"Sparkman is the executive director of a Philadelphia nonprofit that places
discarded church organs with poor schools' neglected music departments. He is
troubled over whether to accept donations from the professional kirkbuzzers'*
guild."-- Jeff Hoover
            

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Daniel's
Wrap-Up
            

            The South has rednecks,
the Midwest has rubes, Los Angeles has vapidity, New York has violence, and
foreign countries have foreigners. News Quiz has affirmed these truths time and
time again. But Pennsylvania? Well, there's a heroic fictional boxer and a
couple of less heroic nonfictional baseball teams. But mostly there are the
Amish, a source of amusement not only because they eschew modern conveniences
(with the exception of Rollerblades and hard drugs, if I have that right) but
also because they are so unfathomably beneficent, at least among themselves.
Real Americans, of course--whether from the South, the Midwest or, especially,
New York or L.A.--would rather be dead than altruistic. And even dead, the most
we can promise is we'll consider it.

            
               Organic
Answer
            

            Under a new program, families of Pennsylvania organ
donors will be eligible to receive $300 toward the donors' funeral expenses.
Last year, 394 altruistic Pennsylvanians donated organs; 4,500 patients needed
them. Three hundred dollars pays for one-ninth of a hardwood casket with your
choice of wheat, cross, praying hands, Masonic, or U.S. flag panels from the
John W. Keffer Funeral Home in York, Pa.

            As Kevin Sparkman of the
Delaware Valley Transplant Program notes, the plan is controversial, but
perhaps less so than the one it replaces. You see, I once knew a guy who had a
friend whose cousin picked up a girl on a business trip to Lancaster. The next
morning he woke up in a bathtub full of ice with a crude surgical scar in his
side. Written in lipstick on the mirror was the message, "Welcome to the world
of Pennsylvania. Now go home." It was signed, "The Amish."

            
               *Fifty-Cent Word
Extra
            

            Rumschpringes (noun): Pennsylvania Dutch meaning,
literally, running around; an Amish rite of passage during which teen-agers are
temporarily freed from the community rules.

            Kirkbuzzer (noun): A
person who robs churches; from the archaic Scotch.

            
               Two Evils
Extra
            

            Recently, the MSNBC Web
site hosted one live chat with Dilbert creator Scott Adams and another one with
(alleged) Serbian war criminal Arkan. In one of those glitches we've come to
expect from Microsoft sites, the two chat sessions got hopelessly jumbled. Or
at least they might have. Here are actual questions posed to Adams, paired with
genuine answers to different questions by Arkan. Both have been edited, but
syntax is preserved.

            
               Q: Is Dilbert based on
a real person?
            

            A: I think he's the
president of Serbia.

            
               Q: Do you recommend
working in a corporation?
            

            A: I personally will not
make a deal with any devil.

            
               Q: Are you trying to
insult persons who toil in workstations?
            

            A: We don't have nothing
against Albanians.

            
               Q: What do you think of
business casual?
            

            A: I think it's pure
propaganda, I don't believe in that.

            
               Q: What about the
tie?
            

            A: It's part of our
souls.

            
               Q: Will Dilbert find
love?
            

            A: He's the most popular
man in Yugoslavia.

            
               Q: Is Dogbert and
Catbert male or female?
            

            A: They produce 9-15
children.

            
               Q: What's with the feud
between you and Griffith, the creator of Zippy ?
            

            A: We are fighting for
peace and love, we are not fighting for war.

            
               Q: Is Dilbert
idea evolving with time and where is it heading now? I mean what is the
next move you think?
            

            A: Well, I don't know what
he's thinking, which move he's going to make.

            
               Q: Is Dilbert
(the strip) ever going to get old and dull a la
Doonesbury ?
            

            A: There is still a chance
to stop it and not be a war criminal.

            
               Q: Are you married?
:)
            

            A: I don't have a
relationship with President Milosevic.

            
               Q: I wish you'd remove
the animal characters and replace them with people, I could relate much
easier.
            

            A: I
really don't give a damn.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The Amish ... incongruously riding A Streetcar
Named Desire .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hitchens Bites Clinton

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records
               ,
by Peter D. Goldsmith (Smithsonian). A book about the extraordinary, if messy,
career of the founder of Folkways Records wins polite reviews, but it's no
masterpiece of biography. Moe Asch created Folkways and ran it for 38 years,
until his death in 1986, releasing 2,200 records, including sides by Leadbelly
and Woody Guthrie and artists from all over the globe playing everything from
children's music to jazz. Asch's tale is compelling, but Goldsmith concentrates
too much on the business story, writes the Dallas Morning News ' Stanley
Trachtenberg: "[S]ometimes Making People's Music reads like a
discography." Similarly, David Nicholson (the Washington Post ) dislikes
the book's sometimes clotted prose and odd lack of personality: "The real
problem is Asch himself. Variously described as a 'very lonely man' and lacking
'much of an interior life,' he is--for all the aforementioned
complexity--strangely absent here. Names, dates, and facts abound, but Asch
remains elusive." (Click here for a dictionary of folk music terms.)

            

               
                  No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson
Clinton
               , by Christopher Hitchens (Verso). Hitchens' jeremiad
against Bill Clinton argues that the president's personal life is part and
parcel with his political one. "Hitchens ... directs his argument at his fellow
leftists, those turtlenecked worrywarts who hate welfare reform and the bond
market and still get hoppin' mad about Sacco and Vanzetti," writes Andrew
Ferguson in Fortune . Says Elizabeth Drew in the Los Angeles
Times : "Hitchens obviously loathes Clinton, finds him a lying, ruthless,
low-life. But in this compelling, disturbing, entertaining, necessary book, he
raises questions that cannot be ignored." What worries reviewers is the
relentless negativity of the Clinton portrait. Writes Karen Lehrman in the
New York Times : "What's good about a well-done polemic is that
everything fits neatly into place. What's bad about a well-done polemic is that
everything fits neatly into place." (To read more by Hitchens and to purchase
memorabilia, visit the Christopher Hitchens Web .)

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Besieged
                (Fine Line Features). The critics are mostly
respectful of Bernardo Bertolucci's sparse romantic tale about a wealthy
British pianist and an African housekeeper. "From the start of ...
Besieged , a film that combines a stunning sensuality with a rigorous
economy, you know that you're in the hands of a filmmaker who trusts in the
storytelling power of the camera," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles
Times . "Besieged is a thrilling reminder of what moving, personal
art the director of The Conformist and The Last Emperor can make
when inspired by the right material," says Entertainment Weekly 's Lisa
Schwarzbaum. Most don't even mind the ending, which is invariably described as
O. Henry-esque. Naysayers are Time 's Richard Schickel ("[T]here's ... a
portentousness in the silence that's distancing and annoying, especially since
it leads to a too perfectly ironic ending.") and an irritated Variety ,
whose Derek Kelly lashes out at everything he can: "The butter is spread pretty
thinly over the bread. ... [It's] structured in a rambling manner, often
borderline risible in its dialogue."). (Click to read David Edelstein's review
in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               
                  The Thirteenth Floor
                (Columbia). The Thirteenth
Floor is the latest alternative-universe special-effects extravaganza,
following Dark City , eXistenZ , and The Matrix . A team of
virtual-reality technicians operates in an alternative universe, circa 1937.
The critics agree that the movie suffers when the initially interesting
conception falls apart. Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News calls it
"a virtual reality thriller so caught up in its time and character confusions
that it takes the entire movie to explain it." Some don't even think the basic
premise is all that hot. "When a movie quotes Descartes's 'I think, therefore I
am' right at the beginning, you should probably consider yourself warned,"
writes the Washington Post 's Desson Howe. The critics cite solid
performances by Vincent D'Onofrio and Armin Mueller-Stahl, and nearly all
admire the film's production design (Kirk M. Petruccelli) and camera work
(Wedigo von Schultzendorff). (Click here to try an "immersive simulation" of 1937 Los
Angeles.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Book
            

            
               
                  Bone by
Bone
               , by Peter Matthiessen. Mixed takes on the third volume of a
grisly Everglades trilogy. "This dense, mesmerizing novel will leave readers
stunned, as if waking from a horrific sunburnt daydream," pronounces Gillian
Flynn of Entertainment Weekly . Says Time 's John Skow of the
"quirky trilogy": "a reader might conclude: brilliant, obsessive,
panoramic--and two novels too many."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            &quot;Time To Clear out the Eurotrash&quot;

            The mass resignation early
Tuesday morning of all 20 members of the European Commission--universally
characterized as the most serious institutional crisis in the 42-year history
of the European community--dominated European papers Wednesday. The
Brussels-based commission is responsible for the day-to-day affairs of the
15-member European Union and enforces EU law. An investigation into charges of
fraud, corruption, and cronyism found evidence of incompetence, mismanagement,
and loss of political control. Although one commissioner, former French Prime
Minister Edith Cresson, was singled out for particularly strong criticism,
commission President Jacques Santer said the body chose "by unanimity to resign
collectively."

            
               Le Soir of Belgium supported the
dramatic gesture of unity since "it is too late for half-measures or for soft,
evasive answers" and claimed the resignations were needed because the
commission "suffers from a democracy deficit and therefore a lack of
legitimacy. ... To counterbalance this [it] has to be perfect, spotless." In
contrast, the Euro-skeptic Times of London speculated that the collective action might,
in fact, represent a further avoidance of individual responsibility, and
worried about the possible "renomination" of the entire commission (an idea
floated by Santer Tuesday): "This supposedly cathartic drama could end up as a
'Japanese' purge, in which heads roll only to ensure that things continue much
as before, with much the same discredited cast. That would be an outrage."

            France's Le Monde
                saw a silver lining in the crisis and
said the institution had to seize this opportunity to
"clean up its administrative and financial habits, improve its decision-making
process and, most of all, rediscover the inspiration and drive it has lost.
This might even mean increasing its funding and staffing levels." The
Guardian of
London pointed out that the commission's problems were partly caused by
the expansion of its responsibilities as it "found itself taking on ever more
grandiose tasks, largely on the demand of member states, with progressively
more limited resources. Yesterday's report shows they did not know how to
cope."

            Meanwhile, there is no
resolution in sight. Germany and Britain want to replace Santer as soon as
possible, while seven other countries would prefer him to remain as a
"caretaker" until Dec. 31, 1999--the end of his term. Britain's Independent made its
position clear in an editorial Wednesday: "It is time to clear out the Eurotrash."

            In Ecuador, Monday's reopening of the banks, after a week
of government-ordered closure, put the population in the streets, as depositors
queued to withdraw their funds and striking taxi drivers and bus operators
blocked roads to protest a 165 percent increase in the price of gasoline. As
Quito faced its third day of roadblocks Wednesday, Diario Hoy reported
that the capital was in a state of paralysis with schools closed and provisions
in short supply. El
Telégrafo of Guayaquil blamed the uncertainty gripping the populace on politicians'
failure to discuss possible solutions to the crisis. "There has to be an
opening and communication on the part of government. If it wants to achieve a
national accord, it's logical that it must display an openness to
reconciliation."

            In Beijing, the
state-run China
Daily pooh-poohed U.S. media reports about Chinese nuclear espionage at
the Los Alamos laboratories. In an editorial Wednesday, the paper claimed, "The 'lab-theft' story is
bound to follow in the footsteps of the 'political donations' and 'satellite
secret leakage' reports--to be forgotten within a few weeks after the claims
cannot be substantiated."

            
A story in Asahi
Shimbun of Japan revealed that Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that attacked
the Tokyo subway with Sarin nerve gas in 1995, is enjoying a resurgence based
in part on the financial security provided by a chain of successful computer
stores affiliated with the group. The paper claims that the stores' prosperity
stems from their cheap prices, which are possible because believers work for
next to nothing. A former member of the group told Asahi Shimbun that
"Aum followers work there, and the job is considered part of religious
training. Their salaries are therefore zero." A "public security investigator"
quoted by the paper speculated that Aum will "grow into a stronger and bigger
organization with ironclad solidarity" when Fumihiro Joyu, a senior cult
member, is released from prison in November.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Wimps Are Winning

            
Italy's advocacy of a three-day bombing pause in the Kosovo conflict was
getting much attention in Europe Friday. Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and El País of
Madrid both led with it, Die
Welt reported progress in negotiations about it, and in London the
Daily Telegraph said on its front page that NATO leaders were
"seriously considering" it. The idea, proposed by Italian Prime Minister
Massimo D'Alema, is that the bombing should stop as soon as a U.N. Security
Council resolution on a Kosovo settlement is drafted (rather than approved) so
as to avoid a Chinese veto. The airstrikes would stop before President Slobodan
Milosevic withdrew any of his 40,000 troops from Kosovo--perhaps even before he
formally agreed to do so.

            It
seemed like a good day for the wimps, but other European papers--including the
Independent
of London and El
Mundo of Madrid--highlighted NATO divisions over the Italian plan. The
Independent said the United States and Britain will "oppose fiercely"
any plan for a pause in the air war. The British press also reported tension
between NATO's closest buddies, President Clinton and British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. The Guardian led its front page with the headline "Clinton clash
with Blair." This was based on some U.S. press reports that the president told
Blair in an "unusually difficult" telephone conversation Tuesday that he must
"get control" of people spreading the impression that the two of them are not
getting on. There have been a number of articles in British newspapers this
week about supposed differences between them, especially over the issue of
ground troops.

            The
other most popular Kosovo angle in Europe Friday was the first large-scale
desertions by Serb troops. This received front-page treatment in Le Monde of Paris, but the
Times of
London tempered the excitement with a big headline saying that the Serb army in
Kosovo is "as strong as ever." Quoting British defense ministry sources, the
Times said that despite reports of up to 1,000 Serb soldiers deserting,
"the size of the military presence in Kosovo remains at about 40,000, the same
as when the air campaign began." It saw this as a blow for those within NATO
who hope that the fight will have gone out of the Serb army by autumn.

            There
was, however, a rare suggestion by an independent British commentator that the
air war might actually be working. Preparing to eat humble pie, military
historian John Keegan, writing in the Daily Telegraph , of which he is
defense editor, said the desertions and reports of anti-war protests in Serb
provincial towns are "the first indication that the Serbian President's hold
over his people may be loosening." He said the "strategic community" on both
sides of the Atlantic may have been wrong in relying on historical precedent to
pooh-pooh the idea of victory by air power alone. They may also have underrated
the new technology because "no self-standing air campaign has ever before been
mounted with precision weapons." Keegan said Milosevic's main mistake may have
been to send barely trained teen-age conscripts to Kosovo, since their morale
is especially vulnerable. "Yet those who direct the war, if it comes right,
will still not have a proper reason to congratulate themselves," he wrote. "If
it is emerging that this is a war of morale--that of the conscripts'
willingness to bear fear versus the NATO public's patience with apparent lack
of results--President Clinton and the Prime Minister should now accept that
they have paid insufficient attention to supporting the morale of their own
electorates and have been insufficiently calculating in attacking that of their
enemy."

            For
the Italian press Friday, Kosovo developments paled in significance beside a
feared revival of home-grown terrorism. All the main Italian papers led on the
murder of Professor Massimo D'Antona, a consultant to Italy's labor minister,
who was shot outside his home in Rome Thursday by two young men in jeans and
denim jackets. A document purporting to come from the Red Brigades, a guerrilla
group thought to have been eliminated, later claimed responsibility for the
killing. All the Italian papers gloomily recalled the Red Brigades' bomb
outrages and assassinations of earlier years, but La Stampa of Turin said in a
front-page comment that there is an important difference now. Italy has a new
ruling class and a new president, "the country has leadership," it said.

            In an interview Thursday
with Yediot Aharanot , Israel's new prime minister, Labor Party leader
Ehud Barak, thanked Tony Blair for showing him the way to his election victory.
"Blair got the [British] Labor leadership when that party was in a similar
situation to the [Israeli] Labor Party," Barak said. "He told me that the
accepted premise in the party was that they must lose elections. They lost for
16 years and got used to it. Blair insisted on finding out why they really
lost, and in this way arrived at a victorious campaign."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Milosevic, Trapped

            

               
                  Economist
               
               
                  , June 5
            

            An
article argues that Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic is trapped. Slobo made financial arrangements for a luxurious exile,
but since his indictment as a war criminal the most he can hope for is a safe
haven in Belarus. Not beloved by his people, Milosevic might be hard-pressed to
retain power even with the support of his secret police, political cronies, and
state-controlled media. ... The cover story argues that the German economy has stalled
because of a complicated tax system, overgenerous welfare, and excessive labor
costs. Germany is dragging down the euro, but both might rebound because the
new government is deregulating, unions are learning accommodation, and a
cheaper euro may boost exports.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , June 21
            

            The
cover story argues that the vice presidency is worth more
than a bucket of warm piss. As veeps Nixon and LBJ were administration
outsiders, but Al Gore is a "Principal" who enjoys Cabinet-level authority and
has weekly one-on-ones with the president. Unfortunately for Gore, the press is
likely to focus more on his stilted campaigning than his eight years of insider
experience. ... An article mocks Elizabeth Dole's scripted stump appearances.
Opinion-makers may be tired of her act, but she is savvier than she seems. Her
pro-gun-control stance and neutrality on abortion appeal to the increasingly
prosperous and moderate GOP electorate, allowing her to seem like a
maverick. ... A piece attacks the rumormongering about George W. Bush's
past. Clinton raised the bar for bad-boy behavior. Americans won't care about
what Bush did, and nor should they. (Disclosure: 
                  Slate
               's Timothy
Noah wrote the article.)

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , June 6
            

            
Adventure is the theme of the third installment in the magazine's millennium
series. ... A writer explores his own brain through magnetic resonance
imaging, finding the physical locations for his ability to speak Italian, his
recognition of familiar faces, and his storytelling ability. ... White
novelist Richard Ford and black essayist Stanley Crouch re-enact Huck Finn and
Jim's voyage down the Mississippi River and pen their respective reactions:
Crouch rejoices that it's no longer anomalous for a black man and a white man
to share a boat; but the trip leaves Ford unsettled about his own latent
racism. ... A photo essay documents competitors in an "adventure
competition" in which teams had to hike, kayak, Rollerblade, and swim across
360 miles of Philippine jungles, mountains, lakes, and islands. Each team had
to include at least one woman, use traditional, nonpolluting modes of
transportation, and perform a social service project along the way.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , June 7
            

            The
cover report slams the Cox report for asserting more than it
proves and hysterically claiming that all Chinese visitors to the United States
are asked to spy for their government. The report actually documents the theft
of only one warhead's technology. ... A related article contends that
China's military is no challenge to the United States'. China has no aircraft
carriers or long-range strategic bombers. One ominous note: If China did steal
American technology, it could take a great leap toward nuclear parity.
... A piece urges national mental-health reform. One good step: A
Senate bill to require insurers to cover mental-health treatment just as they
cover other kinds of medical care.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , June 7
            

            The
cover story exults that now is the best time ever to be black
in America. Black employment, home ownership, academic achievement, and college
enrollment are up; out-of-wedlock births, violent crime, poverty, and welfare
enrollment are down. Blacks aren't celebrating because they fear an economic
downturn and because equality is still elusive. Whites still outearn blacks,
black unemployment is twice the rate of white unemployment, and 13 percent of
black men are disenfranchised because of felony convictions. ... An
article profiles middle-class black homesteaders who are
regenerating ghettos. One common and successful idea: church-run credit
unions.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , June 7
            

            The
cover story clucks over the dismal state of Sino-U.S.
relations. One vivid detail: After the embassy bombing, Chinese officials
produced an anti-NATO music video. ... Horrified by the rise of casual
office wear, the garment industry is launching a PR campaign to popularize
formal attire, says an article . All kinds of designers are getting in on the act:
Sean "Puffy" Combs' "fall collection is full of dressier sportswear."

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , June 7
            

            An
article questions the canonization of Edith Stein, a Jew-turned-Catholic nun
who perished in the Holocaust. Stein's dubious miracle--a prerequisite to
sainthood--was to "cure" a Boston girl named after her who overdosed on Tylenol
in 1987. ... A piece describes the manifold accomplishments of National
Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus, who has won bipartisan support for
the research center, focused the NIH on nuts-and-bolts research rather than
disease-of-the-week fads, and artfully guided the human genome project. Varmus'
peaceful reign could be interrupted when the government decides soon if it
should fund research performed with scientifically valuable but politically
controversial stem cells from human embryos and fetuses. ... A writer
joins American women trekking through Bhutan--a remote, devoutly Buddhist, and
unusually fecund country--in search of fertility blessings. None of the
pilgrims produce children, but all are charmed by the enormous penises that
decorate the country's walls, stores, and homes.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , June 7
            

            An
editorial darkly warns that China is modernizing and expanding its military in
order to displace America as Asia's dominant power. The Cox report might
finally rouse Washington to the hostility of the Chinese government and end our
destructive policy of engagement. ... The cover story denounces the
National Museum of American History. Multicultural prejudice distorts its
presentation, stripping America's history of its heroic high points. ...
An article flays Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., the head of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee: He is an artless buffoon whose only asset is
his family name, which he uses to woo donors and to intimidate opponents.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Monday Morning Quarterbacking on Kosovo

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , June 12
            

            An
editorial laments the mess NATO has made of war and
peace. Milosevic can claim vindication, because NATO dropped its Rambouillet
demands for full access to Serbia and for an independence referendum in Kosovo.
NATO botched its central aim--prevention of ethnic cleansing--and bears some
responsibility for bombing fatalities. ... The cover story claims that Serb brinkmanship spurred some
NATO concessions during negotiations, including the extra four days for
withdrawal of Serb troops and a trimmed demilitarized zone. But NATO did hold
its line in how it carved up peacekeeping zones: The French will govern the
region that Russia coveted. ... Another piece suggests South Africans have less to celebrate about
their recent elections than they think. The peacefulness of the process would
seem to augur well for continued reconciliation. But the African National
Congress' vast parliamentary majority will silence opposition, and votes were
split neatly along racial lines.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , June 28
            

            The
cover story denounces the allies' prosecution of the
war and its settlement. A weaker America will result from the idea that we can
triumph without peril to our armed forces. Air power only worked when combined
with KLA pressure on the ground and the threat of a ground invasion. The
settlement is fatally flawed: Milosevic can't be trusted, ex-combatants can't
coexist, and the Kosovars will continue to agitate for their own state.
... National sovereignty is overrated, according to an article . Supporting nationalist aspirations is
humanistic and consonant with the United States' rebellious roots. Plus, the
more nations splinter, the longer America will dominate the fractured world
stage. ... "TRB " bemoans the abolition of the draft. Americans view
military engagements as distant exploits. A national service requirement would
relink citizens to their country, their compatriots, and the nation's foreign
policy.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , June 13
            

            The
cover story follows a Minnesota public school's "harassment specialist" as she
leads workshops, distributes pamphlets, and investigates complaints. Recent
legal decisions, including one by the Supreme Court, have made schools liable
for indifference to sexual harassment among students. Conclusion: Trying to
distinguish harassment from everyday schoolyard taunts is a clumsy but
worthwhile process. ... College tuition is rising two to three times
faster than inflation, another piece reports. Explanations: Universities vie to
supply the most luxurious amenities; generous federal loans mean students can
afford higher tuition; and the steep fees are a way for colleges to have
wealthier students effectively subsidize poorer ones.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , 
               June 14
            

            The
cover package wraps up Time 's "100 People of the
Century" series by profiling 20 icons and heroes. Colin Powell lauds the
GI as an embodiment of America's courage and
diversity. Henry Aaron celebrates Jackie Robinson for inspiring civil rights by breaching
baseball's color barrier. Others honored include Anne Frank, Billy Graham,
Princess Diana, and Che Guevara. ... The Kennedys and the Nehrus are rated the 20 th
century's greatest dynasties. ... The "100 Worst Ideas of the Century"
are also named, including Prohibition, The Jerry Springer Show , Barney,
and letting interns staff the White House during the government shutdown.
... An article dampens enthusiasm about NATO's victory. The West
drew a moral line against barbarism but failed in its primary aim, which was to
avert a humanitarian catastrophe. NATO is saddled with an unstable Kosovo and
an intact Milosevic.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , June 14
            

            The
cover story says stress causes heart disease, memory loss,
immune deficiency, impaired cognition, and even a thick waist. Women respond to
more stressors than men do, but their blood pressure spikes less in reaction.
Stressed-out kids are more likely to be listless when they're not tense and to
overreact as adults. ... In an essay , British Prime Minister Tony Blair urges "a new
internationalism" based on values and law. The West must start a moral crusade
to excise "the cancer of ethnic conflict" by rebuilding the Balkans,
strengthening the economies of southeastern Europe, and eventually welcoming
some more states into NATO. ... A glowing review of the new Austin Powers movie notes the campy
merchandising that accompanies it. Coming to a store near you: a genuine Austin
Powers Swedish Penis Enlarger.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , June 14
            

            The
already-outdated cover
story wonders if NATO's deal with Yugoslavia will hold. ... A
piece says the food-stamp program is funding the war in
Kosovo. With poverty down, politicians are raiding food-stamp surpluses for
extra cash. ... An article examines the booming international car-theft
industry, which is virtually ignored by law enforcement. Vehicles are picked
off American streets and smuggled abroad, where foreign buyers pay two to three
times a car's U.S. retail price for them. The most commonly stolen models are
Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , June 14
            

            A
piece investigates Binjamin Wilomirski, author of a heart-rending, highly
lauded, and completely fake memoir describing the atrocities he (never)
suffered as a Jewish child in Nazi death camps. Wilomirski, a Swiss Protestant
since birth, may be a charlatan, or he may simply be deluded. Most troubling is
the public's willingness to value the memoir's drama over its truthfulness.
... A survey of the nascent presidential race declares George W. Bush
and Al Gore ideologically indistinguishable. The country is so flourishing
"that politics has almost begun to seem irrelevant." ... Editor David
Remnick opines that Bosnians and Kosovars have suffered from the president's
historical naiveté in general and from his seduction by Balkans fatalist Robert
D. Kaplan in particular. (Click to read William Saletan's explication of the
debate that arose out of Kaplan's work.)

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , June 14
            

            The
cover package assesses George W. Bush's coronation as GOP savior. One piece
argues that "compassionate conservativism" is merely a loose translation of
President Clinton's triangulation and asks Bush to flesh it out with specific
policy proposals. But another piece suggests that Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's top
economic adviser, is the very embodiment of the phrase. Despite his Reagan
administration pedigree, Lindsey ardently supports government assistance to the
underprivileged. ... An editorial crows that Milosevic's capitulation
represents a triumph for the president, hawkish Republicans, NATO, the
U.S.-Russia relationship, and interventionism.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Ground War Euphemisms

            On March 24, President
Clinton went on television to explain the rationale for U.S. participation in
the bombing of Yugoslavia. "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to
fight a war," Clinton assured the public. A week later, Dan Rather observed
that Clinton's verbal gymnastics about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky
("It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is") had made people
suspicious of how Clinton was "parsing" his words about Kosovo. "When you say
you have 'no intention' to commit ground troops to accomplish the mission in
Kosovo," Rather asked Clinton, "does that mean we are not going to have ground
troops in there--no way, no how, no time?"

            It's possible that
Clinton can still avoid a ground war. But the probability that he will have to
reverse that position--and explain his way out of it--is now at least as high
as the probability was a year ago that he would have to admit to an
"inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky and explain away his previous
denials. If an about-face on the question of a ground war becomes necessary,
the phrase "no intention" will be only one of Clinton's escape clauses. His
promises to avoid a ground war, like his denials of the Lewinsky affair, are
laced with convenient loopholes.

            1. "Permissive environment." Clinton has pledged not
to send U.S. ground forces into a "hostile environment." Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger have promised not
to use American troops to "invade" Kosovo or enter a "combat situation."
However, administration officials have held out the possibility that U.S.
soldiers would be sent into a "permissive environment."

            At first, everyone assumed that a "permissive"
environment was one in which Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, his will
broken by the bombing, had agreed to "permit" NATO troops to enter Kosovo
unchallenged. Lately, however, American officials have enlarged the meaning of
"permissive." Last Sunday, Albright acknowledged that Milosevic might never
willingly yield. "There are other ways, however, to create a permissive
environment," she added. "What we are doing is systematically diminishing or
degrading his ability to have that kind of control over the area."

            The next day, in a
cat-and-mouse game with reporters over the meaning of "permissive environment,"
Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart alternately defined it as a) "one where there is
a political settlement"; and b) "an environment where the Serbs and Milosevic
don't have the ability to impose their will." On this theory, once the Serbs'
defenses are sufficiently crippled by bombing, U.S. ground forces would enter
Kosovo without significant resistance.

            2. "Peacekeeping force." In his March 24 speech,
Clinton said U.S. troops would join a "peacekeeping force" to "implement"
NATO's peace plan if Milosevic accepted it. A week later, when a reporter
pointed out that the peace plan was dead, Clinton insisted that the Kosovars
must nonetheless be allowed to return home and live safely. "That will require,
clearly, for some period of time, some sort of international force that will be
able to protect their security," Clinton conceded. U.S. officials have
alternately described this entity as an "international peacekeeping force,"
"international security presence," "implementation force," and
"post-implementation force."

            But ever since the Serbs
captured three U.S. soldiers snooping around the Yugoslav-Macedonian border a
week ago, "peacekeeping" has become a plastic term. Clinton insisted the
soldiers "were carrying out a peaceful mission in Macedonia--protecting that
country from the violence in neighboring Kosovo." The next day, when reporters
asked what the soldiers had been up to, Lockhart insisted "they were left there
in a peaceful and peacekeeping fashion, as a peacekeeping force." This may be
just the first of many armed confrontations NATO plans to attribute to "peace."
When asked Sunday about NATO's plans to return Kosovar refugees to their homes,
NATO's military spokesman told CNN that the "peacekeeping forces" in Macedonia
"were always planned to make sure that the Kosovar Albanians could live in
peace and harmony."

            
3. "Protectorate." From the outset,
Clinton stipulated that U.S. troops wouldn't fight for Kosovar "independence,"
and Albright said the United States wouldn't impose an "occupying force" in
Kosovo. Clinton told Rather it would not be "appropriate" to discuss "creating
a Kosovar enclave that would keep [NATO troops] there forever." When Rather
pointed out that Clinton's pledge to guarantee the Kosovars' "security"
amounted to the same thing, Clinton asserted that this wasn't so and argued
that he was only saying that the Kosovars were "entitled" to security. This
mirrors Clinton's favorite domestic policy spin: arguing that Americans are
"entitled" to assistance or protection (e.g., a "patients' bill of rights")
while avoiding discussion of what it will cost. Once Clinton ruled out an
"enclave," anonymous senior administration officials came up with a new phrase
for the NATO-guarded territory to which the Kosovars would return: an
"international protectorate."

            4. "Supporting the air campaign." Clinton's original
promise to deliver "air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the
brutality in Kosovo" without putting "troops in Kosovo to fight a war" has
proved to be self-contradictory. To hit the Serbs who are committing the
brutality, NATO has to bring its forces down to the ground. The first step in
this transition is the delivery of 24 U.S. Army helicopters to Albania. The
helicopters are more like ground weapons than like air weapons: They will fly
low over Kosovo, shoot at Serbian tanks and troops, and risk being shot down in
return. That's why they belong to the Army, not the Air Force. To protect the
helicopters, the United States is also sending 18 surface-to-surface rocket
launchers--indisputably a ground weapon.

            To operate, service, and guard the helicopters,
Clinton is supplying 2,000 Army troops, adding to the 8,000 NATO soldiers who
are arriving in the region to help refugees. Everyone knows these troops are
trained for combat and can be quickly converted into an invading force.
Alternatively, the fuel and communications networks they will build can be used
to support an invasion. U.S. officials insist that at most these troops might
be dispatched to "escort" Kosovars back to their villages once "hostilities"
have ended. Presumably, these are alternative euphemisms for a "peacekeeping"
mission in a "permissive environment." Nevertheless, U.S. officials assert that
the helicopters and Army soldiers are "an expansion of the air operation,"
"supporting the air campaign," and "not a ground force."

            American hawks have
complained for weeks that Clinton underestimated Milosevic's rigidity. By
swearing off ground forces, they argued, Clinton tied NATO's hands, giving
Milosevic confidence that he could destroy Kosovo without effective resistance.
But Milosevic, in turn, may have underestimated Clinton's agility. A president
who can talk his way out of a perjury rap can talk his way into a war.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tame at Heart

            Why do big-studio movies that celebrate wildness
and primal man and equate civilization with corruption tend to play as if their
plots have been hammered out by Hollywood executives on car phones? And why do
those pictures always feel as if they've been honed with the help of focus
groups in suburban shopping malls to ensure that no aspect will be jarring to
the middlest of middle-class viewers? Instinct is the newest specimen of
commercially overprocessed primitivism. The film, which purports to explore the
circumstances under which a celebrated anthropologist, Ethan Powell (Anthony
Hopkins), disappeared among Rwandan gorillas and emerged two years later as a
mute and wild-eyed killer of park rangers, is loaded with radical credos--ideas
evocative of Kafka, deep ecology, and Dian Fossey at her most gorillaphilic.
But every one of those conceits is rendered toothless by a form of storytelling
that's the opposite of instinctual. The more subversive Instinct gets in
proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the
more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department.

            
               Instinct is
"inspired" by Daniel Quinn's 1991 cult novel Ishmael , which is largely a
Socratic, telepathic dialogue between a man and a gorilla, the latter of whom
hectors the former about the destructive path of modern society and restates
the history of the world as a struggle between "leavers" (animals, wise nomadic
tribes) and "takers" (mostly white males). Someone must have spent a fortune to
option Quinn's book before concluding that an interspecies Socratic, telepathic
dialogue with huge chunks of the Earth First! manifesto wouldn't burn up the
box office, so screenwriter Gerald DiPego was brought in to fashion a story
around Quinn's core principles. (The movie would have been more fun, though, if
DiPego had left in a token telepathic ape. Maybe just for a prologue: "Gimme
that banana and I'll tell you the story of my old friend Ethan Powell. What a
character ...")

            Anyway, Instinct is built around that theater
standby, the series of charged encounters between a psychiatrist and a shackled
patient, during which it dawns on the doctor (Cuba Gooding Jr.) that he and his
society are the ones who are actually in need of curing. (Come to think of it,
the first Broadway play I ever saw, Equus , featured Hopkins in the role
of the shrink who concludes that a boy who blinded eight horses with a metal
spike has a passion sadly lacking in his sterile countrymen.) The ambitious
Gooding's first challenge is to get Hopkins, sedated and under heavy guard at
Florida's Harmony Bay Correctional Facility, to speak. It seems to me that his
next challenge is to get Hopkins to shut up, since with relatively little
prodding the ex-mute wild man launches into a stream of resonant orations about
life among the silverbacks: "Did they think of me? I thought of them. ... It
was terrifying and wonderful ... I was coming back to something I had lost a
long time ago and was only now remembering." Danny Elfman puts a swelling choir
on the soundtrack to help us remember those same things--i.e., awestruck
countercultural jungle movies such as The Emerald Forest (1985) and
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984).

            
               Instinct recycles a lot of countercultural
touchstones--the lovable psychotics out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest (1975), the fascist guards out of Cool Hand Luke (1967). "He
lives with the animals, takes on their behavior, becomes one of them," says
Gooding, seemingly on the verge of a chorus from Doctor Dolittle (1967).
"He can give me a look at man at his primitive state--ungoverned man." It's a
giggle, but the idea of a young African-American learning the secrets of the
Dark Continent from a 60-plus-year-old Welsh ham has its daft charm: "He's
leading me into the jungle," concludes Gooding. Maura Tierney, playing Hopkins'
estranged daughter, listens to Gooding talk and struggles to keep her emotions
in check, smoking intensely while her eyes water and her chin quivers. Will she
and Gooding do the Wild Thing? No; perhaps the mall focus groups turned thumbs
down on interracial romance. Back in the prison, Hopkins puts Gooding in a
headlock and gives him an intellectual noogie: What has he lost, now that he
has been immobilized by a senior citizen? Control? No: No one has control.
Freedom? No: No one is free. The answer is supposed to be his "illusions"--but
more likely it's whatever remains of Gooding's credibility as an actor.

            If nothing else, the
director, John Turteltaub ( Phenomenon , 1996), keeps the performers from
drifting into camp. A raw-skinned actor named John Aylward does a good job of
making the warden--a malignly neglectful bureaucrat--recognizably human, and
John Ashton plays the chief villain, a guard called Dacks, as a man whose
cruelty arises out of an obsession with control: What makes him scary is his
watchfulness. But Turteltaub's technique is otherwise too slick for his
supposedly primal subject. The larger problem is that Instinct doesn't
have the courage to leave its natural subjects untamed. The gorillas are
pussycats, and Powell isn't a true murderer after all. He killed a couple of
Rwandan park rangers in defense of his adorable ape family--which makes the
movie a de facto vigilante picture and thus as mainstream a product as any that
Hollywood churns out. "You taught me to live outside the game," says Gooding,
his eyes misting up. But Instinct is the work of players.

            For true instinct, you must turn to Mike Figgis, an English
director ( Leaving Las Vegas , 1995, One Night Stand , 1997) who's
defiantly not a player and whose pixilated, semi-autobiographical,
semi-allegorical The Loss of Sexual Innocence would not have got past
the mall focus groups that evidently embraced Instinct . It nearly didn't
get past the screening that I caught at Manhattan's indie-friendly Angelika
Film Center, which was marked by uneasy throat clearing and lots of walkouts.
What the hell is this thing?

            In the movie, Adam and
Eve show up at intervals looking like Calvin Klein models: He (Femi Ogumbanjo)
is black and muscular, she (Hanne Klintoe) is waiflike and flaxen-haired with
an expensive-looking coif. They emerge naked from golden waters into a
yellowish African landscape, explore each other's orifices, and recline beside
a white stallion and in range of a (disappointingly ordinary) snake. At the
end, they eat squishy fruit, vomit, and are set upon by paparazzi .

            Before that, seminal episodes of disillusionment, jealousy,
and betrayal are recalled by the movie's protagonist, Nic (Julian Sands). As a
lad in Kenya, he peers through a window at an African girl practicing her
English in lingerie for a drowsing old white pervert. Cut to an English
landscape from which all color has been drained, and where Nic is a skinny
teen-ager (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) whose pubescent girlfriend drunkenly cheats on
him during her father's wake. Sex and death are forever entwined: Nic sees
photos of a naked woman stabbed by a lover, a corpse bloated after three weeks
in a river. As a grown-up, he drives through the northern English countryside
beside a frostily pissed-off blond wife, whom he subsequently takes from behind
in the kitchen of their country cottage while his young son, clutching a
stuffed animal, wanders their way. Figgis shoots all this through windows to
make the couple's alienation palpable.

            Nic's wife dreams of coming upon Nic in a jazz
combo, then dancing half-naked for old people; Nic dreams of being dogged at a
train station by a gangly cretin who then stabs him. As the pavement rises up
to meet his falling body, he sees himself and his wife walk into their country
cottage and close the door. Cut to a shot of newborn twins, who are then
separated and grow up to be the lush Saffron Burrows, one English, one Italian.
The twins nearly meet each other in an airport, but fate keeps them from
connecting. The Italian twin drives Nic--who turns out to be a documentary film
director--to the desert of Tunisia, where there is further betrayal, loss of
sexual innocence, exploitation of Third World peoples, and a tragic
retaliation. The soundtrack is melancholy classical piano.

            That The Loss of Sexual Innocence doesn't gel
is a point too obvious to belabor. Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching
it--not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because
I thought he looked fine--beautiful, actually--naked. Figgis' camera is probing
and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain
allusive and mysterious. What can I say? The man gives good movie.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Wake Up, Mr. Greenspan

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               and 
               
                  Time
               
               ,
May 31
            

            
               Newsweek 's
cover story on the future of technology forecasts a post-PC
world where household appliances are connected to the Internet and each other.
Your sprinkler will check with the weather service before it waters the lawn,
your refrigerator will order more milk when your carton expires, and your
toilet will test your emissions and notify your health-care provider when
you're out of sorts. ... Bill Gates, by contrast, envisions a
PC-plus future , where the PC will remain the primary
computing tool but will be integrated with other smart devices.

            
               Time 's cover package on troubled teens includes a poll showing that
20 percent of teens were evacuated from their schools because of post-Columbine
bomb threats. A piece argues that smaller schools might be an antidote to the
gargantuan high schools where adolescents anonymously drift into deep trouble
and despair.

            
               Newsweek 
               reveals that President Clinton has approved a CIA plan to
destabilize Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic: Kosovar rebels will be
trained to commit acts of sabotage such as cutting telephone wires, ruining gas
reserves, and launching cyberattacks against secret bank accounts where
Milosevic has stowed millions of dollars, presumably pilfered from his
people.

            
               Time says that
evangelical youth gained a martyr when the Columbine shooters killed Cassie
Bernall as she affirmed her faith in God. Post-Littleton, campus Christians are
more organized and energized about their evangelizing.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               , May 31
            

            The
cover story recounts the story of a black World War II hero
later refused re-enlistment by the Army because of trumped-up charges of
Communist activity. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor two years
ago, but his family still awaits an apology. ... A piece describes the fervent campaigning for this summer's Iowa
straw poll. Underdog Republican presidential candidates are seizing it as their
chance for a breakthrough. Frontrunner Gov. George W. Bush faces a dilemma: If
he participates, he risks losing to the social conservatives who dominate GOP
straw polls; if he skips the poll, Iowans may spurn him in February's
all-important caucuses. ... Parents are abandoning the PTA in droves for
groups that are more local and hard-hitting, says a report . The PTA's reformist mandate--it pioneered libraries,
hot lunches, and kindergartens--has degenerated into mere boosterism.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , May 31
            

            The
magazine gleefully anticipates a Senate race between Hillary Clinton and
Rudolph Giuliani: "It feels like a government subsidy for wayward journalists."
... In a piece about Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director
attributes both his psychologically probing cinematic style and his tumultuous
love life to his emotionally frigid parents. ... An article defends Chai
Ling, who led the Tiananmen Square protests and now runs an American Internet
start-up, from charges of selling out and, more gravely, of guiding the
protests with naive extremism.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , May 31
            

            The
cover package forecasts Al Gore's electoral strategy. One piece says the veep
is likely to take credit for wiring school and libraries to the Internet--even
though this wiring is subsidized by a "universal service charge" on everyone's
phone bill. Another article admits that Tipper Gore is a political asset but
warns darkly of her agenda. She appears to be an apolitical soccer mom, but
she's actually a liberal do-gooder and her advocacy of mental-health issues
threatens to increase health-care costs for most Americans. ... The
Standard rejects the line that Treasury Secretary-designate Larry
Summers is a Robert Rubin clone. Unlike Rubin, Summers believes in lots of
government intervention in the economy and does not trust Wall Street.

            

               
                  Economist
               
               
                  , May 22
            

            The
cover story protests the Fed's failure to hike
interest rates despite early signs of inflation. Alan Greenspan's laxity is
encouraging "speculative excesses." Since higher interest rates take months to
restrain economic expansion, postponing a hike is like waiting "to brake a
runaway car until it is a few feet from the cliff's edge." (For a dissent, see
last week's .) ... The magazine instructs new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak "to
note what the previous government did and do the opposite." First priorities:
negotiating deals with Syria and the Palestinians. ... An editorial berates the British government's proposal to
eliminate trial by jury for several crimes including theft and weapons
possession. (The home secretary asserted that most defendants demand jury
trials "for no good reason other than to delay proceedings.")

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , June 7
            

            The
cover story argues that Hillary Clinton's senatorial
run would harm Democrats whether she won or lost. She would "divert resources
from other candidates, politicize their races in ways that don't play well
beyond the Upper West Side, and become a rallying point for conservatives still
itching to exploit anti-Clinton sentiment," thus thwarting Democratic efforts
nationwide. ... The "TRB " column tells readers not to fret over the rising cost of
health care. The expenditures are worth it because the care they fund is
state-of-the-art, and nothing's more important than health.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , May 23
            

            A
writer visits the designers of the bloodthirsty, hyper-realistic, and immensely
popular video games blamed for the Littleton shootings. They are indifferent to
charges of inciting violence ("Why would I care about that?" one sniffs).
... A novelist criticizes the editing of Juneteenth , Ralph
Ellison's soon-to-be published unfinished novel. Ellison's manuscript was more
convoluted draft than coherent novel. The radical surgery performed by his
literary executor may have removed Ellison's vision from the work. ... A
piece alleges that New York state's services for the mentally ill have
deteriorated under Republican Gov. George Pataki. An example of the tragic
consequences of Pataki's neglect: A demented man, refused care by several
overcrowded health care facilities, recently killed a woman by pushing her
under a subway train. 

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , March 20
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
March 20, 1999)
            

            The cover story says the United States needs to realize
that Chinese espionage is inevitable. A bigger source of Sino-American trouble
is export promotion: U.S. presidents should quit hawking goods to China,
because that trade policy conflicts with foreign policy. The "Lexington"
column advocates a consistent U.S. policy toward
China, warning that separation of powers allows the legislative and executive
branches to broadcast different messages. (Lexington also praises House Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Christopher Cox "for his cheerful refusal to be a
hack or a firebrand.") ... An editorial bids adieu to the old model of European integration
premised on an omnipotent central bureaucracy. In addition to being
scandal-ridden, the European Commission has squandered its policy-making powers
to the point of irrelevance.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               
                  , April 5, 1999
            

            
               (posted Friday, March
19, 1999)
            

            The kindly cover profile
of Bill Bradley says he might seriously challenge Al Gore for the 2000
nomination as the "the candidate of political reform and moral reawakening."
The article credits the Democratic underdog with: the 1986 Tax Reform Act,
prescience regarding the American high-tech boom, earnestness, an "active
social conscience," and "political individuality." Bradley believes Gore is
compromised by his association with administration scandals. ... An
article argues that abortion is here to stay because it is "an indispensable
part of the middle-class toolkit." Despite the fact that two-thirds of
Americans have moral misgivings about abortion, expediency overpowers
"traditional morality." Pragmatic Republicans (e.g., George W. Bush) understand
this. ... "TRB" faults Clinton's moral reasoning in apologizing for
American assistance to repressive Guatemalan regimes. The broader goals of the
Cold War required the United States to make common cause with oppressive
governments. Rather than issuing mea culpa s, Clinton should declassify
intelligence archives so citizens may judge for themselves if the United States
is guilty.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , March 21
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
March 18, 1999)
            

            The fascinating cover
story traces the path of anti-abortion activist Jim Kopp, the suspect sought in
the fatal shooting of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian. Kopp began as a
"prayerful defender of life" but became an "any means necessary" fanatic. The
piece explores the radicalization of anti-abortion extremists, who have moved
from Operation Rescue's nonviolent principles to the Army of God
Manual , which instructs activists on violent action. The violent strategy
may be achieving its goal: Between 1992 and 1996, the number of hospitals,
clinics, and physicians performing abortion declined 14 percent. ... A
profile wonders whether Charlie Rose can translate his discursive PBS charm to
60 Minutes II , where he's now a correspondent. The article asserts that
Rose's success at 60 Minutes II depends "on his ability to relinquish
those very qualities that make him interesting and distinctive": his "harried,
stumblebum" style. ... An article focuses on the rebuilding of the
Levi's brand, which has lost the youth market since the early '90s. Levi's
decline is attributed to the "paradigm shift" toward baggy over tight and the
failure of Levi's to retail directly to a new generation of consumers who
experience shopping as entertainment. Levi's hopes to rebound by subtly
infiltrating youth culture: sponsoring Lauryn Hill concerts, posting flyers,
chalking sidewalks, and airing Errol Morris-directed commercials during
Dawson's Creek .

            
               
                  Vanity
Fair , April 1999
            

            The annual Hollywood
hype issue is as immense (414 pages) and gushy as usual. The meatiest feature
chronicles how Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn squelched the romance between
Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak to avoid adverse publicity. The mob, reportedly
acting on Cohn's behalf, threatened Davis with violence to force him into a
sham marriage with a fellow African-American. ... 
               VF
retreads the story of the industry war between Creative Artists Agency and
upstart Artists Management Group. The battle started last summer when prodigal
mogul Mike Ovitz rode back into town, founded AMG, and proclaimed his intention
to reinvent "the architecture of the industry." The piece explains the
institutionalized tensions between agents and managers, and suggests that Ovitz
is off to "a strong start," having already lured away industry "crown jewels"
such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. ... Plenty of
Hollywood glamour photos: The cover triptych shows the usual fresh crop of
movie idols to-be. (Never heard of them? Neither have we.) Virtually everyone
who's anyone is depicted in an inside portfolio: Drew Barrymore ("The Nymph"),
Sean Connery and Michael Caine ("The Old Devils"), Jodie Foster, Michelle
Pfeiffer, and Meg Ryan ("The Three Graces"), etc.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and Newsweek , March 22
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
16, 1999)
            

            
               Time 's cover story is Bill Gates' 12-step program for "succeeding in
the digital age." Revelations: Use e-mail (No. 1) and not paper (No. 5). There
is much jargon: "3. Shift knowledge workers into high-level thinking." One
sidebar wonders why Gates doesn't mention the
antitrust trial in his new book and urges Microsoft employees to "slap their
boss with a digital reality check." Another suggests that Gates is making lavish "investments" in
the Republican Party as "insurance" against a legal defeat. ...

               Newsweek 's cover story calls Joe DiMaggio "our first modern media star"
and "the loneliest hero we have ever had." The story predictably applauds his
achievements on the field and sighs over his difficulties off it.

            
               Time 's sprawl
story sensibly points out that planning and zoning are inherently local issues
not national ones. Nevertheless, national politicians (notably Al Gore) are
feasting on the issue, which a pollster calls "startlingly on track with
voters." ... 
               Newsweek prints a snippy interview with Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov,
currently visiting the United States in search of International Monetary Fund
backing. If he is refused, he says, "Russia will not perish." ... Also
in Newsweek , Nation Editor Victor Navasky rails against Elia Kazan's Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.
The only fair way to give Kazan the award, he says, is to "print the names he
named on the back of it." (For more on Kazan see "" in

                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , March 22
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
16, 1999)
            

            The cover
story surveys the "E-Mail Nation," addressing cyberstalking, office
politics, and online literacy. Conclusion: E-mail's potent mix of intimacy,
anonymity, and speed is reshaping American life. One surprise: The elderly are
among e-mail's most dedicated practitioners; although initially daunted by
technological bells and whistles, they find solace and community online.
... A piece describes Minnesota's new abortion-reporting
regulations. The rules, which were pushed by pro-lifers, require doctors to
complete a 10-point checklist detailing why the patient wants an abortion, list
the patient's method of payment, and record the total number of abortions they
perform. ... An article details the Navy's effort to recruit new sailors and
retain old ones by establishing on-board "wellness" programs, which include
counseling, personal fitness training, and free 15-minute facial massages.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , March 22
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
16, 1999)
            

            A piece calls the
killing of Amadou Diallo by New York police officers more explicable than last
year's beating of Abner Louima. Whereas Louima's beating was a premeditated,
unprovoked act of barbarism, Diallo's killing stemmed from street-crime
patrols, where heavy suspicion of blacks is inevitable, if unlawful. ...
A piece says the first hair dye ads of the '50s ("Does she or doesn't she?"
"Because I'm worth it") were seminal declarations of female self-determination.
New hair color offered women "an immediate and affordable means of
transformation." ... An article describes trendy new wrinkles in Brooks
Brothers' previously starchy marketing techniques. The original fount of
preppiness has been reduced to deploying an army of image-makers to reclaim
customers from faux WASP competitors such as Ralph Lauren.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , March 22
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
16, 1999)
            

            The editors eviscerate
the Clinton administration's China policy and mock the notion of a strategic
partnership with Beijing: "Presumably, if we don't engage this landmass, it
will fall on us." ... The cover story, titled "The Gospel According to
George W. Bush," narrates his transformation from sinful wretch to fervent
believer and his carefully phrased supplications to the Christian right.
... A piece challenges recent findings that mothers don't harm their
children's development by working as an "affront" to those moms who stay home
or work out of necessity. The study will make it even more difficult for
mothers to take time off from work to raise children.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Demand an Explanation!!!

            Greetings, pissed-off consumers. It is I, the great
Shopping Avenger, who has toiled without pause this past month (all right, I
paused) to right the wrongs inflicted on the buying masses by the dark forces
of turbocharged capitalism.

            Before writing the first installment of this column
last month, the Shopping Avenger had no idea that so many people would have so
many complaints about so many different companies. The Shopping Avenger also
had no idea so many people read 
                  Slate
               . The complaints, as Alan
Simpson would say, have come pouring in over the transom. I received somewhere
around 2.7 million e-mails from 
                  Slate
                readers asking for help in
the battle against poor customer service. Perhaps it was fewer than 2.7
million, but not by much.

            Only one correspondent
was hostile: "You're probably just running a scam to collect a bunch of upscale
e-mail addresses," he wrote, dyspeptically and inaccurately. I checked out his
e-mail address--it's not upscale at all.

            But most of you turned to me in good faith, and for this I
am thankful. Alas, I am but one superhero, and could not come to the aid of all
who beseeched me. So, for those of you asking highly technical questions
concerning the operation of your personal computers, let it be known across the
land that the Shopping Avenger still writes on papyrus. And for those of you
who contributed not complaints but wacky observations, such as "I find it
amazing how people will drive many miles out of their way to buy gas that is 5
cents cheaper," I thank you for your commentary.

            Now, though, a few observations of my own, about the
complaints (the understandable ones) I did receive.

            1) The American consumer believes that the telephone
is the instument of the devil.

            2) The people who answer 1-800 lines are spawn of
the devil or, at the very least, incredibly thick.

            3) The typical corporation would much rather blow
smoke than actually apologize for doing wrong.

            4) American corporations
do not yet understand the true power of the Shopping Avenger.

            As an example of all four phenomena, I refer you now to the
complaint of K., who is chagrined by the errant behavior of the U-Haul
company.

            "I signed up a truck from Friday until Monday two
weeks hence," K. explains. "A week later, I called the local number to confirm,
and confirm they did: They confirmed that my reservation was for Sunday. Not
only was it not Fri.-to-Mon., indeed, it couldn't be Fri.-to-Mon., because
U-Haul policy is not to rent trucks for more than one weekend day. ... Hey, no
problem, a fine policy. But let's supplement it with: DON'T TELL ME OTHERWISE
WHEN I SIGN UP."

            Though I am not one to endorse the use of CAPITAL
LETTERS TO MAKE A POINT, I believe K. earned that right here.

            K. goes on to state that he canceled his rental and
sought out a truck at Ryder, where the saleswoman, an ex-U-Haul employee, told
him that it was U-Haul's policy never to turn down a reservation, no matter
what. Overbooking is the norm, she said.

            So, I called U-Haul to inquire about its rental
policies. What I got was, in technical terms, a runaround.

            U-Haul International's
spokeswoman, Johna Burke, told me that her company would never behave in such a
way. Then she blamed the customer for misunderstanding what he heard. This, I
am learning, is standard operating procedure across whole industries: I've
heard variations of "the customer didn't understand our phone prompts" three
times already, leading me to the conclusion that there's a real problem out
there with deliberately obfuscatory phone prompts.

            Then Burke yelled at me for having the temerity to even
suggest that the ex-U-Haul employee K. quoted might be right. The Shopping
Avenger can take the heat, however. I asked her for the U-Haul policy
concerning weekend rentals, but Burke said she could not cite policy, because
individual U-Haul operators set their own policies. She asked me to identify
the state in which the rental was to occur, which I did. Then she suggested
that K. merely thought he made a reservation but actually only asked about
prices. This seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but I checked with K., who
supplied me with his actual reservation number. He also confirmed that he
placed a deposit for the truck.

            Once again, I called Burke to ask whether U-Haul is
in the habit of changing confirmed reservations behind the customer's back, but
Burke, even while knowing that the Shopping Avenger's deadline approached, did
not call back.

            The Shopping Avenger has himself been a victim of
the reservation shuffle, and so he sympathizes with K.'s complaint. And K.
should know that the Shopping Avenger will not rest, except at night and on
weekends, until he shakes an adequate explanation out of U-Haul.

            But let us turn now to a
Shopping Avenger victory.

            Our correspondent A. wrote the Shopping Avenger to complain
of his treatment on the Ticketmaster Web site. As he explained, he had logged
on to the site in order to buy tickets to a Bob Dylan-Paul Simon show.
Everything was going fine until he clicked to confirm his order. The screen
read, "We will now contact the Ticketmaster system to complete your order.
Please wait to see a response from the system with your confirmation."

            "I waited and waited," A. wrote me. "Finally, a
message appeared telling me to try later; the gateway was not functioning. ...
So there I was wondering what the hell had happened to my credit card
information. Even worse, the phone number they gave me to call is long
distance. Needless to say, this was frustrating. ... I picked up the phone and
called the long-distance number. It was busy. In fact, it was busy for the NEXT
THREE HOURS"--there are those capital letters again. "Even worse, when I
finally did get through, I was put on hold for 20 minutes. Let me emphasize:
That was 20 minutes of my long distance, on MY phone bill, to find out what
they had done to MY credit card number."

            A. then writes: "Ironically, while on hold,
Ticketmaster shamelessly plugged its online system, finishing with, 'Buying
tickets has never been easier.' "

            Ironic indeed.

            To add insult to injury, when A. finally spoke to a "live"
person (you will soon see why the word "live" is in quotation marks), he asked
to have the $5.50 "convenience" fee waived for each ticket he planned to buy.
"After all, I was making a long-distance call and they had bungled my initial
attempt at a purchase."

            The operator, a certain "Nola" from the misnamed
"customer service" department, told him he should have called his local service
provider. Of course, no one had provided A. with the local service number. He
eventually bought the tickets anyway, paying the "convenience" charge.

            All this was too much for the Shopping Avenger, who
swung into action. Actually, the Shopping Avenger swung into action even before
he knew of A.'s plight, since A.'s girlfriend had secretly forwarded A.'s
Shopping Avenger complaint to Ticketmaster. Soon after I made inquiries, A. was
refunded $11 in "convenience" charges.

            But $11 wasn't enough. I
wanted an explanation and an apology for A., which he got, sort of.

            In a letter to A., the executive vice president of
Ticketmaster Multimedia, Robert Perkins, explains, semi-grammatically, that
"[w]hen tickets goes on-sale, it operates through telephone lines that may
become busy." He also explains, "Dozens of variables may determine the speed
and continuity of your Internet connection are in the hands of your local phone
company."

            Perkins does say he's sorry, in a fashion: "Please
accept our sincerest apologies and we hope you will continue to offer your
comments as our site evolves in the future."

            A. can accept the nonsensical apology, he told me,
because Ticketmaster is also offering him a $100 gift certificate for his
troubles. Ticketmaster has shown the way: When you screw up, apologize, make
material amends, and get the Shopping Avenger on your side.

            Score that: Shopping Avenger, $111;
evil-but-contrite corporation, 0.

            Next month, the Shopping Avenger hopes to focus on
the evils of the pest control and airline industries. Don't ask why, it's too
complicated to explain. If you have complaints about these industries--or any
other, for that matter--e-mail the Shopping Avenger (with as much detail as
possible) at shoppingavenger@slate.com.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Muteness of Prince George

            Gov. George W. Bush,
R-Texas, announced Sunday that he is forming a committee to explore whether he
should run for president. After a parade of adulatory speeches from committee
members, he fielded questions. One reporter asked whether abortion should be
illegal in the first trimester. "That's a hypothetical question," said Bush.
What about global economic instability? "I won't have specific remedies or
specific suggestions until I start moving around the country," Bush replied.
Should we build a missile defense system even if it violates the anti-ballistic
missile treaty? "I will be glad to answer all those questions once I get out in
the course of the campaign," Bush offered, ending the press conference.

            What a charade. Bush's
"campaign" has been underway for a year. He has plotted strategy, assembled a
campaign team, pitched to donors, courted politicians, and written letters to
potential allies in key states. His fund-raisers expect to collect $10 million
by the end of March. For the next three months, his "exploratory" committee
will raise money and build a campaign staff. Yet Bush remains clueless about
many national issues and, on others, he knows he can only lose votes by being
pinned down. Moreover, the longer he postpones his candidacy, the longer he
deprives his rivals of a target, thereby starving them to death. For these
reasons, Bush is claiming immunity to policy questions. And he's getting away
with it, thanks to several excuses.

            1. I'm doing my job. At his press
conference, Bush refused to answer questions about tax cuts and other "issues"
until Texas finishes its legislative session in May. He explained that being
governor is his "job" and that he had promised Texans he would stay home
through the session. "I'm a person who does in office what I say I will do," he
insisted. Former GOP Chairman Haley Barbour, a member of the exploratory
committee, seemed deeply moved. "I think Gov. Bush's keeping his commitment to
Texas shows what kind of leader George Bush is," said Barbour.

            Lest anyone contemplate
the convenience of this excuse, Bush spun it as a sacrifice. He regretted that
he wouldn't be "able" to visit key primary states for months. "Some have said,
'Well, you're gonna be too late in some state,' " he lamented. But "I've got a
job to do." The press swallowed this line whole. Bush "is understandably
reluctant to leave Austin at least until the Legislature concludes its work,"
said U.S. News & World Report . "He has defied conventional wisdom by
refusing to travel the country to raise money and court supporters."

            2. Read my principles. Bush outlined his
"core, conservative principles"--"limited government," "low taxes," "free and
fair trade," "local control of schools," "strong families," and "personal
responsibility." When asked about specific issues, he referred back to his
principles. "How exactly do you plan to preserve the prosperity of the United
States?" asked one reporter. "When I start to emerge out of the state after the
legislative session," said Bush, "I'm going to lay out an economic stimulus
package that will do just that. You heard the principles by which I'll be
making decisions." On foreign policy, he said only that his "framework" would
emphasize what's "good for America."

            
               3. Read my testimonials. To
deflect scrutiny from his own views, Bush stacked his committee with people who
can vouch for him. At the press conference, President Reagan's secretary of
state, George Shultz, and President Bush's national security aide, Condoleeza
Rice, vouched for Gov. Bush's toughness on foreign policy. Reps. J.C. Watts
Jr., R-Okla., and Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, vouched for his racial inclusiveness.
Pro-choice Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., vouched for his belief in individual
freedom. When a reporter asked what Bush would do about Russia's meltdown, Bush
cited his "principles," babbled about missile defense, and said, "I of course
will be relying upon the briefings on details from people such as Dr. Rice."
With friends like these, who needs positions? "He has George Shultz
advising him on foreign policy," observed ABC's George Will with delight.

            Bush's personnel moves
serve him particularly well on social issues. He has conspicuously courted
former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, and in January he
made a pilgrimage to coalition founder Pat Robertson. Without publicly
embracing any of the coalition's positions, Bush elicited from Robertson the
magic words, "He loves the Lord." Conservative pundits are particularly excited
over Bush's recruitment of conservative Christian speech writer Mike Gerson.
Noting that Gerson "wrote Bob Dole's anti-Hollywood speech in 1996," Fred
Barnes inferred on Meet the Press that "one issue on which we're going
to hear a lot from [Bush] is cultural conservatism."

            4. Read my polls. Since Bush's advantages
lie in politics rather than policy, he steers attention to his campaign
juggernaut rather than to his platform. "The men and women on this stage
represent the best of the Republican Party," he boasted at his press
conference. Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., handed Bush "a list of 80 current members of
Congress who have already endorsed your candidacy," and Bush's aides
distributed a similar list to reporters. On the weekend chat shows, pundits
marveled at Bush's deluge of endorsements, his bottomless coffers, and his
godlike standing in the polls. Bush never explicitly brings up money or polls,
because he doesn't have to. But he counts on them to keep the press pining for
him while he stiffs policy questions.

            
               5.

               Shame on you. When pressured to clarify his
positions, Bush morphs the question into attack politics and attack journalism.
"I will campaign on my beliefs and my principles, and I will not engage in the
petty politics of personal destruction," he insisted. A reporter asked him
about conservative opponents who associate him with his father's moderation.
"I'm going to try to work hard not to play the typical political game of
tearing down your opponent," Bush sniffed, "and I would hope others wouldn't
tear down my dad."

            Bush's wife and daughters provide another handy shield. "I
had doubts and concerns about what a campaign would mean for my family," he
confided to the assembled scribes. "I convinced my wife that I love her and
I'll always love her. That's the only thing that'll overcome the meat-grinding
aspects of national politics." From the podium, Dunn and Rice, two of the
committee's three front women, implored Bush's wife and daughters to endure the
campaign's "trial by fire." Bush has milked this protective anguish for months.
Never mind that according to Time , he privately told several financial
backers in January, "I love my wife. And I love my daughters. ... But they
don't have a veto on this."

            Bush's portrayal of substantive interrogation as
nasty nit-picking has completely suckered the media. Time reported that
his rivals were trying to "pose litmus-test questions" and "tear Bush down."
U.S. News accused them of "picking at his credentials" and warned, "Bush
will accept only so much battering." Quoting a Pat Buchanan adviser's demand
that Bush "take some positions" on "abortion, taxes, China, homosexual rights,"
U.S. News groaned that Buchanan "seems poised for another round of
bashing the front-runner." On Meet the Press , Lamar Alexander said of
Bush's vagueness: "We need to define what we mean. Are we for a single-rate
flat tax? Or are we, as I am, for tripling the tax deduction for each child to
$8,000? Are we for affirmative action based on need, as I am, or based on race?
Are we for English for the children on the first day of school, or are we for
federal bilingual education programs? I'm arguing for plain talk, not weasel
words." To which host Tim Russert replied, "Why won't you abide by the
11 th Amendment and stop criticizing George W. Bush?"

            Meanwhile, Bush suffers
in silence as his fund-raisers bleed the field dry. "I'll play the hand I was
dealt," he shrugs stoically. Poor George. He can't help it. He was born with a
silver gag in his mouth.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 205: &quot;Nothing but Cash&quot;

            

               Devise a pair of words to fill in the two blanks--one word each--as
Thomas Rogers, president of NBC cable, describes his shift away from the old
network economic model: "Our goal over time is to turn viewers into __________
and __________."
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 204)--"Stay!":
               

               

                  
                     Who said this to whom about what, "Keep on doing what you're
doing, and don't call us, we'll call you."
                  
               

               
"Madeleine Albright, to Bill Clinton, shortly after her appalling discovery
that the president had promised Slobodan Milosevic a job at Revlon if only he
would sign the damn peace treaty."-- Jennifer Miller
               

               "The
head of the Human Genome Project said it to the head of the Dog Genome Project
when asked for advice."-- Mac Thomason
               

               "St.
Peter, to Roger Ebert, regarding his concerns about working with Tom
Shales."-- Erich Van Dussen
               

               "The
emperor told us that in 1941 when they sent us to this island. Now you say the
war is over? I wonder why he didn't call."-- David Ballard
               

               "Oh my
God! The call is coming from inside the house!"-- Eric "Just Watched
Urban Legend " Fredericksen
               

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

               Instead of our regular class work, let's go outside
under the big, old dead elm and show a filmstrip, i.e., let's quote a few
highlights from Tim Weiner's dark and charming New York Times obit
titled "Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies, Took LSD to CIA," an account of the man who
ran MKUltra, a project that dosed unsuspecting Americans with hallucinogenic
drugs for charity.

               

                  "In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously
for 174 days."

                  "The experiments were useless."

                  "The CIA awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and
deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973."

                  " 'Gottlieb never did what he did for inhumane reasons,' Mr. Marks
said."

                  "Gottlieb ... developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an
array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill
a leftist leader in the Congo. None of the plans succeeded."

                  "He bought land with an old log cabin outside a small Virginia town,
Boston, where he practiced two of his lifelong hobbies, folk dancing and
herding goats."

                  "Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was
a kind of genius."

               

               
                  Golden Arch's
Answer
               

               Pope John Paul II said it to Cardinal John O'Connor
about his offer to resign as archbishop of New York.

               Five years ago, on turning 75, O'Connor submitted a
pro forma resignation, as church law requires, and received the above
reply. Last week, in what was seen as a sign of his impending retirement, he
invited all the priests in the archdiocese to see him celebrate the Chrism
Mass.

               "The Cardinal turns 80 in January," says archdiocese
spokesman Joseph Zwilling, "and I think many people including the Cardinal
expect that will pretty much mark the end of his term as Archbishop."

               With its characteristic
accent on youth, the church prohibits cardinals over 80 to hold certain offices
or vote for a new pope. Before accepting O'Connor's resignation, the pope is
expected to name a successor to Washington's Cardinal James Hickey.

               
                  Movie Math
Extra
               

               Match the numbers with
the movie lore they enumerate. All figures refer to 1998 movies produced by
members of the MPAA (i.e., excluding DreamWorks and New Line among others.)

               
                  The
Numbers
               

               1. $52.7 million

               2. $25.3 million

               3. $6.95 billion

               4. 1.48 billion

               5. 34,168

               
                  The
Lore
               

               A. Total cost of Elia Kazan rationalizations.

               B. Average production cost of a movie.

               C. Average marketing cost of a movie.

               D. Total engineering cost of Roger Ebert's new
partner, a giant talking cheese sandwich.

               E. Number of movie screens in the United States.

               F. Number of Americans who've dozed during a Kevin
Costner movie.

               G. Number of Americans who envied those dozing
through a Kevin Costner movie.

               H. Box office receipts for 1998.

               I. Insured value of Meg Ryan's perkiness.

               J. Admissions for
1998.

               
                  The
Answers
               

               
                  1-B,
2-C, 3-H, 4-J, 5-E.
               

               
                  Fun
Fact
               

               During the February
sweeps period, 21 of the 25 most watched programs on cable TV were wrestling
shows.

               
                  Common
Denominator
               

               That scamp Monica
Lewinsky and her sexual shenanigans.

            

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 241: &quot;A Very Special ...&quot;

            
               A recent episode
of a popular TV series was postponed because it was frighteningly like an
actual, front-page event. Now the network says it will go ahead and broadcast
the show's season finale, although it too is disturbingly reminiscent of that
same event. How will the listing in TV Guide describe the big
show?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 240)--"So Stop and Ask Directions":
            

            

               
                  
                     Fill in the blank on this thoroughly satisfying
explanation from Defense Secretary William Cohen: "None of those maps indicated
that it was the Chinese Embassy that was being targeted. It was not a human
error or mechanical error--it was a(n) __________
error."
                  
               
            

            "
'Humechanical error?' offered Cohen after an uncomfortably long
pause."-- Beth Sherman ( Dale Shuger and David Duncan had
similar answers.)

            "
'Hilarious error.' (This contributed to China's angry reaction.)"--Justin
Warner
            

            "
'Typographical error.' 'Chinese Embassy' was mistakenly typed 'aspirin factory'
on the map, so the spell-checker missed it."-- Charles Star (similarly,
Ken Novak )

            "
'Cartoon error.' Just try this little trick to defuse the tragedy of the
situation: Missiles through window. Embassy flattened. Staccato violins pluck
out stereotypical Chinese music. Chinese run around, backsides aflame. Cut to
Jiang Zemin positioning boulder on cliff."-- M Pesca
            

            "A
time in my boyhood when the world seemed full of possibility. I and my friends
would take our fishing poles down to the pond and dip our toes in the water and
... oh, I'm sorry--are we out of time? I deeply regret the error."-- Kate
"Please Stop Sending Me Those Autoreplies" Wing
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            It is a terrible thing to be dragged in front of
the TV cameras and forced to admit that your own dreadful ineptitude led to
horrible suffering, which is why I pray that none of you will ever have your
divorce hearing televised. But if you do, may you be blessed with the wiliness
of a fox, the agility of a cat, and the creepy ingenuity of a defense secretary
in concocting a dazzling non-acknowledgement: It was nobody's fault. It's the
new heartlessness.

            Whatever happened to the
military's traditional heartless approach of finding a scapegoat? In Stanley
Kubrick's 1957 Paths of Glory , when those French soldiers failed to go
over the top and take the anthill, the general staff arbitrarily picked three
poor, dumb bastards to be tried and executed for cowardice. In the remake, the
general staff will arbitrarily select three saps who will be tried and found
delightfully not guilty. The movie will be called ... oh, pick it--anything
from Tailhook to Aviano . No, wait. One guy was found responsible
for that last one, not for the deaths themselves, but for destroying a
videotape. Patton, I think it was.

            
               Always Check Your
Answer
            

            "It was an institutional error."

            Some ways of cross-checking a map the institution
decided not to try:

            

               Have an American on the ground confirm the location.

               Have a Yugoslav on the ground confirm the location.

               Ask an American official who'd recently been in Belgrade.

               Ask a travel agent.

               Look it up in the phonebook.

               Call the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement and ask for
its address.

            

            
               Cartographic Fun
Fact
            

            The National Imagery and
Mapping Agency, the Pentagon bureau that made the map of Belgrade, also made
the map of Aviano, the one without the ski lift. Coincidentally, it was also
nobody's fault that the Marine jet severed the cable and killed those
skiers.

            
               Let Your Fingers
Do the Extra
            

            The just-arrived
Manhattan Yellow Pages is sprinkled with chirpy public-service ads. As every
professional knows, placement is as important as the ad itself. That is, the
way an ad in a magazine is read is affected by the other information on the
page. Below, actual phone book public service messages, the actual paid ads
that accompany them on the page, and the presumed meaning of their
juxtaposition.

            Public Service Ad: "Encourage children to write and
share original stories."

            Paid Ad: "Celebrity signatures and sports
memorabilia."

            Presumed Message: Get
your kids to sign lots of stuff, so years from now, when they're famous, you
can sell it to suckers.

            Public Service Ad: "Volunteer to read to
children."

            Paid Ad: "She-Male Escorts, The Alternative to the
Routine."

            Presumed Message:
Something about reading pornography to kids? I'm as appalled as anyone.

            Public Service Ad: "Hold family storytelling
sessions."

            Paid Ad: "ACI, The Nation's Oldest Private Drug and
Alcohol Treatment Center."

            Presumed Message: Hold
family storytelling sessions about Uncle Milt's three-day benders in Atlantic
City.

            Public Service Ad: "Healthy Advice. Consult your
physician before beginning an exercise program."

            Paid Ad: "Sizzle Escorts. Feel the Heat."

            Presumed Message: Ever
since Rockefeller died during sex, people are so cautious. It's like they're
afraid of being sued or something.

            Public Service Ad: "Household safety. Make sure
everyone in your family knows what to do in the event of a fire."

            Paid Ad: "Accident Victims. You Need an Experienced
Law Firm ... fire and explosion injuries."

            Presumed Message: First
the fire, then the lawsuit.

            Public Service Ad: "New in town? Shop the Bell
Atlantic Yellow Pages."

            Paid Ad: "Asian Club Escorts to Excite You."

            Presumed Message: Don't
know where to find a hooker? Here.

            Public Service Ad: "Start your own family book
club."

            Paid Ad: "Gold Shield Security and Investigations.
Private and Corporate Investigations."

            Presumed Message: Make
big money writing books people will pay you not to publish. Start with Uncle
Milt.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Intelligence error.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Driving While Flossing

            

               Please send your questions for publication to  prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My 12-year-old daughter is friends with a girl
whose single-parent mother is rarely at home. While I understand that she has
to work, I cannot understand why she chooses to spend most of her free time
with her boyfriend, who lives an hour away. The result is that her daughter is
at my house most days after school (well into the evening) as well as most
weekends. Her mother calls to check on her, but this is no substitute for the
time and attention her daughter needs.
            

            
               Both my daughter and
I feel very sorry for her friend and understand her unwillingness to be alone
so much, but I am concerned by her mother's neglect and resent the free
childcare. I have considered sending the mother a note but am convinced it
would only result in hurting the daughter and making her feel unwelcome in my
house. I do not want to be ungenerous to a child in need. How should I handle
this?
            

            

               --Concerned Mother
            

            Dear Con,

            Sending a note to this
neglectful mother, you correctly imagine, will not change the situation for the
better. The not-so-hot mother will become defensive, and one way or another the
kid will pay the price. It sounds to Prudie as though you and your daughter
like this child, so why don't you redo your thinking, privately, and come to
see this de facto member of your household as a kind of foster child. Think of
your open-door policy as an act of charity, a chance to make an important
contribution to a youngster's life. Your kind approach will also serve as a
model for your own daughter. If you think it useful, discuss your new approach
with your daughter. It can only help her if she knows her own mom is
consciously trying to make a difference. It can only be a wonderful lesson, by
example, for her to see generosity put into practice.

            
--Prudie, inclusively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Recently my wife wrote to you concerning my .
Your answer was predictable: It's unsafe; tell him to do this in private. Well,
my wife nearly fainted to see me castigated in public, no less on the
Internet!
            

            
               However, I feel constrained to respond. I never
do this in an unsafe driving situation--i.e., curves, crowded lanes, etc. I've
done this all over the United States, in New England mostly on the turnpike,
with never a mishap. My wife cannot say the same ... and she doesn't floss
while driving. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if a person can maintain
control of the situation, he shouldn't be found guilty of not operating
according to the manual.
            

            
               Thanks for letting
me vent.
            

            

               --Flosser's mate
            

            Dear Floss,

            One might surmise that
your driving record while flossing is better than the beloved's with both her
hands free. Perhaps this is a tug of war where the rope is, symbolically,
dental floss. Prudie hopes you two can settle this matter amicably so that the
next step is not clenched teeth.

            
--Prudie, prophylactically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Some weeks ago I made the acquaintance of a new
co-worker (of the opposite sex). We hit it off well, and I asked him to lunch.
After some scheduling problems we managed the meal and had, I thought, a
charming time. After that he was quite pleasant when we ran into each other.
Recently I asked him to join me again for lunch. He pleaded the press of work
and asked for a raincheck. After letting a week tactfully pass, I asked again.
He again declined, mentioning the proverbial raincheck. His manner has
definitely changed, and I know he's going to some lengths to avoid me.
            

            
               Needless to say I am disappointed, but I'm
certainly not planing to press my attentions on him. Unfortunately the
atmosphere now feels strained. Should I speak to him or just let matters rest?
I'm puzzled.
            

            
               Thanks for your
assistance.
            

            

               --Lunchless
            

            Dear Lunch,

            To pass on a wise nugget
from Prudie's favorite, Dorothy Parker: It's not the tragedies of life that
defeat you, it's the messes. What has happened is that the object of your
attention began to feel crowded ... for whatever reason. It could be that he
found you more aggressive than was comfortable, since the first and
second invitations were yours. It could be that while he behaved politely, the
initial lunch was not as charming as you thought. It could be that he intuited
more of an interest on your part than he was prepared to deal with. He could
very well be neurotic, or you may not be aware of your own firepower. Whatever
the actuality, he is definitely ducking you, and your next move should be this:
Behave in a cordial, correct, and distant manner. When you encounter him,
simply nod, smile, and keep going. This approach is the best thing for both of
you.

            
--Prudie, plainly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I just received a
wedding invitation via e-mail at work. It's from a person I don't really know
that well. I will not attend. Am I obligated to send a gift?
            

            

               --eg244
            

            Dear eg,

            A wedding invitation via
e-mail? At work? And you don't know the person well? My, my, how outré .
Do not even think of responding with a gift. What might be in order, however,
is a certificate of chutzpah .

            
--Prudie, properly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I have just written
a letter to a friend I have been out of touch with for several years. He and I
were the closest of buddies. Then my friend moved away from our small hometown
and married. We both settled down ... considerably. I have written to him a
couple of times over the last few years and have received no response. I would
really like to reawaken the friendship. Any suggestions?
            

            

               --Anonymous in Wyoming
            

            Dear Anon,

            The ways of the world
are largely a matter of guesswork. Your letter has every indication that your
pal from the old days is uninterested in picking up the thread. One might
postulate a number of reasons. Your youthful best pal may not remember things
the way you do, he may be disinclined to pick up a long-distance friendship,
or, sadly, his life may have gone haywire and he just isn't up to rejuvenating
the old bond. Do leave things alone, and accept that you may never know the
underlying reasons.

            --Prudie, regretfully

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 226: &quot;It Depends&quot;

            

               "This is quite controversial," said Kevin Sparkman of Pennsylvania.
"Until now, we have always depended strictly on altruism." What is he talking
about?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question--(No. 225) "Love Hurts":
            

            

               On Tuesday, in Texas, after a public display of affection, one of
them 
               playfully grabbed the other by the wrist and shouted,
"Run! Run!" What was going on?
            

            "Leper
practical jokes."-- Dave Gaffen ( Greg Diamond had a similar
answer.)

            "Gov.
Bush got a playful French kiss from Anna Nicole Smith at the annual World's
Biggest Boob Relay Race at the Texas State Fair."-- Brooke Saucier
            

            "Jesse
Jackson, looking in the mirror, decides the country needs him ...
again."-- Christopher Clark
            

            "Sounds
like another one of Darryl Strawberry's romantic liaisons about to be called
foul by the vice squad."-- Peter Carlin
            

            "Lyndon
Johnson and Lee Harvey Oswald, trying not to be seen together. The Tuesday was
in mid-November 1963."-- Tim Carvell
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Daniel's
Wrap-Up
            

            Even when Forrest Sawyer is sitting in, it's still
World News Tonight With Peter Jennings . Just because Johnny goes on
vacation, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson doesn't suddenly
become The Tonight Show With Jay Leno . The task of a guest host is
delicate. He has to be familiar (and competent) enough to keep viewers
satisfied, but also distinct (and flawed) enough that when the star returns,
everyone remembers exactly why they love him so. Similarly, when two men hold
hands in Texas, all our suspicions are confirmed.

            OK, that's not the least bit similar. These segues
are harder than they look from where you're sitting.

            
               Was It Good for You
Too Answer
            

            Rudolph Giuliani and George W. Bush were simpering
and giggling for the press after their 90-minute meeting at the governor's
mansion in Austin, Texas. It was a love fest.

            "He is one of the real hopes that the Republican
Party has of regaining control of the United States," said the mayor in his
characteristic military style.

            "He's a good tough campaigner," the governor
reciprocated manfully.

            "I think I might have eaten a bad clam," said
someone, perhaps me.

            Neither man would formally endorse the other, but
when a reporter asked the mayor if he'd specifically urged the governor to run,
Bush contorted his arm behind his back and said, "He twisted my ..." Well, you
know what he said. Then Giuliani displayed his usual flair for playful repartee
with the run, run business.

            (Answer composed
pre-departure by Randy Cohen.)

            
               Military
Intelligence Extra
            

            1. According to NATO Secretary-General Javier
Solana, "Milosevic is losing, and ..."

            a) He knows he is losing.

            b) He doesn't know he is losing.

            c) I can fly!

            2. Which explanation did NATO spokesman David Wilby
give for the attack that killed 10 civilians in a residential area of Pristina
last week?

            a) "One bomb appeared to be seduced off target at
the final stages."

            b) "Relax, it's not like we hit a convoy of refugees
or anything."

            c) "Kill 'em all, let God
sort 'em out."

            3. Explaining why he went to Belgrade, Dan Rather
said, "On some days, in some ways ..."

            a) I miss Afghanistan.

            b) Tom Brokaw can kiss my ass.

            c) Danger is my
business.

            4. Which was not said by a college student at a
Kosovo teach-in?

            a) "I'm very against genocide."

            b) "This Milosevic guy is Serbian, right?"

            c) "Forget ground troops,
let's send in Buffy."

            5. A party for NATO's 50 th anniversary
will still go ahead as scheduled, but administration officials acknowledged
that they would have to "adjust the tone" to make it, in the words of the
National Security Council's Don Blander:

            a) Less "triumphalist," more "serious and
sober."

            b) Less "imperialist," more "pathetic."

            c) Less "Greek,
Hungarian, Italian, and French," more "British and American."

            

               Answers
            

            1-a. Solana was also asked what would constitute a
"permissive environment" for NATO troops. "Why don't you help me a little," he
replied, "and not ask me to define the word 'permissive.' " He was not asked to
define "losing" either.

            2-a. A little candlelight and a bottle of Alizé, and
that ordnance just can't control itself.

            3-c. "I get $19,178 a day plus expenses," he could
have added, but didn't.

            4-c. At least, that's the only one the New York
Times reporter didn't overhear.

            5-a. Meanwhile, a NATO
postage stamp illustrated with a dove of peace has been "rescheduled for a
later date," the postal service said. "They're replacing the dove with an
Apache helicopter, so it'll take at least a month before it arrives," the
postal service did not add.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Texas-sized homoeroticism.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               
                  Love 's
Labor's Lost
            

            Scholarly opinion is
mixed on Shakespeare in Love . In a New York Times op-ed piece
earlier this month, Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt inveighed against the
film's historical infelicities, errors that he attributed to Hollywood's moral
cowardice. Where screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard made Gwyneth
Paltrow the inspiration for the young poet's love-struck "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" historians, Greenblatt
scolded, know that the sonnet, like 125 others, was in all likelihood written
to a young man. "How is it that a miserably undemocratic, unenlightened culture
400 years ago could be more tolerant of expressions of same-sex love, or the
appearance of it, than our own?" he wondered. Greenblatt isn't against all
forms of poetic license, though--just those that strike him as politically
incorrect. He writes that several years ago he tried to persuade Norman to
devise a screenplay about Shakespeare's relationship with the homosexual
playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose murder in a tavern in 1593 forms a
subplot to Shakespeare in Love . Other scholars are gentler on the film.
In Newsweek , the usually grumpy Harold Bloom called it "charming";
Clemson University's James Andreas enthused, "Shakespeare was a pop phenomenon
in his own age. Now, thanks to our modern media, he's becoming the real king of
pop he always was."

            
               Mass
Appeal
            

            According to recent
reports in the New York Times and the New Republic , a Vatican-led
crackdown on American Catholic colleges and universities is advancing. Among
the most controversial of a plate of new proposals from a committee of American
bishops: church approval of theology department hires, majority quotas of
"faithful Catholics" for faculties and trustee boards, and professions of faith
and fidelity to the church on the part of university presidents. The Vatican
has no formal means of enforcing the standards. According to the Times ,
schools such as New York City's nominally Catholic Fordham University--where Mass
is optional and the chair of the theology department isn't even Catholic--are
nonetheless concerned about the potential impact on their reputations. Members
of the Association of
Catholic Colleges and Universities are trying to satisfy the Vatican but
preserve academic freedom, student body diversity, and teaching quality.

            
               Don't Look
Bakke
            

            The anti-affirmative
action movement is urging students to sue their schools. Determined to abolish
race preferences in higher education, the Center for Individual
Rights of Washington, D.C., is funding a provocative ad campaign telling
students that academic affirmative action policies "violate the law." The
center successfully used this club against the University of Texas in 1996,
arguing that the school was misreading the U.S. Supreme Court's Bakke decision. The New York Times says the
center is currently going after the law schools of the University of Washington
and the University of Michigan.

            

               Heinous!
            

            So dismayed are
professors and administrators at the poor quality of their students' speech,
reports the Boston Globe , that a number of schools, from Smith College
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are increasing classroom speaking
requirements and offering electives to help students lose speech tics such as
"whatever" and "you know." Says Smith President Ruth Simmons about the
prevalent patois: "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's
imprecise, it's inarticulate, it's vernacular."

            
               Raising the
Stakes
            

            Yale law professor and
quirky constitutional historian Bruce Ackerman, testifying before the House of
Representatives in December, argued that a newly elected Congress has little
authority to try an official who was impeached by the previous one. Though
Ackerman's claims were dismissed by anti-impeachment scholars such as Lawrence
Tribe, they are not without their supporters, and he has now presented them in
a minibook, The Case Against Lameduck Impeachment . Another
project, written with Yale colleague Anne Alstott, is even more outré. In
The Stakeholder Society , the pair present a novel plan to
fight income inequality: Give all Americans a "capital stake" of $80,000 when
they reach adulthood to spend as they wish. The money would be raised via taxes
on the wealthiest 40 percent of the population and, eventually, the estates of
deceased beneficiaries. The plan has been touted in the New York Times
Magazine. Can a meeting with Al Gore (or at least Hillary Clinton) be far
behind?

            
               How Green Was My
Cali
            

            The critics are ganging
up on social critic Mike Davis, the MacArthur fellow and Marxist deflater of
Los Angeles' dreams and delusions. Local columnists have pointed out a number
of errors and unsubstantiated stories in Davis' two books about Los Angeles:
City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998). The errors
range from the trivial (misspelling the name of former Gov. George Deukmejian)
to the significant (reporting that there are 2,000 gated communities in Los
Angeles when there are, in fact, 100). The spat has attracted attention in the
Los Angeles Times , the New York Times , and the Economist .
Davis-bashing social critic Joel Kotkin declared, "What bothers me even as a
person who was trained as a Marxist is that somebody would so bastardize
Marxist theory to the point of making things up." But in The Nation ,
University of California, Irvine historian Jon Wiener contends that Davis is
the victim of a campaign by city boosters to run their most persistent critic
out of town. Davis, ironically, has accepted a history appointment 3,000 miles
away--at Long Island's State University of New York at Stony Brook.

            
               Intelligences
Report
            

            Harvard education guru Howard Gardner
made a name for himself years ago with his theory of "multiple intelligences,"
which posited that many different kinds of intelligence--musical, spatial,
linguistic, interpersonal, etc.--balanced differently in different people. A
few months ago, James Traub, assessing the impact of Gardner's theory in the
New Republic , charged that the multiple-intelligence movement has dumbed
down the curriculum in many schools. But in the February Atlantic
Monthly , Gardner renews his call for cognitive pluralism: Not only is there
more than one kind of intelligence, but those intelligences, as he calls them,
are only part of the story. He writes, "We should recognize that intelligences,
creativity, and morality--to mention just three desiderata--are separate. Each
may require its own form of measurement or assessment, and some will prove far
easier to assess objectively than others."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Last Gringo

            The hot news in Nicaragua
these days? The escalators at Managua's first two shopping malls are besieged
by kids, who, enthralled by this new technology, go up the down staircase. Then
there's the saga of the dozen crummy border villages that tried to secede and
join Costa Rica, where gasoline is cheaper. (Thanks, but no thanks, said the
Costa Ricans.) Or political dirty tricks, Nicaraguan-style: Did the Sandinistas
really sic a swarm of killer bees on an enemy campaign rally?

            If these stories didn't
make your newspaper's front page, it's probably because there's hardly anyone
left here to report them. A decade ago, when the contras and Sandinistas were
willing proxies for the final great showdown of the Cold War, a Daniel Ortega
press conference could easily draw 100 foreign reporters--double that if he had
a captured American spy or some other bauble to show off. Everybody had
a correspondent here. I remember one reporter identifying herself as the bureau
chief for Dance magazine as she asked a question at a press conference.
I guess she was checking out reports that the Soviets were using Nicaragua as a
base to smuggle Bolshoi ballerinas to the guerrillas in El Salvador.

            Today, as the chief of the Miami Herald 's bureau,
I'm practically the last gringo journalist left in Managua. (The only other
U.S. daily with a Central American bureau is the Los Angeles Times , with
an El Salvador office.) Sometimes the isolation makes me feel like I'm trapped
in one of those post-holocaust movies from the '50s, where the lead character
wakes up to discover that everyone else has been wiped out by killer robots
from Venus.

            Not that there aren't
consolations. In the old days, reporters begged in vain for interviews with the
nine top Sandinista comandantes . And correspondents who wrote
unflattering stories about the Sandies--I was one--could find themselves tossed
aboard a plane bound for Costa Rica. These days, the average Nicaraguan
official would stand on his head and eat a bug if that would entice a foreign
reporter to do an interview. My fax machine fairly hums with offers of
briefings from Cabinet ministers who can't quite believe their country is no
longer the lead item on the White House daily briefing. They are inevitably
surprised that I don't want to drive eight hours across the country to see the
first shovel of dirt turned for a new road linking two villages that most
people in Managua have never heard of, much less anyone in the United
States.

            In part, my popularity may stem from the dread officials
feel at dealing with the newly unchained local press. Nicaraguan journalists,
muzzled under four decades of the Somoza dynasty and then 11 years of the
Sandinistas, have become the most aggressive in Central America. They take the
freedom to ask any question they want with a disconcerting literalness.

            Last year, Tomas Borge, the sole surviving founder
of the Sandinista Party, was being interviewed on a Managua radio station.
After Borge droned on for a few minutes about the world economy, the reporter
broke in: "Comandante , what everyone really wants to know is if the
rumors all these years are true: Do you just have one ball?"

            "What are you talking
about?" Borge replied. "My wife just had twins . Here, you want to see
them?" He wasn't talking about his newborn infants. As I tuned to another
station, the reporter was still pleading with Borge to keep his pants on.

            Testicular journalism still isn't part of my beat. But I
have covered:

            

               The opening of Managua's first McDonald's. (The
vice president actually came out to dedicate it, pronouncing the occasion as
nothing less than the attainment of civilization: "When foreign investors see
that big M, they know we're not running around in loincloths.")

               The controversy that led to a fistfight at the Miss Nicaragua
pageant--"right in front of Miss Congeniality's father," as one scandalized
local paper put it. (The winner was a blue-eyed blonde, naturally provoking
protest that she was a gringa ringer.)

               The resurgence of Nicaragua's movie theaters, which practically croaked
when the Sandinistas made them show an endless parade of odes to Soviet
industrial workers. Nonetheless, Daniel Ortega and the boys deserve some credit
for a censorship policy that prevented their countrymen from being exposed to
Oliver's Story , which they saw as an example of class betrayal (a heroic
working-class girl takes a place in the ruling class) and Annie Hall
(too occupied with the trivial problems of the petite bourgeoisie).

            

            In the 1980s, you never traveled alone in the countryside
if you could possibly help it--you wanted help handy if you blundered into a
firefight or a minefield. Not that many of us would have known what to do in
either situation--our attempts at self-protection were mostly laughable.

            One regular precaution
before driving out into the boonies used to be marking a giant "TV" with
adhesive tape on the back and side windows, which we believed was easy-to-spot
shorthand for "don't shoot, I'm a reporter." In 1987, Stephen Kinzer of the
New York Times encountered a contra patrol in northern Nicaragua,
chatted with the men amicably for an hour or so, and then got ready to leave.
"Could I ask you a question before you go?" asked the contra commander. "What
the hell does 'TV' mean, anyway?"

            Lately, the only time reporters banded together to travel
outside Managua was during Hurricane Mitch, and that had as much to do with
crying on each other's shoulders as it did with self-protection. Police
reporters in the United States complain about having to call up families of
murder victims, but try interviewing a kid who just saw 44 members of his
family swallowed in a mudslide.

            Happily, the memory of the hurricane is starting to
fade--though it was rekindled in March when President Clinton came through
Central America, scattering relief programs in his wake like victorious GIs
tossing chocolate bars to school kids in 1945. As the last gringo reporter in
Nicaragua, I naturally put in my bid for an interview with Clinton, which was
politely declined by the White House handlers. "All American reporters care
about is Monica Lewinsky, and we're trying to get away from that," one U.S.
official told me. I wonder if he'd heard Tomas Borge's radio interview.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Race Bait and Switch

            More than a century after
freeing African-Americans from slavery, Republicans are promising to liberate
blacks from a newer type of government-sanctioned exploitation: Social
Security. As part of their effort to seize the Social Security issue, and in
particular their campaign for privatization, they argue that the Social
Security system rips off blacks for the benefit of whites. Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, a Democrat, has also taken up the cry. And so have some of the media.
The March issue of Essence magazine invites readers to visit a
"community activist" Web site about Social Security and become involved "to
ensure that we get our fair share." The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
editorialized recently: "The average black male can expect to work all his life
to help finance a comfortable retirement in Florida for middle and upper class
people, then drop dead a month or two after he collects his first Social
Security check." Ron Walters, a professor at the University of Maryland and one
of America's best-known black political scientists, has called Social Security
"a form of 'reverse reparations.' "

            Their argument is simple
and plausible: Everybody pays into the system during his or her working years
then gets a monthly check during retirement. Since blacks have a shorter life
expectancy than whites, they are getting a worse deal and, in effect,
subsidizing longer-living whites.

            So, why is this wrong? First of all, Social Security is
progressive by design. Everybody pays the same share of income into the system
each year (about 6 percent, plus another 6 percent from your employer). But the
formula for benefit payouts isn't proportionate to what is paid in: Low-income
people get more (not in absolute terms, but compared with their contributions),
while affluent retirees get less. A February report by the General Accounting
Office confirms that this formula outweighs the effect of lower life expectancy
for all low-income people, including African-Americans.

            Second, Social Security
benefits don't go just to elderly retirees. The program pays benefits to
younger people with disabilities that prevent them from earning a living, and
also to surviving spouses and minor children of deceased participants. Blacks
benefit disproportionately from these aspects of the system. Although only 12
percent of the U.S. population is black, African-Americans get almost a quarter
of the Social Security benefits paid to surviving children.

            The main source for the Social Security Screws Blacks
campaign is a study by (who else?) the Heritage Foundation. Its study has been
pretty well demolished by the GAO's actuaries and by a counterstudy by the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Among other
distortions, it assumes that everyone retires at 65, although two-thirds of all
workers stop paying in and start collecting benefits earlier than that--which
reduces the disadvantage of a shorter life span.

            Heritage calculates that
a low-income, single, black male born after 1959 would face a rate of return on
his investment in Social Security of -.66 percent, compared with a 1.38 percent
rate of return for a random low-income male from the general population. The
"rate of return" on Social Security is calculated by imagining that each of a
person's payments into the system over the decades is deposited in an account,
from which payments from the system are subsequently withdrawn. Then you
figure what interest rate on that account would cause the payments in--plus
interest--to exactly cover the payments out, and that is the rate of return on
Social Security as an investment.

            Even if Heritage's calculations were accurate, its choice
of year would be tendentious. Almost all current retirees are getting a
positive rate of return on the very low payments they made for most of their
working lives, even if some are getting a better return than others.
Conversely, people in their 20s and 30s today will get a negative rate of
return, though some will be more negative than others. Heritage chose a year
when, by its calculation, the general population was still just barely in
positive territory while blacks had moved into negative numbers, in order to
claim that blacks' losses were subsidizing whites' profits. That would never be
true of the system as a whole, even if it were true of people born around
1959.

            The analogy to an investment with a rate of return
is only one way to think about Social Security, and not necessarily the best.
Another is as insurance against poverty in old age or disability at any age.
When you buy auto insurance, you don't hope for a lot of accidents to improve
your rate of return on the premiums. Social Security is also a transfer
program. The reason the rate of return is so poor for people under 40 is that
their money is going to today's retirees, rather than being invested for their
own benefit. Proposals to improve the rate of return for Gen X and after,
through privatization and what not, invariably omit the money current workers
will have to supply to current retirees one way or another from their
calculations.

            In any event, a government-staffed study of the rate
of return on Social Security, the only one based on records of actual workers
and retirees, puts Social Security's rate of return at 9.1 percent for whites
and 9.6 percent for blacks.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            &quot;Community&quot; Responses

            
               The Pepsi
Generation
            

            Never have I read a more
accurate commentary on high-school social hierarchy than Cyrus Sanai's "." When
I went to high school in the late '80s we used to have this program called
"All-Star," whose stated purpose was to eliminate cliques and bring the school
together. The program thought it could do this by a) making us watch
Pepsi-sponsored movies featuring anti-drug propaganda and shrewd product
placement; b) reinforcing the most obnoxious cliques on campus by choosing all
the "All Star" officers from a popular group of athletes and cheerleaders (on
average, B and C students who drank, smoked, and skipped class); c) doing
everything possible to conceal the fact that high school's purpose is
education; and d) giving us the opportunity to buy as much "All Star"
merchandise as our parents could afford. It was insulting and embarrassing and
(thank God) only lasted a few months.

            Programs like "All Star"
are colossal wastes of time that make teen-agers hate school because they
emphasize exactly what they attempt to eliminate. I hope people who have kids
in high school will realize this and will not think that that is enough to end
tragedies like that at Columbine.

            -- Kevin
Kramer
            

            
Williamsburg, Va.

            
               The Rodriguez
"We"
            

            I think Cyrus Sanai missed
the point of the Richard Rodriguez essay in the Los Angeles

               Times last Sunday (see "Community Kills"). When Rodriguez talked about
community, he was not talking about the need for more school spirit or
collective pride in the success of high-school teams. And he certainly
recognized the social divisions within the school as well (an athlete who
singled out a Jew for being different comes to mind).

            The kind of community he means does not come from
pep rallies or car washes, but rather from a value system and a curriculum that
teach the common bonds that we as Americans have. Not "celebrations of
multiculturalism," but a history, for example, that connects Thomas Jefferson
and Malcolm X, as Rodriguez writes.

            Also missing, as
Rodriguez points out, is any structured family or neighborhood in many young
people's lives. That is the "we" he is talking about, of belonging to something
and having that foundation laid prior to going to school and reaching
adolescence. Not living an anonymous life in your room or on the Internet. The
lack of these positive networks, he argues, as do others, is why many inner
city kids look for "family" in gangs. The lack of strong families in too many
young lives makes the public school's job (poorly conceived and performed as
well, according to Rodriguez) of teaching and bringing a sense of connection to
other Americans, past and present, nearly impossible. This is a long-term
problem, and he knows it. He is certainly not calling for more cries of "Go
team!" or "Beat Northside High!"

            -- Mike Hollon
            

            
Alexandria, Va.

            
               
                  Cyrus Sanai
replies: I think Rodriguez is out of touch (maybe quite happily) with life
as it is lived in the Columbine High Schools of America. You can't teach common
bonds of history to teens while the school and the community stress athletics
as the most honored achievement. In fact, you can't teach them at all; as an
environment for educational and moral growth, American public secondary
education will continue to be a miserable failure so long as the values of the
institution are so at odds with its ostensible mission. (Only the better
American colleges can salvage the mess left by high school, and they are only
as good as they are because of the competition and diversity among them.)
Monkeying with a curriculum to give it the correct ideological spin is fine for
the careers of school administrators and educational consultants, but it won't
fool students. They may not know much of the world, but they certainly
understand what the high school rewards, and it ain't learning about Jefferson
or Malcolm X. Indeed, the grand prize for doing well academically at public
high school is to get you as far away as possible from it, to the Ivy League
and its ilk.
            

            
               It's possible, of course, that in an alternate
universe, where American high schools were truly academic institutions, the
seriously disturbed Harris and Klebold might have open fire on the "brains,"
but I doubt it; first of all because Harris and Klebold would have received
some of the acceptance they craved on their own merits, and secondly because
they would not have despised the school so for favoring the intellectual
achievers. Among the most fierce hatreds of teens (probably right after public
humiliation and rejection) is of hypocrisy; it's why Holden Caulfield is one of
the most authentic (and moral) voices in American literature.
            

            
               My second set of objections to the
communitarian explanation of Littleton is the way it over-blames parents. All
of what you say about families is true, yet irrelevant. It's a given that
strong familial relationships help keep kids on the straight path. (Note that
the Harris and Klebold families, from afar, seem quite ordinary, lacking the
social pathologies typically blamed for deranged teen-age psyches.) But the job
of forging these relationships, never easy, is made all the harder by the
values fostered by the public schooling system. The fiercely family-oriented,
usually devoutly Christian parents who increasingly pull their children out of
the system in favor of home or religious schooling are correct to fear the
corrupting influence of the Columbine Highs.
            

            
               Such corruption is as much intellectual as
moral. The religious schools, shifting their emphasis from athletics to
learning (even if a large part of it is of the Biblical variety), have
consistently delivered better results both in terms of educational and, I would
guess, communal development, than the public schools. This is true most
noticeably among minority scholarship students from weak familial backgrounds
who have attended Catholic parochial schools (I seem to recall Chicago having
the most famous examples of these). I am not advocating religious schooling as
a solution, but rather pointing out that educational institutions which have
their community values focused on learning rather than spectator sports will be
much more successful in education, and will be substantially happier places for
all students except, of course, the athletes, and even they will benefit from a
better education.
            

            
               I think it's an easy
(and well-traveled) path to pin the blame for many social ills on the perceived
lack of communal cohesiveness in American life, and in some sectors it may be
correct. When it comes to suburban high schools, though, I can say, as a
survivor of the experience, that it's a community almost perfectly designed to
crush, twist, and kill the spirits of those who are different, thoughtful, or
just have the bad luck to be on the wrong side of the school-endorsed elite.
So, when I come across intellectuals peddling more community as a solution, it
is necessary to let off both barrels of the sawed-off rhetorical reality
check.
            

            

               Backfire
            

            I wonder if Steven Brill
has given much thought to his proposal to treat guns like we treat automobiles.
He says in his with Margaret Carlson: "register them and license those who
would use them." But he should put a little more thought into how we treat
automobiles. There is no license requirement to own an automobile. To
drive on a public street, one must have a tag on the car indicating that the
driver has paid a fee to put it on the road. In the state of Washington, this
fee is based on the value of the car. My piece of junk is about $35 a year to
license.

            One must also have a
license to drive a car. Ostensibly, this is a safety measure to ensure that
only competent drivers are on the road. In reality, any idiot can get one, and
with minimal luck, avoid taking a driving test ever again. I ran a stop sign on
my test 21 years ago and still passed. Both the car tags and the driver's
license entitle a person to drive in every state in the Union. Under Brill's
system, I could pay $20-$40 a year to license a used revolver; take a joke of a
test administered by a surly, bored, bureaucrat; and carry a concealed weapon
anywhere in the country. I think most gun nuts could go along with that.

            -- Clark
Stooksbury
            

            Port
Townsend, Wash.

            
               Stein
Line
            

            Herbert Stein's "" is very
interesting and to a degree valid. However, it would be very enlightening if he
would have explained the 5 percent gap between the female workers whose
productivity is the same or higher than men's in a given industry or
company.

            With regard to the law prohibiting discrimination
in this area, many women could have told him how this is evaded. All the
employer needs to do is give male and female employees a different job
classification or title.

            A most interesting
variation on the above is at a church of my acquaintance, where in the school
the pay for women teachers is lower because only the male teachers are allowed
to replace the minister in some unforeseen situation.

            -- V. Caley
            

            Milford, Mich.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Merchant of <EM>Menace</EM>

            I don't think there's anything wrong with ethnic
jokes per se. Some of my best jokes are ethnic. Like the one about the
Jewish mother on a beach who screams "My son! My son the neurologist! Is
drowning!" Or the two Scotsmen who tuck $10 bills into their friend's casket
and the third who swaps the bills for a $30 check.

            But what about a sober drama featuring evil
mercantilists whose technologically advanced robots enslave a peace-loving
nation and all at the bidding of a man known as "Emperor"? Oh, right, the
mercantilists also have slanty eyes, wear long robes, and talk just like
Charlie Chan. They attempt to hide their crafty schemes from the outside world
by forcing the conquered nation to sign a faux treaty. They are ruthless and
cruel in their occupation.

            When Michael Crichton wrote a Japan-bashing film
(and novel) back in 1993 called Rising Sun , critics roasted him for
exploiting racial fears. But the racial stereotyping in George Lucas' latest
Star Wars epic, The Phantom Menace , is far worse, and nobody
seems to care.

            Crafty Japanese trade
villains aren't the only heavy-handed ethnic stereotype in The Phantom
Menace . As the story continues, the heroes slip past the evil Japanese to a
nearby planet. There, they attempt to repair their broken spaceship but are
stymied by the hook-nosed owner of the local parts shop--Watto--who also
happens to have a thick Yiddish accent! (To hear an example, click ".")
Psychological manipulations that work on almost everyone fail with Watto--"Mind
ticks don'ta work on me ... only money! ," he cries--and the heroes get what
they want only through the bravery of a gifted slave boy (Anakin Skywalker). At
the end of the desert planet sequence, Anakin is emancipated but separated from
his mother, who still belongs to Watto. Even in a galaxy far away, the Jews are
apparently behind the slave trade.

            And then there's Jar Jar Binks, the childlike sidekick with
the unmistakably West Indian accent and enormous buttocks. Jar Jar is likable,
easygoing, and dumb as dirt--always being scolded or saved from death by the
Jedi knights. His stupidity and cowardice are running jokes throughout the
film. And his people, the Gungan, are a brave but primitive tribe who throw
spears and rocks at the oncoming army in the climactic battle sequence. Only
Hispanics escape Lucas' caricature, which is actually something of a mixed
blessing since Hispanics often rightly complain that they are ignored in the
national race debate.

            In fairness to George Lucas, he gives Japanese
traits to at least one heroine (Queen Amidala), and there is a black man
(Samuel Jackson) on the august Jedi Council. And true evil in this movie--the
so-called Phantom Menace --resides in a handsome white man (Sen.
Palpatine) and a towheaded tot (Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader).

            Until this last episode, the Star Wars series
has shown a happy, multiculty universe, in which thousands of sentient species
coexist, more or less peacefully. This hardly gives Lucas license to revive
racist stereotypes. But it makes the latest characters seem like a lapse in
taste rather than morals. What's especially puzzling, though, is that film
reviewers have by and large given Lucas a free pass. A smattering of reviewers
griped about Jar Jar Binks, and the Village Voice was offended by the
"blatant ethnic stereotype" behind Watto, "the hook-nosed merchant insect." But
far more typical was the Time reviewer, Richard Corliss, who gushed:
"the junk dealer Watto is a little masterpiece of design: cinnamon stubble on
his corrugated face, chipped rocks for teeth, the raspy voice of Brando's
Godfather speaking Turkish." Turkish? Even without the visual clue of
the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "";
listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Little Bit of Sole

            In these body-conscious
days, feet do get their due. Ask any girl: Shoes matter as much as hairstyle in
all walks of life, and infinitely more than gloves and hats, despite being so
near the ground. Buying shoes demands sizable chunks of time and money, and the
eventual decision generates more existential agony about their looks than about
their fit. Pain in the feet may be negotiable, pain in the image never. Passion
or hatred can be ignited by one glance in a shoe store window. If the lust of a
shopper's eye is slaked by actual purchase, her willing feet accept the
challenge, her active spirit expands. The other night, I looked across a
restaurant at a sexy young woman who appeared to be limping. She wasn't,
though, not at all, really. She was just wearing 5-inch spike heel, 2-inch
platform sole, tight-fitting, thigh-high boots, and making her spectacular way
among the tables to the exit.

            The current display at
the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City is called
"Shoes: A Lexicon of Style." It focuses on the amazing range of design in
modern women's shoes. There's no history here, no sociological detachment--only
the look, divided into categories for maximum impact. Drama is increased by the
use of a single lighted showcase running the length of the pitch-dark room with
no interruptions, no pauses for breath. You move along in one direction,
mesmerized by a single great sweep of shoes arranged in pairs on three rising
tiers under vivid lights. Emotional tension mounts, laughter and wonder
alternate with lust and disgust, no relief is offered, from the first stiletto
heel to the last bulbous Nike.

            Apart from a few historic examples, such as some satin
pumps with celluloid heels from 1928, most of these styles date from the last
three decades, even from the last three years. This show indicates that only in
the last third of this century have designers really hit their stride with
varieties of shoe material, shoe shape, shoe trim, and shoe attachment.
Nevertheless, one of my favorites here was designed in 1958 by Herbert Levine:
a pair of stiletto-heeled soles with no uppers at all, nothing but some
invisible adhesive pads to hold each shoe against the wearer's bare sole. These
shoes would look as if they had grown there, by some potent fashion
sorcery.

            Another great shoe moment
is a 1993 pair of "tabi toe" ankle boots by Martin Margiela. Japanese
tabi are white cotton socks with a practical cleft between big and
second toe to go under thong sandals, but as a beige leather, high-heeled boot,
the effect is that of a perfect cloven hoof. I once saw these being worn in
Paris. Emerging casually from under a pair of pants, they made my hair stand on
end.

            Suggestive shoe artifice comes in many varieties. One
curious example by Junya Watanabe is a flat shoe draped and upholstered in rose
and gold brocade, so that each foot becomes a rich little shoe-shaped cushion
at the nethermost point of the body. Opposed to that is the lethal weapon
style, which usually involves a fierce high heel, often skinny and slanted in
an odd direction, like a half-open switchblade, with fastenings for the shoe
that run to grim metallic buckles or very toothy zippers. Even fiercer is a
high-heeled sandal by Todd Oldham with straps of spiky barbed wire that cross
the foot and climb up around the calf. This sandal seems to attack the wearer's
tender skin and the viewer's horrified eye together, until we learn from the
label that it's really all made of soft rubber and must feel deliciously
tickly. On the other hand, of course, there's Dr. Scholl's health sandal, but
even that wholesome item (in this show, anyway) boasts a leopard-print
strap.

            A woman's foot is always
engaged in a tense visual dialogue with her shoe, demonstrating its own shape
and flexibility against the shoe's claims, displaying its own erotic capacities
in tandem with those of the suggestive object. Here we see how high heels can
be globular or pyramidal, golden or barklike, slim as bending flower stems or
thick as beams; straps can be suave ribbons or stiff manacles. Shapes are
mostly variants of the mule and the pump, the oxford and the moccasin, the boot
and the sandal, the muffin and the hot dog. Decoration can be applied as
studded rhinestones, layered feathers, rows of silk rosebuds, festoons of
chain, fringes of beads, or sprays of embroidery; or as stitched-on leather
appliqués--why not glued-on peas and beans? Beyond leather, materials may be
fur and fabric, rubber and vinyl, metal and wood, paper and string, maybe meat
and potatoes, maybe glass. Fastenings are often laces--these never lose their
cool, even after millennia--or else the kinds used for clothes and belts, most
recently snaps and Velcro. Buttons seem to have lost out. Once, every
well-dressed woman owned a buttonhook--a small, question-mark-shaped steel
tool, often with an ivory handle. Now we're quite willing to button a shirt or
a pair of pants, but apparently not a boot.

            At the end, following these ranks of erotic, dangerous,
comic, elegant, or perversely masculine female footgear, comes the "Sneaker
Chic" section. Now we enter the huge athletic universe of canvas and rubber,
with all its high-tech spinoffs and hangers-on. Manolo Blahnik gives way to
Acupuncture and New Balance, to Reebok and Adidas, and the host of others
stemming from the original Keds of 1917. Here, all feet are big. Gender becomes
irrelevant, the erotic pull comes only from the thing itself. In this world,
the watchwords are stability, traction, and support. But no one is fooled: The
look is the true issue. So potent is the element of style in active sport shoes
that great fashion designers have gone for it, producing hybrids such as
Gaultier's spike-heeled sneakers, and Chanel's black deck-shoe-cum-sneaker,
with the big double C gleaming on its white toe.

            Fashion is at its most
volatile in the sport shoe world. Hip insider models can die in a few months,
if the mainstream adopts them, and be quickly replaced by new cult favorites.
Much urban chic thus dwells in beautifully engineered shoes built for strain
but worn by people who would never dream of putting them to the test. Beau
Brummell, who invented modern urban cool in the 1790s, would thoroughly approve
of such delicate perversity. Only style is the true test. Utility is really of
no interest, but its presence is essential. It governs the beauty of the
shoe.

            Since that's the point, the foot retreats from the visual
game, and the enveloping shoe leads its own bright life. As we move along the
showcase, these shoes begin more and more to resemble pairs of small sports
cars and to suggest similar methods of marketing and design. Here we find the
vivid brand names, the poetic model names, the features invented for their
function but displayed for their looks--all evoking motion, action, swift
personal transport, perhaps into a better world.

            This show is on until April 17. If you go, don't
forget to buy the illuminating book by its curator, Valerie Steele. It's full
of keen insights and dazzling supplementary photos showing many of the shoes at
work. Book and show together will have you rushing out shopping yet again.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Geek Love

            Linux will change the
world. Linux will do my homework, my dishes, my laundry. The hype reminds me of
similar hype a couple of years ago about Java, which never did floss my teeth.
But, setting out to demystify Linux, I fell in love. Geek love, I hasten to
add. It's not for everyone.

            Unlike Windows (and
IBM's OS/2 and Apple's MacOS) Linux was written by a person, not a faceless
monolith like the company I work for. This person was Linus Torvalds. Linux is
also different because it is based on the founding principles and software of
the Free Software Foundation, whose name describes its mission. Linux is
derived from an operating system developed by FSF called GNU. The proper name
for Linux is GNU/Linux. GNU is a variation on the Unix operating system and the
acronym GNU stands--disconcertingly--for " GNU's not Unix." Are you still with
me?

            The FSF crew preaches that all software should be "Open
Source," by which they mean that any user should be able to view and change the
underlying code, be it for the operating system or for applications.
(Microsoft, Apple, and other companies consider their code top secret.) Open
sourcers also advocate free distribution of software. To the FSF the issues of
free software are at the very foundation of creating a "cooperative society." I
am a wee bit skeptical. I enjoy getting paid to write software, and I suspect
that many, if not most, Linux enthusiasts are being paid by someone to write
software. It's nice that they can play with Linux for free, but if all software
were free, how would they eat?

            When pushed, the Free
Software Foundation defines "free" as a matter of liberty, not of price. Many
people pay for GNU/Linux, but the underlying mechanics are freely available to
anyone who wants them. Companies that sell Linux offer the support and
maintenance that people have come to expect--and charge for them.

            But software development religions aside, what is an
operating system like Linux doing? As the name suggests, it controls the
fundamental operation of your computer: things like how to read documents from
a disk and send them to a printer. As you may have heard, the demarcation of
what is and isn't "in the operating system" can be a touchy question. Some
companies maintain that an operating system contains any goddamn thing they
want to put in it, thank you very much. Other folks say that an operating
system is just the core functionality (or in computer parlance, the kernel)
necessary to run the chips in your machine.

            Linux is definitely the
second model. When you turn on a computer using Linux you get no bells,
whistles, or windows. You just see some lines of text and then a blinking
cursor. So are we just back to DOS? Well, no: You can add a graphical interface
known as Xwindows, which looks amazingly like Windows, complete with a Start
button. Once you start Xwindows, you're back in familiar territory. You can use
your mouse to open documents and applications (such as WordPerfect). I even ran
a Web browser. A big practical disadvantage of Linux is that there isn't much
application software for it. But that's because so few people use it. It
wouldn't be fair to count this as a negative in weighing Linux's intrinsic
merits. And so, of course, I won't.

            To begin my experiment I had to get a machine running
Linux. So I started searching the Web for information. After getting lost on a
few Web sites, I completely wimped out and went to Barnes & Noble. The
software may be free, but there's big money in books on how to use it. I made a
scientific decision based on weight and purchased Red Hat Linux Secrets
for $39.95, which included Red Hat software's 5.1 version of Linux on a
CD-ROM.

            Back at the office I did
the hard stuff. I hijacked a Pentium 133 with 32 megs of memory and
repartitioned its hard drive into two parts. "Repartitioned" is a fancy way of
saying "divided." Thus, instead of one big hard drive I now have two little
ones using the same physical disk. Linux has a utility program that helped me
do this (because it knows you're going to want to keep running Windows too). It
did involve some complicated thinking about disk cylinders, but it worked.

            I then fruitlessly tried to get Linux to boot up. First I
tried to get it to load directly from the CD that came with the book. Then I
spent another hour trying to get the Linux boot disk I had created to
acknowledge the existence of the CD drive. Finally, I copied the entire CD onto
my hard drive and started the install process. I had to create two more floppy
boot disks.

            I had to repartition my
drive again within Linux to create swap space for the operating system (for
those keeping track I now have three partitions on my hard drive). I had to
format both drives. I then had to remember where on my hard drive I had put the
install files. Then it got started. Linux found my various devices, such as my
mouse and graphics card. It configured both relatively painlessly. It wasn't
complete plug and pray. I still had to select my items from lists, and it was
good that I generally knew what types of hardware I was running, but it worked.
Finally I got a blinking cursor at the Linux prompt. I then launched Xwindows.
To complete the setup, I got the browser configured and read

                  Slate
               ! After installing Corel's WordPerfect I was even able to
write this column on Linux in Linux. (Lexicographical curiosity: The word Linux
is in the WordPerfect spell-check dictionary but not in Microsoft Word's.)

            After spending a day with Linux, I concluded that it runs
great. It helped that I know Unix, but the system does work. I have basic Web
browsing capabilities and a word processor. I also configured and set up the
Web server, so I could, in theory, power all of 
                  Slate
                off this
machine. In fact, Linux is definitely cool as a server. But if you want to
replace your desktop machine, forget it.

            What makes Linux
enthralling from a tech-head's point of view is that it is based on Unix
standards that have been around for decades. Companies from AT&T to Sun
Microsystems to Apple to IBM to Silicon Graphics have produced varieties of
Unix for their business customers. While these varieties are generally
incompatible with one another, all this code-writing has resulted in a
far-flung community that understands the Unix beast. Linux developers stand on
the shoulders of these giants, thus Linux has a lot of intrinsic testing behind
it. That makes it what techies call "robust," meaning resistant to breaking
down. Enthusiasts claim that Linux can run for years without requiring you to
restart your system. On my machine I can claim only a week of running without
restarting, but that is pretty darn good. It also has a solid multithreading
and multitasking model, meaning that one errant program can't bring the whole
computer to its knees. (This is a feature Linux shares with Windows NT, but not
with Windows 95/98.)

            In terms of performance, Linux ran about as quickly as
Windows 95/98 (though much faster than Windows NT Server) on my low-end Pentium
machine. For a completely unscientific example, there was little difference in
basic file operations such as copying and pasting, and WordPerfect ran just as
fast as it did on a comparable Windows machine.

            Should you switch to
Linux? In my opinion, if you are a typical computer user, there is no practical
reason to do so. The best reason is psychological. Linux is a workable
alternative to Windows, and thus it allows you to vote with your PC. If you
hate Microsoft, you can use Linux. It has all the basics necessary to get you
through your computing life, if you are willing to ignore some rough edges here
and there. For instance, you won't have much trouble importing data from word
processing and spreadsheet files. But if you crave a huge variety of software
application--games, personal information managers, graphics programs, financial
software, reference works--you'd be better off buying a Mac or a Windows PC.
Some experts predict that the dawning of the Web means that your operating
system may be less and less important anyway. Many of you have used Linux and
don't even know it, because many of the Web sites you frequent to check the
weather or buy airplane tickets are powered by Linux.

            Now I must confess my doubts about the Open Source
movement. Do all those software developers writing open source code for Linux
have the incentive to fix problems as they arise and--more important--to help
people upgrade and keep old code running? Perhaps the greatest technological
feature that Windows possesses is that it can handle programs as old as the
first DOS applications. Linux will never do that.

            Some critics say that
Linux will fracture into a dozen different incompatible versions, just as Unix
did. Linux champions insists that the community will prevent such a Tower of
Babel disaster. I suspect that a schism will eventually divide the happy Linux
community, as equally creative innovators disagree on the operating system's
future.

            Furthermore, as in 
                  Slate
               , software companies
spend a surprising fraction of their resources testing software, not writing
it. In my experience, this is the ultimate problem with Open Source
development: not enough formal engaged testing. Developers want to write code,
they don't want to solve all the niggling little problems that users come up
with.

            But if the thought of a free operating system is so
exciting that you're willing to pay $39.95 and invest hours for the privilege,
by all means give Linux a try.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 207: &quot;TK&quot;

            

               It happens in Colorado for an hour a day, and former prosecutor Steven
Cohen calls it "the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western
civilization." What goes on?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 205)--"Nothing but Cash":
               

               

                  
                     
                        Devise a pair of words to fill in the two blanks--one
word each--as Thomas Rogers, president of NBC cable, describes his shift away
from the old network economic model: "Our goal over time is to turn viewers
into __________ and __________."
                     
                  
               

               
"Hunters and gatherers."-- M.G. Lord , Marshall Efron , Jon
Delfin , and Joe Shaw
               

               "Dharma
and Greg."-- Jon Hotchkiss
               

               
"Readers and writers. (He was promptly fired.)"-- Paul Tullis
               

               "Cash
and checks."-- Steve Lyle ( Marshall Efron had a similar
answer.)

               
"Imbeciles and quick."-- Tamar Haspel
               

               
"Malcontents and loners. ('We're going to steal the Internet's
thunder!')"-- Doug Strauss
               

               "Gays
and lesbians. (Turns out Falwell was right all along.)"-- Tim
Carvell
               

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

               It's a little too easy to
disdain television, although please do, especially that Animal Medical
Center , where, just the other night, I saw some kind of vomiting Chihuahua,
which, let me tell you, after a long day working for some big jerk at the ...
No, wait, I lie: It wasn't Animal Medical Center , it was 20/20 ;
and it wasn't a Chihuahua, it was Barbara Walters; and she wasn't vomiting,
that was me. But the point stands: Television is like tap water or take-out
pizza; it's not really good, but it's so conveniently available that we dully
consume it instead of making the effort to go out for really good pizza or some
truly magnificent water from, like, a solid gold tap. And yet, if you ask
people about their actual No. 1 recreational activity, it's watching
television. And if you ask them their imaginary No. 1 recreational activity,
it's stripping naked and firing out the window at passing cars with that
actress from that show, you know, the pretty one. So perhaps it's a little
facile to blame all our problems on some sap from NBC cable, when the fault, my
friends, is with some whole other sap entirely. If you write me, I'll send you
his name.

               
                  Ace Award Winning
Answer
               

               "Our goal over time is to turn viewers into
buyers and customers ."

               Tired of relying on ad
revenues from so-called "popular" shows, NBC, the first broadcast network to
own part of a home shopping channel, is expanding its efforts to sell
souvenirs. The network did well hawking a music CD, a tie-in to its miniseries
The '60s , and expects to sell viewers a lot more stuff once it ties
together TV shows, home shopping, and the Internet. "We've made it clear that
figuring out ways to drive sales of product through our broadcast platform is a
key ingredient we see in the overall mix," said Rogers. "And that means one
thing--an anatomically enhanced Tom Brokaw Action Figure," he did not add.

               
                  New Furby/New Dole
Extra
               

               A new version of the annoying yet popular toy and a
new presidential candidate from the awkward yet enduring political family are
aggressively courting acclaim.

               Some comparisons:

               
                  Oft-Cited Personality Trait
               

               New Furby: Spunky playmate.

               Elizabeth Dole:
Thin-skinned perfectionist.

               
                  Core Belief
               

               Furby: Provide cuddly animatronic fun.

               Dole: Cut taxes, build
anti-missile system.

               
                  Positions on Other Major Issues
               

               Furby: Undisclosed.

               Dole: Undisclosed, but
promises, "We're going to be laying out positions on all these issues."

               
                  Handicap for Presidential
Candidate
               

               Furby: Overly programmed.

               Dole: Same thing.

               
                  Slogan
               

               Furby: "Collect them all for phenomenal Furby
fun!"

               Dole: "Let's make this a
crusade!" (Antecedent unclear.)

               
                  Nickname
               

               Furby: Pretty much just "Furby."

               Dole: "Miss 3-by-5 Index
Card" (as a Duke undergrad).

               
                  Hair
               

               Furby: Three "wild" fur designs in all new wildlife
colors and patterns.

               Dole: Can't tell from
newspaper, but former aide Alex Castellanos says, "She's a tough lady; she's as
hard as her hairdo."

               
                  Recent Innovation
               

               Furby: "Deep sleep" lets new Furby go to sleep
quicker and stay asleep until turned completely upside down.

               Dole: Same thing
(unconfirmed rumor only).

               
                  Common
Denominator
               

               Crummy TV shows, crummy
snacks.

            

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Yugo Home 

            Ever since the United
States began contemplating doing something about war and ethnic cleansing in
the collapsing state of Yugoslavia in 1991, all sides have invoked history as a
guide to action. Those who opposed involvement in Bosnia in the early '90s--and
who doubt that NATO can bring peace to Kosovo today--argue that the long record
of intractable ethnic tension among the Balkan peoples means we should stay
out. Any settlement, they say, is doomed to be temporary. Robert Kaplan's book
Balkan Ghosts , which advances this thesis regarding Bosnia, reportedly
convinced President Clinton to steer clear of military action there for a
time.

            Interventionists also
invoke history. They note the longstanding claim of ethnic Albanians to the
territory of Kosovo dating back to 1200 B.C., when the Albanians' supposed
ancestors, the Illyrians, settled there. This ancient history forms the basis
of demands for self-determination on the part of the long-suffering Albanian
Kosovars. But the Serbs, too, stake a historical claim. Their Slavic forebears
migrated to Kosovo around A.D. 500, and they contend that Serbs have lived
there ever since.

            In fact, each of these assertions is subject to
qualification, as is made clear in Noel Malcolm's masterly (but misnamed)
Kosovo: A Short History (my main source along with Hugh Poulton's The
Balkans: Minorities and States in Conflict ). The tie of today's Albanian
Kosovars to the ancient Illyrians is fairly attenuated. And while Slavs did
move into the area around 500, when the Bulgarian Empire conquered the Balkans,
the Serbs didn't gain control of Kosovo until the 12 th century, when
a dynasty of their leaders known as the Nemanjids invaded it after a period of
Byzantine rule.

            For two centuries the
Nemanjids basked in their Balkan kingdom. Serb nationalists today are fond of
noting that in 1389 it was in Kosovo that the Serbian Prince Lazar and his
armies made their last stand against the invading Ottoman Empire at the Battle
of Kosovo. They're less likely to note that the Albanians of Kosovo fought
alongside them. (Explicit references to the Albanian people as opposed to the
Illyrians begin to appear around the 11 th century.)

            During Turkey's 500-year rule, most of Kosovo's
Albanians--and Albania's Albanians, also subjects of the Ottoman
Empire--converted to Islam. The Serbs remained Orthodox Christians. That may be
one reason that the Serbs sought independence first. In 1804 they rose up and
in 1828 broke free. Kosovo, however, remained largely content under Turkish
rule. Serbs, believing that Kosovo still rightfully belonged to them, did
briefly conquer it in 1877 when, along with Russia, the new Serbian state made
war on Turkey. But under the Russian-Ottoman armistice a year later, Serbia was
forced to withdraw.

            At this point, the
Albanians--of both Kosovo and Albania proper--commenced their so-called
"national awakening." A group called the League of Prizren, named for the
Kosovo town where it met, lobbied for autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. A
generation later, this movement flowered into insurrection, as Albanians
throughout the western pocket of the Balkans revolted. Albania secured
statehood in 1912, but before the status of Kosovo could be resolved, the
entire region was rocked, in quick succession by the First Balkan War (1912),
the Second Balkan War (1913) and, for good measure, World War I (1914-18).

            First to invade Kosovo in these years were the Serbs. The
Serbs were knocked out by the Austrians, who were knocked out by the French.
The French handed the province back to their allies the Serbs. After the war,
the Allies, following Wilsonian ideals of self-determination, straightened up
Europe into tidy nation-states. With minimal thought on the part of the
mapmakers, Kosovo was folded into Serbia, which joined five neighboring Balkan
territories to form the new state of Yugoslavia. Albania appealed to the Allies
for control of Kosovo but, considered an insignificant state, was rebuffed in
deference to Serbian claims.

            As the largest republic
in the multinational state, Serbia dominated Yugoslavia. Its capital of
Belgrade, for example, was the nation's capital too. Under Serbian rule, Kosovo
again became a battleground. In the late 19 th century, Serbian
nationalists had built up national myths about the heroics of Prince Lazar and
cast Kosovo's status as a Jerusalem-like holy land populated with Orthodox
religious shrines. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the central government in
Belgrade pushed Albanians out of the region and moved Serbs in--efforts the
Albanian majority resisted, often to their peril.

            In World War II, Kosovo again resembled Europe's Grand
Central Station. The Axis powers rolled in and carved up the region: Albania's
Fascist government, headed by a puppet of Mussolini's, seized the biggest
chunk, while Bulgaria and Germany each occupied a strip. Communist partisans
retook the province in 1944, and when the war ended, the partisan leader Josip
Broz Tito became dictator of the reconstituted Yugoslav federation. The
Communists considered ceding Kosovo to Albania but instead decided that it
should revert to its antebellum status quo. They deemed Kosovo not an
autonomous republic but a province of Serbia.

            In the name of Yugoslav unity, Tito suppressed most
assertions of ethnic identity. He jailed or killed thousands of Albanian
Kosovars and banned Albanian-language publications. But he was, to some degree,
an equal opportunity tyrant: He also halted Serbian efforts to settle Kosovo.
In 1968, with uprisings sweeping the globe, student protests triggered a wave
of demands for greater Kosovar autonomy. Tito acceded to a series of reforms,
culminating in a new Yugoslav Constitution in 1974, which gave Kosovo control
over much of its internal affairs. That year marked the high point for Kosovar
aspirations to independence, and it remains the benchmark for NATO's demand at
Rambouillet for a restoration of Kosovo's "pre-1989" autonomy.

            Tito died in 1980. The
next year, Albanian Kosovar students erupted again, with some Kosovars
clamoring for republichood. Belgrade, no longer restrained by Tito's aversion
to exacerbating ethnic conflict, cracked down. Polarization followed: Slobodan
Milosevic--first as a Communist and then as a Serbian nationalist--whipped up
anti-Albanian sentiment. In 1989, he stripped Kosovo of its cherished autonomy.
Meanwhile, Albanian Kosovars proclaimed their territory a republic and, through
channels violent and nonviolent, sought actual independence. Unrelenting,
Milosevic undertook the massacres of the last year, which finally precipitated
NATO's bombing.

            That, in a nutshell, is the history of Kosovo. If you can
find a solution to today's mess in there, let me know. Take a snapshot at 1200
B.C. and the Albanians can claim it; look at A.D. 1200 and it's a Serbian
kingdom. The United States prefers to use the 1974 benchmark. Milosevic points
to 1989. But even at those points, the snapshot looks pretty blurry.

            Before NATO began bombing
Yugoslavia March 24, the proposed Rambouillet solution--restoring Kosovo's
autonomy but not granting it independence--seemed like a plausible outcome. Now
it's hard to imagine Kosovars accepting any kind of Serbian rule. If
victorious, NATO may grant Kosovo independence or perhaps divide it up. History
won't decide Kosovo's fate. Our actions in the weeks ahead will decide
history.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Why You're So Screwed Up

            Let's stipulate that you
are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to
categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your
temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your
ability to make up puns.

            Here follows an
admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you
really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something
intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and
applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their
points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one
explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi .

            
               BIRTH
ORDER
            

            Would your friends and family say you are more like:
a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b)
Florence Nightingale?

            According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To
Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones
chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious,
defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a
"laterborn"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast.

            Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality
distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the
familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything
in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's
universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're
happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain
that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century,
Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.

            Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also
thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a
nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a
personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his
theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. "Whenever one
encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce
them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict
with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some
firstborns." This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women
prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an
honorary dog.

            
               
                  Ease of Use:
                Excellent.
You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, "Do you have
siblings?" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure "Your Own
Propensity To Rebel."

            
               
                  Applicability:
                As a method
of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited,
except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic.

            
               
                  Gandhi
Explanation:
                He was the youngest of four.

            

               PERSONALITY
            

            Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed
the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black
bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We
all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally
means "black bile"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye.
Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as
members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans,
guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey,
you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be
that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament
sorter quiz on his Web
site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it
first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and
theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?

            Keirsey does not muck
around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria
come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter
team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that
personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being
extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's
types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way:

            Expressive (E) or Reserved (I)

            Observant (S) or Introspective (N)

            Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F)

            Scheduling (J) or
Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]

            The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16
different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of
four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally
curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey
writes: "A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed
into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their
superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones."

            OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the
type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In
Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as
"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to
seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they
feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ...
blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing
everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types." On the
other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded.

            
               
                  Ease of Use:
                Good. I
recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter,
which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.

            
               
                  Applicability:
                High. I
feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the
sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's
very ENTP of me.

            
               
                  Gandhi
Explanation:
                According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF),
what else? More specifically, an INFJ. "INFJs have an unusually strong desire
to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than
one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness
in the social order."

            

               INTELLIGENCE
            

            Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along,
intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified.
Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently,
like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is
considering a ninth.

            Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a
"single, general capacity" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes
an intelligence is the ability to "solve problems or create products" in a way
that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary
advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an
intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the
"man who mistook his wife for a hat" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at
one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at
another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead
of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to
find their own set of strengths.

            The seven original intelligences are: linguistic,
musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and
intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The
latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as "the ability
to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals." Gardner says you can
see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or
automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he
says, refers to the inclination to ask: "Who are we? Where do we come from?
What's it all about? Why do we die?" This could also be known as the "Oy
gevalt " intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who
are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add
culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch
for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.

            One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to
the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in
linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share
those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain
types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our
areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and
help users move to a "higher level of skill."

            
               
                  Ease of Use:
                Fair. Gardner
says, "Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to
tell you what is distinctive about your mind." But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner!
One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing
Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as,
"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes,
or puns" and "I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time." The
MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to
other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing
materials (prices range from $10 to $35).

            
               
                  Applicability:
                Assessing
multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who
feel they have made a wrong career choice.

            
               
                  Gandhi
Explanation:
                In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi
exemplified interpersonal intelligence.

            
               BLOOD
TYPE
            

            What would Hippocrates think of a recent best
seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are
determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile
Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised.
They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They
also choose mates with "compatible" blood types and their corporations assemble
work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to
save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.

            In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter
J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the
four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the
nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most
ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the
self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that
of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet
high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and
creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people
who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to
D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be
strengthened and you'll lose weight.

            Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human
origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at
Arizona State University, "completely worthless." According to Meikle, there is
no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A
and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being
primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most
of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is
difficult. "People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists," says
Meikle. "They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them."

            Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of
little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your
Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's
practice says, "It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with
people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get
better."

            
               
                  Ease of Use:
                Ouch. If you
know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross,
donate a pint, and they'll tell you.

            
               
                  Applicability:
                Scientific
questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not
following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.

            
               
                  Gandhi Explanation:
                None.
But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a
Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's "absurd book,"
followed his plan, and "lost an astounding amount of weight."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Equality Equation

            After all these years I am
still amazed at the persistence of people in believing things that are unproved
or that are more complicated than they realize. My most recent example is Pay
Equity Day, called to protest the fact that women's pay is only 74 percent of
men's. Pay Equity Day was April 8. Perhaps you missed it.

            Why make pay equity the
subject of a protest? Surely Pay Equity Day's organizers don't think that
everyone should get the same pay. I'd guess that my housekeeper's pay is less
than 74 percent of the pay of the organizers. Why don't they protest that fact?
Presumably they would explain that they are more productive than my
housekeeper. But the only evidence they have of their superior productivity is
the fact that someone is willing to pay them more than anyone is willing to pay
my housekeeper.

            One might think that would be the end of the matter. Men
get paid more than women because someone is willing to pay them more, just as
Pay Equity Day's organizers are paid more than my housekeeper because someone
is willing to do it.

            But, of course, that
isn't the end of the matter. If we accept productivity as a proper measure of
what people should earn, we have to consider the possibility that employers'
willingness to pay is a wrong measure of workers' productivity. It could be
wrong in either of two senses. Employers may have an incorrect estimate of the
relative productivities of men and women. Or, having a correct estimate of the
relative productivities, they may want to pay women less than their
productivity merits because they have some prejudice against women in the
workplace.

            In a perfect world we could compare the relative earnings
of women and men with their relative productivity. But there is no good way to
measure relative productivity--at least, no better way than looking at relative
earnings, which only leads us back to where we started. So, students of the
subject approach it indirectly, comparing the earnings of men and women who are
similar in the respects that contribute to productivity: They compare the
incomes of men and women of the same age, the same years of work experience,
the same years of education, and in jobs of the same stress, riskiness, and
difficulty. When they do, they generally find that the gender gap in earnings
remains but is smaller than the gap for women and men in total. But the results
are difficult to interpret. The number of years devoted to education and the
number of years of experience, for example, do not make the same contribution
to productivity. And it is never possible to be sure that you have taken
account of all the factors that determine productivity.

            Suppose you compared the earnings of men and women
who are 35-year-old lawyers, all childless, and all Law Review graduates
of Harvard Law School, and found that the men's earnings are higher than the
women's. (I'm making this up.) Would this mean that there is discrimination
against women? We would also find that all the women in this category do not
earn the same salary. There is something, some X Factor, other than the
conditions I have listed and other than gender, which explains the difference
in salaries among the women. But if this X Factor is unequally shared by men
and women, there will be a difference in the average earnings of men and women
that does not reflect discrimination.

            Maybe the X Factor is
height. A taller lawyer can reach the books on the top shelf without a ladder.
If all women were paid the same as all men of the same height, the average pay
of men would be higher than that of women because the average man is taller.
But there would be no discrimination.

            Much of what we know about the economic status of women is
summarized in an excellent monograph by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine
Stolba, Women's Figures: The Economic Progress of Women in America . One
striking fact presented there is that childless women at age 30 earn 95 percent
as much as men at the same age, whereas mothers earn only 75 percent as much as
men. This suggests that the relatively low earnings of many women are related
to their relatively low productivity because child-bearing and child-rearing
interferes with their productivity in the marketplace. But another force may be
at work. Women who can command earnings that are 95 percent as high as those of
men may decide not to have children rather than forgo those earnings. We don't
know how the earnings of these women compare with their productivity. If their
productivity is 10 percent higher than that of men, the fact that they are paid
only 5 percent less would not show that there is little discrimination.

            There are three gaps involved in this
discussion:

            1) The gap between the earnings of men and
women.

            2) The gap between the earnings of women and their
productivity.

            3) The gap between the
productivity of women and the productivity of men.

            There is plenty of evidence that the first gap has been
declining--fairly rapidly by historical standards. There is no good way to
measure the gap between women's earnings and their productivity, but it is
reasonable to say that their earnings have risen pretty much in line with their
productivity. At least, it seems clear that the earnings of the total labor
force have risen pretty much in line with productivity (output per hour of
work) when measured correctly. Women are so large a part of the labor force
that it is hard to believe that this could be true of the total if it were not
also true of women. If the gap between the earnings of women and men is
declining, and if the earnings of women are rising in line with their
productivity, it follows that the productivity of women has been rising
relative to the productivity of men. That would be consistent with what we know
about changes in the character of women's education and their distribution
among occupations.

            Whether this combination of facts and speculation
is grounds for demonstrations of protest is a matter of taste.

            I think there is a problem lurking here, but it is
not the one the protesters have been protesting. In an earlier age, when
incomes in the market were lower than they are now, the cost to a parent of
forgoing market employment in order to stay home and care for a child was also
lower than today. And when the men-women wage gap was lower, the clear choice
was for the woman to stay home and look after the child. But given higher
market incomes, having and rearing a child is more expensive in terms of
forgone income. And with the men-women wage gap narrowed it has become less
clear how the staying home with the child should be divided between the mother
and the father. This problem of family life is not a result of incomes being
too low or the wage gap being too big. It is rather the reverse.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 228: &quot;Still Not Sure&quot;

            

               At yesterday's ceremony honoring the Teacher of the Year, Bill Clinton
recalled that his sixth-grade teacher once told him, "If you don't learn the
difference, I'm not sure whether you're going to be governor or wind up in the
penitentiary." What difference?
            

             

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 227)-- "Vile":
            

            

               Fox TV is planning to fill hundreds of plastic vials. With what?
Why?
            

            "Oh,
no. This isn't a promotion for The PJs , is it?"-- Tim Carvell
( Dennis Cass , Charles Star , and Doug Strauss had similar
answers.)

            
"Peas--one per vial. The vials were then labeled 'Monday--lunch,'
'Monday--dinner,' 'Tuesday--lunch,' etc., and loaded onto the Ally
McBeal catering cart."-- Dale Shuger (similarly, Tim Carvell ,
Liz Mason , Noah Meyerson , and Norman Oder )

            "With
colored water. Look, Mr. Groening, we agreed to promote Futurama , but we
never specified how, and we think this will work."-- Greg Diamond
(similarly, Steven Davis )

            
"Something they call 'Hume Juice.' "-- M. Pesca
            

            "The
vials are part of a promotional campaign for the May sweeps special When
Soda Goes Flat IV ."-- Doug Strauss
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Daniel's
Wrap-Up
            

            Last month, Fox TV announced the creation of two new
children's cable channels: Boyz and Girlz. Fox President and CEO Rich Cronin
called this separate-but-equal programming an effort to "superserve" children,
adding, "We will not stereotype in any way."

            Which is more than the
News Quiz can promise about Fox. To judge from your answers, the entire outfit
is nothing more than a dumping ground for lurid videos of anorexic lawyers
attacking pretentious investigators of paranormal cartoons, presided over by an
immoral tycoon. Which only proves that sometimes the easiest jokes really are
the most satisfying.

            
               Off the Deep End
Answer
            

            To celebrate the final episode of Melrose
Place , Fox plans to fill hundreds of plastic vials with water from the
MP swimming pool, as Jon Delfin presumably did not know when he
submitted what he thought was a joke (click ). The vials will be used as prizes
in radio station giveaways and other contests, according to TV
Guide .

            Yeah, I know Randy never
takes his ideas from TV Guide . Nor does he often stoop to the crassness
inherent in the combination of "Fox TV" and "plastic vials." The truth is this
question could have been yet more vulgar. I refrained from including TV
Guide 's report that the water was initially stored in "giant jugs."
Godspeed, Heather Locklear.

            
               Gag Reflex
Extra
            

            The bad rap on New
Yorker cartoons is that they are inscrutable. The more depressing truth is
that they are often simply mundane. Try to identify which of the following
captions are from urbane New Yorker cartoons and which are from a
syndicated strip you wouldn't be caught dead reading, The Lockhorns .

            
               Captions
            

            1. "I'd like to read from a prepared statement."

            2. "Look, I've denied it--can we move on?"

            3. "I think you might qualify for federal disaster
relief."

            4. "Maybe we should consolidate our finance
companies."

            5. "What's your exit strategy?"

            6. "Why would I want to watch Crossfire ? I'm
living it!"

            7. "Let's focus on what we do best--eating out."

            8. "Congratulations--you
were the topic on all this week's talk shows."

            
               Answers
            

            1. The Lockhorns . Leroy arrives home drunk.
In the hypothetical New Yorker version, a husband is caught in bed with
another woman.

            2. The New Yorker . A husband is caught in bed
with another woman. May also have appeared in Playboy .

            3. The Lockhorns . Loretta emerges from the
beauty parlor. In the New Yorker version, a precocious child surveys her
friend's demolished sand castle.

            4. The Lockhorns . Loretta pays bills. In the
New Yorker version, precocious children play Monopoly. Could have
appeared in this week's "Money Issue."

            5. The New Yorker . A prisoner addresses his
cellmate. In the Lockhorns version, Leroy addresses a friend as their
wives drag them to the opera.

            6. The Lockhorns . Leroy and Loretta watch
television. In the New Yorker version, a cat and dog watch
television.

            7. The New Yorker . A couple enters a cafe. In
the Lockhorns version, Leroy surveys Loretta's home-cooked meal.

            8. The Lockhorns .
Situation unclear. In the New Yorker version, the situation is also
unclear.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            
               World's Most Videos
Attack .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
The House and
Senate passed legislation to build a national missile defense system .
The White House persuaded the Senate, but not the House, to insert a clause
saying the system won't be deployed until it's "technologically possible,"
which could allow President Clinton and his successors to postpone it. If the
House accepts the Senate language, Clinton will support their joint bill. If
not, he'll veto it. The liberal spins: 1) The system violates the
anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia. 2) It will anger the Russians and
kill arms reduction, which is more important. 3) It's too expensive. 4) It
won't work. 5) Clinton caved as usual. 6) Conservatives just want a campaign
issue for 2000. The conservative spins: 1) New threats from North Korea and
Iran justify building the system. 2) President Reagan is vindicated. 3) The
system can work. 4) The ABM treaty is defunct. 5) Clinton will use the Senate's
weasel words to postpone the system indefinitely. 6) It's a great campaign
issue for 2000. (3/19/99)
            

            
The Kosovo
peace talks collapsed . The ethnic Albanians signed the peace deal proposed
by French and British mediators, but the Yugoslavs (i.e., Serbs) refused,
principally because they can't stand having NATO troops in their country to
enforce it. The mediators' spin: The ethnic Albanians are good, the Serbs are
bad, and now NATO may have to bomb the Serbs. The ethnic Albanians' spin: Now
that we signed the deal to end the violence and the Serbs didn't, please bomb
them. The Serbs' spin: The deal was a sham concocted by the ethnic Albanians
and "their American friends," and we don't believe you'll bomb us. The public
U.S. government spin: Now we're really going to bomb you. The private U.S.
government spin: Bombing will be harder than we thought, so first let's try
begging again. (3/19/99)
            

            
A government
study endorsed medical marijuana . The study was commissioned by U.S.
drug czar Barry McCaffrey and conducted by the National Academy of Sciences. It
says: 1) pot can reduce pain, anxiety, and nausea in chemotherapy patients and
people with AIDS; and 2) its medical use would not increase casual pot smoking
or more serious drug use among healthy people; but 3) since pot smoke is toxic,
only people whose long-term health is moot (i.e., terminally ill people) should
use it. McCaffrey said little about the report, leading everyone to conclude
that he'll ignore it. The anti-pot spins: 1) The report shows pot isn't
medicine. 2) It shows pot is toxic. 3) Medical pot is a slippery slope to
legalization. The pro-pot spins: 1) Pot can help. 2) "Arresting patients is not
right." 3) Legal pain-killing drugs (e.g., morphine) are worse. 4) Politicians
are just afraid of being called soft on drugs. 5) Recent ballot measures show
voters want medical pot. 6) It's not a slippery slope to legalization. 7) Let's
legalize it. (3/19/99)
            

            

               Steve 
               Forbes announced his presidential
candidacy on the Internet. He portrayed the new medium as a symbol of his
emphasis on individualism, growth, and opportunity, in contrast to old-style
centralized government programs such as Social Security. Old platform:
pro-choice flat-taxer. New platform: no-new-taxes pro-lifer. Critics' spin on
his wealth: wacky billionaire. Forbes' spin: He's "not beholden" to interest
groups. Old spin on his experience: He's not a politician. New spin: He can win
because he's been campaigning nonstop since 1995. Old spin on his significance:
He can't win. New spin: He'll destroy the Republican front-runner again.
(3/17/99)
            

            

               Paula 
               Jones separated from her husband.
According to USA Today , "The split followed disagreements over strategy
in her sexual harassment case ... how to spend the money they received from
their settlement and where to live in the post-lawsuit era." Jones' husband
presented himself as the voice of practicality, saying, "My idea is you don't
spend money until you know what you're going to have." But USA Today
says now that he's been fired as an airline clerk, he "will pursue an acting
career and work on a book." The paper also says Paula Jones will accept a job
offer as a manicurist while weighing "paid media offers." (3/17/99)
            

            
The Rev.
Henry Lyons resigned as president of the largest black American religious
body, the National Baptist Convention USA . He had been convicted of
racketeering and grand theft for 1) selling bogus membership lists to companies
that sought access to black consumers; and 2) stealing donations intended to
rebuild burned black churches. The sunny spin, from Lyons' attorney: He's
"remorseful" and resigned with "dignity." The cautious spin: Black churches are
losing their tolerance for leaders who exploit them. The pessimistic spin, from
Lyons' possible successor, the Rev. Calvin Butts: Leaders will always be
fallible, so structural reforms are needed to make them more accountable.
(3/17/99)
            

            
Delaware lawyer
Thomas Capano was sentenced to death for murdering his ex-mistress.
Capano's trial had drawn national attention because he was a member of the
Delaware elite and because, contrary to his attorneys' advice, he took the
stand and confessed to getting rid of the victim's body but asserted that
another of his ex-mistresses had committed the murder. After being convicted,
Capano expressed no remorse but asked the jury to consider his wife's feelings
in choosing his sentence. The jury chose death, and the judge agreed, calling
Capano's invocation of his family further evidence of his selfishness,
ruthlessness, and contempt. Headline and caption writers alluded to the irony
of Capano, a former prosecutor, being sentenced to death. (3/17/99)
            

            
The
International Chess Federation anointed its first black grandmaster .
Maurice Ashley, a 34-year-old Jamaican immigrant to the United States, earned
his place among the world's 470 grandmasters through superior tournament play.
He stopped coaching Harlem kids in chess two years ago in order to train
himself for tournaments and achieve his dream. The sunny spin: Anyone can
succeed with talent and hard work. The cynical spin: Anyone can succeed if he
stops wasting his energy on others. (3/17/99)
            

            
House Minority
Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., endorsed Vice President Al Gore for
president and joined him on the campaign trail. Previously, pundits had
downgraded Gore's stock, arguing that he already trails Gov. George W. Bush,
R-Texas, in polls; that President Clinton's sleaze is rubbing off on Gore; that
Gore's attempt to make suburban traffic jams a presidential campaign issue is
frivolous; and that Gore shot himself in the foot last week by claiming to have
taken "the initiative in creating the Internet." The spins on Gephardt's
endorsement: 1) It's a much-needed boost for Gore. 2) It's mutual back
scratching, since Gore will simultaneously campaign to make Gephardt the House
speaker. 3) The early Democratic unity will scare the GOP. 4) On the contrary,
Democrats are uniting because they're scared by the GOP's early unity behind
Bush. (3/15/99)
            

            

               Cinderella 
               victors shook up the NCAA men's
basketball tournament . In the West, 10 th -seeded Gonzaga, which
has already taken out seventh-seeded Minnesota and second-seeded Stanford, has
a good chance of becoming the third double-digit seed ever to reach the
quarterfinals. In the Midwest, 10 th -seeded Miami of Ohio reached the
round of 16 by knocking off seventh-seeded Washington--behind a 43-point
onslaught from forward Wally Szczerbiak--and second-seeded Utah. In the East,
12 th -seeded Southwest Missouri State held fifth-seeded Wisconsin to
32 points--the lowest NCAA tournament score since the inception of the shot
clock--and then trounced fourth-seeded Tennessee. This year's round of 16 boast
the highest number of Cinderella teams in the tournament's history.
(3/15/99)
            

            
Boxing officials
ordered a rematch of the March 13 heavyweight championship fight between
Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis . Fans and sports writers are in an
uproar because the judges called the fight a draw--despite a huge disparity of
punches in Lewis' favor and the widespread perception of spectators that Lewis
won. Gov. George Pataki, R-N.Y., said he will ask the state athletic commission
to investigate the fight. The spins: 1) The fight was rigged, probably by
promoter Don King. 2) The disputed outcome only shows that judging fights is a
subjective art. 3) Even so, it's Lewis' fault for failing to put the outcome
beyond question by going for the kill. 4) Who cares whether the judges are
honest? The real outrage is that boxing is barbaric. 5) The real outrage is
that the fight was boring. 6) The real outrage is that boxing officials won't
be able to raise enough money to pay the exorbitant sums the boxers are
demanding for a rematch. (3/15/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Blundering Blurbers

            
               Duked
Out
Citing long-standing unresolved ethics and safety violations, federal
authorities suspended human experimentation at the Duke University Medical Center
for four days in May. The experiments ranged from drug tests to research on
psychological reactions to illness. Among the alleged violations: "insufficient
training" of review board members, "potential financial conflicts of interest
with some board members," and inadequate supervision of informed-consent
procedures. (Federal investigators also uncovered an incident in which a
space-walk experiment volunteer briefly lost consciousness.) The ban was lifted
after Duke agreed to overhaul its procedures for protecting human subjects. The
government also warned the City
University of New York and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine to clean up their safety
procedures or face shutdowns of their federally financed human research.

            
               Legal
Omertà
               
            

            

               Closed Chambers , Edward Lazarus' behind-the-scenes exposé of political
wrangling at the Supreme Court, continues to generate controversy. Lazarus, who clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun, earned the
opprobrium of legal scholars, other clerks, and the justices for making
internal court business public in his book, published last year. Now Anthony
Kronman, the dean of Yale Law School who blurbed the hardcover edition of the
book as "well-researched and wonderfully written," has formally apologized to
the Supreme Court and sent a letter of explanation to Yale Law School alumni.
Declaring that his initial enthusiasm for the book constituted a "real lapse"
in judgment, Kronman said he believes former clerks are bound to silence about
the court's nonpublic discussions and activities. According to USA
Today , Kronman's blurb will not appear on the paperback edition of the book
due out this month.

            
               Little Big
Man
            

            

               New York
Review of Books writer Thomas Powers stands accused of ignorance,
incompetence, and racial stereotyping by 32 Native American studies scholars
for his review of several books about Native Americans. Powers, a
journalist who has written about spycraft and the atomic bomb, drew the ire of
the scholars, led by Patricia Hilden of the University of California at
Berkeley and Arnold Krupat of Sarah Lawrence College, who wrote that he had
"little or no detailed knowledge of Native American scholarship" and that he
reproduced tired clichés about Native American figures and traditions. "We are
quite certain that no one of us would be asked to review books in Mr. Powers's
fields," the signatories declared in a letter in the May 20 issue. Powers
expressed bafflement at the charges, concluding that the letter "amounts to an
attempt to intimidate ... me from writing about 'their field.' " The
Review 's editors concurred: "It is hard to take seriously academics who
condemn an independent scholar without making a single substantive criticism of
his work."

            
               The Academics
Strike Back
            

            

               Star Wars hoopla visits academia, reports the Dallas Morning
News . Some scholars view the original Star Wars film as a simplistic
Cold War allegory that helped to legitimize Ronald Reagan's view of the Soviet
Union as an "evil empire" and to build popular support for a "star wars"
missile defense. Others reverse the movie's ideological lenses, arguing that
filmmaker George Lucas based his "evil emperor" on Richard Nixon and Darth
Vader on Henry Kissinger. Finally, others charge that Star Wars
represents a covert remake of Birth of the Nation . "The narrative
homologies between Birth of a Nation and Star Wars click beyond
the possibility of accident," writes Clyde Taylor of Tufts University. "Darth
Vader (dark invader?) is the upstart commander of 'black' political forces,
threatening a weakened, but spiritual, refined, and honor-bound version of the
'South.' ... [R2-D2 and C-3PO] take the place of those sassy, back-talking
darky house servants, of equally mechanical loyalty to their betters." Whatever
their differences, the scholars agree on Star Wars ' enduring impact on
American culture.

            
               Eyes on the
Prize
            

            The
Bancroft Prize, given to honor the best works of American
history, was awarded this year to two books on slavery and one on the (hostile)
relations between Native Americans and settlers. The books are Many
Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by the
University of Maryland's Ira Berlin; Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in
the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry, by William and Mary's
Philip D. Morgan; and The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity , by Boston University's Jill Lepore.

            
               The Other Side of
the Rainbow
            

            
Affirmative action is good for you, supporters told the New York Times .
The University of
Michigan, for one, cites statistical evidence to argue that affirmative
action benefits not only minority students but all students. White students who
attend a "diverse" college campus are more likely to work in integrated
settings and to display ambition, confidence, and other worthy traits, the
school attests. "Diversity enhances learning," says university President Lee
Bollinger. Meanwhile, the New York Times Magazine offers a rosy portrait
of California after the abolition of affirmative action. Minority students who
once might have been admitted to the system's best schools are now finding
places at lower-tier schools. More important, the new dispensation has
encouraged state universities to step up their efforts to recruit students from
low-performing high schools, often with positive results.

            

               businesschool.com
            

            Junk
bond king Michael Milken and the University of Chicago are partnering in an online business school
venture. The University of Chicago has just announced a deal with UNEXT.com, an online
education company partly funded by Milken and headed by a Chicago trustee.
University officials anticipate $20 million in revenues just in the next five
years. But faculty members are concerned about conflicts of interest, not only
on the part of the trustee, Andrew Rosenfield, but also because UNEXT's
investors include two University of Chicago economics professors, Gary Becker
and Merton Miller, as well as the university's law school dean, Daniel Fischel.
Fischel is also the author of Payback: The Conspiracy To Destroy Michael
Milken and His Financial Revolution . Administrators protest that they are
only keeping pace with their competitors: UNEXT has already signed on with Columbia, while Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are
considering commercial partners for their own online programs.

            
               UC-Berkeley Folds
...
            

            A
monthlong protest by students in Berkeley's ethnic studies department, marked by a hunger strike and
129 arrests, ended in near complete capitulation by the administration, which promised
more tenure-track faculty and a research center. The "Third World Liberation
Front" demonstrators argued that over the last decade Berkeley had neglected
its ethnic studies department, failing to fill positions in fields such as
Chicano and Native American studies. The agreement calls for a committee of
students and faculty members to design a five-year plan to guide the
department's hiring strategy.

            
               ... And So Does
Anna Quindlen
            

            
Protests by anti-abortion activists at Villanova University convinced former New York
Times columnist Anna Quindlen to bow out as a commencement speaker. The
best-selling novelist would have been the third member of her family to receive
an honorary degree from the Catholic university near Philadelphia. Quindlen, a
board member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, had no
plans to discuss abortion in her address--"I would have talked about the sheer
pleasure of living," she told the Philadelphia Inquirer . She added that
she didn't want to divert attention from the students on their graduation day.
The protesters were only half-mollified by Quindlen's gesture: The president of
American Collegians for Life regrets that the university did not revoke the
invitation first.

            
               Yo Queerio, Taco
Bell
            

            Under
a "Missionary Positions" theme, the National
Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies met in San
Antonio, Texas, to focus on sexuality, a topic long considered taboo in the
Latino community. As the Los Angeles Times reports, about 1,000 scholars
gathered to hear papers on subjects that ranged from "Latina rage" to "joto"
(queer) scholarship to Chicano rap music and machismo. Alicia
Gaspar de Alba, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles,
declared that Chicano studies has "finally been won by feminists and people in
gender studies." But Juan Rodriguez, a professor at Texas Lutheran University
and a member of the association since 1974, predicted a "backlash" in a few
years: "Academics are no more enlightened than anyone else."

            
               Atlas Shrugs at No.
1
            

            At the end of April,
Random House posted
two lists of the top 100 nonfiction titles of the 20 th century--one
as judged by the Modern Library's "board" (Caleb Carr, Elaine Pagels, Stephen
Jay Gould, Jon Krakauer, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., among others) and the
other as judged by the "readers," or basically anyone who voted for his or her
favorite book on the Modern Library Web site. Topping the "board" list is The
Education of Henry Adams , by Henry Adams. The "readers" gave Ayn Rand four
titles in the top 10, including the top slot. In response, the feisty journal
Philosophy and Literature has inaugurated a different kind of discussion
on its listserv . Its members are posting their votes for the
worst books. Rand has proved to be a listserv favorite, though John
Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Martin Amis' The Information have
also garnered mentions.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Is Permissiveness?

            It's
not easy to tell from the European press where NATO is heading on Kosovo. There
seems to be a consensus around Joseph Fitchett's statement in the lead
story in Monday's International Herald Tribune of Paris that June 18, the date
of a summit between the G-7 countries and Russia, is a "make-or-break date for
the air war to produce a political solution." If no breakthrough occurs by
then, Fitchett explained, NATO will have to choose between ground action and an
admission that President Slobodan Milosevic has won, because NATO's central war
aim of getting the Kosovar refugees home will have become unachievable. But
beyond that, there is no clarity on who stands where on what, especially on the
controversial issue of ground troops.

            The
Independent
of London led Monday, for example, on an agreement between the United States
and Britain to use ground troops "to drive the remaining Serb forces from
Kosovo" in either a "permissive" or "non-permissive" environment. NATO is
"ready to go in fighting," it said. And the Times , in its lead story
reporting a doubling of NATO's land force in Macedonia, said that British
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has "secured America's backing for the forces to
enter Kosovo without Belgrade's approval as soon as the Serb army begins
withdrawing."

            
However the Daily Telegraph , leading on the same thing, reported "a difference
between Washington and London about whether troops could be sent into Kosovo
without Belgrade's agreement." It quoted Madeleine Albright as contradicting
Cook's "significant" statement that the troops are being prepared for
deployment into a "non-permissive environment." She was quoted as saying,
"Those troops are going to go in a permissive way." Under the headline "Britain
and US clash again on when to send in troops," the tabloid Daily Mail
said Albright had "flatly contradicted" Cook. In an editorial, the
Independent presented the agreed build-up of ground troops as a triumph
for British Prime Minister Tony Blair after his "surprising and apparently
reckless absolutism in his conduct of the war" by ruling out any "exit
strategy" except total victory. "Even when President Clinton and Chancellor
Schröder were at their most flaky last week, he blithely insisted there could
be no compromise and that all options, including the use of land forces,
remained open," it said. Now he has what he wanted.

            A
Times of London editorial described Al Gore as a casualty of the war. It
said it has made his "essential task" of putting some distance between himself
and Clinton much harder. "Mr. Gore cannot do anything other than support the
President's conduct of the conflict," it explained. "He is therefore tied to an
enterprise that has, so far, reflected Mr. Clinton's political weaknesses. He
has never felt comfortable with his role as Commander-in-Chief, and neither has
his electorate." In Paris, Libération led on Clinton's statement Sunday in the New
York Times that he is continuing with the airstrikes but not ruling out
"other options." It called this "a semi-threat of ground intervention."
Le Figaro
highlighted a NATO spokesman's remark that the 19 countries of the alliance are
"99 per cent totally agreed" on their Kosovo strategy, although Germany, Italy,
and Greece are among countries that last week declared their firm opposition to
the use of ground troops. Le Figaro led on NATO's supposed satisfaction
with its achievements so far--14,000 bombs having destroyed a third of Serbia's
heavy weaponry and 100 of its airplanes.

            The
Asian Age of
India led Monday with a report that a "fascist clique" is responsible for a plot to
assassinate Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was himself assassinated. A delegation of the
Congress Party, of which Sonia Gandhi was president until she recently resigned
in a huff when her "foreign birth" was criticized, warned Indian Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee that the same "clique" that murdered Mahatma Gandhi more
than 51 years ago was behind it. The paper said the prime minister has already
been warned of "certain plots" against Sonia Gandhi by the Indian intelligence
agencies and has increased the security around her. The Daily Telegraph
ran an interview with former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in which
she said that she too feared she would be murdered and had therefore decided to
stay in Britain rather than return to Pakistan to fight a conviction for
corruption.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Unproven Pay Parity

            
               Pay
Check
            

            I was rather
dissatisfied with Jonathan Chait's "" regarding the "pay gap" for servicemen.
He states:

            
               The 13 percent "pay gap" represents the
difference in the growth of military versus civilian wages since
1982--that is, civilian wages have grown 13 percent faster. This does
not mean that soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not
take into account the pay differential from 1982. If my wages have increased by
100 percent during the past five years while Bill Gates' have increased by
nearly 50 percent, this does not mean that I am earning 50 percent more than
Bill Gates, since he was making more to begin with.
            

            Does Chait really mean to imply that
servicemen made a lot more money in 1982 than their civilian counterparts? The
only evidence he offers for this position is that military members got a big
raise in 1981. However, if memory serves me, the 1981 raise was designed to
provide a "catch up" to bring military pay back to parity with civilian wages
after a decade of lagging pay increases. It seems to me that military and
civilian pay in 1982 should have been comparable. If this is true, the military
may have since lost ground, because some of the annual raises since '82 have
lagged the inflation rate.

            He also cites studies from the Congressional Budget
Office and the RAND Corp. that indicate that "enlisted service members" make
more money than their civilian counterparts. I can't speak about the CBO study,
but I've seen the one from RAND, and its conclusions are more complicated than
he suggests--that junior enlisted servicemen are overpaid compared to their
civilian counterparts, senior enlisted are slightly underpaid, junior officers
moderately underpaid, and senior officers seriously underpaid. So, does Chait
advocate pay table reform rather than an across-the-board increase in pay?

            The bottom line is that
after reading this article, I'm no smarter than I was before about whether
there really is a pay gap, since no evidence was offered that addressed the
actual salaries of either the military or civilian population. A little more
research would have been helpful here.

            -- Geri Peters
            

            
Chesapeake, Va.

            
               Fiddling With
History
            

            In "", Chatterbox writes, "the hallmarks of
Lapham's style are a magnificent contempt for mankind's folly and an apparent
conviction that the United States is reenacting the last days of Rome." And
Chatterbox cites Lapham's mention of "the Roman mob familiar with the expensive
claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero."

            Nero was emperor until 70 A.D. In that year, there
were four emperors (Nero, Otho, Galba, and Vespasian), and the secret of the
Roman Empire--that in a time of turmoil, a provincial commander with an army
could march on Rome and become emperor--was revealed, but Rome's decline was a
long way off. The situation stabilized with Vespasian, and the second century
A.D. is often considered the golden age of the empire (Gibbon himself says that
the time of Marcus Aurelius--late second century--was the best time to live of
all in history). Around 300, the empire split between east and west. The empire
in the west finally collapsed in 476. In the east, it lasted until the
15 th century.

            So, if these times in
the United States are like the time of Nero, we have (by analogy) at least 200
more years, including another century of greatness, and perhaps another
millennium. This is not a criticism of your amusing article on Lapham, but of
Lapham's apparently poor grasp of actual ancient history.

            -- David
Margolies
            

            
Oakland, Calif.

            
               Wrong
Turns
            

            I thought it might be worth attempting to correct
some misstatements and mistakes made in Steve Chapman's "." Chapman writes,
"The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that after the repeal of
55-mph speed limits, fatalities rose by 17 percent on interstate highways where
the limit was raised."

            Hopefully Chapman is aware that the IIHS is an
industry group whose members directly benefit from the imposition of a national
speed limit. Further exploration would have turned up studies by the University
of Georgia (if memory serves) and American Automobile Association showing
either no increase or decrease in fatalities on roads where the speed limit was
increased. Looking state by state, the same lack of a pattern emerges: There
simply is no good data, counterintuitive though it may seem, to link "speeding"
with accidents. Although deaths per passenger mile did indeed decline when the
55-mph limit was imposed, they have declined every year since statistics have
been kept and are continuing to decline in the wake of the revocation of the
national speed limit.

            Another innocent mistake is comparing
"speed-related" deaths to "alcohol-related deaths." Chapman writes, "But speed
comes in a very respectable second, killing 13,000 Americans annually." The
national database in which this information is kept allows officers at the
scene to code multiple reasons for an accident; they do, indeed, tend to cite
"excessive speed for conditions" as a contributing factor quite frequently.
However, if you were to pull the number of accidents where speed was the sole
factor cited, the number declines precipitously. Keep in mind, again, that the
data are not good to begin with; this is simply the opinion of an officer who
arrived on the scene after the fact.

            The radar gun was invented to allow civil engineers
to determine "85 th percentile speed," or that speed that 85 percent
of drivers will maintain on a given piece of road. In more sensible times,
that's how speed limits were set: Build the road, time traffic on it, determine
the speed most people are comfortable driving at, and post that as the limit to
encourage uniform speeds, which, unsurprisingly, minimizes accidents. A
national speed limit, by being completely separated from local conditions,
actually encourages unsafe behavior, as people will vary in their speed
significantly. On many roads, driving at or below the limit puts you well below
the speed of most traffic, thereby greatly increasing the chances of an
accident.

            So, no; rigid enforcement of a national speed limit
with draconian penalties for violating it will not save thousands of lives. Nor
would repealing the freedom of the airwaves act (the federal legislation that
permits radar detectors and any other listening-only devices) be a good idea
merely to protect the various municipalities' right to collect revenues from
motorists. It may not be sexy or simple, but setting speed limits on a
case-by-case basis at sensible speeds would do much more to reduce speeding and
accidents than any of the measures Chapman proposes. Since even the Department
of Transportation estimates that better than 80 percent of Americans speed, it
might make more sense to look at why, rather than simply demanding that they
all stop.

            Or maybe Chapman thinks
the current "war on drugs" is a good idea, too.

            -- Simon
Kennedy
            

            
Chicago

            
               Schooled in the
Past
            

            While it is always good to have some historical
perspective on modern trends, I think David Greenberg misses a couple of subtle
distinctions in his piece on the violence of schoolkids in years past (see "").
Let's stipulate that high-school males of yesteryear were a rowdy,
school-stoning, carriage-tipping, teacher-beating, horse-whipping,
liquor-soaked bunch of devolved maniacs. That is, after all, about the deepest
level to which Greenberg's analysis descends, and having once reached it he
turns and angles for the bright sky of the story he wants to tell.

            The kids in Littleton, Colo., murdered their
classmates in cold blood. They found a 17-year-old girl weeping under a table,
shouted "Peekaboo," and killed her. At close range. And they apparently enjoyed
it. "Look at this black kid's brain! Awesome, man!" is what one was reported to
have exclaimed. They stood in front of another girl, asked her if she believed
in God, and shot her in the head when she answered yes. They had no goal; no
end in mind beyond destruction. They weren't trying to restrict a rival gang,
enforce a political ideal, or overthrow authority. They appeared to revel in
death and blood and hate for its own sake alone.

            So, I ask Greenberg: Would you be comfortable
lacing up the old athletic club breeches, rubbing a bit of pine tar on your
trusty ball bat, and heading down to P.S. 121 with a few of your friends to
teach these ruffians a lesson?

            If Greenberg can't
detect the differences in these situations, then he is part of the problem. I
too read a lot of history, but unlike Greenberg I think you have to go back a
bit farther to find truly analogous behavior. The Dark Ages should prove
fruitful. And by the way, it's misleading to place the sentence "occasionally
children were put to death" at the end of a list of the things teachers did to
keep students in line. Does Greenberg mean to suggest this was the tool of last
resort? He is referring to the fact that some teen-aged "children" were
occasionally executed for crimes (the crime of murder in the period to which he
refers, or perhaps for stealing hare from the king's wood in earlier times).
Not laudable, but definitely irrelevant to his argument. Just a bit later in
the piece he makes the point himself that teen-agers were considered adults in
the time he is examining. Or were we executing 9-year-olds back then?

            -- Mark Betz
            

            
Parsippany, N.J.

            
               
                  Slate 's
White Lies
            

            I enjoy Jacob Weisberg's
writings on art, but in his review of the Whitney's "The American Century" show
(see "") he conflates two of the museum's most controversial shows. The buttons
saying, "I can't ever imagine wanting to be white," by artist Daniel Martinez,
were in the 1993 Biennial--not, as Weisberg writes, the Black Male show.

            -- Robin
Cembalest
            

            Executive Editor,
ARTnews
            

            New
York

            
               
                  Jacob Weisberg
replies: I stand corrected.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 207: &quot;Samaranch Hand&quot;

            

               As it prepares to convene in Switzerland this week, the International
Olympic Committee has invited a well-known American to join its reform panel.
Who and why? (Question courtesy of Andrew Staples.)
               
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Thursday's Question
(No. 206)--"How Do You Take It?":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           It happens in Colorado for an hour a day, and
former prosecutor Steven Cohen calls it "the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the
history of Western civilization." What goes
on?
                        
                     
                  
               

               "The
trees talk about how to kill another celebrity."-- Jennifer Miller
               

               "Tim
McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Ramzi Yousef get together to try and solve the
JonBenet Ramsey case."-- Cliff Schoenberg ( Norm Oder et al. had
similar answers.)

               "Adolph
Coors studies for his bar mitzvah."-- Jon Snow (similarly, but rappers
not brewers, Leigh Bardugo )

               
"Barbara Walters, Meredith Vieira, Joy Behar, and Ramzi Yousef at the taping of
their TV show The Parallax View ."-- Meg Wolitzer
               

               
"Finally, a question to which I know the answer: Murderers yell at each
other."-- Sharon Smith
               

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

               To play News Quiz
requires the willful suspension not of disbelief but of genuine knowledge: An
awareness of the actual answer so easily eclipses the inspiration for a comic
response. And, clearly, everyone knew the facts of the matter today. But
there's more about Colorado you might not know. To condense from (but not
otherwise alter) the 1960 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia: "About two
thirds of the people of Colorado live no more. ... Streams tumbling down from
the snowy peaks of the Rockies form ... cantaloupes. ...The Cherokee Indians
found gold on ... President Andrew Johnson, who became a leading ... brandy.
... He surveyed friendly relations." In this context, it's hard to know what
makes a kaffeeklatsch odd. Or a klatsch.

               
                  Fresh Air
Answer
               

               Luis Felipe, the Latin Kings leader convicted of
murder and racketeering, is about to join Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh,
World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski for
conversation in the exercise yard at the federal "Super Max" prison in
Florence, Colo.

               Kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in
7-by-12 cells, the men can not even look into the eyes of another prisoner.
They are permitted to spend one hour per day in separate cages in the exercise
yard, where they can speak to each other through mesh fences.

               Because Felipe is believed to have ordered murders
from his cell in a New York prison, he has been kept even more isolated, but a
ruling by federal Judge John Martin allows Felipe into the exercise yard.

               The conversation? Yousef's lawyer, Bernard Klienman,
said, "They talk about innocuous things like the movies. They don't talk about
anything they shouldn't be talking about."

               Steven Cohen was a
prosecutor on the Latin Kings case.

               
                  Infectious
Extra
               

               "Epidemic!," the
wonderful new exhibit at New York's American Museum of Natural History, must
have presented a challenge to the gift shop managers, but they rose to it. Some
actual items for sale in the museum shops:

               

                  Rat Hand Puppet, $25--Plague-infested fleas not included.

                  Cockroach Earrings, part of a series that includes mice, flies, and
mosquitoes, $8--It's a formal affair: Should I go with the malaria or the
hantavirus?

                  Biohazard Martini Glass, "playfully reminds us of the effects of
overindulgence on our immune system", $5--Remind me: What's the difference
between "playful" and "heartless"?

                  Virus Coaster Set (includes Influenza A, Hepatitis B, Adenovirus, T4
Bacteriophage), $12--How many times must I tell you: Don't put your glass on
the table, put it on something that will give you searing abdominal
cramps.

                  Influenza A Squishy Rubber Ball, $5.50--Hey, catch ... a dose of this!

                  "Transfusion™ fruity body and hairwash gel" sold in a realistic IV bag,
$12.50--From the people who brought you the Body Bag poncho.

               

               
                  Common
Denominator
               

               JonBenet.

            

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Easy
Answers
            

            It is often said that there are no easy answers,
but in fact there are. In a former life I used to interrogate politicians on
television, and in six years there was never a subject on which they were
unable to come up with an easy answer. Not necessarily a correct answer--or
honest or heartfelt or logically coherent--but easy.

            What is an easy answer?
An easy answer, for a politician, is one that assures you will never be proved
wrong. Or at least that if you seem to have been wrong, another easy answer
will be available to explain why you weren't. "There are no easy answers" is
itself an easy answer--if you can get away with it. Often, you not only can get
away with it, but you can also enhance your reputation for being "thoughtful"
(high praise that in the culture of politics means indecisive in a classy way,
rather than kindly or considerate of others or anything like that). Sometimes,
though, you have to do better, and this is when easy answers become hard
work.

            War and peace issues are the worst. A famous joke among
academics is that scholarly disputes are especially passionate because the
stakes are so low. By contrast, when the stakes are as high as they can get,
there is a special need for elected officials to avoid having a forthright
opinion. Easy answers to the rescue!

            The current issue of American military involvement
in Kosovo, for example, seems to be a yes-or-no question to which either
conventional answer--call them "yes" and "no"--is decidedly uneasy. "Yes" means
risking American lives in a faraway land that has no apparent connection to the
only thing that really matters, which is the Dow Jones industrial average. "No"
means doing nothing, as the world's only superpower, while a thug government
commits daily televised atrocities against white people in Europe (not just
some unmediated Africans). Unless you're extraordinarily lucky, the outcome of
making either choice will leave you morally implicated in some dead bodies
(with larger raw numbers making up for lack of American citizenship in the case
of a "no").

            Fortunately, even for
Kosovo there are answers available besides yes and no. They will be familiar
from intervention disputes dating back at least to Vietnam, but they are
especially useful for the summer-squall-style military actions of today, in
which we all agree to be frenzied about the occupation of Kuwait or a
drug-smuggling dictator in Panama or warlords in Somalia or genocide in Bosnia
on the strict understanding that we will be allowed to forget all about these
matters and places in six months, max. Here are half a dozen consumer-tested
easy answers on issues like Kosovo:

            1."Well, Cokie, my concern is that if we go into [INSERT
LOCATION], we should do so with the resources necessary to get the job done.
Airstrikes alone [or 'only 200,000 troops' or 'a mere half a dozen hydrogen
bombs' or whatever is on the menu] just aren't enough. It is immoral to put
American soldiers at risk without a guarantee of overwhelming superiority for a
certain and speedy victory."

            This is perhaps the most
prestigious dodge: the Powell Doctrine, named for Gen. Colin Powell (who is
responsible for the doctrine but not its use as a dodge). The Powell Doctrine
holds that the lesson of Vietnam is do it right or not at all. Go in full force
from the beginning rather than escalate yourself into a quagmire. Or don't go
in at all. Finish quickly before the public loses patience (or ideally, as in
the case of Grenada, before the public has even heard of the place). Or, of
course, don't start at all. As to which of these alternatives--all or nothing
at all--is the right one in any situation, the Powell Doctrine does not say. So
this is a great way to sound tough and sophisticated without actually
committing yourself. Since any actual military engagement is not going to
involve every last wing nut in the Pentagon's "miscellaneous screws" jar, you
are well positioned to say "I told you so" if things go badly. Yet you never
actually opposed the action, so you're OK if things go well. And no one can
accuse you of wimping out if the military action doesn't take place: Hey, you
wanted to go in with more force!

            2."Where is our exit strategy, Ted? That is what I'd like
to know."

            "Exit strategy" became a
fashionable term during the Gulf War. It really sounds like you know what
you're talking about. And what does it mean? As I understand it, an exit
strategy is a sort of poor man's Powell Doctrine. It does not demand certain
and prompt victory. It merely demands a certain and prompt conclusion to the
exercise that is acceptable to the United States. When invoking this concern,
it is not necessary to specify--and indeed it is hard to imagine--what
conclusion short of victory a guy like you, who flings around terms like "exit
strategy," would find minimally satisfactory. And no military action (except
for actual movies) can be fully scripted in advance. So you're golden. If
things go wrong: "Ted, I pleaded with the president to make sure we had an exit
strategy." And if the action goes well or disaster occurs because we didn't
intervene: "Ted, I was behind this all the way. I've always said that victory
is the best exit strategy."

            3."Tim, I support the president. American credibility is at
stake. The commander in chief has made a commitment on behalf of the United
States, and the United States must honor that commitment."

            This is the sneakiest
dodge and probably the most popular--especially among Republicans. You get to
be patriotic and hawkish. And if things go well, you were behind the commander
in chief all the way. But if things go badly, it is the president's fault for
making the commitment. Tragically, you had no choice but to support him once
the commitment was made, but of course making it was irresponsible folly.
Please note that, like a reheated stew, this dodge works even better after a
military action has begun. "Tim, we never should have got into this quagmire,
but now we have no choice but to ..."

            4."I'm not persuaded this is so important, so vital to the
nation's interests that we ought to intervene."

            That's an almost exact quote from a real senator,
Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and illustrates a nifty linguistic evasion. You don't
say you're against it, you say you're "not persuaded" to be for it. Not only do
you evade the tough choice, you also evade responsibility for your decision.
It's the president's fault, even if he's right, because he didn't persuade
you.

            You can also say (like
Sen. Max Baucus of Montana) that there are "unanswered questions." Being
undecided and wanting ever more information is another great way to be
designated as "thoughtful." And with a bit of skill and a bit of luck, you can
keep taking your own temperature until it doesn't matter any more. Meanwhile,
you're OK no matter what happens. "Not persuaded" can be spun as a yes or a no.
A nice variant is to say, "The American people must be persuaded this is the
right thing, and the president hasn't made the case." Not only is whatever
happens not your fault (unless it's good), it's not even the public's fault.
It's the president's fault, either because we did what he wanted or--if we
didn't--because he didn't convince us to do so.

            5."I don't think we should begin bombing unless and until
the Serbs really begin a very significant massacre against the people in
Kosovo."

            That is Don Nickles of
Oklahoma in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (where most of these quotes
come from). In a way, this is not a dodge. It is a sort of madcap Solomonic
approach. Sen. Nickles is saying: "Why must we guess whether Milosevic is going
to kill a lot more people? Let's wait and see if he does it! And why must we
choose between saving a lot of Kosovars and saving none? Let's split the
difference and save half of them." As a bonus, Nickles retains a valuable fudge
factor in the question of what qualifies as "a very significant massacre."
Depending on what happens, Nickles is in a position to accuse the president of
failing to defend American interests and values, or of recklessly endangering
American lives on the basis of a massacre that was merely "significant" but not
"very significant."

            6."What's happening in [WHEREVER] is a tragedy and an
outrage, Wolf. Intervention to stop the bloodshed is absolutely essential. But
it's a job for [INSERT NAME OF CLOSER COUNTRY AND/OR REGIONAL GROUP], not for
the United States."

            This final dodge is slightly different. You're
claiming credit for sharing whatever humanitarian or geostrategic concern
dictates military action, while opposing the use of the only military power you
yourself bear responsibility for. I once interviewed an especially moronic
senator, since defeated, who declared that some worthy military action was "a
job for the United Nations." I asked him why other countries should risk their
soldiers' lives if the United States wouldn't, and he replied, "I didn't say
'other nations,' I said the United Nations." When it was pointed out to
him that U.N. troops don't come from Mars, he was stymied. That point had never
occurred to him.

            But exposing the logical flaw here does not depend
on any huffing and puffing about America's leadership role. An American pol
going on American television to say that the Europeans should tidy up the
former Yugoslavia without our help is like the Economist running (as has
been known to happen) a stuffy editorial saying that a corrupt dictator in some
Third World country should resign. Of course he should. And the sun should
shine in London every day. But even the Economist 's opinion cannot
affect these matters. When an answer moves beyond difficult to completely
impossible, it becomes easy once again.

            Watch for these easy
answers on the TV talk shows and in the newspaper. Practice on your own. Soon
you too can be ducking responsibility like a real-life member of Congress.

            
               For more Kosovo
coverage, click .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            &quot;Welcome Back, Mr. President!&quot;

            The crisis in the Northern
Ireland peace process, provoked by new outbursts of violence in the province
and the Irish Republican Army's reluctance to decommission its weapons,
dominated the newspapers of Ireland and Britain Friday. Several papers led on
Thursday's tripartite statement from President Clinton and the British and
Irish prime ministers urging a settlement "between now and Good Friday." In
Belfast, the Irish
News prominently reported former Sen. George Mitchell's warning that
history would not forgive failure, describing his speech at a St. Patrick's Day
reception at the White House as "the most powerful" of a week of Irish
celebrating and politicking in Washington.

            In an editorial page
article in the Irish Independent , commentator Chris Glennon said "an air of
despondency" hung over the negotiations because nobody knows what the bottom
line is for either Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams or the Protestant leader David
Trimble on the decommissioning problem. "There is a lot of gloom about the
prospects," Glennon wrote. "That was a factor in the St. Patrick's Day
celebrations being less fun in Washington than in recent years." An editorial
in the Irish Times said Al Gore was "one of the happiest
people" on St. Patrick's Day because Irish-American Democrats had endorsed him
to succeed Clinton in next year's election. "Mr. Gore's enthusiastic support
for the peace process boosted his acceptability," the paper said.

            In Britain, the Daily Telegraph led Friday
with the claim that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has softened his stance
on decommissioning. It said the tripartite statement "makes clear that the
IRA's continued failure to disarm need not block Sinn Fein from the new
power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland." The liberal Guardian had an emotive
front page story on the initiative under a seven-column headline "Now is the
time for courage," and an editorial expressing relief that the Spice Girls had crept
into the No. 99 spot in the U.S. Hot Hundred pop charts, since otherwise "it
would have marked (on the authority of the Wall Street Journal , no less)
the first time since the Kennedy administration that the UK record industry
didn't have a single record in the top 100 US best sellers."

            As Monica Lewinsky
continued her book promotion tour of Britain, saying Thursday in yet another
"exclusive" interview (this time with the Daily Express ) that her
main problem in life was fatness--"You can be anything in this world but fat,"
she said--the Independent welcomed the return of Clinton to the fray, with
his first news conference for more than a year, as "an older and wiser man,
with his extraordinary resilience lending a kind of dignity to the mere fact of
his survival in office. ... With the peace process in Northern Ireland poised
again on the edge, the White House's full attention could once again play a
decisive role," the editorial said. "With Nato--and its new central European
members--on the verge of military action in Serbia, Mr. Clinton's skills of
diplomacy and rhetoric are needed. ... Welcome back, Mr. President, there is
work to be done."

            Papers in Australia and in the Far East remained focused on
the Olympics scandal. The Sydney Morning Herald led its front page Friday with a
photograph of Georgina Coles, ex-wife of Phil Coles, an
Australian member of the International Olympic Committee, wearing U.S.$10,000
worth of jewelry that he had denied accepting as a gift from a Greek
businessman associated with the Athens bid for the 1996 Olympics. "The
emergence of the photograph will come as a body blow to Mr Coles, who was near
tears when told that his former wife had contradicted his denials," the paper
said.

            In Hong Kong, the
South China Morning
Post carried an editorial Friday calling again for the resignation of
the IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. His confirmation in office was
"thoroughly disheartening," it said. "After the recent tarnishing of its image
with corruption revelations, the committee badly needs to restore its
credibility and regain respect. That can hardly be done so long as it remains
dominated by the old regime epitomised by Mr Samaranch."

            Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung led its front page Thursday
with an exclusive revelation that a raiding party of East German academics had
secretly opened the coffin of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 30 years ago. Seven
experts in conservation and pathology entered the royal vault in Weimar by
night on the pretext that one of the clasps on Goethe's sarcophagus had broken
and his remains might deteriorate. In fact, they took the poet's body away in a
handcart and brought it back three weeks later only after cleaning the skeleton
and using plastic to reinforce the decayed laurel wreath on his skull. The
operation was carried out by stealth to avoid exposing the then Communist
regime of East Germany to charges of desecration. The 250 th
anniversary of Goethe's birth is being celebrated this year.

            The Daily
Telegraph of London led Friday with the news that the British government
has decided to impose fines on restaurants and cafes that fail to tell
customers they are serving genetically modified food. The government, which
previously declared such food absolutely safe, has caved in to a powerful media
campaign. Restaurateurs say the measure will be impossible to enforce, and
environmental groups called it "a con" that doesn't go far enough. The
Times of
London in an editorial Friday called it "a lightly cooked up fraud upon the
food-buying public."

            A British press furore about dog poisoning in
Italy--sparked off, as it were, by Muriel Spark's disclosure last weekend that
five of her dogs have been poisoned at her home in Tuscany--finally
reverberated in Italy Friday when La Repubblica of Rome asked in a front-page headline:
"Who killed Muriel's dogs?" The subject covered a whole inside page of the
paper, which described her as a "poor romantic Englishwoman" who had followed a
"bucolic idyll" by going to live in Tuscany and had then had all her pets
killed. Since the police told her that the poisoners were "a small group of
deviants" in the hunting community, "it shouldn't be difficult to restore, at
least in part, her great love of Italy, which has been so barbarously
betrayed." (For more on this, see "" in 
                  Slate
               .)

            In an editorial Friday, the Daily Telegraph ,
a conservative paper, made fun of a splendid correction published in the
liberal Guardian the day before. The Guardian had apologized
"profusely" to Patti Boulaye, an actress seeking election as a Conservative to
the new Greater London Assembly, for having misquoted her in an interview.
"This is a time to support apartheid," it quoted her as saying. "This is a time
to support apartheid because it is unfashionable." But in fact Boulaye had
advocated supporting "a party," meaning the Conservative Party. "Because Miss
Boulaye happens to be black, the reporter assumed she was obsessed with a
racist political system," commented the Telegraph . "And since she is a
Tory, the paper assumed she supported what, it conceded yesterday, was
'abhorrent to her.' "

            In Paris Friday,
Le Monde 's main
story was that the French are the drunkest people in Europe, with 2 million of
them dependent on alcohol. In London, the Daily Telegraph reported a
survey showing that children in Britain watched more television than anywhere
else in Europe, mainly because their parents were scared of letting them out of
doors.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 215: &quot;Here's the Pitch&quot;

            

               Fill in the blank. After creating the highest-rated movie ever made for
Showtime, Warren Weideman is about to make four sequels, but the project was a
tough sale. "Most producers eyes would glaze over as soon as I said the words,
'____________.' "
            

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 214)--"Nutkin":
            

            

               You give the brief lead; I give the headline from London's
Independent : "Letter Reveals Nutkin Was a Savage Squirrel"
            

            "My
God! Mad Cow disease has mutated! Run for the hills!"-- Tim "Why, Yes, I'd
Love Some Wasabi Polenta" Carvell
            

            
"Despite revelations, Pat Buchanan still stands by his campaign
manager."-- S. Bell
            

            "Ha!
That got your attention. Now, back to the tariff implications of EMU
membership."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            "Fergie
wins Royal Anagram contest for her positively bitchy entry: 'Queen wears rags
at rave; rants like evil slut.' "-- Brooke Saucier
            

            
"Squirrel Nutkin was a bitter, resentful recluse who secretly despised
Twinkleberry and goaded Old Mr. Brown into violence, according to a collection
of correspondence published by former lover Joyce Maynard."-- Chris
Thomas
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            The daily coverage of
Kosovo, Microsoft, and Rudolph Giuliani teaches this lesson: It's futile to
read the newspaper. Salient details are always concealed, key decisions are
always made in private, and the ink gets all over your hands. Review the
dailies from 1942 or 1929 or 1863, and you'll come away with a similar
impressively false sense of the great events of the day. So why persist in
newspaper reading? For one thing, it lets you participate in the ongoing
conversation that is a nation's culture. One doesn't wish to stand silently by
while others merrily exchange misinformation about Albania, the NYPD, and
computer viruses. (That's why millions of decent Americans watch Just Shoot
Me : It'll be the talk of the schoolyard tomorrow. Surely not because it is,
in any meaningful sense, good.) For another thing, the news provides a myth
system for a secular age, giving us figures of good and evil, around whom we
can construct tales of ... well, OK, figures of evil and more evil. But perhaps
the utility of newspapers--their ability to provide truth and understanding--is
beside the point. One buys them for other reasons: for powerful photographs,
now often in color, of underwear models; for a chance encounter with an
embarrassing detail about Ron Perelman; and perhaps most of all, for that
lovable Marmaduke cartoon. At 60 cents, it's a bargain!

            
               Squirrelicious
Answer
            

            "A letter in which Beatrix Potter reveals that one
of her best-loved fictional creations, Squirrel Nutkin, was based on a pet
squirrel with behavioural problems is expected to fetch up to £15,000 at
auction," reports Kathy Marks.

            Writing in 1903, six months before the publication
of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin , Potter notes: "I bought two squirrels,
but the one called Nutkin--who was much the handsomest--was so very savage I
was obliged to take him back to the shop. So I have only one now, called
Twinkleberry."

            Rosemary Franklin, the
letter's owner, learned its value when she took it to BBC Television's
Antiques Roadshow .

            
               Scrupulous
Extra
            

            Some corrections from
today's New York Times :

            

               It was Anna, not Alice.

               He is a Republican, not a Democrat.

               He was a captain, not a lieutenant.

               It is Silbury Hill, not Avebury.

               The group's name is Ninos Con Bombas, not Todos
los Manos.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Rocky and Bullwinkle and
Margaret Thatcher.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hungary for Invasion

            Quoting "a senior official
in the Clinton administration," the Guardian of London
claimed Monday in its main front-page story that the Pentagon is pushing for a
ground attack on Yugoslavia to overthrow President Slobodan Milosevic. "Key
figures in the Pentagon are proposing that the White House consider a
full-scale armored invasion of Serbia in which Nato would capture Belgrade,
topple Milosevic and haul the leaders of his regime before a war crimes
tribunal," wrote the paper's Washington correspondent. The invasion would be
launched from Hungary, he said. The report, like most others that have promoted
the ground war option, contained the now familiar dampener that NATO still
expects Milosevic to fall before a land invasion becomes necessary. More
dampeningly still, the Daily Telegraph of London led Monday with the news that British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, currently the most hawkish of the NATO leaders,
failed to sway his allies in favor of deploying ground troops.

            The press of each allied
nation had a different take Monday on both the war and the weekend's Washington
summit. The main German newspapers led Monday on NATO's new Strategic Concept,
which includes "out of area" military deployment if Western interests are
threatened. The conservative National Post of Canada welcomed this extension of NATO's
role but warned in an editorial that it should not be "a euphemism for global
humanitarian interventions more properly handled by the UN." Spain's
El Mundo and
El País both led on
NATO's pledges of military and economic help to Yugoslavia's neighbors in
return for their support against Milosevic. In Italy , La Stampa of Turin led on
Clinton playing "the Yeltsin card," while Corriere della Sera of
Milan splashed the news that NATO is ready to block even Russian tankers to
enforce its oil embargo against Yugoslavia. In Paris, Le Figaro led on the cost of
the war, warning that Europe is coming under pressure from the United States to
pay a larger share of it.

            An editorial in the Sunday Times said the
oil embargo and the use of Apache helicopters against Milosevic's tanks might
yet obviate the need for a ground war, but a report from Albania in the
Sunday Telegraph implied that the United States might never put the
helicopters into the air. Reporter Tim Butcher wrote that "the final elements
of the deployment are still not in place" and that there is no indication from
any NATO source of a willingness, yet, "to employ the Apache in Yugoslavia
where its low-flying tactics will expose it to ground fire." He said that "the
level of paranoia" about the Apaches, which are being protected by 3,000 U.S.
troops, suggests that they are intended to break Serb morale without actually
engaging in battle. "The Albanian press has had a field day, reporting that
they are armed with nuclear weapons," he added.

            (Last Friday, the independent Albanian daily
Gazeta Shqiptare claimed that the Serbs have started using chemical and
biological weapons against the Kosovo Liberation Army. It said that a shell
containing radioactive materials and neurotoxins had been fired Thursday near
the Kosovo-Albanian border and paralyzed a KLA soldier. Traces of "altropine,"
an antidote to chemical weapons, had been found by the KLA on the bodies of
dead Serb soldiers, it added.)

            In a commentary in the
Sunday Telegraph , military historian John Keegan accused media
commentators of becoming dangerously obsessed with what politicians such as
Clinton and Blair are saying about the progress of the war instead of focusing
on what is actually happening in the field. "Last week's euphoric discussion of
the significance of the deployment of 24 Apache helicopters shows how
unrealistic media assessments of the evolution of Nato's war effort is," he
wrote. "The United States lost 5,000 helicopters in Vietnam, out of a
helicopter force many times larger than that. It also did not win the Vietnam
war." In another example of Apache skepticism, the Sunday Telegraph 's
defense correspondent pointed out that the Pentagon had promised April 4 that
the Apaches would be getting "up close and personal to the Milosevic armor
units in Kosovo" within days, while three weeks later Task Force Hawk is "still
weeks away from performing any sort of combat mission."

            Writing in the paper's "Review" section, Oxford historian
Niall Ferguson said that the slaughters in Kosovo and at Columbine High School
and the nail bomb attack last week in London's black neighborhood of Brixton
are all linked to one person--Adolf Hitler. "From beyond his unknown grave,
Hitler has a hand in all these apparently unrelated events," he wrote.
Criticizing Clinton's and Blair's overuse of Third Reich analogies in their
anti-Milosevic rhetoric, Ferguson said it would not do for them to say that the
current airstrikes against Serbia are based on the lessons of the past.

            In the 1930s, it was not
Hitler's opponents but rather his appeasers who, like NATO leaders today,
exaggerated the effectiveness of air power. "Does anyone out there want to
argue that Hitler could have been defeated by a policy of air strikes to
'degrade the Nazi military machine' without the deployment of ground forces
other than in a 'permissive' environment?" he asked. "Invoking the memory of
the Second World War, Clinton and Blair have picked a fight with one little
Hitler [Milosevic]," Ferguson concluded. "They should not now be surprised if,
even in the obscurity of Littleton and Brixton, they have to fight some even
littler Hitlers, too."

            In a front-page story, the Sunday Telegraph revealed
that Blair has regularly consulted Margaret Thatcher on the Kosovo conflict. In
a number of telephone calls, all initiated by Blair and some lasting as long as
30 minutes, she urged him to "stiffen the spine" of the Americans, as she had
done when she chided President Bush for going "wobbly" during the Gulf War.

            In an editorial on the Littleton massacre, the Independent on
Sunday warned against dismissing it as a problem unique to gun-crazy
America. The problem, it said, is a wider one "to do with the increasing
solipsism of the world in which our teenagers live." Not only do they "retreat
into bedrooms which seem as self-contained as an astronaut's capsule, each with
its own TV, stereo-system and wired-up computer," but into an "increasingly
self-referential and self-validating" worldview. The things that once linked
teen-agers to the value systems of the rest of society have gone, as have "the
frameworks of reality which placed social restraints on the individual's
freedom to think, say, do, or buy whatever is desired."

            Last Friday's bombing of a Serbian TV station was much
criticized in Europe over the weekend. Le Monde 's editorial Sunday said the action might be
"terribly counterproductive" because it won't change the minds of Serbs who
believe Milosevic's propaganda, but it will appear pointlessly destructive of
human lives to those who don't. It could also have "devastating" effects on
Western opinion by giving the impression that NATO is only bombing buildings in
Belgrade because it is incapable of taking on the Serb military units in
Kosovo, where Milosevic appears "to have all the time he needs to empty
villages, mine frontiers, bury his tanks and armored vehicles, and install
artillery batteries opposite the KLA bases in Albania."

            In Hong Kong, the
South China Morning
Post led Monday with what is said was "the biggest protest in Beijing
since the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement began 10 years ago this month." The
story also made the front page of the New York Times and the Financial Times of London, which
said that more than 10,000 members of a mystic cult called Fa Lun Gong caused
acute embarrassment to security forces by virtually surrounding the compound
where China's leaders work. It said the cult "claims 100 million members and
sees human corruption in everything from homosexuality to rock and roll and
drugs."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             A Labor of Linux

            Linux may be impractical
for the masses, but its rebel cachet--"The Man doesn't have me under his
thumb!"--appeals to the motorcyclist in me. Walking out of a bookstore with a
Linux manual under your arm is like swaggering into a restaurant carrying a
motorcycle helmet: You can feel the waves of envy.

            Since my technical education ended with a
seventh-grade "Computer Literacy" class in which we played "Lemonade Stand" on
an Apple IIe for half an hour twice a week, my Linux goals for this article
were modest:

            

               Prove that a computer ignoramus can install the operating system on a
computer that was running Windows 98.

               Install a Linux-compatible Web browser and read 
                     Slate
                   in
it.

               Install a few other Linux applications.

            

            Purchasing Linux in a book, I must admit, was a second
resort. Originally, I intended to download the free version of the
much-heralded operating system, but then I found out that it would take five
hours and that the download doesn't come with instructions. Chickening out, I
visited the computer section of my local bookstore and grabbed a copy of the
friendly yellow Linux for Dummies . But the cashier all but refused to
sell it to me. "You can't get that book," he said, obviously speaking as one of
the Linux initiate. On his advice I paid $34.63 plus tax for Mastering
Linux , a phone-book-sized tome, which includes a copy of Red Hat Software's
5.1 version of Linux on CD.

            Cracking Mastering
Linux open, I was struck by its similarity to motorcycle manuals. "Remove
cylinder head," says the average motorcycle manual, without explaining how you
do that. "Create boot disk," commands Mastering Linux . What's a boot
disk? I found myself turning to a dictionary
of computer terminology on the Web to decipher every third acronym (BIOS?
ATAPI? SCSI?) and figured out that in this case you create an installation boot
disk by copying files from the CD to a floppy.

            
               Making Room for
Linux
            

            After creating the boot disk, I was supposed to
make a new partition on the hard disk of my computer, a Pentium 133 with 32
megs of memory. Partitioning a hard disk means corralling off some space, and
that can be done in Windows with a program called "fips," which I copied from
the Linux CD onto a floppy in Windows. I then restarted Windows in DOS mode
(one of the options when you shut down Windows 98) and ran "fips.exe" from the
floppy. Although I had never used DOS before, I followed the straightforward
directions and made room for Linux.

            The next step was to run
the Linux installation program from the boot disk. I shut the computer down and
put the boot disk in the drive and turned the computer back on. Success! The
boot disk asked me to check boxes for the language and the keyboard I'd be
using, and the source from which I'd be installing Linux. I told it to go to my
CD-ROM drive where the Linux CD resided--and promptly hit a brick wall. The
program refused to recognize my CD-ROM drive, a fairly standard one, and
rejected the 11 nonstandard options from the list. I studied Windows' device
manager for clues on my CD-ROM drive. Mastering Linux suggested that if
the installation program fails to detect your drive, provide very specific
directions for the "IO" and "IRQ." I entered these new settings and still
failed.

            Everyone who talks up Linux mentions how "elegant" it is.
As I tinkered, rebooted, and failed, and tinkered, rebooted, and failed over
and over again to get it to recognize my CD-ROM drive, all I could think was:
yeah, elegant like a Judas
Cradle. And this was only the installation program.

            So I telephoned the
Microsoft Helpdesk. Even though Linux is supposed to demolish Microsoft, the
Microsoft Helpdesk, which provides computer assistance to its employees, was
surprisingly helpful. As I described my trouble, the Help guy replied, "You're
setting up Linux?" Pause. "Um, you know we don't really support that?" Yeah, I
know, but can you help me anyway? "Well, I don't know much about Linux, but
talk to Clarence (not his real name). He'll help you." In 15 or so calls to the
Helpdesk, I encountered only one person who sounded annoyed rather than curious
(and even, dare I say, gleeful) at the fact I was firing up Linux.

            
               A Case of Mistaken
Identity
            

            The Linux that came with Mastering Linux was
never going to communicate with my CD-ROM drive, and I began to lose all
enthusiasm for the project. Just the sight of Mastering Linux induced
the stomach-churning sense of dread that my sixth-grade math textbook once gave
me: "I don't get this. Other people get this. Why don't I get this? I think
I'll go watch TV."

            Instead of watching TV,
I made a fresh start by purchasing a newer version of Linux. The version of
Linux that comes in Mastering Linux offers no technical assistance, but
Red Hat's version 5.2, which costs $39.99, promises one month of free e-mail
support. (CORRECTION: After this article was posted, I learned that
Macmillan Digital Publishing and not Red Hat Software provided the e-mail
support for this version of Linux. That new information is now reflected in the
remainder of the piece.)
            

            The Red Hat manual offered clearer directions, and the new
version automatically partitioned my hard drive. But it still snubbed my CD-ROM
drive. I e-mailed Macmillan with my problem and the company e-mailed back a
one-line response: "Set your BIOS to boot off of the CD." I wrote back: "How do
I do that?" Macmillan's e-mail answer was another one-liner, a URL. I clicked
the link, which led to a page of more links to lots of information on BIOS, but
a half-hour search yielded no information on booting from the CD-ROM drive. I
e-mailed back asking for a more specific URL, and they wrote back, "Look around
there. ... You also may want to check the site of whoever manufactured the
motherboard." Thanks a bunch.

            With Microsoft Helpdesk assistance I figured out
that my CD-ROM drive was probably connected to my sound card and not to the IDE
port, and thus was foiling Linux. I reluctantly returned to Mastering
Linux and found an alternative method for installing the operating system
for people who don't have CD-ROM drives: install from the hard disk. For this
you create a "supplementary disk" from the CD-ROM and use it after booting from
the installation disk. The supplementary disk loaded an unfamiliar blue
"Welcome to Red Hat Linux" page, but after 10 minutes of nothing happening, I
figured I had worn out my welcome. I turned off the computer and went home.

            My next move was to
hornswoggle a friend, a tech guy at the New York Times Web site, into
helping me. I informed him of my CD-ROM/sound card suspicions, and he pried
open my computer's metal box and started gabbing about 40-pin connections. My
troubles were over. Here was someone who knew the acronyms, someone who could
shine a light into the cave I was blindly fumbling in. So with the CD-ROM drive
securely connected to the correct IDE port in my motherboard, we booted up
again. Again, no dice. It was a new low in my Linux morale.

            
               Any IDE Port in a
Storm
            

            After some chin scratching my friend suggested we
look into my BIOS setting. There he discovered my IDE port was disabled. He
enabled it. We booted up and victory! The CD-ROM drive started purring, and
from there the installation was cake. The hard disk whirred away, occasionally
asking for information. I typed it in, it whirred some more, and within an hour
installation was complete.

            I then logged on as "root"--the master user--and
loaded X Windows, Linux's graphical user interface. It looked like a pale and
wan version of Microsoft Windows--with tiny, little crude buttons--even though
it predates Windows. But it worked. I loaded the Netscape browser and tried to
call up 
                  Slate
               , but 
                  Slate
                did not appear. Instead I
got two error messages, one telling me to adjust my SOCKS environment, and
another saying there was something wrong with my DNS server.

            So I was on the phone
with the Helpdesk again, learning about my SOCKS and my DNS server. My
officemate suggested that maybe all I needed to do was adjust my proxy settings
in Netscape and not my SOCKS. He was right, and victory was mine.

            
               I Suffer a Core
Dump!
            

            Next I wanted a word
processing program. I downloaded WordPerfect 8 for Linux from Corel's Web site.
I unzipped and "untarred" (de-archived) the program. I installed it. And it
didn't run. I bribed my tech guy friend to come and help me again. He went back
to the original download and started over, but he couldn't get it to run
either. So he fiddled around with my PATH and a few other things beyond my
comprehension, when a "core dump" occurred. This is some type of serious error,
although I'm still not sure exactly what it is. So we started over and
downloaded again. After reinstalling and receiving increasingly mournful error
messages ("Unable to go on," "Floating point exception") and another core dump,
we called it quits. Three and a half hours of help from a guy who makes his
living working with computers and no WordPerfect to show for it.

            Why would a person like me want to use Linux? The first
reason is price. Linux is free if you download it off the Web. With a manual
and a CD it's about $40. Compare that with Windows 98: $199 for a full setup,
$89 for an upgrade, or bundled for "free" as part of nearly every non-Macintosh
computer. I didn't investigate running Windows software under a Linux
Windows-emulator, mostly because I already have Windows on my system to run
Windows software. I also didn't attach my Linux machine to the company
network--because I couldn't find easy instructions in my books, and further
consultations with the Helpdesk would have been cheating. I'm fairly certain
that setting up a printer is easy, but I'm taking the word of Linux experts on
this.

            Either I'm not ready for Linux, or Linux isn't
ready for me. Or both. I feel guilty about having used not one but two manuals
to install Linux, and worse still that I couldn't make WordPerfect work. I feel
malignantly guilty about having paid cash money for a free operating system and
for enlisting both the Helpdesk and a friend in my endeavor. Yes, I finished
the marathon, but I did it by putting on roller skates and grabbing the
suspenders of those who knew what they were doing.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Free Movies in Belgrade

            Some European papers seem
to be trying to will Bill Clinton into sending ground troops to Kosovo. The
Daily
Telegraph of London, very keen on ground troops itself, led its front
page Monday with the headline "Clinton hints at Kosovo invasion," based on the
president having dispatched his leading advisers to Sunday morning TV shows "to
suggest a possible escalation of the conflict." El Mundo of Madrid
led Monday with news of the growing American popular support for a land
invasion and the increasing pressure on Clinton to embark on one by both
Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

            The war continued to
lead practically every European paper Monday with the exception of Rupert
Murdoch's mass-circulation British tabloid, the Sun , which splashed
"Wills In Hospital Drama" on its front page. The story told how Prince William,
Prince Charles' eldest son, had had a broken finger reset after a first attempt
to fix it failed. The Daily Telegraph also considered this story worthy
of its front page, although the Times gave greater prominence to a story about the queen's sister: "Prince Margaret recovers after
scalding feet in bath." The paper's medical correspondent explained that "any
serious burn to the feet, hands, face or genitalia is considered of great
medical importance and is usually treated in hospital."

            The Sunday Telegraph of London reported from Belgrade that NATO
has warned Yugoslav authorities about some of its planned airstrikes in order
to minimize civilian casualties. John Simpson, diplomatic editor of the BBC,
wrote for the paper from the Yugoslav capital that the clearest example of this
development had been in the town of Kragujevac, where workers at a car factory
had been ordered to end a sit-in protest against the airstrikes because the
factory was about to be targeted. "The only problem officials faced was in
persuading workers that their information was genuine," he reported. The same
paper reported that 80 British SAS commandos had been sent deep into Kosovo to
target the Serb Special Police and army units for NATO aircraft, find and mark
massacre sites, locate the hideouts of death squad leaders, and find secret
Serb weapons arsenals.

            Another Western
journalist in Belgrade, José Comas of Spain's El Pa í
                  s ,
contributed a special article to the Sunday-Monday edition of Le Monde of Paris describing the
mounting anger and defiance of the Serb population toward NATO: Many young
people, including sworn opponents of Slobodan Milosevic, were saying they would
fight to the death over Kosovo. The people of Belgrade had reconciled
themselves to every shortage except that of cigarettes, he reported, quoting a
young Serb woman as saying that this could be the first thing to destabilize
the Milosevic regime because "the Serbs can't live without tobacco." But Comas
said the war had also brought positive changes to life in Belgrade. "Crime has
completely disappeared," he wrote. "Before the bombs, taxi drivers tried to
cheat their customers. Today, they charge the correct fares." He added that
nearly all theaters had stopped charging for tickets, and that those that still
did charge something were giving the proceeds to the Red Cross.
            

            L e Monde also devoted a front-page article Sunday
to a mysterious journey by Yugoslav Defense Minister Pavle Bulatovic, who,
according to the Bulgarian newspaper Trud , turned up unexpectedly last
Monday at the Serb-Bulgarian border post of Kalotina and was kept waiting there
for several hours before being taken to the airport at Sofia, the Bulgarian
capital. According to Trud , he then took a flight to Athens, but Greek
authorities have since denied his presence there. It was believed he might have
gone arms-shopping in Moscow before reappearing on Serbian TV last Saturday in
Belgrade, Le Monde said.

            In an editorial, Le
Monde described Boris Yeltsin's saber rattling on television last Friday as
"both pathetic and disturbing." The Russians were a great people, it said, and
"to see them represented by a valetudinarian buffoon and exploited by a corrupt
regime after 70 years of totalitarianism fills one with deep sadness." The
paper said that Russia's past greatness and her continuing possession of 5,000
nuclear warheads explains why American, German, and French diplomats continue
to pay court to her, but added: "If it is wise not to marginalize the Russians,
it is also perhaps imprudent to take their bragging seriously, thus encouraging
them to be even more intransigent--and more demanding when they ask for
loans."

            In Madrid, on the other hand, El País said in an
editorial Sunday that the West would be wrong to ignore Yeltsin's warnings,
however "insolent and demagogic" they might be. "Russia is still the world's
second nuclear power, and we cannot further humiliate her with impunity in her
present state of prostration," El País said. "Neither Europe nor the
world should forget the lesson of Versailles: A humiliated Germany hatched the
seeds of Nazism." But "Don't Fear the Bear" was the headline of the
Sunday 
               Telegraph 's editorial.

            The lead story Monday of
the Sydney Morning
Herald had Australia accusing Serbia of forcing an Australian aid
worker, Steve Platt of CARE, into making a "preposterous" televised confession
of spying for NATO. The Australian government accused the Serb authorities of
putting words into Platt's mouth and demanded his immediate release.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 223: &quot;You Who?&quot;

            

               "I'm on top, I'm 35 years old, I don't want to get hurt anymore, and
I've got nothing left to prove." Who said this about what?
            

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 222)--"Zanimax":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    
                                       The
Iranian daily newspaper Zan (Farsi for "woman") and the American movie
company Miramax (English for "Big Mira"?) are in trouble for similar offenses.
What?
                                    
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Running afoul of parent company Disney."-- Michael Fein
            

            
"Requesting public information from the city of New York."-- Dave
Gaffen
            

            "I have
no idea what the offense is, but Khomeini is Farsi for 'Weinstein.'
"-- Adrianne Tolsch
            

            
"Forcing women into lesser roles."-- Chrysa Kieke-Sciglitano
            

            
"Trouble at Zan due to clerics. Trouble at Miramax due to guy who made
Clerks ."-- Cliff Schoenberg
            

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Foreign magazines sound so deliciously trivial, so
delightfully parochial. Zan . It's no Time or Spin or
Maxim . That's my delightfully parochial view, an easy one to maintain
because here in America we're No. 1--except for education, income, and infant
mortality. Do other nations escape this jingoism? Surely neither Belgium nor
Belize nor Brunei can assert this sort of claim. But of course they can; every
nation can, as long it avoids hard data and stakes its pride on cultural
superiority.

            Saturday night in New York, the big "Gypsy Caravan"
concert presented Romany musicians from six different nations. Musafir, an
Indian group, featured a drummer who played unimaginably complex rhythms on a
dholak. The Hungarians, Kalyi Jag, featured a drummer who played the
milk can. Can the Hungarians really believe it's all culturally relative?
Surely the milk can guy wakes up in the middle of the night and admits to
himself that the dholak guy is just better.

            Of course these kinds of
questions always confound me because I'm from a country where Disney owns the
evening news and the only compelling rhythm is the beat of my heart when the
camera zooms in on Peter Jennings. He articulates so clearly when he speaks of
cherry-tree-eating beavers!

            
               Infidel
Answer
            

            
               Zan and Miramax are in hot water for
sassing religion, a serious offense in this, the neo-Middle Ages.

            Miramax embarrassed prissy parent company Disney by
making Dogma , directed by Kevin Smith ( Clerks , Chasing
Amy ). Everyone involved apologized meekly. "Why make trouble?" asked
contrite Miramax boss, Harvey Weinstein. Smith says his movie was "from first
to last always intended as a love letter to both faith and God almighty." The
movie, featuring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alanis Morissette, Selma Hayek, and
Chris Rock, will be distributed by some other company so that really gullible
people will think Disney had nothing to do with it.

            Iranian authorities confiscated copies of Zan
after it printed a cartoon showing a thug being asked to kill a woman rather
than a man because under Islamic law a woman's "blood money" is half that of a
man's. (Blood money is compensation that must be paid to the family of a victim
who is murdered or killed in an accident.) Gholamhossein Rahbarpour, head of
Iran's Revolutionary Courts, told the Associated Press that Zan insulted
Islam because blood money is "one of the main judicial and religious principles
of Islam." The paper is banned from publishing until after the case goes to
court.

            Faraj Balafkan,
Zan 's editor, is expected to continue her fight for press freedom.
Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman, is expected to continue his fight to make as
much money as possible.

            
               Ultradull
Extra
            

            Last week, participants were invited to invent an
organization more soporific than "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities," a
group that ran a policy ad on the op-ed page of Wednesday's New York
Times . A few particularly tepid examples:

            

               "Indiana Dentists for Civic Responsibility."-- Neil Pollack
               

               "The Charles Osgood Appreciation Society."-- Tim Carvell
               

               "The Ya-Ya Sisterhood of Concerned Scientists."-- Chris Kelly
               

               "Citizens Concerned With Environmental Development. (An actual
organization.)"-- Brian Danenberg
               

               "Corporate Lawyers Against Unnecessary Integrity."-- Francis
Heaney
               

               "Mid-Level Executives at Mid-Cap Companies for Increased Median
Compensation."-- Michael Connelly
               

               "http://www.corporatecomedy.com. (An actual Web
site.)"-- Anonymous
               

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Eastern antipathy toward Salman Rushdie; Western
antipathy toward Gwyneth Paltrow.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Monica to Emigrate?

            The NATO war against
Yugoslavia ceased to lead the front pages of many European newspapers for the
first time Monday. The British tabloids were more interested in a mysterious
bomb--definitely not Irish, said the police hastily--that injured dozens of
shoppers in Brixton, South London, Saturday. The Italian press was more
interested in the political machinations that led to the cancellation of a
planned referendum on electoral reform. The French press was more interested in
a crisis within an alliance of French opposition parties, and the Spanish press
with Spain's own internal politics.

            Only the British and
German broadsheets stuck loyally with the nightmare in the Balkans, but the
angles were all different. The Guardian of London, apparently taking its cue from the
New York Times , led Monday with a claim that President Clinton had been
misled by intelligence reports that President Milosevic "would buckle at the
first show of high-tech military might." The paper said that "leaked documents"
included a CIA assessment from January claiming that Milosevic has no stomach
for a war he could not win. "After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and
assuage his backers, he will quickly sue for peace," the CIA report was quoted
as saying.

            The Daily Telegraph led with a startling eight-column headline
"Milosevic must go, says Blair." The removal of Milosevic has not so far been
an official NATO war aim, but the paper claimed that the British prime minister
and Clinton have "changed tack." The basis for this assertion appeared a little
weak. It was that Blair, speaking Sunday on American TV, said Milosevic was "a
significant problem" and that it is "extremely difficult to contemplate"
Kosovar Albanians living in future under his rule. The Times of London led,
rather surprisingly, with the ecological fallout from NATO's bombing of a
Serbian oil refinery. "Poison cloud engulfs Belgrade," said the paper's main
front-page headline over a warning of "an ecological disaster." The Daily
Telegraph ran the same story on an inside page, saying that Strauss'
"Beautiful Blue Danube" has gone black.

            Germany's Die Welt led Monday with a
prediction of a new wave of Serb brutality against Albanian Kosovars. Under
this was a photograph of Berlin's historic parliament building, the Reichstag,
which reopened Monday 66 years after the notorious fire that tightened Hitler's
grip on power. But the joyous reopening was marred by an acrimonious row over
its redesign by the British architect Norman Foster. Stern magazine
complained that "Foster's airport aesthetic with neon lights and metallic gray"
dominates the building's new interior, while Die Welt Sunday attacked
its "banality" and its "chilly, almost antiseptic" atmosphere.

            The Financial Times of London said Monday that Albania was trying
to get diplomatic advantage from its acceptance of more than 320,000 Kosovar
refugees by demanding quick entry into the European Union, overriding the usual
criteria for membership. The Daily Telegraph dwelt on the Pentagon's
anger with NATO headquarters in Brussels for providing false evidence to the
world's media on the bombing of the refugee convoy in Kosovo. In Monday's
National Post of Canada, historian Michael Bliss of the University of
Toronto wrote a searing condemnation of the Kosovo war, predicting among other
things that the Americans would never again agree to lead future wars by
committee. "The country that does most of the fighting and pays most of the
bills will from now on call the tune, looking to its own interests," he said.
"Whether the United States will have a taste for the long haul in the Balkans,
or will withdraw from Europe to protect its clearer national interests, hangs
in the balance."

            A Londoner named Slobodan Milosevic has protested
to the British Press Complaints Commission about media persecution, according
to the Daily Telegraph Saturday. In a formal complaint to the newspaper
industry's self-regulatory body, Milosevic (who has lived in Britain for 19
years and calls himself Dan) listed at least a dozen news organizations that
have been camping on his doorstep or otherwise pestering him, his family, and
his east London neighbors since the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began. He told
the PCC that he wishes to "state categorically" that he is not related to the
president of Yugoslavia, has no links with any of the former Yugoslav
republics, and does not want to discuss his views on the Balkans with anyone.
The PCC said it would investigate.

            The Times of
London announced on its front page Saturday that Monica Lewinsky is planning to
move to Britain. Quoting "her friend and confidant" Sir Ian McKellen, the
Oscar-nominated actor, the paper said she was going to live there because the
press and public are more sympathetic toward her in Britain. "She has
complained about constant harassment from the American press which
characterises her as an overweight sex-crazed seductress," the Times
explained.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Chilling Times

            There
are a lot of "chills" about this week, the greatest being the chill between
China and the United States over China's massive theft of American nuclear
secrets. The Cox report dominated newspapers across the Pacific Wednesday as
they assessed the deteriorating state of U.S.-Chinese relations. In Hong Kong,
the South China Morning
Post implied that Cox found nothing of importance that wasn't already
known. It has been known for years that Beijing has the ability to unleash
nuclear weapons and that it regards this as integral to its policy on Taiwan,
the paper said in an editorial. "Beijing hopes to regain sovereignty over the
island by peaceful means, but will not rule out invasion as a last resort," it
added. "Under certain circumstances, the US probably would help to defend
Taiwan rather than let its free-market democracy be taken by force. That is
where China's nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles come in. This does not
mean that China intends to start a nuclear war. But it clearly wants a more
credible missile force. After the alarms die down, Sino-American relations may
get back on track. However, the changing missile equation will make that more
complicated than ever."

            The
United States wasn't spared criticism in the affair. The Sydney Morning Herald in an
editorial Wednesday said it was "futile to blame the Chinese for a problem that
would not be as potentially serious if the Americans themselves had been more
careful." "Most of all, it would be disastrous--especially at this time of
undeniably chillier relations between China and the US--to lose sight of the
larger guarantee of security that comes from the present policy course, of
engagement with China, through trade, diplomacy and dialogue," it added. In
London, a Financial
Times editorial said the United States has made itself an easy target
for China's ambitious spies because of security failings that "are just the
latest symptoms of a deep muddle over the direction of US policy towards
China." "The US needs to be straight with China," the paper said. "That means
being consistently tough on security and positive on trade. ...Yet Washington
shows precious little sign of the political leadership needed for the
task."

            The
Independent
of London said the Cox report exposed "an almost inconceivably sloppy attitude"
to security by the United States and showed "how difficult the West now finds
it to deal with an economically and politically resurgent China." With China's
acquisition of the latest American technology, the assumption that the United
States will remain the world's only superpower "can no longer be so easily
held," it said. The Independent concluded that "with China, the US must
be fair but firm if the Pacific century is not to begin with a cold snap."

            
Another chill set in between India and Pakistan, where the newspaper
Dawn led Wednesday with
Pakistan's putting its forces on "full alert" and announcing its right to
retaliate after India launched airstrikes on disputed Kashmir. But the Indian
press was more interested in Sonia Gandhi's withdrawal of her resignation from
the leadership of the Congress Party, which she had made when some party
members attacked her for being Italian born. The Times 
               of India
said her reinstatement has given the party "a fresh lease of life" and has set
the stage "for what is going to prove a bitter, divisive and issueless
election."

            Yet
another chill was between Egypt and Libya, whose leader, Muammar Qaddafi,
failed to greet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the airport when he flew to
visit him in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte Monday. On Tuesday, the Pan-Arab
al-Quds al-Arabi described this as a "deliberate" snub linked to Egypt's
refusal to join other member states of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)
in defying the air embargo that was in force against Libya for seven years
until last month, when the country handed over two Lockerbie bombing suspects
for trial by a Scottish court in the Netherlands. Qaddafi sent two of his
lieutenants to receive Mubarak while he waited for the Egyptian president in
his tent "not very far from the airport," al-Quds al-Arabi noted. Taken
aback by Qaddafi's absence, Mubarak stated that he was on a
"brotherly"--meaning unofficial--visit to Libya, the paper said.

            
Another icy chill is between Buckingham Palace and the British tabloid the
Sun . There's another British royal wedding next month--of Prince Edward,
the Queen's youngest son, to Sophie Rhys-Jones, a PR girl who looks spookily
similar to both the late Princess Diana and Jill Dando, the country's most
popular TV presenter, who was recently murdered in London. Wednesday,
Rhys-Jones was portrayed topless in a "world exclusive picture" in Rupert
Murdoch's mass-circulation tabloid. It was a snap taken more than 10 years ago
when Rhys-Jones was 23 and working in PR for a London radio station. She was in
a car with two work mates on their way to an outside broadcast location in
Spain when the disc jockey beside her pulled up her bikini top and their
companion, Kara Noble, a radio presenter, took a picture of her with a breast
exposed.

            The Sun called it a
bit of "sexy fun," but the other tabloids reported that Rhys-Jones felt
"devastated and betrayed." The London Evening
Standard splashed the word "Cruelty" on its front page, which was how
Buckingham Palace has described it, and reported that the Sun has paid
Noble a sum "well in excess" of $160,000 for the photograph, which has been
syndicated throughout the world. The Evening Standard said in an
editorial that "having an image like this pushed in one's face makes it a bit
harder to keep the stardust sparkling in the prospect of a live televised
fairy-tale wedding at Windsor next month." Another widely reported royal story
Wednesday was that the Diana Memorial Fund, set up to support her favorite
charities, is spending about $48,000 a month fighting an American legal
action--the same sum it receives in donations from the public each month. The
legal case, due to be heard in Los Angeles next March, is against Franklin
Mint, the manufacturer of a popular Diana doll. The Fund claims that the doll
infringes its intellectual property rights. In an editorial Wednesday, the
Times of London called for the fund to be wound up, since "it is now
little more than a litigating business exploiting the Diana brand name."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Smell of a Deal

            The new flurry of efforts to broker a diplomatic
solution to the Kosovo crisis alarmed the British conservative newspapers
Monday. The Times , the Daily Telegraph , and the Financial Times all urged President Clinton to stand
firm and intensify the war. "The smell of a deal is in the air," said the
Telegraph , disapprovingly. In an editorial headlined "Dealing with the
devil," the paper reminded Clinton that NATO's peace conditions "run counter to
everything that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stands for." "Having
foolishly tied his hands behind his back by eschewing ground action, Mr.
Clinton may be looking for an easy way out," it warned. "It is up to his
allies, in particular Tony Blair, to stiffen his resolve that NATO's demands be
met in full. ... The current whirl of diplomatic activity calls for especial
vigilance on the West's part."

            An editorial in the Times said it was time
for the "listening President" to speak with a firmer voice. "The strong US
public support for NATO's intervention could weaken in the face of
indecisiveness," it said. "If Mr. Clinton is to avoid a groundswell of get out,
he must show that he is prepared to go in with whatever force it takes, and
stay in until the only guns in Kosovo belong to NATO and all the Kosovans, like
the three [American] servicemen, can go home again." The Financial Times
said that the only way out for Milosevic was to accept NATO's conditions in
full. "He must do so clearly, addressing NATO leaders directly," it said.
"Nothing less will do."

            The liberal British newspapers, the Guardian and the
Independent , carried no war editorials Monday, but the
Guardian ran one in praise of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose triumph in
getting the three servicemen released has been greeted with cynicism by the
U.S. political establishment. Saying it was time for such cynicism to stop, the
paper claimed, that for all his "media grandstanding" and his repeated failure
to see major projects through, "he remains an inspiration for millions of
Americans, not least in motivating them to vote." "Moreover, he continues to
advocate the integrationist ideal of his mentor Martin Luther King," it said.
The picture of him linking arms with the white and Hispanic soldiers "will
exert great power in the United States, and Jesse Jackson should be applauded
for making it happen," it added.

            The Independent ran a bitter commentary by
its veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk comparing the attention paid to the
release of the three soldiers in Belgrade to that of the deaths of 60 civilians
in a NATO bomb attack that destroyed a bus last Saturday. Noting that NATO's
only comment on the latter event was the passive phrase, "it is regretted,"
Fisk said NATO wants us to believe that it has reserved its sorrow for the
Albanian refugees expelled from Kosovo. But personally he didn't believe "that
NATO feels this sense of outrage as strongly as it claims." He compared NATO's
attitude to that of a person who crosses a city street to help an innocent
civilian who is being attacked. "What NATO has done--faced with the atrocities
of Kosovo--has been to stay on the other side of the road, to make a note of
the criminal's address, and to throw stones through the window of his home
later that night," he wrote. "Not a single NATO life has been lost in five
weeks of war in the Balkans--because we do not regard the catastrophe of the
Kosovo Albanians as worth a single NATO life. It's as simple as that."

            In an interview with the French Sunday newspaper
Le Journal du Dimanche , Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov said
Moscow would be willing to send troops under U.N. command to enforce a peace
accord in Kosovo. Once again, he called the NATO bombing campaign "a tragic
mistake" and said: "There are no good chess players among the leaders of NATO.
... Before moving a pawn, you have to assess all the possible strategies of
your adversary." In an editorial Monday, Le Figaro of Paris said that, by contrast, Milosevic
has shown great talent as a chess player. By moving the war to the terrain of
American public opinion with his release of the three soldiers, he was
attempting a final maneuver. "Having been put in check, the king can always
castle," the paper explained. "He knows he has lost the game, but he still
isn't naked." By freeing the hostages, Milosevic has opened a crack in the door
on the eve of the meeting between Clinton and Russian mediator Viktor
Chernomyrdin. "He knows he is in check, but he wants to avoid check-mate,"
Le Figaro said. Libération , in its main front-page headline, called the
release of the soldiers "a diplomatic ambush by Milosevic."

            In La Repubblica of Rome Monday, one of its correspondents in
Belgrade reported that Politika , the most widely read newspaper of the
Yugoslav capital, has maintained its circulation during the war despite being
despised as a Milosevic mouthpiece. This was entirely due to its daily five
pages of death announcements, the correspondent, Biljana Sbrljanovic, wrote,
although the number of these announcements has not grown since the NATO bombing
started. For the Serbs, these illustrated death notices were "more important
than death itself, because if Politika doesn't publish your photograph,
it is as if you haven't died." The regime is now censoring the death
announcements in order to conceal the number and the identities of the victims
of NATO's bombs, she wrote; but Sunday one notice slipped past the censors: a
young woman employee of the bombed Belgrade TV station whose body had only just
been found. The announcement said, enigmatically, that she had been "a victim
of the assassins who came from the sky and of those who came from the
ground."

            In Japan Monday, the Asahi Evening News
marked Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's visit to the United States by publishing a
Gallup Poll, commissioned by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, showing that a
record 61 percent of Americans consider Japan to be a trustworthy partner. The
poll, conducted annually since 1960, also found that, for the first time since
the question was first asked in 1997, more than half of Americans said the
alliance is very important to U.S. national security. However, a Harris Poll
conducted in March for Asahi Shimbun showed that 49 percent of Americans
thought U.S. forces were in Japan in order to prevent the country from becoming
a military threat, the paper said.

            In Israel, Ha'aretz reported
prominently Monday that students studying criminology at Bar-Ilan University
were being required to read a textbook describing homosexuals as "criminals."
The book, The Making of a Criminal by Bar-Ilan Professor Moshe Adar,
asserted: "An honest person tends to see others as being honest as well; the
evil person sees evilness in others. The homosexual tends to blame his victim
for seducing him. ... The cheating merchant will worry that all the other
merchants are cheats and liars. The thief will accuse everyone of thievery."
The book was listed as required reading for two courses, Criminology and
Introduction to Psychopathology, the paper said. Third-year social science
students at Bar-Ilan said they would be tested on it in about two weeks.
University spokesman David Weinberg said Adar was "considered an expert in his
field, and has an international reputation," and that the university was
standing by him.

            Several British papers
carried a report Monday that Britain's largest supermarket chain has
asked fruit growers to supply it with smaller melons after research indicated
that housewives subconsciously compared them to the size of their breasts.
According to the Daily Telegraph , the Tesco chain has been told by a
psychologist "that the current preference for smaller busts--epitomized by the
model Kate Moss and the actress Gwyneth Paltrow--was the reason why the
traditional big, fleshy melons were remaining unsold."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            London Calling

            On Broadway, where
distinguished American writers complain that it's nearly impossible to get
their plays produced, the British dramatist David Hare has opened no fewer than
four in the past 12 months. Last spring, Hare's play about Oscar Wilde, The
Judas Kiss , came from London. It was followed this winter by his adaptation
The Blue Room , which made the cover of Newsweek on the backside,
as it were, of Nicole Kidman. At the moment, Hare occupies two stages in New
York. Amy's View , starring Judi Dench, is playing to full houses at the
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, while Hare himself is performing a monologue about
Israel, Via Dolorosa , at the Booth Theatre.

            It shouldn't come as any
surprise that American audiences have a taste for British drama. Stage envy is
a well-trod Anglophilic path, which has in the last few years widened into a
mostly one-way superhighway stretching from London's West End to the New York
Theater District. Current productions that have breezed down it include The
Weir , by the young Irish playwright Conor McPherson, and Closer , by
Patrick Marber. Lately, we Americans even seem more interested in our own
playwrights when we see them reflected back at us by the Brits. Revivals of
Tennessee Williams' early work Not About Nightingales and Eugene
O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh , starring Kevin Spacey, are both English
imports. In a recent discussion in the Sunday "Arts & Leisure" section,
three New York Times drama critics discussed this phenomenon. Basically,
they all concluded that British is better.

            But Hare, who now dominates Broadway in a way Tom Stoppard
never has, may illustrate a somewhat different phenomenon. There is, of course,
an element of Anglomania in his success here. But I think it may also speak to
something more interesting. Hare feeds an appetite for a theater engaged with
society, which our domestic dramatic economy isn't satisfying at the moment. He
is in almost every way an old-fashioned playwright, who uses dramatic form to
amplify questions of politics, religion, society, and relations between the
sexes. And while I think that even Hare's best work falls short of greatness,
the combination of his seriousness and his success bode well for theater as a
form on both sides of the Atlantic.

            Hare's early work has the
reputation for being left-wing agitprop. In fact, while less skillful than his
later efforts, his early plays are not mere polemics. Hare's first produced
play, Slag (1970), is a kind of dystopian fantasy about radical
feminism, in which the attempt to run a girls' school dissolves into absurd
infighting. It is true that the author's Labor Party socialism originally took
the not-very-novel form of negative portrayals of establishment institutions
and the residue of British imperialism. But what soon began to distinguish him
from a lot of his like-minded contemporaries were a low-key wit and an ability
to write memorable roles for women. Hare's first play to open at the National
Theatre in London in 1978 (and currently being revived there) was
Plenty , later made into a film with Meryl Streep. Streep plays the role
of Susan Traherne, a woman who works undercover in France during World War II
and subsequently finds herself unable to cope with postwar British life.
Despite her craziness, we see that she has a point.

            His radicalism mellowed with time and success. Where once
he proposed a debate between between socialism and capitalism, between the
Third World and the First as in Map of the World (1983), Hare's later
plays posit a subtler conflict over personal and political values. The first
time he really demonstrated this maturity was in The Secret Rapture
(1988), a work Hare himself has pointed to as an important departure. It's
about two sisters who have to deal with the messy legacy of their departed
father. One is generous and impractical. The other is ruthless and
self-interested in a Thatcherite vein but nonetheless sympathetic in the end.
Frank Rich, then the lead drama critic for the New York Times , who liked
the play when it debuted in London, wrote a harsh review of the New York
production and especially of the performance by the author's then-girlfriend
Blair Brown. An embittered Hare pledged not to bring another play to New York
until Rich stopped reviewing.

            In following years, Hare
became more interested in the soul of Britain under Thatcherism. In the early
1990s, he wrote a trilogy of "State of the Nation" plays: Racing Demon ,
about the Church of England, Murmuring Judges , about the legal system,
and The Absence of War , about the Labor Party. All opened to acclaim at
the National Theatre and provoked national debate in Britain. Racing
Demon, a play about Anglican priests, even came to New York once Rich moved
on. Why, you have to ask, is it so seldom that important-seeming American plays
address societal issues such as these? You might start with the fact that the
United States, unlike Britain, has no centralized national theater, either
literally or figuratively. What occurs on the New York stage doesn't resonate
around the country, or even down the Amtrak corridor to Washington. And you
might add that the political interests of American playwrights tend to revolve
more around issues of identity and less around national institutions.

            We also have a different kind of theatrical tradition,
which is less talky and intellectualized than the British one. The playwright
whom Hare harks back to most directly is George Bernard Shaw. Though his wit is
not of Shavian sharpness, his plays are in another sense more sophisticated.
Where Shaw's characters tend to represent views pitted against each other,
Hare's cannot resist becoming genuine characters--contradictory, quirky, and
imperfect both as heroes and villains. The play where one sees this most
clearly is Skylight (1995), for my money his most successful work. It's
the classic Hare setup, a collision between two people who see life differently
but are nonetheless connected: a successful Thatcher-era businessman and his
former mistress, a schoolteacher in London's East End. You know where Hare
comes down in the debate between their values. But the play does not exist for
one character's worldview to vanquish the other's. Both are by turns
persuasive, flawed, and poignant.

            The recent offerings on
Broadway show not only Hare's gift for the exposition of issues but also his
limitations. The Blue Room , which I saw in its London production last
fall, was probably the weakest of the bunch. Arthur Schnitzler's original play,
La Ronde , was a scandalous-for-its-time depiction of empty sexual
promiscuity--so scandalous it wasn't meant to be performed. But with the shock
value lost, the play needed something more than Hare's topical amendments
added. His adaptation didn't provide much food for thought, which is unusual
for him. A bit of hackwork, it suggested that he might be spreading himself too
thin.

            V ia Dolorosa , which I also saw in London, is more
stimulating (intellectually), but only a bit. Based on a visit to Israel, it's
journalism by other means of the sort that Anna Deveare Smith has done so
brilliantly. But Hare is no Smith. His performance adds little to his script,
and his script adds little to the subject, arriving mostly at familiar
platitudes about Israel. Nonetheless, one has to admire his guts for trying to
entertain an audience single-handedly with a talk about Middle East politics,
no less. And the work is somewhat interesting despite its inherent limitations.
We see how Hare can turn even a monologue into a kind of dialogue of
perspectives, as he pits the passionate commitment of West Bank settlers
against the humanism of the Israeli culturati. "Are we where we live or what we
think?" he asks at the end of the play. "What matters? Stones or Ideas?"

            
               Amy's View , the best of the recent works
to show up here, is a more familiar and successful exercise. It is a play with
clear imperfections, such as an excessively shrill third act. But one forgives
such flaws because of the way Hare draws his audience into the play's issues.
Here the debate he sets up is a three-way among mother, daughter, and the
daughter's boyfriend. Esme, played by Judi Dench, is an actress who lives for
the theater. Her daughter, one of Hare's ethereal women a little too good for
this world, lives for love. The daughter's boyfriend, Dominic, is a cynic who
lives only for himself.

            Within this conflict of values is a clash about
art. Dominic, a director of exploitative films and television, contends that
the theater is a dead form. Esme stands in for the continued vitality of the
stage. The final act finds her having lost everything--her home, her financial
independence, and her daughter--but performing brilliantly in a new play that
she describes as "sincere." We see her failings redeemed through commitment to
her craft. The same might justly be said of the man who wrote the play.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Rape and Murder

            Russia's re-emergence as a
big player in the Kosovo crisis was a major story across Europe Wednesday, with
papers giving contrasting interpretations of this week's talks in Moscow
between U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and the Russian special
envoy to Yugoslavia, Victor Chernomyrdin. In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
ran a front-page headline reading "Rapprochement between Washington and Moscow"
and stressed their commitment to future cooperation. The Italian papers, by
contrast, generally pronounced the negotiations a failure. La Repubblica of Rome said
that peace is now more remote, La Stampa of Turin that the meeting produced no result, and
Corriere della
Sera of Milan that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is resisting
Russia's efforts at a diplomatic solution. There was much uncertainty, too,
about the significance of Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic's
statement that Milosevic would accept a U.N. peacekeeping force. "What does
Draskovic stand for? Who stands behind Draskovic?" asked the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung in an editorial that didn't provide answers.

            Rapprochement or not,
the Financial Times of
London reported from Moscow that vehement opposition to NATO's actions in
Yugoslavia is "the most consensual issue in Russian politics today." Most
European papers gave prominence to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's saying that the
world has entered a new era of lawlessness and that NATO's disregard for the
United Nations was comparable to Hitler's contempt for the League of Nations.
Corriere della Sera carried an interview with Russian Prime Minister
Yevgeny Primakov, who said that Milosevic will never surrender. "NATO would
have to send in 200,000 ground troops, and who's to say that even they would be
sufficient. There would follow a long war, the first real one in Europe since
World War II, that would cause many, many dead and even more refugees."
Answering the accusation that Russia hasn't done enough to help the Kosovars,
Primakov said it could have done more if it hadn't been excluded from the
Rambouillet conference.

            Primakov said that the Balkan conflict has undermined his
efforts to democratize Russian institutions, combat corruption, guarantee free
expression, and bring Russia closer to Europe, because it has reopened Russian
religious, political, and ethnic divisions and, above all, revived Russian
hatred of the West. "If Russia were to become an Asiatic power again, world
equilibrium would be at risk," he said. Primakov added that he had tried in
vain to understand the logic of NATO's actions, but they had served only to
consolidate the Milosevic regime and eliminate all political opposition in
Serbia. If NATO's attacks were initially directed at military targets, "they
are now ruining the economy of rather a poor country. When Western troops cross
the Yugoslav border, they will find nothing but graves and hatred. With what
advantages? To what purpose?"

            In Britain, the Kosovo
conflict has been squeezed off the front pages of many papers this week by
extensive coverage of the murder Monday of Jill Dando, a popular TV presenter,
who was shot in the head with a pistol on her front doorstep in west London.
But Wednesday, the tabloid Daily Mail managed to link even this event to
the war with front-page speculation that her murderer might be a Serbian gunman
seeking revenge for NATO's bombing of a Belgrade TV station last week.

            Tuesday's Guardian of London carried a rare, perhaps unique, interview
with a volunteer Serbian "cleanser," a 50-year-old Belgrade truck driver named
Milan Petrovic, who recently spent 10 days in Kosovo helping to drive thousands
of ethnic Albanians from their homes. Petrovic said that the cleansers are
under orders not to kill, beat, or mutilate their victims and that most obeyed.
"One in a hundred, I'd say, did raping or killing or that kind of thing--not
more," he said. While claiming that the cleansers generally "respected human
rights," Petrovic didn't attempt to conceal his racial prejudice. "They're
cowards, those Albanians, they run like rabbits," he said. The rich
Albanians--"all criminals you know, with satellite TVs and big houses"--are
tougher to move than the others, "but if you push hard enough, they all go in
the end."

            Petrovic claimed to feel
sorry for the children he expelled from their homes, but said that, as
Albanians, they had no right to be in Kosovo. "I had to follow my orders, and
anyway, I knew there would always be someone to meet those women and children,"
he said. As for the KLA "terrorists," he would have liked to kill them and
their families on the spot, but his orders had been to hand them over to the
army. "I don't know what they did to them--they're probably holding them as
prisoners of war." Petrovic said he had signed up as a cleanser when the war
started to show his disgust for NATO. He was one of about 2,000 volunteers who
assembled in the southern Serbian city of Nis before leaving there to start
cleansing operations in the Kosovo village of Silovo. He said he saw little of
NATO's war, "We heard the planes way up above us, but I think they were
concentrating on Pristina so they didn't give us any trouble."

            In London Wednesday, the tabloid Daily Express
reported from Kukes in Albania that 100 Kosovar women gave the same account to
UNICEF counselors of how they had been repeatedly stripped, sprayed with
perfume, and then raped by Serb soldiers who held them hostage in three houses
for several days. The subject of rape also cropped up in an interview Wednesday
by Corriere della Sera with the wife of the suspected war criminal and
former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. Ljiljiana Karadzic, who like
her husband is a psychiatrist, said that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serb soldiers
had been accused of raping 150,000 women. "If we compare this figure with the
number of our soldiers, it means that every one of them must have raped three
women," she said. "So when did they find the time to fight?" Referring to one
claim by a Bosnian woman that her 75-year-old cousin had been forced to rape
her at rifle point, Karadzic commented: "I am also a sexologist. To think that
I could have cured my patients of impotence by pointing a pistol at their
temples!"

            The British satirical
magazine Private Eye had an exceptionally tasteless cover this week of
President Clinton photographed in intimate conversation with British Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook under the headline "Clinton--Ground War Latest." Clinton
is saying, "I'm not going in--it's too risky." "I expect you say that to all
the girls," replies Cook.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Dowism
            

            In "," Bruce Gottlieb, like Clive Crook before him,
thinks he has found a flaw in our argument that stocks are undervalued. He has
not. In a 
                  Slate
                "" last year, Crook claimed that we were
contending that the value of a company is the present value of its stream of
future earnings and that such a contention was false. Gottlieb's piece, in an
easy-to-follow way, demonstrates Crook's argument that, if you value a firm by
discounting its earnings, and all earnings are not paid out in dividends, then
you are double-counting.

            But the problem with what Crook and Gottlieb are
saying is that we never based our theory on earnings but instead, as we
wrote in our Wall Street Journal piece on March 17, 1999, on the "money
a stock will put in your pockets through the profits generated by the company
that issued it." Neither in this year's piece nor in our March 30, 1998,
Journal piece did we claim that all those profits--or
earnings--would go into your pockets. What we said explicitly was that the
proper figure to use to measure the cash generated by a company was somewhere
between the lower bound of the dividend that a firm pays and the upper bound of
its official after-tax earnings. Indeed, in our first piece we explicitly
highlighted the fact that earnings are a problematic measure of cash flow
because of the potential that a firm might grow simply through retentions.

            But Crook and Gottlieb are intelligent,
well-intentioned journalists. What led them astray? They both cite an argument
against our first piece raised by Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School. He
claimed that it is a "mistake" to assume that dividends per share will post
real growth, as we did in our calculations, because dividends, in theory,
should only just keep up with inflation.

            Crook and Gottlieb appear to have been convinced
that real earnings growth only reflects retentions and that real dividend
growth must be zero. While Siegel's point fits the simplest introductory
economic models, it is contradicted by the facts: Historical data on dividends
reveal significant real growth of dividends per share. For example, in the
latest edition of Siegel's excellent book Stocks for the Long Run , Table
5-1 on Page 79 shows that the growth of real dividends per share has been 2.1
percent on average since 1946 and positive since the 19 th century.
(In our calculations, we assume 2.1 percent real growth in dividends.)

            What Siegel, Crook, and Gottlieb say can't
happen--dividends growing faster than inflation--has been going on for almost
130 years. Where has all this growth come from? We treat that question at
length in our book, relating the observation to theories at the frontier of the
branch of economics known as "Industrial Organization," but here is a hint: The
simplest textbook model of the perfectly competitive firm doesn't do a great
job of describing the companies that have driven the market higher and
higher.

            Discounting dividends is uncontroversial, and the
fact that they grow is clear. It is interesting that Gottlieb says that, on the
strength of dividends alone, the Dow should be about 14,000 using our theory.
That is a good start. Even sticking with dividends alone, the number is pushed
considerably higher than that if one accounts for repurchases and the tax
advantage associated with them. So much for the crazy stock market bubble. Dow
14,000 is clearly a lower-bound estimate. Today, many enormous firms don't pay
dividends at all. These firms have value because, ultimately, they will deliver
cash to their shareholders.

            Crook and Gottlieb think that all valuation
techniques are out the window for firms that don't pay dividends, but they are
misinformed. There is a very large peer-reviewed academic literature on this
topic. The basic idea is simple: You can base a value measure on earnings
instead of dividends if you can identify those things that you are
double-counting and make sure that you only count them once. For example,
earnings themselves are a reasonable measure of the dividend that you use to
construct the value of the firm if all earnings are paid out each year. Such an
example is no pipe dream. Real Estate Investment Trusts, for example, pay out
95 percent of their earnings, and many of them post earnings growth well above
inflation year after year. In 1999 alone, REITs, on average, are expected to
increase their earnings by 10 percent, with inflation at about 2 percent. When
firms retain lots of earnings it gets more complicated, with the growth of
earnings increasing as more and more cash is retained in the firm. For those
who can't wait until the fall release date of our book Dow 36,000 and
want to start thinking through these issues, check out the Spring 1995 issue of
the journal Contemporary Accounting Research , which provides a number of
valuable review articles of the some of the relevant academic work.

            It is impossible to
address every conceivable objection in a short article in the Wall Street
Journal or 
                  Slate
               , which is one reason we are writing our
book. We look forward to picking up this debate in the fall when we lay all our
facts and arguments on the table. Until that time, we have a little homework
assignment for Gottlieb and anyone else at 
                  Slate
                who would like
to try. Microsoft's earnings have grown at an average rate of about 25 percent
annually over the past 10 years. Microsoft pays no dividends. Were all
Microsoft's earnings consumed in running in place, as Gottlieb's model
suggests? Should Microsoft be worth nothing since it doesn't pay an actual
dividend today? Was the price increase over that period justified? What would a
fair price for Microsoft be if the risk premium were zero? We look forward to
their answers.

            

               --James K. Glassman and Kevin Hassett Washington

            
               
                  Bruce Gottlieb
replies:
                
               Glassman and Hassett write in to say I have
misrepresented their argument. They do not, they say, value a stock by looking
at future earnings. They even agree that this would be a big mistake. They
claim to look instead at future cash flows to stockholders. The two authors
might want to reread their original WSJ article, which says: "Assume
that after-tax earnings are a reasonable estimate of the cash flow from a
stock." In other words, there is no difference between my description of their
argument and their own.
            

            
               Meanwhile, they have misrepresented my
argument. My article does not say or imply that "real earnings growth only
reflects retentions and that dividend growth must be zero" or that "all
valuation techniques are out the window for firms that don't pay dividends." It
simply asserts that, in calculating a firm's potential value, you can't assume
that earnings are simultaneously retained and paid out--and that the
Glassman-Hassett argument depends on precisely these conflicting assumptions.
The argument is fallacious whether all the earnings are paid out, all are
retained, or anything in between.
            

            
               Glassman and Hassett now claim that they will
sort out the components of retained earnings to avoid double-counting in their
forthcoming book. I look forward to it. But I boldly predict it won't work
unless they have an entirely new thesis, since double-counting of corporate
earnings is the core of their current one. The thesis is simply wrong and
cannot be refined into sense. What's more, double-counting of all corporate
earnings is how they get the figure in their title-- Dow 36,000 --so
that will have to go if they even start down Refinement Road.
            

            
               It's obvious that
our discussion must rest until this ambitious book is published. For right now,
it is worth noting that this letter is the first place where Glassman and
Hassett have explicitly admitted that equating earnings and dividends is a
mathematical sin. They refer to it as "double-counting," which indeed it
is.
            

            
               Speaking With the
"Enemy"
            

            I've never read a more paranoid piece of writing
then James J. Cramer's "." At the risk of being lumped into Cramer's "legion of
enemies," I thought it worth highlighting some of the absurdities in the
piece.

            Cramer writes that "[TokyoMex's] online following
... is much bigger than mine. And my record of giving good financial guidance,
publicly and privately, is better than his. So why the fuss over me while other
portfolio managers write every day about their stock picks and get no heat?"
TokyoMex's activities deserve notice, but it's ridiculous to say that his
following (via his own small Web site and Silicon Investor chat rooms) is
bigger than Cramer's (whose thoughts have been distributed through not only
TheStreet.com, but also ABCNEWS.com, Good Morning America , GQ ,
Yahoo! Squawk Box , SmartMoney , Time , and Politically
Incorrect , among other media properties with vast audiences). TokyoMex may
be unsavory, but Cramer just sets him up as a straw man to burn him. Just
because Cramer is more ethical than an infamous pump-and-dumpster doesn't mean
that his unusual position as both professional money manager and professional
financial journalist--and yes, it is unusual--isn't deserving of scrutiny and
criticism. The dual role is Cramer's gimmick, and more power to him for having
the energy to exploit the possibilities inherent in straddling two worlds. I
find his columns entertaining more often than not. But his situation isn't
common, so the argument of "everyone does it, why pick on me?" isn't
relevant.

            Then Cramer says, "I don't write for the money, and
I don't write for the notoriety, so giving them up wouldn't hurt." If it's
true, then give up your $250,000 salary and your stock options in
TheStreet.com, stop writing about your personal life in your musings, and
remove the iconic projection of yourself from your Web site. You don't have to
stop providing the insights that only you can give to the ignorant investing
masses in order to forgo the money and fame that come along with your position.
And, frankly, you shouldn't have to. But do us all the favor of not acting like
you're just being noble.

            Cramer continues, "[T]here is no difference between
a portfolio manager who recommends stocks in an interview to a reporter ... and
a portfolio manager who recommends stocks in a column of his own." Say what?
Extending that logic, there's no difference between a government that promotes
its policies to an independent press and a government that runs its own
newspapers. The second of the two scenarios Cramer describes conflates the
interested role of the portfolio manager with the presumably disinterested role
of the journalist. Don't tell me there aren't ethical challenges in that beyond
those posed by the first scenario.

            Finally, Cramer writes, "The journalists who would
stop me are complicit with that ignorance and are willing tools of those that
would like the reader to have to rely on those who charge high commissions or
high fees to unknowing, worried consumers of finance." This is a low blow. The
general tone of Cramer's piece is dismissive of financial journalists (or at
least those who would criticize him) as know-nothings or, worse, conspirers
with the dark forces of the finance industry. But I've read Alan Abelson (the
only "enemy" Cramer refers to by name) off-and-on since I first got interested
in investing, and whatever else he is, he isn't a "tool" of the industry. Nor
are the vast majority of financial journalists. Sure, there are some hacks, but
most are intelligent folks who have the interests of their readers at the top
of their agenda. Cramer notes that if investors don't find his writing worthy,
he will "disappear from the writing firmament." Well, isn't that what would
happen to the "established" business press that Cramer so disdains, if his
accusations were even partly true?

            I really do like
TheStreet.com and 
                  Slate
               , and I have my own conflicts (I work for
Morningstar, whose site at www.morningstar.net is a competitor to
TheStreet.com, a supplier to MoneyCentral, etc.). But Cramer's screed didn't
reflect well on your publication or his. 
                  Slate
                has been
(unwittingly?) caught in the cross-fire that has been going on for a few years
between Alan Abelson and James Cramer. It would have been better if your
editors had dispatched the enviably good James Surowiecki to cover the feud, or
if you had invited the two to duke it out in a "Dialogue." Luckily, I don't
have to cancel my subscription to your zine in a fit of pique!

            
-- Cebra Graves New York City

            
               Good and Necessary
Evil
            

            Terry Jeffrey
perpetuates an old shibboleth when he mentions Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and
rare" comment regarding abortion (see ). Jeffrey asks how we could want any
good thing to be rare. Presumably American involvement in World War II was a
good thing--yet I doubt anyone would want it to happen again. There are other,
less dramatic, examples; surely David Kaczynski's decision to alert the FBI to
his brother's suspicious activities was the right choice. Nonetheless, few of
us would want to face that decision ourselves--even if we are confident that we
would have chosen similarly. Not all moral choices are painless. One can want a
particular practice to be rare just because it is painful, even if it is
morally required (and not just permissible). So there is no contradiction in
wanting abortions to be safe, legal, and rare.

            
-- Ananda Gupta Bethesda, Md.

            

               
                  Terry Jeffrey responds:
                
               This rejoinder employs
faulty logic. U.S. involvement in World War II was a good thing and, hopefully,
not rare. I would hope that the United States would defend itself every time a
fascist power bombs Pearl Harbor. Likewise, I would hope that David Kaczynski's
good thing in informing the FBI of evidence bearing on his brother's guilt was
also not a rare thing. I would hope that every time Kaczynski, or anybody else
for that matter, discovers that a brother of his is an environmentalist
extremist bent on murdering people, that he will inform the FBI of this
evidence. If abortion, like defending oneself against fascists and
environmentalist murderers, is a good thing, than it should not be rare. Good
behavior should never be rare. It should be routine.
            

            
               
                  Time Is
Money
            

            I have great respect and admiration for Marshall
Loeb (that's not a throwaway line; I really do), but his explanation that he
was getting paid by Time , not the advertisers, is kind of funny (see
"Culturebox: "). Imagine how 
                  Slate
                and others would slice me up
if you found out I was running a magazine about journalism--one that some call
a "watchdog"--and was getting paid writing assignments from one of the
organizations I was supposed to be watching and, of course, not disclosing it
on the pages of the magazine whenever the magazine writes about that
organization. You'd probably even get a great quote from Marshall saying how
troubled he is by it. Might they cancel future assignments if a piece in the
magazine really stings them? Might they add on assignments if a piece
celebrates them? Mightn't it all just look bad even if everyone behaves
honestly?

            For you to let that
explanation go uncommented on was surprising. Seems to me that getting paid by
Time , as opposed to advertisers whom the Columbia Journalism
Review is not nearly as likely to be covering, is a bigger issue.

            
-- Steve Brill New York City

            
               Called on the
Carpetbagger
            

            In "," David Greenberg
says that "for some politicians, such as Arizona's John McCain, living in an
adopted home state doesn't seem to matter at all." Actually, when McCain first
ran for the House of Representatives, he was accused of being a carpetbagger.
His reply was that, being a military child, he had moved around his whole life,
and in fact, the longest he had ever lived in one place besides Arizona was
when he was a prisoner of war for five and a half years in Vietnam! Needless to
say, the accusation did not do for the competition what they hoped it would, as
the reply was a large part of what won him his seat.

            

               --James Wartell Tucson, Ariz.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Let's Blame Bill

            The
frustration of the bellicose British press at the half-hearted pursuit of the
war in Kosovo vented itself Wednesday in an editorial in the Times attacking
President Clinton, who, it said, has "proved his absolute inadequacy as a
Commander-in-Chief, stumbling on a stage that is bigger than his talents can
match and performing with hesitancy, frailty and fear." It added, "[T]his war
will not be serious until Mr Clinton listens to the Pentagon, rather than the
latest opinion poll. He has never countenanced a campaign plan; and in the
absence of one, even air power has been misapplied. ... Mr Clinton has
retreated into the semantic ambiguities for which his presidency has become
infamous." The editorial concluded that "[f]or Nato, for European peace and for
Britain, the true, high reckoning begins: it is called failure."

            The
Daily Telegraph led its front page Wednesday with a report that
both Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were struggling "to hold
back a growing tide of criticism of their leadership of the Kosovo conflict."
Along with other papers, the Telegraph reported cracks in British
bipartisan support for the NATO offensive. In an article in the
Telegraph , the Conservative Party spokesman on foreign affairs, Michael
Howard, called for the establishment of a committee of inquiry into the war and
the "diplomatic failures" that preceded it. Howard described the bombing of the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade as "an act of gross incompetence." He said, "To use
outdated street maps for an operation of this kind beggars belief."

            The
liberal Guardian led Wednesday on "gloom" in NATO as China and Russia
hardened their demands for a halt to airstrikes before they will agree to
support peace moves in the United Nations. Having consistently urged the use of
ground forces, the paper finally recognized in an editorial that "the
possibility of a ground attack has dwindled." It said that the British and the
French have been willing to do their bit but that Clinton "could not muster the
will, or lacks the necessary political weight, to commit the United States to
ground action." The central issue now, it said, is that "NATO forces, acting
for the Kosovo Albanians, must have preponderant physical power on the ground,
whatever the formalities of status may be." The liberal Independent 's
front-page lead spoke of "an unmistakable whiff of panic and confusion in the
West's councils of war."

            There
was gloom on the continent as well. Le Monde of Paris led its front page Wednesday with the
headline "Kosovo emptied of half its population" and said in an editorial that
President Slobodan Milosevic knows--"because we have been at pains to tell
him"--that he need not fear a land offensive, and he knows the limits of the
air bombardments. "He can, at his leisure, test the unity and determination of
the allies," it added. "One way or another, it is always he who holds the
cards." On Tuesday, the Greek daily Ta Nea published a leaked NATO
document warning that Albania, Montenegro, and Macedonia are in imminent danger
of economic and political collapse because of the Kosovo crisis. The
displacement of nearly 600,000 Kosovar refugees threatens to destabilize the
entire region, it said. The "restricted" memo, dated April 29, was reported to
have been sent by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana to the alliance's 19
member states last week.

            With
only five days to go before voting in the Israeli general election, the
government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reported to be reconciled to
defeat. The main headline Wednesday in the daily Maariv quoted Netanyahu
as saying, "I'll apparently lose." One senior Likud Party official told
Yediot Aharanot , "We don't have many good reasons to be optimistic."
Meanwhile, two more public opinion polls showed that Labor Party and One Israel
leader Ehud Barak is moving inexorably ahead. The Jerusalem Post led Wednesday
on Netanyahu deciding, because of the polls, to take personal charge of Likud's
TV advertising campaign.

            

               Ha'aretz
led
on Defense Minister Moshe Arens accepting the possibility of a Palestinian
state. He reportedly said that recent developments have made territorial
compromise inevitable. The Jerusalem correspondent of the Independent of
London described the hatred among different religious and ethnic
communities that has surfaced during the Israeli election campaign. In one TV
debate, Yusef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Shinui Party which
seeks to reduce the influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews, challenged Eli Suissa,
the ultra-Orthodox interior minister, with the words: "Maybe you'd like to put
me in a concentration camp?" To this Suissa replied, "You've already been in a
concentration camp and you didn't learn your lesson."

            The
firing of Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov by Boris Yeltsin two days
before impeachment proceedings against the president were due to begin in the
Duma provoked little surprise in that country's newspapers Wednesday.
Kommersant said Primakov has been under threat of dismissal for at least
two months, and that Sergei Stephasin, Yeltsin's choice to succeed him as
acting prime minister, has already been offered the job at least three times.
Segodnya said it is understandable that Yeltsin ran out of sympathy for
a man whose main political support came from Communists, who "have proclaimed
as their basic goal the overthrow of the president." Nezavisimaya Gazeta
said Primakov is going without loss of face because he is already recognized as
the man who saved Russia from an abyss. His chances of winning the next
presidential election, if he decides to run, are "very high," the paper
said.

            In an
editorial Wednesday on the booming U.S. economy, the Financial Times warned that the
country is running out of workers. With unemployment at a 30-year low, there
aren't many motivated people left for the labor market to absorb, it said. "As
Alan Greenspan pointed out last week, faster adoption of new technology has
helped productivity growth to increase. But this may well prove temporary. When
the economy runs out of workers, the laws of supply and demand take over."

            
               Le
Monde ran a front-page article about unexpected difficulties facing the
new single European currency, the euro. It said the European Central Bank has a
major problem creating a consistent monetary policy because of growing economic
disparities among the countries of "Euroland." It said, "While some Euroland
countries are enjoying American-style growth, others are on the brink of
recession."

            
               La Repubblica of Rome
reported Wednesday that the singer Michael Jackson has been fined 4 million
lire (around $2,200) for plagiarism. He was found to have copied 37 notes from
a song by Italian pop star Albano Carrisi in his song, "Will You Be There?" The
judge agreed there were extenuating circumstances because both songwriters had
been inspired by old blues music.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Sex, Discipline, and Your Refrigerator

            It has always seemed to me
that the two great mysteries of the universe are: "Why is there something
instead of nothing?" and "Why do people put locks on their refrigerator doors?"
Long ago, I concluded that both these mysteries must remain forever
unfathomable. More recently, two remarkable works of popular science have
convinced me that it is too early to despair.

            First, the refrigerator
locks. Why would any rational creature want to erect an obstacle between itself
and a midnight snack? Midnight snacks have costs (usually measured in calories
or grams of fat), but they must also have benefits--otherwise, they wouldn't
tempt us. We snack when we believe the benefits exceed the costs. In other
words, we snack when snacking is, on net and in our best judgment, a good
thing. What could be the point of making a good thing more difficult?

            But people do lock their refrigerators. They also destroy
their cigarettes, invest their savings in accounts that are designed to
discourage withdrawals, and adopt comically elaborate schemes to force
themselves to exercise. Odysseus resisted the Sirens' call by lashing himself
to the mast. I used to have my secretary lock my computer in a drawer every
afternoon so I couldn't spend my entire day surfing the Net.

            Economists have tried to
explain such behavior in all sorts of unsatisfying ways. You can say that
people like to avoid making choices--but isn't the purchase of the lock a
choice? You can suppose that our minds house multiple "individuals" with
conflicting preferences--but it's unclear how to turn that into a precise
theory of exactly how many people we're sharing our minds with, and how their
conflicts get resolved. You can throw up your hands and say that some behavior
is rational and some isn't, and this particular behavior is in the second
category--but that's tantamount to giving up without a fight. Or, most
unsatisfying of all, you can simply posit a "taste" for self-control.

            The problem with that one is that once you allow yourself
to start positing "tastes" for everything under the sun, you abandon all
intellectual discipline--any behavior at all can be "explained" by the
assertion that somebody had a taste for it. Economist Deirdre McCloskey warns
against hollow triumphs like, "Why did the man drink the motor oil? Because he
had a taste for drinking motor oil!" If you can explain everything,
you've explained nothing.

            But in his entirely marvelous book How the Mind
Works , cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggests that we can safely
posit a taste for self-control without opening the floodgates that would allow
us to posit a taste for drinking motor oil. Here's why: Unlike a taste for
drinking motor oil, a taste for self-control confers a reproductive
advantage.

            When you snack at
midnight, you get most of the benefits, but your spouse (who cares about your
health and appearance) shares many of the costs. So a taste for locking the
refrigerator in the afternoon--even when you know that, by a purely
selfish calculation, you ought to make yourself a giant hot fudge sundae every
night--makes you more desirable as a mate. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised
that natural selection favored people with a taste for refrigerator locks.

            What about people who aren't looking for mates or who are
already securely married? They have a taste for self-control because their
ancestors (who must have mated successfully or they wouldn't have become
ancestors) had that taste. The bottom line is that it is intellectually
honest to explain behavior by positing surprising tastes, provided those tastes
are useful in the mating game. Presumably the sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists have had this idea all along, but economists have been slow to
recognize its significance.

            Now as to the origin of
the universe--or, as I prefer to phrase the question, "Where did all this stuff
come from?"--I now believe that everything is made of pure mathematics. I came
to this insight from Frank J. Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality ,
all of which is wonderfully provocative and some of which is convincing. His
point is to take seriously the claims of those artificial intelligence
researchers who assert that consciousness can emerge from sufficiently complex
software. Pure mathematics is pure software and contains patterns of arbitrary
complexity. The universe itself, together with the conscious beings who inhabit
it, could be one of those patterns.

            Or maybe not. The argument only works if you believe that
mathematics is eternal and precedes the universe. One could equally well argue
that mathematics arises from counting and measuring and so can't exist until
after there is a universe of things to count and measure. I should also
say that while I love the idea that the universe is nothing but a mathematical
model of itself, I've never met anyone else who found the idea of "software
without hardware" even remotely plausible.

            But there might be a good economic reason why we're
stymied. Steven Pinker points out that understanding the origin of the universe
is not a terribly useful skill. It confers no reproductive advantage, so
there's no reason we should have evolved brains capable of thinking about such
a question. Nature is too good an economist to invest in such frivolities. On
the other hand, the ability to understand human behavior has clear payoffs for
a social animal like Homo sapiens . So it's not too much to hope that we
could work out a detailed and convincing theory of refrigerator locks.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Belgrade Gets the Baghdad Treatment

            The lead story at most
papers is that NATO has decided to begin bombing a wider range of government
buildings, including some in downtown Belgrade. The Times of London runs the
headline "Belgrade to get the 'Baghdad treatment.' " An editorial argues that
airstrikes have been (and will continue to be) more effective at destroying the
Serbian military than most people think. Nevertheless, the article concludes,
if the strikes don't stop the atrocities in Kosovo within a "few days," ground
troops should be sent in. Another editorial urges the United Kingdom to donate
humanitarian supplies and eventually grant immigration visas to "our share" of
the refugees.

            The Independent of London
has posted a reporter on the border between Macedonia and Kosovo to
interview the incoming flood of refugees. He writes:

            
               The stories are too horrific to tell in
detail. I heard of murder, rape, looting, and persistent abuse--by rifle-butt
and boot. I heard of several hundred people hiding in a cave that once formed
an old marble quarry, being taunted from outside by men firing machine-pistol
volleys into the air. ...
            

            
               There were a dozen, almost identical
accounts of the operational technique of ethnic cleansing. First the roar of
tanks coming down the valleys, then the sound of whistles being blown and the
firing of automatic weapons, as the villages and hamlets that dot southern
Kosovo ... are surrounded by regular soldiers who order the people to
move.
            

            
               Then come the hard men, often masked, who
separate the important ones from the peasants. The peasants are forced south,
taking only what they can carry, where they must brave further "checkpoints" in
the form of armed robbers, before they reach the border. The "important ones"
stay behind.
            

            The angry reporter
complains that in the Macedonian capital, 15 miles away, NATO swells are eating
"steak au poivre ... washed down with the fiery Macedonian wine." Meanwhile, no
international agency has bothered to set up aid stations at the border to
distribute hot porridge or first aid to the dehydrated and hypothermic
refugees.

            Most papers mention that three American servicemen were
been captured by Serbian forces, though there are few details. The United
States claims the men were in Macedonia when arrested; the Serbians say they
had crossed the border into Serbia. A picture of the men--one with a badly
bruised face--was displayed on Serbian TV and reproduced in newspapers around
the world.

            An article in the
Moscow Times
reports that Russia has sent a warship to the Mediterranean and is prepared to
send six more. President Boris Yeltsin has promised not to intervene militarily
in the Kosovo situation. Nevertheless, commenting on the ship movements,
Yeltsin's defense minister ominously said, "The Defense Ministry is also
considering more decisive actions that will be recommended to the leadership if
the situation changes." Another article says that foreigners from NATO
countries are feeling increasingly unsafe in Russia. The U.S. Embassy has been
attacked, the windows of a restaurant called Uncle Sam's Café were smashed, and
the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg urges Americans not to speak English too
loudly on the street. The article interviews many Westerners who feel
threatened, but none has been physically injured.

            The Irish Times reports "speculation" that NATO is thinking about creating a
"safe haven" in Kosovo. The area would be secured by ground troops. Amazingly,
the article doesn't say who exactly is doing the "speculating." The news peg
for the article is a visit to the Albania-Kosovo border by NATO's deputy
commander.

            But the big news in Ireland is the peace
negotiations between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister
Bertie Ahern. The latest news is that, after four days of negotiations, the two
sides failed to agree on when the Irish Republican Army must disarm. Protestant
leaders are refusing to share power with the IRA in Northern Ireland until the
IRA disarms. IRA leaders want to create the coalition government before
disarming. Talks will resume April 13.

            
               Most Boring Headline
Ever? "Capital Legislator Want More Facts on Daylight Savings Time" from
Mexico's News . A close second is "Why Farm Sheep at All?" from the
Falkland Islands' Penguin News .

             

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Hawkish Doves, Dovish Hawks

            Democratic Sen. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, you may remember, opposed the Gulf War on the grounds that
Iraq's conquest of Kuwait was just one "nasty little country invad[ing] a
littler, but just as nasty, country." So what does Sen. Moynihan think of
American intervention to stop nasty little Yugoslavia's invasion of littler,
but almost as nasty, Kosovo? He's a hawk.

            Conservative columnist
Charles Krauthammer declared before the Gulf War, "If a small, heavily
militarized regime can stand up to a global blockade [and] the opprobrium of
the entire world ... and still emerge intact and in possession of the fruits of
its aggression, the message to every other potential aggressor and victim will
be clear: There are no rules in the post-Cold War world."

            So what's Krauthammer's view of the small, heavily
militarized Yugoslav regime that is standing up to a global blockade and the
opprobrium of the entire world? He would leave Yugoslavia intact and in
possession of the fruits of its aggression. He's a Kosovo dove.

            Kosovo is performing a zoological alchemy on
America's foreign policy leaders. Hawks have mysteriously become doves, doves
have inexplicably become hawks. Kosovo has upset the traditional taxonomy and
replaced it with what appears to be chaos.

            But it's not chaos.
Here's who is where on Kosovo, and how they got there.

            
               Doves Into
Hawks
            

            
               1. The
Europeanists
            

            Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., is the stellar example
of this category, which includes other Democratic legislators who opposed the
Gulf War. The Europeanists are pragmatic rather than moralistic about Kosovo.
Biden opposed intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Lebanon, and Kuwait. But he's
hawkish on Kosovo because it's in Europe, and Europe, unlike the Persian Gulf
and East Africa, is a vital American interest. America, Biden likes to say, is
a "European power." (The Europeanists are also NATOists. They say NATO will be
ruined if it doesn't stop Milosevic, so the United States must support the
alliance.)

            The Europeanists' claims
are somewhat disingenuous: It's hard to argue that benighted, bankrupt Kosovo
is a more vital American interest than oil-rich, centrally located Kuwait. So
there is another, unspoken, reason why the Europeanists favor intervention: a
Democratic president.

            
               2. The Liberal
Humanitarians (a k a Red-Tailed Hawks)
            

            Unlike the Europeanists, the Liberal Humanitarians
have turned hawk for moral reasons. These folks have opposed every American
military operation from Grenada to the Gulf War. Sen. Paul Wellstone of
Minnesota is a pre-eminent Liberal Humanitarian. The Democratic senator opposed
the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein is no Hitler, and the control of Kuwaiti
oil was not a cause worth dying for. But Wellstone favors Kosovo intervention
to stop the "Holocaust-like atrocities" occurring there.

            The Liberal Humanitarians are a product of the
post-Cold War peace. During the Cold War, liberals shunned military
intervention--even humanitarian military intervention--because such adventurism
could provoke conflict with the Soviets and tended to buttress thuggish
right-wingers. The end of the Cold War has freed them to pursue humanitarian
ends: The United States now can be the world's policeman, so it
should be.

            (A special place in the
Liberal Humanitarian pantheon belongs to New York Times columnist
Anthony Lewis. Click to read why.)

            
               3. The Third
Worlders
            

            The Rev. Jesse Jackson is
the principal of this small group. Jackson opposed the Gulf War but has since
favored U.S. intervention in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia. The Third Worlders
share most of the concerns of the Liberal Humanitarians but are particularly
hawkish about helping groups traditionally shunned by the West, notably
Africans and Muslims. In this case, Jackson avidly sides with the underdog
Muslim Kosovars.

            
               4. The Credibility
Fanatics
            

            Henry Kissinger is the
intellectual leader of the Credibility Fanatics. They are conservatives who
fundamentally detest U.S. involvement in Kosovo and have little interest in the
morality of the issue. They don't believe Kosovo is important enough to fight
for, they wish we had never gone to Rambouillet, and they think it will be a
horrible, ugly conflict. But while their Kosovo instincts are dovish, they are
Real hawks (pronounced "ray-all"): Now that the president has committed
U.S. forces, we must win. If we don't, the credibility of NATO and the United
States will be shattered. Unsurprisingly, Republican Sens. John McCain of
Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the Senate's leading veterans, are
Credibility Fanatics.

            
               5. Caspar
Weinberger
            

            Weinberger, a kind of
conservative counterpart to the Europeanists, deserves his own category. His
Weinberger Doctrine, which precludes U.S. military action except in absolutely
vital cases of national security, would seem to bar any Kosovo intervention.
But Weinberger has declared that the Balkans are a vital national
interest because they "were at the heart of two world wars." Hence the United
States should intervene--and with overwhelming force.

            
               Hawks Into
Doves
            

            
               1. The
Neo-Isolationists
            

            Many Republican senators belong in this category,
including Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and Deputy Majority Leader
Don Nickles of Oklahoma. During the Cold War, these conservatives were hawks,
believing the United States should intervene promiscuously to reverse communism
(Krauthammer's "Reagan Doctrine"). Now that there's no Evil Empire, they
believe the United States shouldn't intervene militarily unless national
security is really at stake.

            The Neos cite three reasons for their Kosovo
dovishness. First, Kosovo is not a vital American interest: It has no
commercial or strategic value. Second, unlike Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the
Serbian rout of Kosovo is a civil war, and the United States should not involve
itself in civil wars. We leave sovereign nations alone. Third, and more
preposterously, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma claims that interceding on behalf
of Kosovars demonstrates a "European-American" bias in American foreign policy.
Why don't we help the Rwandans and the Sudanese? (Krauthammer fits in the
neo-isolationist category, but not perfectly. Click for why.)

            The Neo-Isolationists
are not entirely insincere: They really do believe Kosovo is too
irrelevant to national security to risk American lives. But there's also
another major reason they have turned dovish: Democrat Bill Clinton is
president, and they side against him reflexively.

            
               2. The
Paleo-Isolationists (a k a Turtledoves)
            

            They are the mirror image
of the Liberal Humanitarians. Pat Buchanan is their champion. Like the Neos,
they are Cold War burnouts. They were ferocious Cold Warriors, but they favored
military action only to defeat the communist menace, not for any greater moral
purpose. Now that there is no menace, they have withdrawn into their shells.
The Paleos believe almost nothing justifies intervention these days. Buchanan
opposed the Gulf War on the grounds that it was irrelevant to America's vital
interests. (Any oil price increase caused by Iraq's takeover, he claimed, would
help the United States by hurting Europe and Japan.) If the invasion of Kuwait
didn't qualify as a vital interest, then a civil war in Kosovo certainly
doesn't. Unlike the Neos, the Paleos are not against the Kosovo bombing for
partisan reasons: They would oppose U.S. involvement even if a Republican were
president.

            
               3. The Israel
Analogists
            

            This is less a group than
an undercurrent. No one has explicitly adopted this position: The closest there
is to an advocate is New York 
               Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal.
Palestinian advocates have exploited the Kosovo war by likening Serbian
viciousness against Kosovars to Israeli cruelty toward Palestinians. The Israel
Analogists would turn that comparison around. Rosenthal, for instance, opposes
the Kosovo bombing partly because the Serbian army and the Kosovo Liberation
Army are morally equivalent in their brutishness. Just as the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more complicated than the Palestinian cartoon
of it, so too the Serbian-Kosovar war is subtler than it seems. Rosenthal even
tacitly compares Serbs to Israelis: "Serbs are as likely to give up Kosovo
willingly because the Albanians want it as Israelis are to give up Jerusalem
because the Arabs want it." (The subtext: Serbia has as much right to Kosovo as
Israel does to Jerusalem--namely, a lot.)

            
Not all hawks and doves have changed places.
Consider:

            
               1. The
Conservative Moralists
            

            This group includes Bill
Kristol and his Weekly Standard , Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other
neoconservatives. These folks are Reaganites who did not give up Reagan's
imperial, moralistic vision when the Cold War ended. They don't believe
communism's defeat ended America's global obligations: The United States should
still strike boldly against authoritarian oppressors. The Conservative
Moralists are less concerned with the national interest than with what's right.
The Standard , for example, editorializes that Republicans should support
Kosovo action unless they want to become "the party of callous indifference to
human suffering."

            
               2. The Old-School
Lefties
            

            The rest of the left may have turned hawk on
Kosovo, but a few die-hard doves remain. The 
               Nation , for example,
has written extensively against the war. A recent cover story argued that the
bombing was dubious because a) the United States was just as brutal in Vietnam
as the Serbs are now; b) the United States ignores similarly horrific ethnic
cleansings in Turkey, Rwanda, etc.; and c) U.S. policy is being driven by
corporate interests. It's reassuring to know that some things, indeed, never
change.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Pronouns and Transsexuality

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Here is an odd one
for you. I am a transsexual woman (postoperative, many facial surgeries, voice
surgery). I am a manager and programmer. Most of the time people have no idea,
but in the work environment, everyone eventually knows. Most people are fine
with it, but a few (always men) choose to act out in spectacularly
inappropriate ways. The worst is in meetings with clients where a male manager
will refer to me repeatedly as "he." This, of course, makes no sense to the
client, who has no idea why the professional woman across the table is being
referred to as a man. Things I have tried include taking the offender aside to
ask that he use my given name (Jess or Jessica, as he wishes) instead of
pronouns. If we're not in a client meeting and I have the clout, I sometimes
take the person down on the spot--in the nicest way I can. Any cool suggestions
or ideas?
            

            

               --Jess
            

            Dear Madame,

            If anyone has earned the
right to the feminine title, it is you. Prudie offers the following ideas to
eliminate the insensitive hostility: You could send a memo, in-house, stating
that if the pronoun problem persists, you will take your gussied-up self, along
with your skills, to another firm. If it is a practical impossibility to leave,
you might consider going to the person's superior and registering a formal
complaint. If you have the figurative stones for it, you might respond to the
digs made in front of clients with a remark such as, "You have to make
allowances for (so-and-so). English as a second language can be so confusing."
In other words, throw the discomfort on the other guy. The "outsiders" will not
know what to make of the byplay, and Prudie guesses the needler will clam up.
Maybe with the head-on sparring you can train these jerks one by one.

            
--Prudie, supportively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My 24-year-old
girlfriend has a roommate, also 24. The roommate's boyfriend has lived in their
apartment (2 br/1 bath) for four months. He is 30, gainfully employed (Price
Waterhouse), and pays no rent. Not a pizza, not a thank-you. The roommate's
defense is: He is my BF and stays in my room. How do you collect rent due? And
how much?
            

            

               --Concerned in Atlanta
            

            Dear Con,

            Who wants to know? You
have no standing in this deal. If , however, you have been deputized to
ask on behalf of your GF, she's in a bit of a bind, unless the lease stipulates
how many people may occupy the flat. Her only hope, if she is unhappy with the
perpetual houseguest, is to advise the (official) roommate that 1) the
threesome is not a comfortable arrangement for her, or 2) the guest is a de
facto resident and should share the expenses--to the tune of one-third. She
might also consider moving.

            
--Prudie, practically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am a Ph.D.
psychologist who does consulting at a local psychiatric hospital. While most of
the staff there call me Dr. Moore, there are some who call me by my first name.
I wouldn't mind this so much in private, but it's not good in front of the
patients. Much of my work is with severely disturbed people and requires that I
testify in court to request civil commitment. For reasons of both ego and
personal safety, I would prefer to be called by my title, particularly in front
of my patients. I can't think of a way to request this without seeming overly
impressed with myself and my degrees. Keep in mind that none of them would ever
call the psychiatrists by their first names. How do I request this politely and
without appearing to be a snob?
            

            
               --Sincerely
yours,
            

            

               Stymied
            

            Dear Sty,

            You request it in a memo
and with an explanation. It is quite likely that those calling you "Joe" are
unaware of your reasons for wishing to be called Dr. (Prudie does not grasp,
however, how use of your last name provides greater safety than your first. It
is the last name, after all, that is listed in a phone book. Perhaps your
concern is that some patients are hearing both names used?) In any case,
good luck. It should not be too difficult to get things your way.

            
--Prudie, honorifically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My son is being
married in October. One of my dear friends is not invited, because she is my
friend, not my son's. I did not feel it was appropriate to invite her, due to
the limitations placed on my son and his fiancee with respect to the number of
guests invited. Two other friends who have been very much a part of my son's
life are livid that I did not insist on this woman being invited. I feel any
pressure I can take off these two kids is in their best interest. What do you
think? Also, I wondered, when having a wedding shower, if it's appropriate to
invite people who are out of state and obviously aren't going to come to a
shower. Some friends say it's fine; I feel it's soliciting a gift. I'd be
interested in your feedback.
            

            

               --Wanda
            

            Dear Wan,

            As to the good friend of yours who doesn't
particularly have any relationship with your son, Prudie understands the
constraints when putting on a wedding. But she also thinks there's got
to be a way to squeeze in just one more. Bear in mind that all those invited
surely will not come. And of course both the bride's and groom's side can keep
expanding the "just one more" ploy, but if it's really just one more,
Prudie thinks it is doable. If you are close to this woman, she ought to be
there. As for the shower invitations to out-of-state friends, Prudie agrees
with you that such invitations are really invoices.

            Though the happy day is
some months away, Prudie sends best wishes and congratulations to the young
couple and tranquil thoughts to both sets of parents.

            --Prudie,
matrimonially

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Community Kills

            The massacre at Columbine
High School prompted op-ed writers across the land to diagnose a shocking "lack
of community" as the cause of the madness. As if! There is no public
institution in America that works harder to forge a sense of belonging than the
suburban public high school. Assemblies, homecoming week festivities, car wash
fund-raisers, pep rallies, proms, graduation ceremonies--these rituals instill
in their participants the "school spirit" that persuades many alumni to return
to town every five years for reunions to celebrate high school's glory
days.

            Representing the "lack
of community" position were essayist Richard Rodriguez and biographer Neal
Gabler, writing separately in Sunday's Los Angeles Times "Opinion"
section.

            Rodriguez took the standard communitarian tack, arguing
that newly landscaped suburbs such as Littleton produce deracinated teens who
can't become individuals because they lack a sense of community: "[Y]ou cannot
become an individual without a strong sense of 'we,' " he writes. Gabler
combined a squishier communitarian criticism ("it may be too simple to say that
rootless malleable communities ... give rise to rootless malleable children
with little identity of their own, save the identity borrowed from mass
culture, but it may not be too far off, either") with his media monism:
Identitiless teens play "Doom" on the PC, then try it out in the enhanced 3-D
perspective of real life.

            But neither Gabler nor
Rodriguez appear to have attended a suburban high school. If they had, they
would know that such high schools suffer from an overdose of community,
not a deficit. In Columbine, community killed.

            Columbine evidently overflowed with this sort of school
spirit, most of which revolves around student athletics. The latest consensus
from Littleton is that rage directed at student athletes and their perceived
protectors, the school administration, drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to
meticulously prepare and then execute the killings. At Columbine and suburban
high schools elsewhere, athletics are the biggest tool in creating the sense of
"we" that Rodriguez extols. The community--both on and off campus--worships the
basketball and football gods, and favoritism for the top jocks is
institutionalized in the name of fostering a sense of community. It's more than
curious that at institutions supposedly dedicated to academics,
spectator-friendly athletic competitions are the only activities considered to
be worthy of regular praise and attention. Gabler notes that Columbine's
closed-circuit TV system played sports highlights regularly. Can one imagine
the Rocky Mountain News , or any other newspaper, replacing high-school
sports coverage with debate team transcripts?

            The skewed community
values created by administrators, teachers, parents, and the media exacerbate
the natural volatility of high-school social groups. Just as rape and other
felonies committed by star athletes at the NCAA powerhouses are tolerated with
wearying predictability, today's high-school administrator will allow the
barely controllable gangs from the gridiron free rein to commit verbal and
physical aggro upon the castes below. Most victims of the harassment and
ostracism survive. Some drop out of school or transfer. In my day, one hassled
student ended his life by hanging himself from a basketball rim. In Harris and
Klebold's case, the endgame was a spasm of violence.

            While Harris and Klebold have established--one hopes--the
extreme end of inappropriate response to high-school hazing, their crimes were
anticipated by popular culture. It's particularly strange that the supposedly
media-savvy Gabler didn't acknowledge in his piece the popular-kid killing
classic Heathers and its less acute echo Jawbreaker . Even the
mild snarkiness of MTV's Daria should have put Gabler, for whom mass
entertainment is the only important reality, on notice that high schools are
communities that are hardly tolerant, accepting, or even rational. Are the
public vows to rebuild Columbine also a vow to resurrect the very community
that shaped Harris and Klebold?

            You can't feel like an outsider if you don't want
to get inside. Viewed from this angle, Harris and Klebold's rampage can be
interpreted as an extreme desire to join a community whose values they had
bought into. By embracing Nazi sloganeering, Harris and Klebold may have
thought that they had cast out Columbine's influence. But they absorbed
Columbine's football team community values--aggression, planning, cohesion, and
physical sacrifice for the goal--in the methodical planning and execution of
their atrocity. Yet right up to their donning black trench coats for the last
time, they would probably have preferred being honored at a Columbine pep rally
than at the Nuremberg rally.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            God Said, &quot;Ugh&quot;

            Andrew Kevin Walker, the
screenwriter of Seven (1995) and of the new snuff-film thriller
8MM , must have grown up watching hundreds of hours of kinky detective
shows. My guess is that they left him aroused but essentially ungratified.
Walker has made his fortune by packing in all the maggoty, sadistic details
that the creators of Hunter and The Commish left to the
imagination and that even such coolly clinical cop series as The X-Files
and Homicide have opted to leaven with reminders of the fundamental
beneficence of humankind. Walker's clean-cut detective heroes (Brad Pitt in
Seven , Nicolas Cage in 8MM ) embark on odysseys into the nether
region, where they view atrocity after atrocity before arriving at the source:
an evil that is pure, unrepentant, and infectious. You can lop off its head,
but the skull goes on grinning, serenely confident that it has passed on its
disease to its slayer.

            David Fincher's
Seven thrust Walker's worldview into your viscera; I can still recall
that film's gun battle, set in a long corridor, with its slingshot angles and
bullets that seemed to explode beside your head, and the ghastly sight, both
riveting and repellent, of a partially flayed, obese corpse, its milky white
blubber framing intestines that looked like blue balloons. Joel Schumacher, the
director of 8MM , has none of Fincher's graphic originality, but the
material still carries a lurid charge. Cage plays Tom Welles, an earnest,
professionally polite private investigator summoned to the manse of a recently
deceased tycoon. The elderly widow (Myra Carter) has discovered in a safe an 8
millimeter film that appears to document the murder of a young woman. The
appalled widow needs to know if the killing is real or simulated and hands
Welles the financial resources he needs to ferret out the filmmakers and their
possibly unfortunate leading lady.

            Leaving his harried wife (Catherine Keener) and infant
daughter in wintry Pennsylvania, the detective travels from Cleveland to North
Carolina to the subterranean S/M parlors of Los Angeles to a production office
in the meat market of New York City. What he sees twists Cage's hitherto poker
face into an increasingly Eastwoodesque grimace. His eyes bulge. His monotone
verges on the point of exploding into hundreds of hysterical semitones. He
stops taking calls from his wife (always clutching the baby) on his cell phone.
A wisecracking porn shop clerk (Joaquin Phoenix), whom Welles has hired as a
tour guide, delivers the film's thematic warning: "There are things that you
see that you can't un-see, that get into your head. ... Before you know it
you're in it, deep in it. ... Dance with the devil and the devil don't change,
the devil changes you." I won't spell out where 8MM leads but, trust me,
there are no surprises. As in Seven , there are devils and they dance and
everyone gets down. And down. And down.

            Schumacher ( Batman
& Robin , 1997), a one-time costume designer and art director, usually
exhibits the aesthetic of an interior decorator, his pictures boasting the most
cluttered mise en scènes I've ever mise en seen. I'm impressed
that in 8MM he has managed to muzzle his fruitier impulses and work in a
chill, stripped-down style, reverting to form only in the black leather porno
basements and his characteristically semicoherent action scenes. The ambience
isn't as clammy as Fincher's in Seven , but it's dank enough, with eerie
intimations of a demon lying in wait. The score by Mychael Danna features
faraway muezzin wails--calls that could be emanating from the girl in the
flickering movie who's about to be slain. She stares doe-eyed into the camera,
like the naked waif in Edvard Munch's Puberty , who seems just at that
instant to realize her true vulnerability.

            It gets to you, this movie--gets you titillated, then
spooked, then suffused with righteous fury. Murderous fury. It's only after the
picture ends that you realize that Welles hasn't really danced with the
devil, at least not by the standards of vigilante movies. He doesn't get a
sexual charge out of the brutality, nor does he develop a penchant for
torturing innocents. Apart from his stricken expressions and a couple of nasty
wounds, there's nothing even to suggest that he's damned by taking justice into
his own hands. If ever bad guys deserved to be executed, it's the bad guys in
8MM . They promise they're going to torture and kill the hero's wife and
baby daughter, they cast aspersions on his masculinity, they sneer at the
notion that anyone would care about their victims. It's up to Welles to say, "I
care"-- BLAM! What's to feel guilty about?

            Movies like 8MM
make me appreciate what Paul Schrader tried to do when he chose to bring
Russell Banks' novel Affliction to the screen. Having written Taxi
Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979) and other vigilante pictures in
which the underlying motives of the avenger are called into question, Schrader
embraced the story of a vigilante who turns out to be dead wrong, driven mad by
an increasing sense of his own impotence in a world that has left him behind.
Schumacher worked with similar themes in the poorly thought through Falling
Down (1993), in which Michael Douglas has a spell of road rage and doesn't
cool off. Next to these films, the moral contortions of 8MM seem
especially bogus, a sadomasochistic peep show booth pretending to be a
confessional.

            The test of a piece of storytelling is whether its audience
can forget that it's listening to a history--something in the past tense--and
enter the living present. That doesn't happen in God Said, "Ha!" Julia
Sweeney's film of her own one-woman show. The subject is cancer--Sweeney's late
brother's and then her own. Sweeney stands in the middle of the stage and tells
the off-screen (but audible) audience how her brother got sick and took up
residence in her small Hollywood house and how her parents moved down from
Spokane, Wash., and threw her life into an uproar. She comes off as extremely
smart and likable--and she looks better than she did on Saturday Night
Live , with the soft face and sensuous blue eyes of Elizabeth McGovern. Her
monologue has some funny, dislocating observations: the unsophisticated ways of
her folks juxtaposed against her newly acquired yuppie tastes, her need to
sneak around like a teen-ager when a boyfriend comes to stay and, especially,
her dislocation when, after taking her brother to the hospital for
chemotherapy, she finds herself suddenly playing his part, as if, she says,
she's at a square dance.

            But God Said,
"Ha!"--which has won praise for Sweeney's artistry and candor--is the sort
of work that gives one-person shows their bad rap. Few of the good bits flow
together; nothing builds. It's mostly one thing after another: I went here,
then I went there, then I went to a bookstore and cut a big fart and someone I
didn't remember from the Groundlings recognized me, then I tossed a cigarette I
wasn't supposed to be smoking out the car window and then noticed that the back
seat was on fire, and then ... Occasionally, she turns to look into
another camera--a move that unintentionally evokes the old Chevy Chase "Weekend
Update" shtick--but the movie is otherwise static, and the lines sound as if
she has said them hundreds of times before.

            Sweeney tells instead of shows, declining to haul out the
big guns--her immense comic gifts--to put her characters across. I have a
feeling she must think it would be vulgar to get too showbizzy, too gonzo, too
Saturday Night Live -ish with this material, given that it's about (hush)
cancer. But then why do it? What's the point of going out in front of an
audience with a tale of illness if she's not going to bring all her imaginative
resources to bear on it--to transform it into something that transcends its
relatively routine particulars and gives us something to hold onto when our
time for tragedy comes?

            Julia Sweeney chose to take the story of her
brother's illness and hers to the stage and then the screen; Pauline Kael made
no such decision, which is why Rushmore director Wes Anderson's New
York Times account of visiting the retired New Yorker critic seemed
an unseemly invasion of privacy. After writing about Anderson's piece in , I
sent a letter to the New York T
               imes , which printed it Sunday.
Click to read my letter, Anderson's response, and my annotations.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  October
Sky
                (Universal Pictures). Critics' reactions cover the spectrum.
The story, based on Homer Hickam Jr.'s memoir Rocket Boys , follows a few
backwoods kids in the 1950s who use amateur rocketry as a steppingstone to
college scholarships and an escape from the coal mines where their fathers
work. Those who praise the film say it's "one of the most unfashionable movies
of the new year, and one of the most appealing. Made with a gee-whiz
earnestness and simplicity that's so out of style it's refreshing" (Kenneth
Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). Others are more wary of the movie's
syrupy core: David Denby says the film is "borderline corny, but I was held by
it; I was even moved by it" ( The New Yorker ), and David Edelstein in

                  Slate
                "agreeably guileless for such a manipulative genre." The
most critical reviewers call it predictable: "[T]he visuals, the dialogue, the
sentiments, all seem lifted right out of the Boy Scout Handbook " (Peter
Rainer, New York ). (Visit Hickam's high school's Web page to see the hometown
reaction to the film.)

            

               
                  Jawbreaker
                (TriStar Pictures). "Feeble" and
"inadequate even by lazy-pastiche standards" is how Dennis Lim of the
Village Voice describes this mean teen movie about a posse of cruel
popular girls who accidentally kill one of their own and try to cover it up.
Although it pitches itself as an hommage to films such as
Heathers , Carrie , and Clueless , critics say
writer-director Darren Stein "can't decide whether he's satirizing his demon
heroines' homicidal indifference or celebrating it" (Owen Gleiberman,
Entertainment Weekly ). The film has only two things worth looking at:
the eye-popping costumes and Rose McGowan, who has the part of the
bitch-goddess down pat. (Read this article on McGowan, fiancee of Marilyn Manson, in
Entertainment Weekly. )

            
               
                  Office
Space
                (20 th Century Fox). Good reviews for the first
nonanimated feature film written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of
Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill . "Bristling with shrewd
observation, inspired humor and all-around smarts," says Kevin Thomas of the
Los Angeles Times . The subject is the soul-crushing monotony of life in
a corporate cubicle, and how a few drones manage to shake things up. The only
negative reviews come from two critics who write for big papers--Stephen Holden
of the New York Times and Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today --which
makes you wonder if they've got so successful they've forgotten the torture a
jammed copy machine can inflict on the lowly. (The official site has a variety of
screensavers you can download to brighten up your own cubicle.)

            

               Music
            

            
               
                  The Hot
Rock
               , by Sleater-Kinney (Kill Rock Stars). The fourth album from
the hard-rocking female punk rock trio from Olympia, Wash., gets great press:
"[T]his cerebral album ... is a striking countermelody to the junk that now
passes as Top-40 rock" (Christopher John Farley, Time ). After years on
the indie scene, the band is now receiving praise everywhere from Rolling
Stone to Entertainment Weekly , whose Will Hermes asks, "Is
Sleater-Kinney the greatest rock & roll band in America?" and gives the
album an A. The only sour note comes from the Los Angeles Times ' Richard
Cromelin, who finds some of the songs cold, tight, and remote. (Listen to samples from their latest album courtesy of
Rolling Stone .)

            

               Books
            

            
               
                  Traveling
Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
               , by Anne Lamott (Pantheon Books).
Cathy Lynn Grossman sums up the responses to Lamott's collection of essays on
faith: "Either you recognize your own personal truths in Lamott's highly
personal epiphanies ... [o]r she makes you spit, sputter, and slam things. You
don't find it remotely enlightening to share relentless intimacy with someone
so angry, self-righteous and strange--and so proud of being candid" ( USA
Today ). Most critics call the collection "funny, warm and sagacious"
(Regina Marler, the Los Angeles Times ), but there are a few who condemn
it as self-absorbed. (Read an excerpt here.)

            
               
                  The Elegant
Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate
Theory
               , by Brian R. Greene (W.W. Norton & Co.). Excellent
reviews for math and physics Professor Brian Greene's explanation of the basics
of string theory, currently the most popular "theory of everything," cited as a
way of reconciling the otherwise incompatible theories of general relativity
and quantum mechanics. Reviewers compare him to both Stephen Hawking and
Richard Feynman for his ability to make complicated problems of physics
comprehensible to the lay enthusiast. "He has a rare ability to explain even
the most evanescent ideas in a way that gives at least the illusion of
understanding, enough of a mental toehold to get on with the climb" (George
Johnson, the New York Times Book Review ). (Read the first chapter, courtesy of the New York
Times --free registration required.)

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Blast From the Past ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Message in a Bottle ;

               
                  Movie
                  --My Favorite Martian ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Testament , by John Grisham;

               
                  Book
                  --South of the Border, West of the Sun ,by Haruki
Murakami;

               
                  Theater--
                  Death of a Salesman (Eugene O'Neill
Theatre, New York City).

            

            :

            

               
                  Movie -- Payback ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Simply Irresistible ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Rushmore ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Dry Cleaning ;

               
                  Book -- Werewolves in Their Youth , by Michael
Chabon;

               
                  Theater -- You're a Good Man,
Charlie Brown .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  She's All That ;

               
                  Movie
                  --The 24 Hour Woman ;

               
                  Movie -- Still Crazy ;

               
                  Movie -- My Name Is Joe ;

               
                  Book--
                  What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness
Eludes the Modern Woman , by Danielle Crittenden;

               
                  Book
                  --Amy and Isabelle , by Elizabeth Strout;

               
                  Book -- Heavy Water , by
Martin Amis.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie
                  --
                  Gloria ;

               
                  Movie
                  --
                  Playing by Heart ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Another Day in Paradise ;

               
                  Book
                  --
                  Reporting Live , by Lesley
Stahl;

               
                  Book
                  --
                  Face-Time , by Erik Tarloff;

               
                  Book
                  --
                  Miss Nobody , by Tomek Tryzna.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 198: &quot;Chat and Argue Choo Choo&quot;

            

               Next month, hoping to re-establish cordial relations, more than 140
congressmen will board a chartered Amtrak train bound for Hershey, Pa. What
will they do when they get there?
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 197)--"A Man Has Needs":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              Fill in the blank as Bill Press
assesses the about-to-be-announced presidential bid of his Crossfire
playmate Pat Buchanan. "He is convinced that if Elizabeth Dole stumbles, if
G.W. stumbles, in a field of pygmies, he's the giant. This is not just a need
for ____________ on his part."
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               
"Frequent flyer miles."-- Edward H. Hernandez , Evan Cornog , Deb
Stavin , Steve Smith , and Morris Jackson
               

               "Higher
speaking fees."--Peter Carlin
               

               
"Lithium."-- Mat Honan, Sandra Combs ( Mark Katz , Judith
Spencer , Kate Wing , and Raphael Laufer had similar
answers.)

               
"Liebensraum ."-- Andrew Staples
               

               "Seeing
himself unattractively represented in hundreds of editorial cartoons as a
leathery-faced half-man, half-elephant."--Kate Powers
               

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Why engage in a futile
act? If it's just plain stupid to continue making rambling, drunken, late night
phone calls to Ellen Barkin despite a court order--hypothetically
speaking--what's to be gained by running a no-win campaign in New Hampshire?
Well, you get your message out, shape the debate, and perhaps gain influence
over the eventual winner. That explains the Ellen Barkin thing. But what about
Buchanan? Here, it's defeat as self-aggrandizement. He transforms himself from
a vitriolic TV gas bag into a candidate for the presidency. That ought to
impress Ellen Barkin.

            
               Adoring
Answer
            

            "This is not just a need for adulation on his
part."

            Tuesday, CNN announced that Buchanan was taking a
leave from Crossfire , a program friends say he is bored with, much like
the American voting public, I add editorially.

            In 1996, the feisty
reactionary beat Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, capturing the state
with 27 percent of the vote. This would be difficult to repeat, suggests Kyle
McSlarrow, Dan Quayle's campaign manager, because much of Buchanan's 1996
campaign team (including sister Bay) is unavailable, because the field is so
crowded, and because the voters have "wised up," I add, quoting only myself, a
man who finds simple joy in the phrase "Dan Quayle's campaign manager."

            
               Extra
Special
            

            "Let's say somebody is
acquitted, and it's one of those acquittals in which the person was guilty
..."-- Rudolph Giuliani
            

            
               Chris Kelly's
Anniversary Extra
            

            I'd like to share
something that I've been keeping to myself for some time. This is a real letter
that was entrusted to me by a friend, and to him by a friend, and I really
can't say more than that. Please, read until the end for the shocking
denouement.

            Oct.
10, 1984

            
President
Metro Goldwyn Mayer
10202 West Washington Blvd
Culver City, Calif.

            Dear Sir,

            I am writing to you with regard to the motion
pictures, Hello Dolly , The Way We Were , Superman ,
Yentl , and possibly more, but at the moment those are the titles
uppermost in my mind.

            My voice has been recorded and Barbra Streisand's
face and name have been associated with the sound tracks and recordings made by
the motion picture industry. If your studio is not involved then I apologize
and am writing in error. I do not have access to the names of the studios
involved in the production of the motion pictures associated with my voice.

            My name is Muffin Kennedy. I am the only child of
Joseph P. and Gloria Swanson Kennedy. You may remember me from World War II. I
represented the United States government on the radio from Chicago, Illinois,
and was heard throughout the United States, Europe, and the Pacific War Zone.
The subject matter discussed in the broadcasts came from Washington, D.C., and
anything said by me was said with the permission of the United States
government and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

            I have been a victim of amnesia since 1947 and
unfortunately lost my identity. I have come back to many incidents in my life
during the last year and a half.

            Barbra Streisand has annoyed me throughout the years
with friends of hers. They have entered my home wherever I have lived without
permission. They have shocked my person to the extent that I blacked out
whatever they were doing.

            I have not been paid one
penny for the records, tapes, or motion picture sound tracks made with my
voice. I did not give permission for anyone to record my voice. I did not at
any time sign a contract allowing any studio in Hollywood or anywhere else to
use my voice in the production of a motion picture. I do not want my voice used
again by the motion picture industry, nor do I want any more songs
recorded.

            
Sincerely,
Muffin Kennedy (similarly, Beth Sherman, Jon Hotchkiss, Kate Wing ) OK, I
made up that last part.

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            Anti-Semitism, thwarted
erotic desires.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Monomoney Mania 

            A couple of days ago my CW
alarm starting buzzing furiously. For something like the sixth time in a month,
a businessman I was talking to had just declared, in the tones of someone
stating a profound insight, that the modern world economy no longer has room
for scores of different national currencies--that the inexorable logic of
globalization will soon force most countries to adopt the dollar, the euro, or
the yen as their means of exchange. This particular speaker was Latin American,
and was clearly influenced by the recent discussion of "dollarization" as a
solution to his region's woes, but I have heard pretty much the same line from
Asians and Europeans. No doubt about it: A new conventional wisdom has emerged.
And you know what that means: It's time to start debunking.

            At first sight, it might
seem obvious that the fewer currencies there are, the better. After all, a
proliferation of national moneys means more hassle and expense, because you
keep on having to change money and to pay the associated commissions. It also
means more uncertainty, because you are never quite sure what foreign goods are
going to cost or what foreign customers will be willing to pay. And as
globalization proceeds--as the volume of international transactions rises, both
absolutely and relative to world output--the cost of having many currencies
also rises. So why not have fewer--maybe only one?

            There's also the matter of speculation. The financial
crises that have shaken much of the world all started, at least in the first
instance, with investors betting that the currency of the afflicted nation
would fall in value against harder currencies such as the dollar. Why not spoil
the speculators' game by giving them nothing to speculate about--by replacing
pesos and reis with portraits of George Washington (or, if you happen to be
European, with generic pictures of bridges and gates--for more on European
currency design, see 1997 
                  Slate
                piece)?

            But not so fast. There
are still some very good arguments for maintaining separate national
currencies. Not only that, while globalization and technological change in some
ways are pushing the world toward fewer currencies, in other ways they actually
reinforce the advantages of monetary pluralism.

            The classic argument in favor of separate national
currencies, with fluctuating relative values, was made by none other than
Milton Friedman. (One appealing aspect of this particular debate is that it
cuts across the usual ideological lines. European socialists like unified
currencies, so does the Cato Institute. American liberals like floating
exchange rates, so do Thatcherites.) Friedman started from a more or less
undeniable observation: Sometimes changing market conditions force broad
changes in the ratios of national price levels. For example, right now the
Irish economy is booming and the German economy's sputtering. Clearly, prices
and wages in Ireland need to rise compared with those in Germany. Now, you
could simply rely on supply and demand to do the job, producing inflation in
Ireland and deflation in Germany. But even a free-marketeer such as Friedman
realized that this is asking a lot of markets and that it would be much easier
to keep German prices stable in German currency, Irish prices stable in Irish
currency, and let the exchange rate between the two currencies do the
adjusting.

            Friedman offered a
brilliant analogy. He likened exchange rate adjustment to the act of setting
clocks forward in the spring. A truly devout free-market believer should--if he
is consistent--decry this as unwarranted government interference. Why not leave
people free to choose--to start the working day earlier if and only if they
feel like it? But in reality there is a coordination problem. It is hard for
any one business to shift its work schedule unless everyone else does the same.
As a result, it turns out to be much easier to achieve the desired time shift
by leaving the schedules unchanged but resetting the clocks. In the same way,
Friedman argued, a country whose wages and prices are too high compared with
those abroad will find it much easier to make the necessary adjustment via a
change in the value of its currency than through thousands of changes in
individual prices.

            So there is a trade-off. You don't want too many
currencies--you wouldn't want to have separate dollars for Brooklyn and Queens.
But when two countries are subject to strong "asymmetric shocks"--which is
econospeak for saying that if they shared a common currency one would sometimes
be in a boom while the other was in a slump and vice versa--there is a good
case for their having separate currencies whose relative values are allowed to
fluctuate. The question, then, is whether changes in the nature of the world
economy have altered the terms of trade-off--and if so, in which direction.

            Now the increasing volume
of international trade and investment does, other things being the same, make
it more costly to maintain multiple currencies. But other things are not the
same, and other forces arguably make the optimal number of currencies in the
world larger rather than smaller.

            Consider, in particular, the effects of modern information
and communication technology--which may also be the driving force behind
globalization. Surely that technology has made it easier, not harder, to deal
with a world of many currencies. For example, European advocates of a single
currency used to delight in pointing out that if you took a grand tour of the
European Union, starting with 100 deutsche marks and changing your money into
local currency at each stop, at the end you would have only something like 40
marks. This was always a bit of a red herring, since the commissions that
businesses pay on foreign exchange transactions are far smaller than the fees
at foreign exchange kiosks. But anyway, who needs to change money nowadays?
When I go to Europe, I pay for most things by credit card and get petty cash
from local ATMs, which are happy to accept my BankBoston card.

            Information technology
also makes it easier for businesses to deal with the risks associated with
fluctuating currencies. It has always been true that such risks could in
principle be "hedged" away through ; the problem was that the necessary markets
were sometimes thin or nonexistent. Thanks to computers, however, investment
banks now offer a vast array of financial instruments, and hedging has become
much easier.

            I can't resist mentioning a related issue. When you talk to
euro enthusiasts, they invariably claim that one of the great benefits of the
new currency will be "price transparency." Once all European prices are quoted
in euros, it will be obvious to consumers when a German company is charging
more than its French competitor or vice versa--whereas it wouldn't be if the
prices were quoted in francs and marks and had to be converted at the going
exchange rate. This claim always puzzles me: Here we are in the information
age, able to process gigabytes of data with a single mouse click--but we
imagine that people can't multiply and divide?

            The one remaining question is that of currency
speculation--fear of speculators, not the desire for efficiency, is what has
led Argentina to talk seriously about replacing pesos with dollars and made
dollarization at least a topic of discussion elsewhere in Latin America. But
while currency speculation may have had disastrous impacts in some countries,
in others letting the currency drop seems to have been just what the doctor
ordered. Australia's floating dollar has apparently allowed the island
continent to sail almost unscathed through the Asian crisis. Even in Brazil it
appears that fears that a drop in the currency would bring back hyperinflation
were unwarranted. And to me, Argentina and Brazil both look a lot like
Australia: resource-rich nations a long way from anywhere, with no dominant
Northern Hemisphere trading partner. Economic logic suggests that in the long
run such countries, if they can put their inflationary histories behind them,
have no business adopting the currency of a faraway country which will not take
their interests into account.

            So let's recognize this current enthusiasm for
currency unification as what it is: an intellectual fad, not a deep insight. I
say let a hundred currencies bloom. Well, maybe 20 or 30.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Family Plots 

            The term "black comedy" has
become so elastic in the last few years that it now extends to entertainments
as various as Life Is Beautiful , in which Chaplinesque sentimentality is
juxtaposed with concentration-camp horror, and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking
Barrels , in which flyspeck louts machine-gun other flyspeck louts with
farcical haplessness. Somewhere in the middle comes my ideal black comedy, in
which humans are base but their emotions have weight, and the human condition,
while irremediable, is leavened by the artist's cheery sleight of hand. A great
black comedy should be palatable but hard to digest, slipping easily down the
gullet and then sticking in the gut. The form is currently represented by an
unheralded, low-budget jewel called Six Ways to Sunday , directed by Adam
Bernstein from a script he wrote with Marc Gerald. Its young protagonist, Harry
Odum (Norman Reedus), a fry-cook in the postindustrial wasteland that is
Youngstown, Ohio, lives with a shut-in mother, Kate (Deborah Harry), who has
contrived to keep him in a state of sexual ignorance. A breathy ex-prostitute
now going to seed, she bathes Harry, controls the light in his room, and warns
him off relations with "sluts" while hovering inches from his face in low-cut
nighties. Harry's a walking Freudian time bomb.

            Invited by his buddy
Arnie (Adrien Brody), a Jewish boy with garish rapper affectations, to help
collect a debt for a mobster from the proprietor of a sex club, Harry finds
himself bombarded by images of topless women and unable to keep from whaling on
a man they came only to threaten. "I hope I killed him," he says, when pulled
from the man's bloody, broken body. And then: "I hope I didn't kill him."
Seasoned criminals love to exploit such youthful intensity, and Harry is soon
adopted by Abie "The Bug" (Peter Appel) and then by his boss, Varga (Jerry
Adler), Jewish gangsters in search of a more dependable bully boy than the
chaotic Arnie. Bringing Harry along means teaching him how to dress and spend
money ("Having money and not flashing it is strictly for gentiles," they
explain); treating him to a whore (Anna Thompson), whom he reluctantly accepts
and then pays not to have sex with ("Do I seem normal with girls? Sexually?" he
asks); and presenting him with a huge switchblade, which Harry is shortly
expected to plunge into the heart of a man he has never met.

            S ix 
               Ways to Sunday is freely based on the
1962 novel Portrait of a Young Man Drowning , by Charles Perry, an
African-American playwright and performer who died of cancer before completing
a second book. Set in Brooklyn, Perry's novel (which features white characters)
is bleaker than the film, less archly distant, with a nastier ending. Bernstein
and Gerald have made it their own. The movie's slapstick and brutality inhabit
the same psychological landscape, and Harry's acts of violence are viewed in
stroboscopic flashes, held long enough to convey their garishness but so
fleetingly that you might giggle at your own uncertainty: Did he really do
what I think he did? I hesitate to use the word "offbeat," which has come
to describe a metronomical quirkiness that's as predictable as anything on the
beat, but here the surreal touches are sprung without overture, like frogs that
just happen to be hopping across the screen. Harry is dogged by a phantom
slickster, Madden (Holter Graham), who leers at women and then demonstrates how
to molest them. Is it Madden who's attacking Varga's Hungarian maid Iris (Elina
Lowensohn), or is Madden a stand-in for Harry? Iris is a tiny yet imposing
thing (Lowensohn was Dracula's daughter in Michael Almereyda's 1994 movie
Nadja ) with a game leg; it was her "affliction," says Harry, later, that
was the source of his attraction. "That's why I was attracted to you ,"
she replies, prompting a look of puzzlement. Here, as elsewhere, Reedus is
remarkable, his face both masklike and porous, so that you never consciously
register the ways in which Harry is dissolving before your eyes--but you're not
in the least surprised when he does.

            Deborah Harry is no
actress--her speaking voice is as dead as her singing voice is glassy. But Kate
is meant to be zonked and zombielike, a Mummy Dearest, and this bedraggled
ghost of a glamorous icon is startlingly potent. Those cheekbones seem to
stretch from one side of the screen to other--they hold up Harry's features,
which might otherwise collapse. The director underlines the tension between her
past and present by using the Blondie song "Sunday Girl" in a tender encounter
between Harry and Iris in a diner. At first I questioned the wisdom of that--it
seemed a little cheap. But Bernstein has brought off a coup, making Kate a
literal presence in that scene and reinforcing Deborah Harry's stature. It's
even a coup that Harry's mom is played by a Harry--the incestuousness extending
to their very names.

            My first professional movie reviews were written in 1982 at
the weekly Boston Phoenix under the tutelage of Stephen Schiff, then a
magisterial film critic as well as an exacting editor. Presented with a
sentence containing two adjectives in succession ("Jason Tiddlywinks gives a
funky, severe performance"), Schiff would say, "Choose one." "Well, gee, I
dunno, the performance is funky but also kinda severe so you kinda need both."
"Choose one," he would repeat. Squirming, I would direct him to eliminate an
adjective and then Schiff, after a respectful beat, would strike the other.
Where adjectives are concerned, there's no substitute for tough love.

            Now that Schiff has
become a big-deal screenwriter (his Lolita generated scads of ink and
his adaptation of True Crime , directed by and starring Clint Eastwood,
opens next week), it's as if those last 17 years didn't happen. I'm sitting
here trying to choose one or another adjective for his newest script, The
Deep End of the Ocean --an exhausting task because I'm genuinely of two
minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's
heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with
its psychological elisions to let it off the hook. Based on a novel--one of
those Oprah best sellers--by Jacquelyn Mitchard, it's the story of a mother,
Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose 3-year-old son vanishes in a hotel
lobby. The first section of the film dramatizes the apparent kidnapping and its
agonizing aftermath. Then, after nine years in which Beth and her husband, Pat
(Treat Williams), achieve a queasy normalcy with their remaining two children,
a 12-year-old boy (Ryan Merriman) shows up at their door offering to cut their
lawn for money. Is it? Could it be? (I hope I'm not spoiling anything--all this
is in the film's coming attractions.)

            The first part of The Deep End of the Ocean is
powerful all right but, given this kind of material, that isn't much of an
achievement. And I'm not sure what Whoopi Goldberg is doing there as a lesbian
detective with about as much verisimilitude as Goldberg's 500-year-old alien
bartender on Star Trek: The Next Generation . But in the nebulous middle
section, the movie develops layers, and Schiff and director Ulu Grosbard
achieve something extraordinary: They dramatize the undramatized--the latent.
When an actress such as Patricia Arquette presents a blank face to the camera,
it's really blank, but Pfeiffer's blankness can make you seasick with its
sloshing, stormy underpinnings. Williams gives off glints of suppressed
violence and, as the couple's older son, Jonathan Jackson has a queer
affectlessness that signals something roiling underneath. The family's fake
equilibrium creates a tension that's nearly unbearable, and when the front door
swung open and that boy stood there it was all I could do to keep from jumping
out of my seat.

            But the movie grows
increasingly frustrating. The kid, we learn, was taken by a woman crazy with
the loss of her own baby and then raised, after her suicide, by a big-hearted
guy called George (John Kapelos), who had no knowledge of his adopted son's
true origins. So the Cappadoras' elation at the return of their son is
gradually eroded by the realization that their boy still thinks of George as
his real father. But how are we to take the evident inability of Beth and Pat
even to address the subject of the boy's nine years with another couple or
their bland expectation that he'll nestle himself into the family bosom as if
he'd never left? Are they supposed to be so shallow, so uncurious, so
dim? It's hard to tell, since so much has been left off-screen--including a
climactic discussion between the boy and his stepfather that triggers the
film's absurd ending.

            There's another aspect of Mitchard's narrative that bugs
me, although here my reasons are entirely personal. As someone born to a mother
in her first year of medical school and a father in his third, I was--with
great regret--placed in the care of grandparents for the first years of my life
and later reclaimed before my third birthday. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
in psychiatric bills later, I can speak about this with limited objectivity;
the point is that, although very young when taken from my primary
caregivers--my grandparents--I recall both the joy of my years with them and
the hellish trauma of separation more vividly than much of what happened to me
last week. I risk boring you with my autobiography to buttress my contention
that The Deep End of the Ocean is fundamentally bogus. I don't buy that
Sam, in his fourth year at the time of his snatching, would, less than a decade
later, have no recollection of the parents and siblings with whom he'd spent
the first three, and that only the aroma of a cedar chest would rekindle faint
memories of his warm life among the Cappadoras. I find it absurd that he could
ever have settled into life with his new family (especially a certifiably crazy
mother) with no scars, growing into a happy, snub-nosed, uncomplicated
adolescent instead of, say, the delusional momma's-boy assassin of Six Ways
to Sunday --or, for that matter, a vaguely unstable wannabe movie critic.
People differ, of course, and there might be ways to account for Sam's
surprising evolution, but they're not in the novel and they're certainly not in
the movie.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Method-ology
            

            As a miffed scientist, I wish to register my
protestations about Timothy Noah's "." Your Intdis Index is an accounting
system; it has nothing to do with the scientific method. The scientific method
is about hypothesis testing and experimentation. Simply giving things numerical
values is not science.

            I can understand your
wanting to shame the Wall Street Journal with some semblance of
mathematical rigor, but Lord knows we poor scientists have to defend ourselves
against enough nonsense posing as science ("Mister Chairman, how can that 10
year study show us anything about bears when my cousin told me he never saw a
bear in his life?").

            
               --Kate Wing
            

            
Washington

            
               Personal Non
Grata
            

            "" wonders if the
principal investigator for the research project on the effect of women's work
on young children and the journalist who reported the story in the Washington Post , themselves, have
young children and worked outside the home. But the Los Angeles Times
lead story was about another research finding (air pollution in Southern
California), and we did not learn whether the researchers and journalists
involved live in L.A. Newspapers continually report on cancer research or heart
disease without telling us if the reporters ever had those diseases, or if they
or any member of their immediate family is an albino lab rat, and so on.

            
               --John Haaga

            
Bethesda, Md.

            
               Does He or Doesn't
She?
            

            If Tinky Winky (see "")
has no explicit gender, how do you know that the handbag, tutu, and so on
aren't veiled signals that Tinky is female?

            -- Pete Wright
            

            
               Akron, Ohio
            

            
               Jacob Weisberg
replies: I didn't say the Teletubbies have no gender, because they do. Two are
ostensibly male (Tinky Winky and Dipsy), and two are ostensibly female (Laa Laa
and Po). I said they have no intended sexual orientation.
            

            
               Choose and
Lose
            

            I adore intellectual parlor games as much as the
next girl. But Jacob Weisberg's "" seems to be offered up as genuine critical
insight rather than as the "cocktail chatter" it is. Like all dichotomies,
Apollonian vs. Dionysian is limited as a means of ordering the world. It's like
putting a filter over a camera lens: Some colors are heightened, but others are
completely obscured, and the final result may bear no resemblance to reality.
Labeling Matisse a "cool, calm, Northern European" and Picasso as a "hot,
temperamental Spaniard" is that kind of distortion (not to mention ethnic
stereotyping of the most trivial and annoying sort). Do Picasso's "blue period"
paintings really strike one as "hot" and "temperamental"?

            Do the terms apply to a work's form or its content?
I was especially amused by the Dickinson/Whitman dichotomy. Dickinson's poetry
is simply too weird, and yes, sexual (talk about images of "ecstatic release"),
to fit comfortably into a category whose hallmarks are deemed to be "measure,
reason, and control." Yes, you can sing just about every one of Dickinson's
poems to the tune of "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing" (try it, it's fun),
but that kind of surface-level orderliness is undermined by the speaker's
disconcerting propensity to topple into the abyss, whether prompted by union
with God, union with the beloved, or union with death. If a work is "about"
"abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release," but its execution displays
"measure, reason, and control" --one might place any number of baroque operas
in this category, for instance, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, for that matter.

            Equally annoying is the
assertion that we are all either Matisse or Picasso people, or Stones or
Beatles people. Many of my older acquaintances have little tolerance for
any of them, while I would never be able to make a "desert island"
choice between them--really. Besides, "Sympathy for the Devil" only seems
darker and more subterranean than "Girl."

            
               --Kathleen R.
O'Connell
            

            New York City

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 231: &quot;Ultracolossal&quot;

            

               An announcement Sunday roiled the world of the superjumbo. Who plans to
do what?
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 230)--"Whoooo's Johnny":
            

            

               
                  
                     "Johnny has been such an effective spokesperson for us
because he truly believes in the power of our products," says the president of
New Jersey's Franklin Electronics. Who is endorsing
what?
                  
               
            

            
"Johnnie Cochran endorsing open-source software. 'If they share the code, you
must download!' "-- Dee Lacey ( Kathy Kreutzer had a similar
answer.)

            "John
Travolta for the Franklin Stayin' Alive Digital Fever Thermometer."-- Molly
Shearer Gabel
            

            
"Perhaps someone should inform Franklin Electronics that, contrary to what they
might expect, having John Wayne Gacy endorse your clown-makeup line is a bad
call."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "I have
no idea, which seems to cast doubt on the theory that he's such an effective
spokesman."-- Heather Harmon
            

            "Johnny
Cash narrates Franklin's electronic Holy Bibles. Willie Nelson's slated to
voice their new 'Talking Talmud.' "-- Beth Sherman
            

            Click
for more responses.

            
               Randy's
Self-Reference Wrap-Up
            

            To our youngest players, the title of Thursday's
question may be as ancient and obscure as Edgar Bergen's wacky catch phrase:
"I'm a ventriloquist on the radio, suckers!" or Pedro's "S'all right." Ah,
Pedro, Pedro, Pedro. In last Wednesday's New York Times , Richard Severo
remembered: "Originally, Pedro had a body that was crushed in a train wreck
near Chicago. Señor Wences, salvaging the head, put it in a box. At first,
those who booked the act resisted; they did not think people would relate to a
head in a box. Señor Wences prevailed and Pedro proved almost as big a hit as
Johnny." Not Heeere's Johnny. Not quiz question Johnny. This Johnny was just a
wig and a smear of lipstick on a clenched fist, but he made Señor Wences that
rarest of performers, a genuinely funny ventriloquist. Señor Wences died last
Tuesday at age 103.

            Some other Johnnies
neglected by quiz participants--Johnny Angel (Shelley Fabares), Johnny One Note
(Rodgers and Hart), Johnny Too Bad (a swell song from The Harder They
Come ), and this line of dialogue from the 1959 racially charged English
murder mystery Sapphire , spoken, if I recall correctly, by Horace Big
Cigar (Robert Adams): "We got plenty Johnnies, boss." Indeed we do.

            
               Johnny on the Spot
Answer
            

            Johnny Cash is endorsing
computer bibles. And he's not just a pitchman; he's a user. He's also in on the
manufacturing: The man in black narrates the desktop version of the King James
Bible, scheduled for a July release.

            
               Death With Dignity
Extra
            

            A published photograph of
Joe DiMaggio's memorial service last Friday in St. Patrick's Cathedral shows
Rudolph Giuliani seated next to Henry Kissinger. Despite the crude color
reproduction used by the Times , you can actually see the cloud of pure
evil hanging over these two men. (Or is that Phil Rizzuto's head?) Right behind
them you can just make out a portal opening up to hell, presumably for the
arrival of George Steinbrenner.

            Deeply reverential fun facts:

            

               Dr. Rock Positano, organizer of the day's events, was DiMaggio's foot
doctor. He has also treated the feet of Mort Zuckerman, Giuliani, and
Kissinger.

               The post-mourning brunch was held at Le Cirque 2000. Few could eat through
their grief. If by "few" you mean "all."

               Steinbrenner said his conversation with brunch partner Kissinger was
"better than my four years at Williams. But I didn't know any mass murderers at
Williams." If by "said" you exclude the final sentence.

               Did I make that clear? He's held the naked feet of Zuckerman, Giuliani, and
Kissinger. Disgusting yet biblical yet disgusting.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Johnny Carson's inadequate circulatory system.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Paper Swoon

            As a striving free-lancer,
I believe in the three note theory of success: i.e., send three flattering
missives to the right people each day, and you'll be at the top in no time. It
doesn't really matter what you write--but what you write on does matter.
Stationery has always been important, but paper's cachet as a cultural
signifier has increased dramatically in the age of e-mail. While friends don't
care if you send them letters on recycled grocery bags, those who don't know
you will scrutinize the note--the paper, the letterhead--and judge you.

            Cognizant of the perils
of purchasing stationery, I start at the top, Cartier--arguably the snootiest
stationer around. At the desk of the 52 nd Street store in Manhattan,
I find a stern saleswoman at the desk taking an order from "Mr. Ambassador" on
the phone. She hangs up, looks at her watch, and says she can give me about 10
minutes--until the next ambassador, I guess. The first stationery she shows me
is 32 pound (meaning that 500 stacked sheets of it will weigh that much). The
sheet is thick enough to choke a Hewlett-Packard, which is the point, of
course. It's the preferred weight for writing paper, the maximum recommended
for laser printers is 28 pound.

            Before we discuss paper price, she informs me that the name
and address die to engrave the stationery will cost $130. A little steep, I
suggest. A die that includes a family crest is closer to $1,000, she says
crisply, "and people enjoy leaving their address dies to others in their
wills."

            We whip through some
options--envelopes lined with tissue, beveling or indenting the sheet around
the edge to create a border, stamping the family crest in gold--before we
return to paper prices: Fifty ecru, note-sized sheets and matching envelopes go
for $254, engraving included. (That's about $5 a note.) The price for 50
business-sized sheets and envelopes is $259.50, and 50 6 inch by 4 inch note
cards and envelopes cost $256.

            My fingers glide across the soft paper like skates on a
pond. And then the saleswoman lets it slip: Cartier's paper is actually Crane's
32 pound paper.

            Stephen Crane made the paper for the first colonial
bank notes back in 1776; Paul Revere did the engraving. Those new 20s in your
wallet with the Andrew Jackson watermark are Crane & Co.'s handiwork. In
addition to the U.S. Mint and the treasuries of 40 other countries, Crane
supplies paper for about 3,000 retail stationers in the United States. The
locations of Crane & Co.'s 13 outlets can be found on the firm's
Web site, and another page lets you search by ZIP code or international region for other retailers.
(A Greenwich, Conn., calligrapher tells me that Tiffany & Co. also
repackages Crane's paper.)

            "Most of our social
stationery is 32 pound, 100 percent cotton rag," says Leslie Reed, Crane's
manager of personal products. Cotton's long fibers are what make paper soft. In
the old days, all paper was made of cotton rags, hence the name. Today, most
writing paper is made of 25 percent cotton and 75 percent wood pulp. The
problem with wood pulp is that paper makers have to use acid to break it
down--and the chemical never quits working. This explains why recently printed,
cheaply made books are self-immolating in the Library of Congress, while
500-year-old Gutenberg Bibles are OK.

            Some paperphiles buy foreign stationery made by Smythson of
Bond Street, London, or by Pineider of Florence, Italy. Smythsons outlets can
be traced via a toll-free number, (800) 345-6839. The saleswoman at Blacker and
Kooby, on 87 th and Madison, shows me some Smythson sheets and
envelopes, offering that it is the paper of choice of the British royal family.
Beautiful and very "U," as Nancy Mitford would say, but almost U in that hounds
and blood sausage way. A little rumply--the cards don't quite match the
envelopes.

            Then she opens a green
leather case, revealing Pineider samples. It made me believe, as some
scientists contend, that the beauty response is hard-wired. The paper is both
languid and luminous, and it feels denser than Crane's. But the 225-year-old
Italian stationers don't bother with weight standards, used for currency and
book paper, because this stuff is strictly for letter writing. It is, they say,
the smoothest possible writing surface you can find. It would be a crime to use
anything other than a good fountain pen on it. But which pen? That's a research
project unto itself.

            The sheets are creamy white and the tissue lining in the
envelope a bluer white. The saleswoman didn't have to drop names (the pope and
Stevie Wonder) to justify the price of 75 note-sized sheets and envelopes. At
$144 ($1.92 per note), this stationery is a steal. But the engraving cost is a
steep $175 and $42 for the die plate. You can find Pineider outlets by calling
(800) 616-9111.

            I stop by Kanter's Printers on 23 rd
Street, an address generated by the Crane Web site. Kanter's price for 100
note-sized sheets and envelopes on Crane's paper is $166 ($1.66 a note!), about
$100 if I use Strathmore, a competing paper, which is only 25 percent cotton
rag.

            To get the stationery
engraved, the die plate will cost $56, about average. It is a onetime charge,
and Kanter's--and most other stores--let you keep the plates. But if I forego
the luxury of engraving, the clerk will sell me 500 24 pound Strathmore sheets
and envelopes, flat printed, for $167. (That's 33 cents a note. Now we're
really talking.) Turnaround time for printing is 10 days, about a month faster
than either Smythson or Pineider.

            If you're not going Europaper, the mom and pop operations
are definitely the best value. Is engraved paper really worth it? I ask the
printer. "Some people want a Caddy and others want a Chevy," he shrugs. "Does
anyone use colored paper?" "Hairdressers and discos."

            After choosing paper, you
must pick a size. Business-sized sheets are a mistake for two reasons: 1) it's
difficult to write enough to fill that much space; and 2) that much flattery
might be misinterpreted as stalking. The note-sized sheets look insubstantial
and girlie. The 6 by 4 cards are best because they make a few scribbles look
weighty and dignified.

            Luckily, there are only three sizes of fine stationery,
because there are hundreds of typefaces from which to compose your letterhead.
At stationery shops you see people agonizing over whether they're really more
Helvetica than Old Roman. The sample books don't help much because you want to
see how it looks in your name on the size sheet you've chosen. Some Crane &
Co. outlets let you test drive a sample of typefaces on a computer. The
Levenger Web site, which sells Crane's, limits you to four
sensible choices, so you can't go too far wrong. Most professional printers
will do a proof of your letterhead for $12-$25.

            Let me offer one piece of advice: Avoid monograms.
Those three initials may look aristocratic, but that's because they were first
used by drunken, illiterate royals who couldn't write their whole names. I
wonder if Tom Wolfe knows that? His writing paper has a large blue, diamond
shaped monogram at the top. But then, he doesn't need to observe the three note
theory anymore.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             My Way to the eBay

            According to the voice on
the radio, we should all be worried about "compulsive gamblers" who spend
several hours a day playing slot machines. I can't figure out what the voice
was thinking. Nobody who spends several hours a day playing slot machines can
be called a gambler. Gambling is about risk and uncertainty. Sit long enough in
front of the slots, and you'll lose your money at an entirely predictable rate.
That's the very opposite of gambling.

            Here's what a gambler
does: He takes a large fraction of what he's got and risks it on a single spin
of the wheels. You don't see much of that in the casinos. Instead, you see
folks lugging around buckets filled with quarters, parceling those quarters out
one at a time. There's a name for that strategy: It's called diversification,
and its purpose is to eliminate risk. The more time these people spend at the
slot machines, the less they're gambling.

            Now, I'm willing to believe this behavior can become
compulsive, but there are still distinctions worth maintaining. These people
aren't addicted to gambling. They're addicted to sitting in front of slot
machines.

            Likewise, I'm not
addicted to shopping; I'm addicted to eBay--the hottest auction site on the
Internet. I know this because my bidding strategy, which would appear insane to
any casual but thoughtful observer, makes sense only in the presence of a
compulsion to spend as much time as possible monitoring my auctions.

            Most eBay items are sold in "second-bid" auctions, which
means the high bidder gets the item and pays the amount of the second-highest
bid (I've left out a few complications that can be ignored here). Ordinarily,
there is only one sensible strategy in a second-bid auction: Bid the highest
amount you'd be willing to pay; then sit back and wait to see if you've
won.

            In a standard English
auction, where the high bidder pays his own bid, bidders usually try to
"lowball"--that is, to bid less than they're willing to pay, in the hope of
walking away with a bargain. But there's no reason to lowball in a second-bid
auction, because the amount you pay is independent of the amount you bid. If
the antique royal blue water pitcher is worth $300 to me, I should bid $300,
not $250. (If you're not convinced, click for a detailed explanation.)

            Moreover, the same reasoning says that it makes not a shred
of difference whether I bid early or late. So, why do I repeatedly find myself
bidding furiously in the last five minutes of an auction and submitting three
different bids in succession when one should suffice? Either I'm behaving
irrationally or my analysis of bidding strategy contains an invalid assumption.
For that, there are several candidates.

            First, I assumed that I
start off knowing what I'm willing to pay for the water pitcher. But maybe
that's wrong. Maybe I learn what I'm willing to pay by observing the
progress of the auction. eBay lets me observe the number of bidders, the
identity of the highest bidder (so far), and the amount of the second-highest
bid (so far). When 10 new bidders jump in, or when a bidder I respect moves out
in front of the pack, I might revise my valuation and submit a new bid.

            Of course, that explanation works only if I care about the
other bidders' opinions--say, because I think they know more than I do or
because I'm trying to predict what kind of resale market I might face someday.
For me, though, the resale market is irrelevant; I never resell anything,
thanks to the same obsessive traits that keep me on eBay in the first place.
(On the other hand, maybe I do care about resale prices, because I like knowing
that my possessions inspire envy.)

            If I can learn from other bidders, then they can
learn from me--which is the second reason I might want to deviate from a
simplistic "bid and wait" strategy. I bid low at first to convince my
competitors that the item isn't worth much. Then I jump in with a higher bid at
the end, hoping that at least some of those competitors are away from their
computers and unable to respond.

            So, bidding should be
leisurely when bidders have little to learn from each other (say, when they're
bidding on a new computer that's been widely reviewed) and intense when some
bidders are far more expert than others (say, when they're bidding on a heart
defibrillator for home use). That's a nice testable hypothesis. Unfortunately,
it seems to have failed its first test. When one of my colleagues used eBay to
sell an outrageously expensive (i.e., over $1,000) bottle of Bordeaux wine,
three bidders submitted eight different bids in the first three days. Now, if
somebody is willing to pay $1,000 for a bottle of wine, I'm inclined to guess
that he's well informed about its quality. So why are these people revising
their bids?

            Maybe they're just addicted to bidding. Maybe I am too.
Last week, eBay listed a collectible knife with which I am entirely familiar. I
bid $225, which exhausted my willingness to pay. But in the final five minutes,
I raised my bid to $250, then $275, then $300, and finally won the auction,
exhilarated by my victory.

            Maybe eBay just makes me giddy. As a free market
aficionado, I am intoxicated by the prospect of one-stop shopping for houses,
cars, Beanie Babies, and underwear, all at prices that adjust instantly to the
demands of consumers around the globe. Or maybe the behavior of eBayers can be
explained only by subtler and more carefully tested theories that have not yet
been devised. Given the mountain of data being generated by eBay, I suspect
those theories will be the stuff of doctoral theses for a long time to
come.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Wealth of Stein

            A year ago I was living in
a $150,000 apartment, which I owned. It was a small, two-room apartment. Now I
am living in a $175,000 apartment, which I own. It is also a small two-room
apartment. In fact, it is the same apartment, although a little shabbier. A
year ago I could have sold the apartment for $150,000. Now I can sell it for
$175,000.

            Am I richer? I would
have $25,000 more in cash if I sold today vs. a year ago. But money is a
sterile thing, good only for what it will buy. Today's $175,000 will buy 62,724
packages of Product 19, whereas last year's $150,000 would have bought only
53,763 packages, so I am richer in Product 19. I do not, however, live on
Product 19 alone.

            We are accustomed to the idea that we should convert all
dollar amounts to "real" values by adjusting with the consumer price index.
Because the CPI rose by 1.7 percent in the past year (January to January), the
value of my apartment rose by only 14.7 percent in terms of the goods and
services included in the CPI, rather than the 16.6 percent by which it rose in
terms of dollars.

            But if I sell my
apartment, I probably won't use the proceeds to buy that month's assortment of
stuff that's in the CPI. I will probably want to buy some other asset that will
yield a stream of income into the future. I could, for example, buy 30-year
Treasury bonds. In March 1998 the $150,000 from my apartment sale would have
bought bonds with a total yield of $8,925 a year. In March 1999 with $175,000 I
can buy such bonds with a yield of $9,730 a year. In those terms I have got
richer.

            But Treasury bonds are not what make everyone feel richer
every day. I might want to be more venturesome in the hope of getting a
larger--though riskier--income stream. Suppose I buy shares in the S&P 500
Index. The price of that index rose 21.3 percent in the past year (to March
11). Since the price of my apartment rose by only 16.6 percent, I can buy only
96.1 percent as much of the S&P 500 as I could have bought a year ago. But
what I care about is how much future income I will get. If the future income
from the stocks in the S&P 500 has risen by 4 percent per share, I would be
getting as much future income from buying in 1999 as I would have got from
buying in 1998. But I really don't know whether it has risen that much. So, I
don't know whether the shares of the S&P 500 I can buy for $175,000 in
March 1999 are worth more than the shares I could have bought in March
1998.

            In March 1998 I could
have bought 1,859 shares of Microsoft for the $150,000 price of my apartment.
In March 1999 I can buy 1,084 shares. Am I richer or poorer in terms of the
opportunity to earn income from Microsoft? Possibly the probable income from
the 1,084 shares is greater than the probable income from the 1,859 shares was.
But I don't know.

            So am I richer than I was? The rise in the price tag of my
apartment, combined with the changes in prices of other things, changes the
opportunities I face. I have an opportunity to get more cash, more Product 19,
and more annual income from Treasury bonds. In those terms I have become
richer. In terms of opportunity to enjoy living in my apartment, I am neither
richer nor poorer. I have become poorer in terms of my opportunity to buy the
S&P 500 and even poorer in terms of my opportunity to buy Microsoft.
Whether I have become richer or poorer in opportunity to earn income from the
S&P 500 or from Microsoft I don't know, and neither does anyone else.

            I suppose we do know
something about who has got richer or poorer relative to others in the past two
years. The person who owned shares in Microsoft has got richer relative to the
person who owned the S&P 500, and that person has got richer relative to
me, and I have got richer relative to the people who produced the stuff that
went into the CPI, and they have got richer relative to the people who had
cash. I guess I am richer relative to the poor fellow who wants to earn the
cost of my apartment by writing essays for $1 a word.

            The wealth of the nation is its future stream of national
income. That stream is almost certainly a rising one. Year by year, and little
by little, we are as a nation--taking us all together--getting richer. But that
has little to do with, and is much less than, the surge in asset prices in the
past two years. Wealth is not wealth that alters when Greenspan speaks.

            And yet, and yet, despite these uncertainties I
feel richer when the price tag on the apartment I live in goes up. That may be
an illusion, but illusions are facts of life.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Serbs, Kosovars, Israelis, Palestinians

            Ask two Israelis a question
on any subject, and you'll hear six opinions (nine during election season) and
probably start a brawl. And even on Kosovo, a topic you wouldn't think Israelis
could disagree about, they are managing to squabble, revealing a peculiar
ambivalence about this black-and-white issue.

            American Jews have
uniformly greeted the Serbian brutality in Kosovo with outrage. They identified
with the displaced Kosovars, comparing them to the Jews of the Holocaust. They
commended NATO for bombing quickly rather than ignoring the brutality as Allied
leaders did during the Holocaust. One Jewish organization ran newspaper ads
depicting trainloads of bedraggled Kosovars, an echo of Nazi concentration camp
trains. American Jews poured cash into half a dozen relief funds established by
national Jewish groups, and at least two Jewish agencies sent relief teams to
the Balkans.

            Israeli Jews' reaction to Kosovo has been equally intense
but much more complicated. Like American Jews, most Israeli Jews view Kosovo as
a reminder of the Holocaust and feel a special obligation to aid Kosovars.
Israel has done more for Kosovar relief than any other non-NATO country (as
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never hesitates to note). Israel sent a field
hospital and 80 doctors to Macedonia and welcomed 112 Kosovar refugees,
offering them permanent residence. Israelis also mobbed a huge Kosovo benefit
concert.

            But beneath Israelis'
sympathy for Kosovars lurk more perplexing reactions that illuminate the
anxieties of a state where a beleaguered ethnic minority seeks independence,
the byzantine nature of Israeli electoral politics, and the enduring weight of
the Holocaust in Israel--but not the weight you'd expect.

            Israeli doubts about Kosovo begin with Israeli doubts about
Palestinians. Palestinian newspapers and leaders have compared the ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo to the Palestinian "nakba " of 1948, when thousands
of Palestinians fled Israel and ended up in permanent refugee camps. (This
analogy has been endorsed by the likes of the Economist , which called
the flight of the Palestinians an unpunished ethnic cleansing.) Palestinians
also claim that the West's intervention to preserve Kosovar autonomy confirms
their right to independence. "We will ask the international community to
intervene to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and to expel the
settlers from it," said Ahmed Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian Authority's Cabinet
secretary, citing the Kosovo bombing as exemplar.

            Most Israelis are merely
irritated with this Palestinian claim, viewing it as an unseemly attempt to
exploit the Kosovo crisis and as a faulty analogy. (An Arab invasion of Israel
in 1948 prompted the Palestinian flight, not an Israeli invasion of Arab
territory.) But Israel's far right has taken the Palestinian claim seriously.
The far right views Kosovo not as tragedy but as threat, "a dangerous
precedent." Some right-wing Knesset members have called for an end to the
airstrikes: If the West intervenes on behalf of an independence-seeking ethnic
minority in Kosovo, one asked, "couldn't it happen here, too, in a different
variation today or tomorrow?"

            The Serbs only exacerbate Palestinian righteousness and
Israeli right-wing paranoia by calling Kosovo Serbia's "Jerusalem." If Kosovo
is Jerusalem, that means that either a) Israel's hold on Jerusalem is
unjustified, as Palestinians argue; or b) Serbia's hold on Kosovo is justified,
as a few fringe-right Israelis are now hinting.

            Kosovo ambivalence has
also become a pawn in next month's Israeli election. The Israeli left has
blasted Netanyahu for his languorous response to the humanitarian crisis: He
took several days to decide that Israel would help refugees and several more
days to announce support for bombing.

            But Netanyahu and his allies, particularly hawkish Foreign
Minister Ariel Sharon, are using Kosovo more cleverly. Early in the bombing,
Sharon warned that an independent Kosovo could become the heart of a "Greater
Albania" that would be a staging ground for Muslim terrorism. Netanyahu quickly
disavowed Sharon's remarks, but Sharon had scored points with the far right,
where anti-Muslim sentiment abounds. Israeli media have been full of
unsubstantiated reports that the Kosovo Liberation Army is funded by Iran,
Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, and Hezbollah. Calls to Israel's far-right talk
radio station have demanded that Israel send its Muslim Kosovar refugees to
Iran or Saudi Arabia.

            Sharon has especially
exploited Kosovo to court Israel's 1 million new Russian immigrants, whose
votes are expected to decide the election's outcome. Sharon has visited Russia
three times in the past few months, including once in the midst of the Kosovo
bombing. Sharon eagerly sucked up to Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov,
implicitly condemning the NATO bombing during his most recent trip. Russian
Israelis are not especially pro-Serb, but they definitely want close ties with
Russia. So, Sharon is using Kosovo to butter up Russia. That, in turn, could
swing Russian voters.

            The final and most beguiling aspect of Israel's Kosovo
ambivalence is Holocaust remembrance but of a different sort. There is
lingering Israeli sympathy for Serbia rooted in Serbs' supposedly admirable
behavior during the Holocaust. The premise: 1) Serbs welcomed Jews into their
anti-Nazi guerilla groups; 2) individual Serbs bravely sheltered Jews from the
Nazis; 3) Serbs fought the Nazis harder than anyone; and 4) both Serbs and Jews
were victimized by brutal Croats and Bosnian Muslims.

            During the past decade,
Serbia has taken advantage of this version of its World War II history to make
common cause with Israel. In the late '80s, with the blessing of Slobodan
Milosevic, a group of Serbs organized the Serbian Jewish Friendship Society,
which has propagandized endlessly about Serbia's Holocaust decency. (Serbia
also tried to ally with Israel over their shared enmity with Muslims.) Serb and
Israeli cities made themselves sister cities. When Iraq was shooting missiles
into Israel during the Gulf War, a delegation of Serbs traveled to Tel Aviv to
show solidarity. There were rumors that Israel even supplied Serbia with
arms.

            This mythology of Serbian goodness paid off during Serbia's
Croatia and Bosnia wars. Israelis sided with the Serbs against the Croats, who
had been truly monstrous toward Jews during the war. And even when it became
clear that Serbs were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims, Israel was largely silent,
and even occasionally sympathetic, about Serb misbehavior.

            As it happens, Serbia's treatment of the Jews was
not as the Serbs have portrayed it. It's true that Tito's Communist Partisans
welcomed Jews into their guerilla units, and it's true that the Serbs were not
as terrible as the Croats and Bosnians. But, 1) the Chetniks, who are the
direct ancestors of today's Serbian nationalists, were consistently and
violently anti-Semitic. (The Chetniks also supported the Nazis for much of the
war, and even turned over Jews to them.) 2) The Serbian collaborationist regime
cooperated eagerly with the Nazis. 3) Serbia's Jews fared much worse than most
European Jews. Nazis exterminated more than 90 percent of Serbia's 15,000 Jews,
the women and children at a camp right outside Belgrade. Serbs did not resist
or protest this slaughter.

            Even so, vestigial sympathy for Serbs remains today
in Israel (and, in a much more limited way, in the United States). Israel has
seen a few small pro-Serb demonstrations during the Kosovo crisis, and Israeli
media frequently refer to the Serbs' decency during the Holocaust. Such
expressions of solidarity, along with right-wing distaste for the NATO bombing,
don't begin to outweigh Israeli sympathy for Kosovars and outrage at Serbs. But
God knows they're more than Milosevic and his people deserve.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 220: &quot;Sticks and Stones&quot;

            

               The list includes beasts, criminals, villains, thugs, fascist legions,
and hordes of murderers. List of what?
            

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 219)--"Not":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              The slogan in Maine,
promulgated at government expense, is "Not Me, Not Now." Not
what?
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Not
Hillel."-- Carrie Rickey ( Tim Carvell and Andrew
Silow-Carroll had similar answers.)

            "Not a
new law that requires women in labor to serve jury duty."-- Adrianne
Tolsch
            

            "Not a
chance in hell former President George Bush will allow blacks, Jews, Mexicans,
Canadians, or homosexuals within five miles of his Kennebunkport summer manse
... unless they are to be used as game."-- Larry Amaros
            

            "Oh,
this is Maine's tourist board, lamely responding to Vermont's campaign,
'Wouldn't You Rather Be in Vermont?' "-- Tim Carvell (similarly, Dale
Shuger )

            
"Maurice? What's that noise? You're not having sex with that lobster, are
you?"-- Chris Kelly
            

             

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Maine means L.L. Bean,
Stephen King, and the Bush family compound, which is basically Hyannis Port,
Mass., but with unattractive people who aren't having much fun or killing
people in drunken driving incidents, so I guess it's a trade-off. It is cold
there. And they grow lobsters in the rocky soil, between the rows of blueberry
trees that form such an attractive backdrop to Miss Angela Lansbury, star of
television's Baywatch , although you'd think they'd shoot a show like
that someplace warmer. The state seal shows a farmer and a seaman and a moose,
who seems faintly disapproving of the lifestyle of the farmer and the seaman,
which strikes me as impertinent coming from a ruminant. If two people are
happy, where's the harm, Mr. Oh-So-Judgmental Moose! The seal includes a pine
tree symbolizing other pine trees--does that still count as symbolism?--along
with the North Star and the Latin word "Dirigo," which actually means "I
direct," but if you imagine Mel Brooks saying it, sounds like "Dir I Go eating
a lobster which is not even slightly kosher! Like some big dumb moose!"

            
               Abstinent
Answer
            

            "Not Me, Not Now"--not sex. Particularly not teen
sex, particularly not nonmarital sex.

            Maine is one of 48 states--California and New
Hampshire have opted out--spending the $50 million a year Congress allocates
for abstinence education, with every $4 of federal money matched with $3 of
state funds.

            North Carolina now has an official state sex act:
"mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual relationships in the context of
marriage." The state bird is the cardinal; the state flower is dogwood; they're
not even dating.

            Wyoming's theme is "Sex and Reading Can Wait"
(except for the part about the reading).

            Utah, with its own view of the erotic, uses the
money to sponsor a hockey league. "When kids are playing hockey or basketball,"
says Nan Streeter, manager of Utah's reproductive health program, "it's hard
for them to get involved in risky behavior."

            Not to drag in my
personal life, but one thing that's always given me real erotic contentment is
knowing that, while having sex, it's hard for me to get involved in playing
hockey.

            
               Benelux
Extra
            

            A bloated promotional
supplement in today's New York Times touts the lowlands as a great place
to make a buck. Match the advertised attribute with the nation.

            
               National
Characteristic
            

            1. "The four P's" make it a great place to do
business.

            2. Aristotle would find it just the right size.

            3. "Most people ... live below sea level."

            4. "One Thousand Years Young."

            5. National capital transformed "from dour city of
bureaucrats into a magnet for multinationals."

            6. "The Times They Are a' Changing."

            7. "You're constantly
among attractive and amusing people who find you fascinating."

            

               Answers
            

            1. Belgium. The P's are place, people, price,
pro-business, pot-smoking, pouty, pert'n'sassy, and promiscuous. Is that
four?

            2. Luxembourg. The ad notes other attractive, small
things--microchips, squirrels, country music great Brenda Lee (except for the
squirrels and Ms. Lee).

            3. Netherlands. Say no more. I'm sold.

            4. Netherlands. And, coincidentally, Strom
Thurmond.

            5. Belgium. Brussels. And thank goodness all those
dull bureaucrats have been displaced by witty, playful multinational corporate
executives. Let the revels commence.

            6. Luxembourg, apparently, was the old tambourine
man's inspiration. Although oughtn't it be "a-changin' "? Maybe it's different
in Walloon.

            7. Randyland. No, it's
not on any map of the Benelux nations; you have to find it in your heart. OK,
everybody, let's recite the four P's.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Stephen King.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  The
Matrix
                (Warner Bros.). Keanu Reeves stars in this complex,
dystopic sci-fi thriller. Critics give high marks to the computer-enhanced
special effects but are divided on the merits of the ambitious plot and the
everything-but-the-kichen-sink filmic provenance, from Soylent Green to
Terminator 2 to Hong Kong actioners. For some the effects are enough:
It's "one big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure
flick. ... It has stu-freakin'-pendous special effects, hipster sang-froid out
the wazoo and a story line that makes only as much sense as it has to" (Michael
O'Sullivan, the Washington Post ). A grudgingly appreciative Janet Maslin
says that at its best the movie brings "Hong Kong action style home to
audiences in a mainstream American adventure with big prospects as a cult
classic and with the future very much in mind" (the New York Times ).
Others criticize the convoluted story line and call it strictly genre and
strictly for "guys in their teens and 20s, for whom the script's pretentious
mumbo-jumbo of undergraduate mythology, religious mysticism and technobabble
could even be a plus rather than a dramatic liability" (Todd McCarthy, Daily
Variety ). (To see the trailer and some fine Keanu pics, visit this fan
site; check out
David Edelstein's in 
                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  10 Things I
Hate About You
                (Buena Vista Pictures). Critics, many of whom
admitted they had been gearing up for "10 things I hate about this movie"
reviews, are charmed, if not in love with this week's Shakespeare offering.
(The source is The Taming of the Shrew .) Entertainment Weekly 's
Owen Gleiberman writes it "may be the cheekiest 'literary' update yet--a
post-riot grrrl gloss" of the play. Many gush over the foxy young star, Julia
Stiles. Complaints are mainly a result of critics'
upscale-high-school-caper-film fatigue. A few find the film irritating:
Daily Variety 's Dennis Harvey says, "it lurches all over the map,
encompassing dialogue both inspired and juvenile." (Visit the
official site.)

            
               
                  Cookie's
Fortune
                (October Films). Critical response to Robert Altman's
warm 'n' fuzzy Southern Gothic tale covers the spectrum. Most are tickled pink:
"a small miracle" with "an irresistibly companionable spirit" (David Denby,
The New Yorker ). The classic Altman deep bench (including Patricia Neal,
Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Chris O'Donnell, and Liv Tyler) does not
disappoint, and most play twinklingly kooky oddballs. However, several critics
are not so keen. More than one call it "Altman lite" (Jack Mathews, the
Daily News ) and say "[t]he fabled Altman atmosphere fails to jell"
(Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly ). A small cadre is seriously
disappointed: "another footnote to an Altman career that is fast becoming all
footnotes" (Richard Corliss, Time ) or, more simply, "[h]e falters again"
(Stanley Kauffmann, the New Republic ). (For more on director Robert
Altman, visit this site, which has links to interviews and essays about him, and
read Edelstein's review Friday in 
                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  A Walk on
the Moon
                (Miramax Films). Mixed reviews, tending toward the
negative, for this tale of sexual liberation set in 1969. A 32-year-old Jewish
housewife who married too young is on vacation in the Catskills with her two
kids and mother-in-law when she meets a sexy, young blouse peddler. The rest?
As the Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert says, it's "one small step for the
Blouse Man, a giant leap for Pearl Kantrowitz." Time 's Corliss writes
that the film's nice, if "you look past the gaffes and clichés." On the
positive side, most say the acting is great, and though the film "doesn't take
enormous chances," it is nevertheless "extremely satisfying" (Denby, The New
Yorker ). 
                  Slate
               's Edelstein is more positive than
most, praising the "deliciously resonant dual setting: a Catskills summer
community to which middle-class Jews from the city migrate to swim and eat and
play mah-jongg, and the gathering hippies at nearby Woodstock." ( the rest of
his review.)

            
               
                  The
Out-of-Towners
                (Paramount Pictures). Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin
star in a remake of Neil Simon's 1970 film that's "so feeble and unfocussed as
to make the Farrelly brothers of There's Something About Mary appear to
have suckled at the bosom of Aristophanes" (Lawrence Van Gelder, the New
York Times ). All critics agree; few put it so well. The plot: A nice
Midwestern couple goes through the wringer in Manhattan (lost luggage,
muggings, etc). The film's only breath of fresh air is John Cleese, who plays a
snobby hotel manager, recycling Basil Fawlty to good effect. (For more on
Martin, check out this site.)

            

               Books
            

            
               
                  Morgan:
American Financier
               , by Jean Strouse (Random House). Excellent
reviews for this doorstop-sized biography on the legendary financier: "a
magnificent, insightful study" (Maury Klein, the Wall Street Journal ).
Reviewers are impressed by Strouse's extensive research, which turned up a
truckload of new details on Morgan's life and, more importantly, by the
balanced portrait that she provides of a man whose biographies have to date
been colored by vindictive accounts from contemporaries with axes to grind. The
strongest negative comment comes from the New York Times Book Review ,
which warns that "readers without an interest in business and financial history
may find some of this material wearisome" (Richard Lingeman). (To buy the book
click here.)

            
               
                  The Times of
My Life and My Life With the Times , by Max Frankel (Random
House). Decent reviews for former New York Times executive editor Max
Frankel's memoirs: Ward Just calls it a "a smart, tough, scrupulous book" in
the New York Times Book Review ; in that fair journal's traditional
negative-comment spot (the penultimate paragraph) all Just can come up with is
that there's "a whiff of the puritan about Max Frankel, and perhaps also the
rustle of score-settling." Some reviewers note that his personal life--if you
can even say he had one--gets short shrift, and most say Frankel's time at the
helm is not half as interesting as his flight from Germany in his childhood and
his days as a young correspondent. Perhaps the best backhanded compliment is
provided by another New York Times review, this one from the daily
paper: Richard Kluger writes that the book has "only occasional spasms of the
immodesty that almost by definition infects all who venture into
autobiography." (To buy the book click here.)

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Mod Squad ;

               
                  Movie -- EdTV ;

               
                  Movie -- 20 Dates ;

               
                  Television -- Futurama ;

               
                  Book -- All Too Human: A Political Education , by
George Stephanopoulos;

               
                  Book -- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges , by Nathan
Englander.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  True Crime ;

               
                  Movie -- The King and I ;

               
                  Movie -- Forces of Nature ;

               
                  Television--
                  The Oscars ;

               
                  Book--
                  Years of Renewal , by Henry Kissinger.

            

             

            

               
                  
                     Movie--
                  
                  The
Deep End of the Ocean ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The
Corruptor ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The Rage: Carrie
2 ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Wing
Commander ;

               
                  Death-- Stanley Kubrick;

               
                  Book--
                  Black Hawk Down: A
Story of Modern War , by Mark Bowden.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Analyze This ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Cruel Intentions ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Lock, Stock & Two Smoking
Barrels ;

               
                  Book -- Monica's Story , by Andrew Morton;

               
                  Theater -- Annie Get Your Gun ;

               
                  Theater -- Bright Lights, Big
City .

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=470222513-07051999>Blowhards and Blowups</SPAN>

            
               
                  New
Republic , May 24
            

            The
cover story questions Sen. John McCain's beatification by the press. His
oft-recounted experiences in Vietnam and well-publicized stances for campaign
finance reform and against tobacco make him seem noble, rugged, and
enlightened. But the media have ignored his unsavory side, which includes
skirt-chasing and fervent social conservatism ("he's a thousand percent
anti-gay," says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.). ... A story gauges the intellectual heft of the presidential
candidates' platforms. Too-vague Bradley touts "lofty ideas but no proposals,"
too-specific Gore hawks "a profusion of proposals that obscure his big goals,"
and too-vague, too-unspecific Bush hasn't shared "either goal or proposal."
... A piece says that the White House's response to the China
intelligence scandal epitomizes Clinton's dangerous tendency "to substitute
damage control for foreign policy." The administration has brushed off the
charges with the same deft techniques--the dodge, the denial, and the claim of
irrelevancy--that characterized its handling of Flytrap.

            

               
                  Economist , May 8
            

            The
cover editorial, "A Bungled War," asserts that NATO should scrap its initial
goals of establishing autonomy and democracy in Kosovo, and settle for a
Bosnia-style peacekeeping force. Milosevic is despicable, but his removal would
further destabilize Yugoslavia. ... A story diagnoses what ails the World Trade Organization:
too much legalism, too little leadership, and the heavy new burden of
monitoring trade issues (such as food regulation and environmental protection)
that were once domestic concerns of individual countries. ... The
magazine lauds a recent crop of video games that emphasize strategy
and good judgment over violent combat. Even though the games are populated by
assassins and commandos, they are not excessively bloodthirsty; one even
subtracts points for gratuitous kills.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               , May 9
            

            The
cover story profiles prodigal mogul Mike Ovitz. After trying his hand at
Disney, philanthropy, Broadway, and professional sports, he is returning to the
pinnacle of the Hollywood hierarchy through his new Artists Management Group,
which purports to give clients more control of their "product." The piece
retreads his feud with his former company, Creative Artists Agency. Ovitz is
sure to make tons of money and infuriate his former colleagues, but there is no
guarantee that this will satisfy his gargantuan appetite for power.
... A piece trails Vice President Al Gore on his quest to
raise $55 million by the 2000 convention. Gore has been tending his network of
money men all his political life, but his focus on fund raising might
overshadow his campaign message. (Evidence that this is already happening:
articles like this one.)

            
               
                  Vanity
Fair , June 1999
            

            A
profile asks if hedge fund manager and journalist Jim Cramer is a financial
wizard or just an attention-happy blowhard. From a journalist: "He really knows
what he's talking about." From an investment banker: He's "a very, very good
self-promoter" and "entertainment" only. ... The magazine excerpts a new
oral biography of the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Eric Idle
expresses relief that the all-male troupe had "no girls to sulk or feel left
out," while John Cleese admits that they almost called the show Bunn Wackett
Buzzard Stubble and Boot . ... The cover story lambastes journalists
for pawing through Julia Robert's personal life, but reveals her shoe size, bra
size, and romantic history anyway.

            
               
                  The
Nation , May 17
            

            Katha
Pollitt announces her resignation from the magazine's masthead, though she will
continue to write her column. She was chagrined at The Nation 's recent
publication of a column by conservative education activist Ron Unz arguing that
liberal education reform has been an unmitigated failure. (See a previous for
details). ... The cover story asserts that Kenneth Starr's indictment of Julie
Hiatt Steele is based on unbelievable assertions by Kathleen Willey, who
"choreographed" her allegations to make them more "marketable." ... A
piece profiles new for-profit prisons specializing in geriatric felons and
worries that they will cut services to bolster profits.

            
               
                  ARTnews ,
May 1999
            

            Yet
another best-of-century list: the 25 most influential artists. The magazine's
panel makes mostly predictable choices, including sculptor Constantin Brancusi,
Surrealist Salvador Dalí, Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, architect
Le Corbusier, Neoplasticist Piet Mondrian, photographer Man Ray, Impressionist
Claude Monet, and "probably the most influential" Henri Matisse. The unusual
picks include Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. Surprising omissions: Mark
Rothko and Alexander Calder.

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek , May 10
            

            The
newsweeklies' cover packages pander to anxious parents. Newsweek shows
them "the secret life of teens," while Time tells them
how to protect Web-surfing kids from online perils. Newsweek 's paranoid
cover package ("it's Lord of the Flies on a vast scale") urges early childhood intervention for difficult toddlers and
"zero tolerance for bullies." Time 's cover instructs parents to check
the ratings listed on video game boxes, block offensive content on their
computers, and click the "history" button on their browser to see where their
kids have been. A handy foldout "quality
meter" rates games and Internet sites. (Any 12-year-old could predict the
results: educational software gets a "wholesome"; sex and hate sites are
"gruesome.") ... Tipper Gore beseeches Time readers to attend to youngsters' mental
health ("If we knew a child had a broken arm, we would take that child to an
emergency room.") ... 
               Time reports that lawyers are
already cozying up to the parents of slain Columbine High students. Possible
litigation targets: the killers' parents and the local police. Parents of the
children killed in West Paducah, Ky., have already filed suit against the
producers of The Basketball Diaries , the film said to have inspired the
rampage there.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
                  , May 10
            

            An
article asserts that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic,
supported by a network of student volunteers, is winning an Internet propaganda
war. The volunteers argue politely in chat rooms, maintain a sophisticated Web
site, and encourage activism by Serbian expats. In contrast, a Pentagon
official says that American anti-Serb radio programming reaches "an area the
size of my desk."... A piece explains a new Republican plan to revamp Social Security,
savvily designed to pre-empt criticism from both conservatives and liberals.
The plan gives workers a 2 percent income-tax rebate to be invested in a stock
market fund. At retirement, you choose a payout based on that fund's
performance or on a set of guaranteed benefits. ... In the
cover story, U.S. News becomes the latest publication to warn about the declining effectiveness of antibiotics. Some are
prescribed so heavily that bacteria are growing resistant to them. Children,
more susceptible to microbes than adults, are in the most danger.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker , May 10
            

            A
piece describes how the dog genome is being combed for clues about human
genetic diseases. Because dogs are deliberately inbred, genetic diseases are
easier to isolate and track. One researcher--aided by a team of 27 sleepy
Doberman pinschers--has already targeted the gene for narcolepsy.
... An article profiles J.S.G. Boggs, an artist whose medium
is counterfeited money. Boggs creates exquisite mockups of real bills and
convinces his patrons to use them as real cash. He claims to have "spent"
upward of $1 million in drawn money. He has been exonerated on counterfeiting
charges in Britain, Australia, and the United States.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , May 10
            

            The
cover story canonizes Littleton victim Cassie Bernall, the born-again Christian
teen-ager killed after declaring her faith in God. Her death is called a
divinely ordained act, intended to inspire others to spread the gospel.
... A piece lauds Al Gore's response to the Littleton
shooting. He has become a "born-again Hollywood basher" and was the only
presidential candidate to deliver a compelling moral response to the shooting.
... An article reminds readers that the next president will
likely fill three Supreme Court seats. ... An editorial berates congressional Republicans for last week's
"deeply irresponsible" isolationist votes on Kosovo.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Cure for Sinophobia

            Trying to make sense of U.S.-China relations these
days can reduce even the most resolute Sinologist to a blubbering wreck. At the
moment, Washington and Beijing are pummeling each other over: the Chinese
Embassy bombing, the Chinese espionage detailed in the Cox report, American
technology export policies, the renewal of China's normal trade (formerly most
favored nation) status, China's application to join the World Trade
Organization, American support for Taiwanese democracy, American sympathy for
the Dalai Lama, the burgeoning military alliance between the United States and
Japan, China's friendship with North Korea, China's wavering endorsement of
nuclear nonproliferation, China's persecution of democrats, China's persecution
of Christians, and China's surging anti-Americanism.

            Oh, and I forgot to mention that today is the
10 th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Happy
anniversary!

            The China question has
produced a kind of mass hysteria in the United States. The
extremes--Sino-apologists and China bashers--have kidnapped China policy.
Business interests insist that our economic partnership with China trumps all
else. Many conservatives, meanwhile, are screaming for a Cold War, demanding
that we confront the new Evil Empire before it grows too mighty. (This
conservative opposition continues a long and deplorable trend, described by

                  Slate
               's Jacob Weisberg last year in "": The party out of
presidential power inevitably accuses the ruling party of being soft on China,
but then adopts the same accommodationist policies as soon as it wins the Oval
Office.) And the lobbies for the Christian right, Tibet, human rights, and
labor demand that we break with China until it stops: persecuting Christians,
destroying Tibet, oppressing dissidents, and mistreating workers.

            So what's a poor American to think? Here are seven paths to
wisdom for U.S. China policy.

            
               1. 
               Disaggregate:
American interest groups want to hold China policy hostage to their pet
issues--security, democracy, Tibet, trade, etc. They are monochromatic:
Democracy advocates judge China on its worst behavior toward dissidents and
ignore any good behavior, while business apologists applaud China's dynamism
and don't notice repression, espionage, etc. Any reasonable China policy must
separate issues of agreement and disagreement. China and the United States can
cooperate on trade, but we'll never make common cause on Tibet. So our policy
needs firewalls : The American business community shouldn't be able to
force the United States to cave on human rights just to improve economic ties.
Nor should human rights advocates be allowed to make trade agreements
contingent on Chinese kindness toward dissidents. Until the United States can
disaggregate, its entire China policy will be held hostage to the most
contentious issue of the moment.

            
               2. Don't
criticize without offering a sensible alternative: A key reason for
our mangled China policy is that China hawks endlessly indict U.S. policy
without proposing their own remedy. In the New York Times last week,
columnist Thomas Friedman whacked the China bashers for their belligerent
carping over the Cox report: "Where exactly do you guys think you are going
with this? ... Do you want to declare war on China? Is that what you want?" The
China bashers slam Clinton's economic coziness with China, but they're mum
about what they would do instead: They don't want a trade war, either. Other
Americans preach for Taiwanese independence, but then refuse to say whether
Taiwan is worth fighting for.

             

            3. Stop seeing China as the Soviet Union: Unlike the
U.S.S.R., China is not expansionist, not interested in exporting communism (and
hardly interested in keeping the communism it's got), and incredibly keen about
joining the world economy. This is not the Cold War. China is not the
implacable enemy that the Soviet Union was, and we should not treat it that
way. We can do business with China. On the other hand ...

            
               4. Don't help
China become a superpower: China may not be the Soviet Union, but it's
not Great Britain either. China wants to build sophisticated weapons and
dethrone the United States as Asia's dominant military power. We don't have to
help it. The United States should limit technology transfers, increase spying
on Beijing, strengthen our military alliances with China's neighbors (notably
Japan and Korea), and stall China's weapons development as much as we peaceably
can.

            5. Take the long view: U.S. policy wobbles because it
is always responding to the crisis du jour--the Cox report, WTO, the latest
suppression of dissidents, etc. But U.S.-China relations are better considered
over a span of many years. On democracy, for example, American activists are
raging over China's recent suppression of all democratic dissent. This
suppression is an outrage, but our policy must be more sophisticated than mere
indignation. Compare 1999 China with 1979 China: 1999 China permits vast
economic freedom, sponsors competitive village elections, allows the
establishment of nongovernmental organizations, tolerates environmental and
women's rights activism, and is starting to develop a reliable legal system.
This is certainly not democracy, but it's not totalitarianism either. Catharin
Dalpino, former deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human
rights, and labor, notes that Taiwan took the same preliminary steps on its
path to democracy. (Of course, taking the long view on democracy also requires
taking the longer view. China may have improved since 1979, but it still
has an unblemished history of authoritarianism, five millenniums without
sustained democracy.)

            
               6. Worry a
lot about Taiwan: Amid all the fretting about normal trade status,
WTO, espionage, and Tibet, we tend to overlook Taiwan. This is worrisome,
because Taiwan is by far the hottest issue between the United States and China.
"There is an increased sense of desperation in China about Taiwan. We can
stumble into a war with China over Taiwan very easily," warns Professor David
Shambaugh of George Washington University. Chinese leaders are fretting about
Taiwan's prosperous democracy and its flirtation with independence. They are
also irked by U.S. military support for Taiwan--especially the U.S. plan to
deploy a Theater Missile Defense for Taiwan in the next few years. Keeping the
peace in the Taiwan Strait must be the United States' top China priority. It
will require immense prudence: The United States must nurture a democratic
Taiwan while discouraging a declaration of independence, must arm Taiwan
against Chinese invasion while promoting closer Sino-Taiwanese ties.

            7. And, finally, don't be so melodramatic: Our
relations with China are messy partly because we worry too much about them. "We
have never been able to look at China like we would look at Brazil or India. We
are always swept up in some idealized notion of what China is or should be,"
says Brookings Institution scholar Bates Gill. "On day-to-day issues, we have
never learned to have normal reactions. China is not 10 feet tall." Yes, China
is an emerging power and, yes, China may be the great American rival of the
next century, but Americans have transformed China into an otherworldly nation,
a mysterious angel, a baffling demon.

            Here a historical analogy is illuminating: Only a
decade ago, after all, America was frantic about another mysterious, ominous
Asian power that was not quite friend, not quite enemy. This nation, too,
seemed antagonistic toward America and bent on global domination. Today, Japan
is more like America's kid brother than a mortal threat. China, too, is just a
nation like any other, with ambitions and fears, strengths and weaknesses. And
until we recognize that, U.S.-China policy will be more fraught than it should
be.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 247: &quot;Does This Look Inflected?&quot;

            
               The author of a
new book charges that a prominent American not only betrayed him, but also
"[h]is mocking pronunciation of my name ... sounded like a jeering mob." Who is
this insensitive American, and how did he mispronounce the author's
name?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 246)--"Unundercover":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              "We're not hiding it," says
Capt. Michael Fallon of the Hartford Police Department, hoping to ease
community fears. In fact, they plan to take it to fairs so children can climb
on it and have their pictures taken with it.
What?
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Another poorly directed NATO bomb."-- Beth Sherman ( M.D.C. Bowen
had a similar answer.)

            "Rhode
Island?"-- Herb Terns
            

            "Boris
Yeltsin."--Alison Rogers
            

            
"McGruff, the drug-sniffing, suspect-devouring crime dog."-- Matt
Sullivan (similarly, Mike Behn , Jean Campbell , Chuck
Lawhorn , and Judith Spencer )

            "L.
Ron Hubbard's mmmphphph ..."-- Max Novak
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Overly
Sensitive Wrap-Up
            

            While News Quiz has avidly solicited sardonic
comments on Kosovo and Littleton, the Abner Louima case confounds me. I
understand a joke with a Volpe punch line or a joke about the NYPD's sincere
efforts to increase minority recruitment (no kidding, this time they mean it)
or to make the many other reforms persistently resisted by both the department
and the mayor (I'm serious, this time they really, really mean it). But I do
not feel comfortable with a punch line that alludes to the plunger. And while I
don't think I've received a single response to today's question that seeks to
trivialize Louima's suffering, I still feel uneasy, and so I've omitted those
replies. It is, of course, a matter of sensibility. No offense meant. Now
everyone go on out and tease a fat guy on me.

            No, wait, come back. I
was only ...

            
               The Right Tools
for the Job Answer
            

            The Hartford Police Department is not hiding its
new armored personnel carrier.

            And, besides, they prefer to call it a "tactical
rescue vehicle," says Capt. Fallon. "I call my night stick a 'happy wand' and
my gun a 'puppy,' " he did not add.

            The department has
stocked up on pepper spray and smoke bombs and has given additional riot
training to 45 officers, alarming many Hartford residents, tensely awaiting a
prosecutor's decision about whether to charge a white officer who fatally shot
a black 14-year-old in the back. Police Chief Joseph Croughwell denies that he
is preparing to suppress a riot. He does understand how these misconceptions
can occur, "I can see how people would add one and one and get four." Or
two.

            
               Pomp and
Circumstance and Then Some More Pomp Extra
            

            Match the actual twaddle
from a recent commencement speech with the fatuous blowhard who ladled it
out.

            
               The
Twaddle
            

            1. "The people who are
crazy enough to think they can change the world, they do."

            2. "We must take
responsibility for the society that our children live in. We must teach them
the sense of right and wrong, good and evil."

            3. "Real fulfillment in
your life will come not from leisure, not from idleness, not from
self-indulgence, but rather from striving with all your physical and spiritual
might for a worthwhile objective."

            4. "If you are like me,
you are far more likely to regret what you did not do than what you do do."

            5. "Let us realize that
education is the greatest anti-poverty program."

            6. "The only certainty is
that there is no certainty."

            7. "Your parents have been
the builders. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could be the healers."

            8. "It is more important
than ever that we be staunch in our convictions."

            9. "We must think bigger
and do better."

            10.
"Shoot for the moon, shoot for the sun. Even if you miss, you will only land
among the stars."

            
               The
Blowhards
            

            A. Charlie Rose, Long
Island University

            B. Bill Bradley, Mount St.
Clare College

            C. George Mitchell,
Fordham University

            D. Charlie Rose, Long
Island University

            E. Al Gore, Graceland
College

            F. Robert Rubin, New York
University

            G. David Gergen, Yale

            H. Elizabeth Dole, online
at www.collegeclub.com

            I. Bill Clinton, Grambling
State

            J.
Charlie Rose, Long Island University

            
               The
Answers
            

            
               1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D,
5-E, 6-F, 7-G, 8-H, 9-I, 10-J.
            

            
               Build Your Own
Penis Joke
            

            "The stiffness was
absolutely spectacular. That's when I said, 'Aha!' I knew then and there it was
an important discovery."--Chemist Stephanie Kwolek, 75, reminisces about her
invention of Kevlar.

            
               Neal Pollack's
Headline Haiku
            

            Beneath Albanian sky
Ivy League parents
close to renewal
with nation's woes

            -- Chicago
Tribune , May 20, 1999

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Plungers.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            DOS Capitalism

            Writers have long sought
metaphors to capture the conflict of new and old worlds. Henry Adams posited an
antithesis between the Dynamo and the Virgin--the mysterious electrical
generators he saw at the Great Exhibition of 1900 and the religious devotion
that built Chartres Cathedral. Adams saw the new technological forces of a
century ago as awe-inspiring, destructive, and almost beyond comprehension. His
opposition has been revised many times since. Recently, for instance, the
political scientist Benjamin Barber described the contest as "Jihad vs.
McWorld." As one may gather from his terms, Barber is hardly enamored of either
globalism or tribalism, the modernizing principle or the medievalizing one.
Both, in his view, undermine the viability of participatory democracy.

            The newest entrant in
this contest of symbols is Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist of
the New York Times , who offers a somewhat sunnier pair in his new book,
The Lexus and the Olive Tree . The Lexus, a luxury car made mostly by
robots in a state-of-the-art Japanese factory, stands for progress--"all the
anonymous, transnational, homogenizing, standardizing market forces and
technologies that make up today's globalizing economic system," as he puts it.
The olive tree, which grows in the Middle East, where Friedman was stationed
for several years as a correspondent for the Times , stands for
nationalism, religion, tribe, community--gnarled, rooted things that cling to
the soil. Friedman believes that the clash between these two principles defines
the post-Cold War era in international relations. "The Lexus and olive tree
[are] wrestling with each other in the new system of globalization," as he puts
it, energetically compounding his metaphor.

            Friedman is a Lexus man himself--he lets it be known that
he drives one of these sublime sedans around the Washington suburb where he
lives, when he's not trading Internet stocks on the Internet, communicating
with CEOs by cell phone, or eating a Big Mac in some far-flung capital. He
avers that he respects olive trees and aspires to preserve as many as possible
but that there's no stopping, or even slowing, technological advancement,
market integration, or American cultural hegemony.

            His point of view is that of the Treasury
Department, the Economist , and the Davos World Economic Forum. Capital
now moves swiftly and freely around the globe--a phenomenon Friedman calls, in
one of his catchier coinages, an "electronic herd." Because this herd can
stampede at will, if not at whim, developing nations, now known as "emerging
markets," no longer have much discretion about which economic policies to
pursue. If your country lacks a capitalist-friendly financial structure with a
convertible currency, "transparency" of information, and protections for
private property, First World investment money will simply go elsewhere. As the
leader of a country, you can choose to conform to international economic norms
or you can choose to be poor. Friedman makes this point various ways, saying
it, quoting others saying it, and quoting himself saying it to others. He calls
this dilemma "the golden straightjacket."

            But rather than consider
whether we should be altogether pleased that the entire world seems to be
converging upon the same economic model, Friedman simply declares it a
nonissue. The integrated world market is coming, no one can do anything about
it, so the question of how we like it is irrelevant. You might call Friedman's
foreign policy market realism. Capitalism, not liberal democracy, emerged
triumphant from the Cold War. And though a free economy tends to open up a
society over time, growth and democracy aren't necessarily connected in the
short term. To Friedman's way of thinking, the question of whether a government
has elected leaders or respects human rights has far less effect on its
immediate prosperity than the question of whether it listens to the
International Monetary Fund. Russia and India, which have something resembling
free elections, are stagnating because they refuse to liberalize their
economies. China, which has a thriving capitalist economy but doesn't have free
elections, survived the Asian economic crisis largely unscathed.

            The problem with Friedman's book is not that he's wrong
about economics or international relations. I think he's largely right, though
as I'll argue in a minute, he overstates the ease with which the Lexus and the
olive tree can happily coexist. The problem is that he has distilled the
conventional wisdom of the enlightened financier circa 1999 without adding much
thinking of his own. Financial metaphors running away with him, Friedman
describes his journalistic method as "information arbitrage." He sees himself
acquiring knowledge at wholesale from the top diplomats, hedge fund managers,
and central bankers to whom his Times column grants him access, and
selling at retail to general readers. Reporting on things seen and heard while
globe-trotting, with a bit of opinion thrown in, works well in Friedman's
biweekly Times column, but a book needs to do more than endorse the
wisdom of others--especially if the wisdom is as familiar and widely accepted
as that of Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs and Lawrence Summers of the Treasury
Department. The fact that Friedman agrees with these guys is no excuse for
neglecting challenges from such skeptics as George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul
Krugman, or the aforementioned Barber, none of whose views he considers.

            A subsidiary fault is
rhetorical hyperventilation. The less Frieidman has to say of his own, the more
he relies on slogans and strained neologisms. Countries, he tells us, have
economic operating systems of different degrees of sophistication, which he
dubs DOScaptial 1.0, 2.0, etc. "Globalution" is the way the "electronic herd"
creates pressure for democracy. "Glocalism" is a culture's ability to profit
from what's good about other cultures without soaking up what's bad. Backward
countries and companies suffer from "Microchip Immune Deficiency" or MIDS. At
times, Friedman manages to sound like Jesse Jackson at a rally. "The United
States can destroy you by dropping bombs and the Supermarkets can destroy you
by downgrading your bonds," he writes.

            This penchant for Toffleresque gimmickry finally gets the
better of him in the chapter titled "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict
Prevention." Friedman's "insight," as he calls it, is that "no two countries
that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its
McDonald's." A variation on the theory that democracies don't go to war with
each other, the golden arches hypothesis was proved false even before his
book's publication date by the war between NATO and Serbia (where the Belgrade
McDonald's franchises were promptly vandalized). An ethnic and territorial
conflict that doesn't have much to do with globalization at all, the war in
Kosovo defies Friedman's notion that international relations is now an
extension of international economics.

            As an evangelist for globalization, Friedman is
intent on demonstrating that it's compatible with a respect for identity and
tradition, that olive trees can grow next to Lexi. His Clintonian instincts
tell him that any difficult choice must be a false choice. His happy-go-yuppie
sensibility tells him that we can have our cake and eat it too, that technology
can uphold tradition instead of undermining it. Thus Friedman spills over with
hopeful juxtapositions garnered on his travels. He describes Muslims on a
flight from Bahrain using the plane's global positioning system to pray toward
Mecca, Kuwaiti feminists in veils and on the Internet, Kayapo Indians in a hut
in the Brazilian rain forest watching soccer and monitoring the value of their
gold-extraction rights on a satellite TV. This last example Friedman describes
as "Lexus and olive tree in healthy balance."

            Friedman is almost certainly correct in his belief
that globalization is likely to make life better for people in remote places.
But it won't do it while preserving their local cultures. It will do it by
partially or completely obliterating them. That's what market capitalism does.
It uproots and homogenizes as it enriches--like a Ronco appliance, as Friedman
might say. I don't know anything about the Kayapos, but I'd wager that if they
keep watching that satellite TV, they won't be in loin cloths and huts the next
time the foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times helicopters in
for a visit.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             From Yellow to Blue

            Do the supermarket tabloids
need a serotonin reuptake inhibitor? In the post-Flytrap world they seem to be
too depressed to get out of bed and find themselves dwelling instead on the
details of their unhappy relationship with Washington, brooding about
mortality, and fixating on the sad lives of people who can only be called
obscure celebrities.

            The tabs never liked the
Monica story all that much: Washington is not their natural milieu, and in
general the mainstream media had better sources and reported more explicit
details. The tabs found themselves usurped in this scandal-enriched world, and
it showed in declining circulation. But now the National Enquirer and
the Star are about to enter a new phase. Last month the sister
publications were bought for $300 million by an investment group headed by
former Clinton administration Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. Does this
mean tab readers can expect a lot more monetary policy and a lot less Monica
pulkes ?

            Like discarded lovers who keep driving past their ex's
imagining the lurid scenes that are taking place inside, the tabs can't quite
let go of Hillary, Bill, and Monica. Forget running for the Senate or being
ambassador to the United Nations. According to the Enquirer , Hillary's
real goal after Clinton's term ends is "to keep Bill under her thumb for the
rest of his life as 'payback.' " While the publication alleges his post-White
House goal is to get a divorce, Hillary will refuse, threatening to "reveal
secrets about Clinton that would leave him utterly humiliated." The
Enquirer doesn't speculate as to what these might be, but what's left?
Bestiality? Cannibalism? That's possible compared with what the publication
goes on to report--that Hillary insisted that the two of them watch the
broadcast of Monica's videotaped testimony, during which the president mumbled,
"Poor Monica, I'm sorry she had to go through this." It is much more likely
that Clinton would simultaneously send ground troops to Iraq and Bosnia than
mumble something like that in front of Hillary.

            The Globe has come
up with its own bizarre denouement for this drama. It reports that Monica would
like to talk to Hillary to plead forgiveness. "Monica told friends she longs to
tell Hillary ... 'I'll do anything to make things right with you.' " Probably
the only thing Monica can do that would bring Hillary any satisfaction is to
keep the feed bag tied on. The Globe also alleges that Monica got so far
as to call the first lady on her private White House line but lost the nerve to
speak when she heard Hillary's voice. However, it does seem more likely that
the president is a cannibal than that Hillary has been receiving
annoying hang-up calls from Monica.

            The Star at least emerges as the engine behind the
latest story--that the president is a rapist. In January it published a quite
accurate account of what has emerged as Juanita Broaddrick's story. It also
reported that there were rumors during the 1992 presidential campaign that the
reason Broaddrick didn't come forward with her story of being sexually
assaulted by Clinton in 1978 was that her husband had cut a deal with the
Clintons. Broaddrick was furious when friends showed her the charge, and she
decided that it was time to tell the truth. But none of the tabs, including the
Star , has anything to add to the now public story--.

            If the tabs haven't
really been able to move on, neither has Monica, reports the Enquirer .
Her new plan is to win Bill back by starring on her own TV talk show. An
"insider" says, "She honestly believes that some day when she's a huge success
in TV, Bill will want her back in his life." According to the story, one reason
Monica decided to do her first interview with Barbara Walters is because
Walters promised to introduce Monica to people in the industry. (Psst, Monica,
don't forget that at one time, while she was trying to get the interview with
you, Walters was also the best friend of your erstwhile attorney William
Ginsberg.) The Globe reports that Monica acknowledges she's a sex addict
and as a first step to get control of her compulsion "has thrown away all her
sexy, seductive lingerie." It's terrible to think of that great American
artifact, the thong of thongs, ending up in the dumpster.

            With the Clinton sex scandal now fading into embers, the
tabs have entered a dark, morbid phase. This week the Enquirer has a
story about the "deathbed vigil" for Larry Fortensky, Elizabeth Taylor's most
recent former husband, the one-time construction worker she met when they were
both in rehab. Fortensky suffered severe brain damage in a fall down a
staircase in January. According to the Enquirer , it was a drunken fall.
The Star has alleged it was a suicide bid. The Globe believes it
may have been a murder attempt. A caption on the Enquirer 's horrifying
picture of the critically injured Fortensky is "touching family photo." Ah,
yes, there's nothing more moving than family members "sharing" their
photographs of comatose loved ones for publication.

            The 2-year old murder of
child beauty pageant winner JonBenet Ramsey returns to the covers of the tabs.
Both the Globe and the Enquirer now point the finger at her
mother, Patsy, the Enquirer promising, "indictments are imminent against
JonBenet's mom Patsy for murder and her dad John for his role in a cover-up.
The conclusion the grand jury is considering is that Patsy slammed a
bed-wetting JonBenet over the head. ... It was a fatal wound. All the rest--the
strangling, sexual abuse, the ransom note--is cover-up."

            And not even a counseling session with Elizabeth
Kübler-Ross would help the tabs get over the death of Diana. The Star
weighs in this week with its theory that her death was the result of an
assassination conspiracy among the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and Britain's MI6 to keep
her from marrying department store heir Dodi Fayed.

            Finally, the tabs have been wallowing recently in
the misery of people you can't remember or never heard of. Take Dana Plato.
Drawing a blank? She was a child star on the old sitcom Diff'rent
Strokes . Since then she's been arrested on robbery and drug charges. Now,
in a "heartfelt exclusive interview," in the Enquirer , a lesbian lover
of hers has announced that Plato has vanished after stealing $700 from her.
Plato's girlfriend is worried the former actress "is on a downward spiral to
death."

            And can anybody remember Renee Richards, the
transsexual tennis-playing physician? Richards, now 64 and a successful
pediatric ophthalmologist, advises other men who want, as she did, to change
genders in middle age not to do it, according to the Star . "You better
get on Thorazine or Zoloft or Prozac," she advises. Dr. Richards, can you write
a prescription for the tabloids?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Abort
Face
            

            What is especially enjoyable about the Republican
Party's agony over abortion is that the leading Republican lights are almost
surely pro-choice in their hearts. Not Pat Buchanan and not Gary Bauer, but
they're not the ones doing the agonizing. The agonizers are folks like
Elizabeth Dole and George W. Bush, and their agony isn't moral, goodness knows.
It's political: How to prevent the party's hard-line pro-life stance from
driving millions of voters away.

            Dole and Bush and Dan
Quayle and John McCain and Steve Forbes and the rest all claim to share the
hard-line anti-abortion view, as they must in order to be leading Republican
lights in the first place. But who believes them? Does Liddy Dole really think
abortion is equivalent to infanticide? Is George W. mourning over millions of
murdered babies every year? Not likely. So they must pretend to a deep moral
belief they probably don't have, then pretend to have come up with a reason
this deep moral belief shouldn't really matter. Even Bill Clinton might have
trouble executing this double-reverse flip-flop fib off the high board. Are
lesser pols up to it?

            The official Republican position on abortion, as expressed
in the past three GOP platforms, is so extreme that if it were taken seriously,
no Republican could be elected to any office except, perhaps, pope. Fortunately
for the GOP, few voters are aware of it, fewer still understand it, and those
who do understand it assume correctly that the party doesn't really mean
it.

            The platform reads: "The
unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be
infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse
legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to
unborn children."

            The 14 th Amendment guarantees all persons "the
equal protection of the laws." If the fetus is a person under the
14 th Amendment, an abortion must be treated exactly like the
premeditated killing of an adult--that is, like first-degree murder. There can
be no exceptions for rape or incest. And the woman who procures an abortion is
guilty of murder just as if she had hired a gunman to kill her born offspring.
In a death penalty state--and the Republican platform favors the death penalty,
naturally--she must pay with her life.

            The 1996 platform goes
on to say, "we have only compassion" for women who procure abortions and "our
pro-life agenda does not include punitive action" against them. Which only
shows that the platform does not even believe itself, since that stuff about
the 14 th Amendment can have no other meaning.

            But the current Republican position is logically
consistent. If full human life begins at conception, then full human rights do
too, including the right to equal protection of the laws. It is a concept that
does not easily lend itself to compromise, as the Republican presidential
contenders are demonstrating. Their search for a way out has led most of them
to two rhetorical strategies.

            One is the notion the
late Lee Atwater called "the big tent." There's room for everybody. John McCain
says about the abortion issue, "I believe we are an inclusive party and we can
be so without changing our principles." What does this mean? Does it mean that
people should feel free to vote Republican even if they disagree with what the
Republican Party stands for? A nice offer, though I wouldn't expect many
takers. Or does it mean that because there are so many people to divvy up, the
two parties needn't stand for anything in particular? Not a big vote-getter
either.

            Asked about abortion the other day on CNN, Republican
National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson also invoked what is apparently the
party-line phrase: "inclusive party." He elaborated, "We want to reach out and
grow this party. ...We're recognizing that there are differences. This is a
huge country. It's a continent really. There are 270 million of us, and there
are only two parties. So why wouldn't we have some differences?"

            It's surely true that it
would be suicidal for a party to demand agreement on all issues from either its
candidates or its voters. The tricky question is what are the core values that
really define you and what are the fringe issues on which differences are not
crucial. Republicans would prefer not to be defined by their position on
abortion. But if you take it seriously, the anti-abortion position is
definitive by definition. How can you make the capital gains tax a litmus test
issue but say that the slaughter of millions of innocent children is something
about which you have only a mild preference and don't care much if people
disagree? The truth is that most Republican leaders don't actually take their
alleged position on abortion seriously. But they can't admit this.

            The other rhetorical way out for Republican politicians is
to say that you yourself are as hard-core as ever, but since a majority of
Americans apparently disagrees, there's no point in trying to do anything about
it it. Elizabeth Dole goes further: There's no point in even discussing it.
Last week she called on Republican women to "set an example" and "refuse to be
drawn into dead-end debates" about something that is "not going to happen."
George W., sounding like a very promising cross between his father and Dan
Quayle, explained in March why he opposes pushing for a constitutional
amendment, although he favors one himself: "There are a lot of Americans who
don't view the abortion issue as a matter of life. I do. That's one reason why
I'm a pro-life person."

            This is an imaginative
attempt to dress craven pragmatism as high principle, but it makes no sense.
The Republican and Democratic platforms are littered with proposals that are
"not going to happen." Almost nothing is going to happen if a majority must
already favor it before any political leader will speak out in its favor. If
she actually believed that millions of human lives were at stake, the former
head of the Red Cross surely wouldn't try to build a holy crusade around
refusal to discuss the matter. Nor would she blame the media for an "inordinate
focus" on the issue.

            Lamar Alexander's way out is worth noting, though it
doesn't rise to the level of illogic. Lamar says that we should "move
state-by-state to change laws and culture so there will be fewer abortions,"
and therefore "I do not support a constitutional amendment that would overturn
Roe vs. Wade ." Well, you see, Lamar, Roe vs. Wade held that state
anti-abortion laws are unconstitutional. That's what it was all about!
Maybe--to give him the extreme benefit of the doubt--Lamar means that he favors
overturning Roe by Supreme Court decision rather than by constitutional
amendment. This is an unlikely occurrence and, combined with the state-by-state
business, a rather leisurely approach if you honestly believe that the
slaughter of innocents is going on daily.

            Finally, since the subject is Republicans, logic,
jurisprudence, and advanced metaphysical speculation, you're probably wondering
where Dan Quayle comes down. Quayle agrees with everybody else that a
constitutional amendment is not going to happen. "But that's not
important . The important issue is where you stand on this
important debate. I have always been pro-life." In other words, as long as you
profess to believe that human life begins at conception and that abortion is
murder, it's not important whether you actually do anything about it.

            This is, of course, a truer statement of the
Republican position on abortion than any other candidate's. But it is more than
that. Quayle may actually have produced a compromise in what seemed to be a war
of moral absolutes. Speaking, if I may, for the pro-choice side of the debate:
Pro-lifers may profess any principles they care to, as long as they agree not
to act on them. They can actually believe what they say, for all I care. Though
I doubt, in the case of most Republican presidential candidates, that this last
concession will be necessary.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Making Nice

            As I understand it, when
political scientists and sociologists refer to a society as "civil" they are
citing the many important functions that are performed by voluntary,
intermediate institutions. These institutions are intermediate between the
state and the individual. They are voluntary in that the performance of
individuals within these institutions is not dictated by the state or by the
exigencies of the market. Churches, trade unions, philanthropic bodies, and
clubs are examples of such institutions.

            Each of these
intermediate institutions is a society in itself, and each of us spends much of
his life in them. Some of these little societies are civil and some are not. I
use the word "civil" here to mean that the participants are cooperative and
respectful of the others and their interests. That is different from "polite,"
which is a surface quality. The chairman of a congressional committee who calls
upon "the gentle lady from Arkasota," while thinking, "you dumb hillbilly
bitch," is polite but not civil in my sense.

            What makes some of these minisocieties civil and some not?
I think of two in my experience that were especially civil. One was the Center
for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, where I spent a year as a fellow
more than 30 years ago. There were about 30 of us fellows at the
center--economists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and
psychologists. Most of us knew few--if any--of the others before we met there,
but we immediately became friends and enjoyed a pleasant social life together.
More important, we could consult each other and collect candid advice. There
was no feeling of rivalry among us.

            Being happy just to be at
the center had something to do with the pervasive good feelings. Also, each of
us had shed both his ego requirements and drive for status--at least for the
duration of the year's leave. The fellowship was not part of one's real life,
it was an interlude to be enjoyed and not spoiled by conflict. It was as if we
were on a cruise ship with passengers we had never seen before and would
probably not see again after the cruise was over.

            My second example is the book discussion group I belong to
at Washington's Cosmos Club (a venerable gentlemen's club, which now admits
women as well). Book discussion groups are regularly described as scenes of
rivalry and hostility--of fights over which books to read and who gets to talk
the most. Why is our group civil? I credit, in part, the physical and
psychological environment of the club, which makes for dignified clubbiness.
But what's more important is the character of the participants. We are all
members or spouses of members of the club. We are mostly pretty old. And we
have mostly had, and may still be having, some achievement and attention
outside the book discussion group. So nobody feels the need to assert his
individuality and importance. We can relax and enjoy the pleasure of civil
behavior to each other.

            These may seem trivial
cases, in which neither the gain from cooperative effort nor the possible gain
from individual assertion is very large. The key is not in the absolute
strength of these gains but in their relative strength. In the cases I have
mentioned, the two forces are weak, but the need for ego-satisfaction in this
arena is weaker than the gain from cooperation.

            I can give a more serious example. For many years, starting
with the end of World War II, I worked for an organization of businessmen
formulating policy statements on issues of economic policy. We were
all--businessmen and staff--impressed with the failures of policy that caused
the Depression and that may have contributed to the outbreak of war. We thought
we had some insights that would help to avert such failures in the future. At
the same time, the organization was a major scene in which we might struggle
for self-expression and status. It was where we staffers spent most of our
waking hours, derived our incomes, and achieved status internally and to the
rest of the world. But the divisiveness of these interests was outweighed by
our common interest in the program on which we had embarked. So we all worked
together eagerly and happily to try to bring about a change of policy. We were
a civil society.

            But after about 10 years,
the memories of Depression and war were fading, some of what we thought were
new ideas had become conventional wisdom, and many of the most inspiring
leaders of the group had gone on to other things or had retired. Then we
gradually sank into bureaucratic rivalry and sparring--into incivility.

            Different participants in a society will have different
views of how civil it is. I thought that those of us who worked on the
economics side of the Nixon administration made up a civil society. We had a
common goal--the success of the administration in economics--and felt besieged
by a common enemy, the media. I did not covet anyone else's job and did not
feel that anyone coveted mine. I had no ambitions for more status and attention
within that society. But then I read in Bob Haldeman's diary, which was
published in 1994, that in 1972 Secretary of the Treasury John Connally had
complained to Haldeman that several people--including me--were conspiring
against him. Evidently, Connally did not regard that society as civil. For him
it was a jungle out there, even though one of the predators was really a
rabbit.

            Civil behavior has two sides. One side is treating
other people with civility. The second side is interpreting the attitude and
behavior of other people toward oneself as civil. For most people I suppose the
first side is difficult without the second. In the Nixon administration, John
Connally was not civil in the second sense. That led him to the not-very-civil
act of complaining to Bob Haldeman.

            Civility is not one of the major virtues. It is not
like courage or honesty. The friendly cooperation that characterizes civil
societies is a pale shadow of the love that inspires great self-sacrifice. But
to participate in societies that one perceives to be civil adds much to the
pleasure of life.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Kosovo Question

            For the past week,
President Clinton has been preparing to bomb Yugoslavia. His stated reasons are
that the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government, led by President Slobodan
Milosevic, is waging war on the ethnic Albanian population of the Yugoslav
province of Kosovo, and that Milosevic refuses to sign a peace plan to which
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian rebels have grudgingly agreed. Persuading the American
public to support U.S. military action abroad is always difficult because such
action poses risks to our troops, requires moral justification for American
aggression, and threatens to entangle us in commitments we will regret. To win
over the public, Clinton is trying to turn those three issues upside down.

            
               1. Risk. This is the big buzzword
among opponents of the bombing. Speaking to reporters after his meeting with
Clinton Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott used this word five times
in three minutes. Another favorite phrase in the anti-bombing camp is "rise to
the level." Last month, Democrats defeated the GOP's impeachment effort by
persuading the public that the charges against Clinton didn't "rise to the
level" worthy of removing a president. Now Republicans are turning the tables,
arguing that the stakes in Kosovo don't "rise to the level" worthy of U.S.
military action.

            Some supporters of the bombing argue that the risk
can be minimized. But this is a losing game, since risk is always more than
zero. The better answer is to reframe the status quo as a parallel option with
risks of its own. "We must weigh those risks [of bombing] against the risks of
in action," Clinton said at his press conference Friday. "If we don't
act, the war will spread. If it spreads, we will not be able to contain it
without far greater risk and cost. ... You have to ask yourself, what will be
the cost and the duration of involvement and the consequences if we do
not move? ... I'm convinced we'll be dragged into this thing under worse
circumstances at greater cost if we don't act."

            To put plausibility and
punch in this theoretical argument, Clinton cited Milosevic's past aggression
and invoked images of slaughtered innocents. Absent intervention, said Clinton,
Milosevic will produce "the same thing that happened in Bosnia"--"refugees" and
"further atrocities." "I would hate to think that we'd have to see a lot of
other little children die. ... I do not believe that we ought to have to have
thousands more people slaughtered and buried in open soccer fields before we do
something." To drive home his point that inaction, like action, requires
justification and bears consequences, Clinton distilled his frame job to a
brilliant sound bite: "In dealing with aggressors in the Balkans, hesitation is
a license to kill."

            2. Aggression. Opponents of the bombing depict the
United States as the aggressor and protest that we shouldn't intervene unless
provoked. "For us to initiate an action such as bombing Serbia is really an act
of war," Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, R-Okla., told reporters outside the
White House Friday. "I don't think that we should begin bombing unless and
until the Serbs really begin a very significant massacre." Monday in the
Senate, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, urged her colleagues not to let
Clinton "take an affirmative military action against a sovereign nation that
has not committed a security threat to the United States."

            Clinton has responded by casting the Serbs as the
aggressors. At his press conference, he replied, "I don't think it's accurate
to say we're acting first. I think they have acted first. They have massed
their troops, they have continued to take aggressive action, they have already
leveled one village in the recent past and killed a lot of innocent people." He
added that the Serbs had "stripped away" Kosovo's right to "self-government" a
decade ago. Above all, he argued that the Serbs have repeatedly violated a 1998
agreement with NATO in which they pledged to limit their military presence and
action in Kosovo. This, he maintained, is sufficient to "trigger" bombing: "The
threshold for their conduct has already been crossed." In the Senate Monday,
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., agreed: "Everybody forgets we are operating in the
context of an agreement that [Milosevic] signed. ... The Yugoslav government
has flagrantly violated the limits stipulated in the October agreement."

            Together, these points
reverse the aggression argument in two ways. First, they turn the immorality of
aggression into an argument for punishing the aggressors, i.e., the Serbs.
Second, they shift the burden of justification from the pro-bombing to the
anti-bombing camp. The code word for this burden-shifting maneuver is
"impunity." As Clinton put it Friday, "We cannot allow President Milosevic to
continue the aggression with impunity."

            Much of the aggression debate revolves around the integrity
of NATO. Senators who oppose the bombing warn that it would pervert NATO into
an "aggressive" organization. "NATO is a defensive alliance," Nickles observed
Monday on the Senate floor. "Never has NATO [threatened] to go in to another
country that's not threatening neighboring countries, not threatening part of
the alliance ... to quell a civil war."

            Advocates of the bombing
interpret NATO's mission more broadly. Defense, they argue, rests on
deterrence, which rests on credibility in threatening the use of force, which
rests on the use of force when challenged. This argument is weakened by its
abstraction but is bolstered by the fact that the Serbian challenge is in
Europe, NATO's turf. After meeting with Clinton Friday, Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt.,
told reporters that "the question" in Kosovo was, "Is NATO relevant? Can NATO
stop massacres right in their own backyard? ... The United States, if it's
going to keep NATO relevant, has to show leadership."

            3. Commitment. Clinton's critics invoke the specter
of Vietnam by warning against an unwise "commitment" to war in Kosovo. Clinton
can't dispute the principle of commitment, so he turns it on its head. We've
already pledged to use force, he argues, and now we must keep our word.
Ostensibly, this commitment was made last year when the United States voted
with its NATO allies to use air power if one side of the Serb-Kosovar war
signed the peace plan and the other refused. After meeting with Clinton Friday,
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., told reporters, "The president is resolved. He's
going to keep the agreements made with our NATO allies."

            Just as advocates of
bombing use the word "impunity" to shift the burden of the aggression argument
to their opponents, they likewise use the word "credibility" to shift the
burden of the "commitment" argument. Failure to make good on NATO's
already-delivered threat would "undermine the credibility of NATO, on which
stability in Europe and our own credibility depend," said Clinton. Sen. John
Warner, R-Va., agreed: "The credibility of NATO is on the line. The credibility
of the United States working with its European partners in NATO is on the
line." Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., urged his colleagues to "support NATO" and
"not undermine [its] united effort."

            Clinton is trying to reverse assumptions not merely about
what should happen but also about what will happen. The White
House mantra for the past week has been that Milosevic faces a "stark choice":
Sign the peace plan or NATO will bomb you. The last thing Clinton needs is a
genuine debate in the United States over whether we're serious about that
threat. To shortcut that debate, he is trying to lull Americans into assuming
that we're objectively as well as morally committed--that the bombing is
inevitable. He pulls off this trick by presenting bombing as the default course
with a momentum of its own. "If President Milosevic continues to choose
aggression over peace, NATO's military plans must continue to move forward,"
Clinton decreed Friday.

            The questions posed
before a war are always the same: Should we fight? Can we? Must we? Will we?
Philosophers and theologians try to answer these questions, but smart
politicians rewrite them. That's not fair, you say? Neither is war.

            

               For more Kosovo coverage, click .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Solution or Semantics?

            

               The "Group of Eight" (the United States, Britain, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia) approved "general principles on

               the political solution to the Kosovo crisis
               ." They
include 1) "withdrawal from Kosovo of military, police and paramilitary
forces," 2) "deployment in Kosovo of effective international civil and security
presences," and 3) "substantial self-government for Kosovo." The upbeat spin:
Russia has agreed with our conditions. Yugoslavia is isolated and will have to
cry uncle. Peace is at hand. The skeptical spins: 1) Russia hasn't agreed with
us on the meaning of "forces," "effective," "international," "security,"
"presences," "substantial," or "self-government." 2) The price of winning
Russia's endorsement was that we had to put the interpretation of these terms
under U.N. rather than NATO jurisdiction (thereby giving Russia and China veto
power) and that we had to remove "all" from the description of Serb forces that
must withdraw.

            

               
                  Kosovo update : 1) Two U.S. helicopter pilots died in a
crash during a training mission in Albania. They are considered the
war's first U.S. casualties. 2) A U.S. warplane shot down a Yugoslav MiG-29
fighter. 3) A Greek medical aid convoy in Kosovo was reportedly struck by a
bomb but without causing any injuries. Yugoslavia blamed NATO. NATO denied
responsibility. 4) Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova left Yugoslavia and arrived in
Italy with his family. Everyone wants to know whether the Serbs had forced him
to pretend on television that he was seriously negotiating with Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic. 5) The Wall Street Journal reported that
NATO had developed a plan to put tens of thousands of ground troops into a
"semi-permissive" environment in Kosovo--i.e., with or without Milosevic's
approval--by July. NATO denied it.

            

               Huge tornadoes killed at least 43 people , injured at least 500,
and destroyed more than 1,500 homes and businesses in Oklahoma and
Kansas. Of the 76 tornadoes reported, the largest was said to be a
half-mile to a mile wide, with winds surpassing 260 mph, and reportedly raked
the ground for four hours. The Associated Press line on Wednesday was that
Oklahomans were comparing the devastation and trauma to the Oklahoma City
bombing. "There was a sense that the storm was occurring right in front of a
nationwide audience, and it undermined once again the persistent naïve feeling
... that what we can watch so closely we can somehow control," proclaimed the
New York Times . "We have perpetuated the myth of a kind of visual
coexistence with twisters. But to watch your own tornado is a little like
watching your own funeral."

            

               
                  Kathleen 
                  Willey testified that
President Clinton made a "very forceful" unwanted sexual advance toward her in
1993. Speaking under oath in the Julie Hiatt Steele trial, Willey said
Clinton grabbed her breasts, kissed her, and put his hands "all over me."
Clinton has testified previously that he made no such advance on Willey. The
trial is officially about whether Steele obstructed Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr's investigation of Clinton when she denied knowing about the alleged
advance, but the media's unofficial interest is in whether Clinton did it and
how much lurid detail the trial will provide.

            

               The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 11,000 just 24
trading days after its first close above 10,000. The media yawned.

            

               C
               harismatic won the Kentucky Derby. At 30-1,
he was the longest long shot to win the Derby since 1940 and was only the
second horse to win from the 16 th post in this century. The
horse-racing world was shocked. The media's feel-good story lines focused on 1)
the underestimated horse, who was offered for sale in February but had no
takers; 2) trainer Wayne Lukas, who got the victory despite the fact that rival
trainer Bob Baffert had three favored horses in the race and had won the last
two Derbys; and 3) jockey Chris Antley, who had been thinking of quitting the
sport after a bout with drug abuse in the late '80s and a weight problem last
year.

            

               David Duke lost his race for Congress in Louisiana. He got 19
percent of the vote in a special election to fill the seat vacated by former
House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston, R-La. The top two finishers, who got 25
percent and 22 percent, respectively, will compete in a runoff. The New York
Times played up Duke's showing, saying he "fell just short" of making the
runoff and suggesting that he would have made it if a rival hadn't cut into his
vote. Republican leaders expressed relief that Duke won't become their "Y2KKK"
problem. Duke's spin: Now that everyone knows my views, the sizable vote I
received shows how many people agree with me. Duke's critics' spin: Now that
everyone knows his views, the sizable vote he received shows how many people
agree with him.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Please settle an ongoing dispute between my
husband and me. My husband believes it is OK to floss his teeth while driving
his car. (I am not making this up.) His teeth are very nice, but I believe this
activity should be restricted to the privacy of the bathroom only. He does not
see a problem doing this in public. Please respond.
            

            
               Sincerely,
            

            

               --Mrs. Floss
            

            Dear Mrs.,

            Prudie hesitates to ask
what he is steering the car with. Flossing is not a one-handed maneuver. You
are correct that it is not an activity meant for public viewing but, more
important, seeing to one's dental hygiene while driving a car poses a threat to
oneself, as well as to others. Do tell Mr. Floss that Prudie implores him to
find four minutes to do his admirable oral upkeep when he is outside of his
automobile.

            
--Prudie, nervously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I usually agree with your advice 100 percent,
but there were two cases where I'd have suggested something different. I wonder
if we actually disagree, or if my solutions just didn't occur to you.
            

            
               For the woman put off by her old , I agree that
the best solution would be for the roommate to change her ways, but leveling
with her would more than likely end the friendship. It sounds as if things are
just fine as long as your correspondent doesn't have to visit her friend's
house. So, why not just develop a convenient "cat allergy"? The white lie is a
time-honored solution for situations like this.
            

            
               And for "," the
person who wants to keep weight off but can't control what's served at dinner
parties, it's only good manners to eat what your host serves you--with gusto
and gratitude. You can fast the next day. (Well, OK, one bowl of Special-K with
skim milk.) Just a thought or, rather, two.
            

            

               --I'm a Southerner and Manners Are Our Thing
            

            Dear I'm,

            Thank you for being a Prudie. White lies are,
indeed, meant for situations like this, but in the case of "Nauseously Yours,"
there is the chance that straight shooting would be of real help to the
roommate living in filth.

            As for scarfing down
whatever party fare is offered, Prudie will split the difference with you.
Granted, one can't get into terrible trouble with an indulgence now and then,
assuming one is eating conscientiously, but to inhale a whole meal of rich food
is counterproductive. Let's say that when at a dinner party where the sky's the
limit--calorie-wise--it is permissible to treat oneself to something
particularly wonderful ... which of course would involve small tastes of
everything, wouldn't it?

            
--Prudie, moderately

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I'd like to rely on
your unwavering good taste and style to answer a fashion question. Does the
rule of no white clothing before Memorial Day and after Labor Day still apply?
I learned at a very young age that dressing in white clothing before Memorial
Day or after Labor Day was inappropriate. Are the standards still alive, or are
we living under the rule of the "casual Friday" ilk that has pervaded the
standards of dress?
            

            

               --Waiting on Hat Pins and Darning Needles for Your Reply
            

            Dear Wait,

            Prudie supposes that the
calendar's rules regarding white are still operative for the old guard. Even
for them, however, fashion has weighed in with a wild card: winter white. To be
perfectly candid with you though, Prudie's own style sense veers toward the
more individual: Wear what is flattering and what you like. (This is why no one
has seen Prudie's knees in eons.)

            
--Prudie, sartorially

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Whatever happened to courtesy? When I am out and
about, whether getting food or shopping for other goods, I seem to encounter
clerks who equate "There you go" with "Thank you." I can't tell you how many
times I have heard "There you go" as I am handed my change, or my bag, with no
thanks given. "There you go" seems to imply "Get the hell out," whereas a
thank-you is an appreciation of my helping to keep the staff employed.
            

            
               I am not some crotchety old fool. I have worked
retail for several years myself, and I say, "Thank you" because I realize that
if I do not act appreciatively, the customer may well go on down the
road!
            

            
               Thank you for you
time.
            

            

               --Courteous Carol
            

            Dear Court,

            My dear, with all due respect, Prudie thinks you
have the wrong take on this. Actually, Prudie finds "There you go" to be a
rather chipper bon voyage at the end of one's transaction. Have you
noticed how certain phrases seem to take hold? Like "Have a nice day" (which
Prudie happens to loathe). "There you go" is simply one more evolution of our
spoken language ... perhaps meant to refresh commonly said things.

            You are correct, of
course, that a thank-you is always appropriate, but that does not mean a
substitute phrase is improper. Prudie, frankly, cannot fathom how you've
decided that "There you go" is code for "Get the hell out." All you can do,
really, is not go there, yourself, when speaking.

            --Prudie,
linguistically

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 210: &quot;TK&quot;

            

               The whistle, the clanging, it's a good noise," said Dennis Brady, "a
noise that's supposed to be there." Where?
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 208)--"Favorite Things":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 Urine-absorbing disposable
diapers, mistake-eradicating liquid paper, bullet-stopping Kevlar--what's the
connection?
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               
"They're all items in the complimentary gift pack given to visitors at the
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library."-- Larry Amaros ( Tim Carvell ,
Steve Bodow , Wade Carvell , Kate Wing , Dale Shuger ,
Eric Fredericksen , and Al Petrosky had similar answers.)

               "Elia
Kazan will bring all three to the Oscars. The liquid paper is to fix the signs
of protesters, while the diapers and Kevlar are just precautionary."-- Nell
Scovell (similarly, Beth Sherman and James Urbaniak )

               "TThe
era in mistakes were evident has ended. Viva misteaks. No more xxx-ing out
words or axidental shootings. No more pee-induced discomfort."-- Deidre
Pike
               

               "None
has proved any less useless for stopping missiles than what we're building
now."-- Chris Kelly
               

               "Three
things you will need if you are a 110-year-old black writer intent on composing
your autobiography on a manual typewriter in an outdoor location where New York
police officers may happen to walk by."-- Francis Heaney
               

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            In a tight News Quiz race
for Living National Symbol of Old Age, Ronald Reagan just edged out Strom
Thurmond. But the fact is neither man can live forever. Can he? No, no, no. Of
course not. So it's not too soon to think about a replacement. Reagan's persona
was genial but addlepated old fool; Thurmond's was mean-spirited but
concupiscent old racist. Who will be our next cartoon old-timer, and what
particular geriatric qualities will he or she embody? Charlton
Heston--coldhearted but handsome old bully? Leni Riefenstahl--satanic yet
visually gifted old narcissist? Nominations welcome.

            
               Inventive
Answer
            

            Each was invented by a woman.

            Between 1790 and 1984, only 1.5 percent of those
receiving patents were women, notes Sabra Chartrand in the New York
Times . From 1984 to 1996, that increased to 9.2 percent. When they were
more house-bound, many women inventors devised solutions to domestic problems.
This is no longer the case. In 1998, 15.7 percent of the scientific and
engineering patents went to women, many of whom won not as independents, but as
employees of corporations or members of research teams.

            March is Women's History
Month and National Inventors' Month.

            
               New and Improved
Extra
            

            
               Actual headline
               :
Richard Bernstein's review of the latest volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs:
"An Architect of Diplomacy Seeks Détente with History"

            
               Improved
headline
               : "Self-Serving Guff Written in Blood of
Cambodians"

            
               Actual event 
               at Monday
night's Drama League benefit: Mary Tyler Moore, Diane Sawyer, Katie
Couric, and Liz Smith dance in a number from Cabaret .

            
               Improved benefit
event
               : Mary Tyler Moore, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric,
and Liz Smith swim laps in a big tank of lobsters.

            
               Actual 
               headline from a
New York Times music review: "Holocaust Inspires New Work"

            
               Crazy dream world
headline
               : "Holocaust Inspires Quiet, Respectful
Contemplation"

            
               Actual Associated Press item :
"Charles Manson's guitar was smashed by three inmates."

            
               Unlikely version of
story
               , but wouldn't it make a swell Police Academy
movie?: "Three inmates were smashed by Charles Manson's guitar."

            
               It's Tim Carvell
Day
            

            McSweeney's Internet
Tendency, the online outpost of the delightful humor magazine, is currently
featuring Tim's "The Talent Competition." California, the balmy home of the
next Democratic National Convention, is currently featuring Tim himself.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The Monkees and the Reagans.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             War Powerless

            President Clinton wants to
send 4,000 American soldiers on a NATO peacekeeping mission to Kosovo. If all
goes as planned (though what goes as planned in the Balkans?), the troops will
spend the next three to five years disarming ethnic Albanian guerillas,
replacing Serbian policemen with ethnic Albanians, and generally restoring
order to the Godforsaken Yugoslavian province. The mission is a superb idea, a
noble effort to pacify the troubled region before war spills into the rest of
Europe.

            It's also illegal. The
Clinton administration is "briefing" and "consulting" with Congress about the
mission but will not seek congressional approval. The administration insists
that it does not need such approval: "Ample constitutional precedent" (Bosnia,
Somalia, Haiti) proves that the commander in chief can conduct such forceful
operations without a congressional say-so. And Congress, it seems, agrees.

            It is probably hopeless, and certainly unfashionable, to
remind the president and Congress that they are wrong. Few passages in the
Constitution have been more abused than Article 1, Section 8.11, which gives
Congress sole power "to declare war [and] grant letters of marque and
reprisal." Constitutional history is fuzzy on many matters, but on this it is
pellucid: The framers intended Congress, and Congress alone, to decide whether
and when to send troops into combat. (According to scholars, "letters of marque
and reprisal" are, roughly speaking, the 18 th century equivalent of
our small-scale military actions.) The framers allowed that the president could
authorize defense and immediate retaliation in the case of a surprise attack.
Otherwise, the authority belonged to Congress. Our elected representatives were
supposed to deliberate, slowly, on this most consequential of state actions.
The framers feared, above all, that a vainglorious executive would, if
unchecked, drag the country into foolish foreign entanglements.

            This principle of
congressional supremacy guided the United States through World War II.
(Occasionally, Congress declared war before sending troops; mostly it didn't.)
But Congress' military influence began to wane as presidents grabbed more and
more power. The seminal event was the Korean War, which President Harry Truman
waged with U.N. approval and virtual silence from Congress. The shift continued
through Vietnam and the secret invasions of Cambodia and Laos. In 1973,
Congress reasserted itself by passing the War Powers Resolution over Nixon's
veto. Under the resolution (more commonly known as the "War Powers Act"), the
president has 90 days to obtain congressional approval of a military action. If
Congress does not vote aye, the troops must come home.

            The War Powers Resolution has been a monument to
congressional fecklessness and presidential bullying. Every president has
called the law unconstitutional and proceeded as if it (and the Constitution)
didn't exist. Ronald Reagan, the grand champion of executive power, ignored the
war powers clause and resolution in Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Central America,
and the Persian Gulf. (Reagan's advisers, usually so obeisant to "original
intent" when interpreting the Constitution, were more cavalier on the subject
of war powers.) George Bush skirted congressional war powers in Panama and
denied that they applied to the Iraq war. Clinton has ducked them in Haiti,
Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq. (When administration officials cite "ample
constitutional precedent," it is this "ample," but hardly constitutional,
record, to which they are referring.) Presidents have euphemized away the
seizure of congressional authority, minimizing their uses of force as "surgical
strikes," "police actions," or "immediate reprisals." They have cited the
pressures of the Cold War: At a time when any regional flare-up might provoke a
nuclear confrontation, they argued, America needed a single, firm hand on the
tiller. As Reagan said, "You can't have 535 secretaries of state."

            Congress grumbled but
didn't stop the erosion of its power. Whenever a president dispatched troops or
missiles, congressional Democrats and a few Republicans would pipe up that the
president was ignoring the War Powers Resolution. The president would argue it
didn't apply. Congress would gripe a bit more, and by that time the troops
would be on their way home. The resolution has become a convenient cover: It
allows Congress to complain that the president is breaking the law without
forcing Congress to take any real responsibility. If the operation goes awry,
Congress can load all the blame on the president. If the operation goes well,
the president takes all the credit anyway. "There's nothing in it for
Congress," says Eric Alterman, author of Who Speaks for America?: Why
Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy . "No one is going to make his career as
a great foreign policy senator." The political adage states that politics stops
at the water's edge. In fact, politics doesn't even start. Congress just isn't
interested enough.

            This time around, Congress isn't even bothering to invoke
the war powers clause or resolution. Both the rescue of Kosovo and the ongoing
bombardment of Iraq are undoubtedly military operations as contemplated by the
Constitution. Both expose U.S. troops to hostilities, and neither is an
immediate retaliation for an attack on the United States. The Iraq bombing has
been going on for two months, and the administration has not signaled any
willingness to abide by the War Powers Resolution. The Kosovo engagement is
scheduled for three years, but the administration has no intention of ever
putting it to congressional vote. (Congress has never held a War Powers
Resolution vote on the Bosnia mission, which began in 1995.) Even so, Congress,
perhaps exhausted by impeachment or simply supportive of the operations, has
been notably silent. "There is war powers fatigue," says Brookings Institution
scholar Richard Haass.

            The fact remains that the
congressional surrender of war powers is anti-democratic and anti-republican.
The most important duty of the state--the power to wage war--is now held by one
man and his unelected advisers. Members of Congress, who were elected to
deliberate and make these nasty decisions, have abdicated the duty the framers
intended them to have. Their abdication deprives the rest of the nation of the
chance to hear and participate in debate. It is no coincidence that the Iraq
war, the only recent military engagement preceded by a vigorous national
debate, was also an operation that Americans supported wholeheartedly. Do
Americans even know where Kosovo is?

            Congressional Democrats and Republicans have cooperated in
abandoning war powers. The indifference of congressional Republicans is not
surprising: Since the days of Reagan, they have generally endorsed the
executive's war-making authority. The Democrats' indifference is more
demoralizing. Democrats, after all, endorsed Congress' war powers when Reagan
and Bush were sending in the Marines. Why don't they now? The president, too,
seems hypocritical. After all, he fervently participated in the anti-Vietnam
movement, and the War Powers Resolution was a great triumph of that movement.
Now that he owns the executive authority he once feared in Nixon, Clinton has
cavalierly dismissed constraints on his power.

            Congressional war powers are not an entirely
lost cause. A few stubborn legislators are still shouting about it. Sen. Joe
Biden, D-Del., wants to amend the War Powers Resolution to give it more teeth.
He will hold hearings if he can get Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Jesse Helms, R-N.C., to agree to them. Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., an
international law professor, has championed congressional war powers for years.
Last year he tried and failed to invoke the War Powers Resolution for the
Bosnia mission. Now he and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., are circulating a letter
to colleagues that they will send to the president next week. The letter
insists that "The Constitution compels you to obtain authority from Congress
before taking military action against Yugoslavia." So far, Campbell and Frank
have enlisted only 34 co-signers, and the administration shows no signs of
paying attention.

            You can see why the administration wouldn't listen.
A congressional debate and vote on whether we should intervene in Kosovo could
be a fiasco. The intervention could be stopped by a block of isolationist
senators and House members. Our failure to intervene might well cause the war
to escalate and spread. But the absence of such a debate and vote may be worse.
The Constitution is most necessary when it is most inconvenient.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 201: &quot;TK&quot;

            

               In the '60s it happened to 95 percent of American boys; today it's down
to 60 percent, and a policy just announced by the American Academy of
Pediatrics is meant to make it happen even less. What?
            

             

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Monday's Question
(No. 199)--"Thirds":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    He's done it twice, and
he announced on the radio that if it were legal to do it again he would.
Opponents say this desire indicates "a strange psychological state." Who wants
to do what?
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               "Strom
Thurmond, own slaves."-- Tim Carvell ( Noah Meyerson had a similar
answer, as did Erich Van Dussen, except more Paul Harveyian.)

               "Boris
Yeltsin, work three days in a row."-- Kate Clinton
               

               
"Nigerian President-elect Olusegun Obasanjo, fix an election just so he can
visit Jimmy Carter."-- Dave Gaffen
               

               "You're
telling me they passed a law to prevent Kevin Costner from directing? Well,
thank God!"--Steve Smith
               

               
"Argentine President Carlos Saúl Menem, drive down East 88 th Street
holding a can of Bud."-- Peter Lerangis
               

                

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Many of your suggestions
involved actions that, while amusing and cruel, are not illegal but merely
unlikely (Most men would be too scared to lift it while the monkey was in the
room.), unappetizing (With a human femur? Not in my copy of Joy of
Cooking !), or in direct contradiction of the laws of physics (Sure, naked
and on the surface of the moon--but here on Earth? I doubt it.). You know who
you are.

            
               Factory Tour
Follow-Up
            

            "As of a year ago (the
last time I visited), the Hershey plant in Oakdale, Calif., offered
tours."-- Jamie Contreras
            

             

            
               Month of Junk
Follow-Up
            

            Colleen Werthmann and Don
Porges warn: "Never reply to the address that spam message says you should use
to be removed from the mailing list. This is one of the ways spammers verify
that the address is live and may result in even more spam."

            "Randy,
you received 35 [pieces of junk mail] and not one was sex-related? You gotta
get on AOL, man."-- Bill Franzen
            

             

            
               Born To Run
Answer
            

            Over the weekend, Argentina's President Carlos Saúl
Menem said he'd like to seek re-election, but his country's constitution
forbids three consecutive terms. In addition, a 1995 amendment specifically
prohibits Menem from running again. Former President Raúl Alfonsín thinks Menem
is just nuts, but Menem said Alfonsín should be ignored because "he couldn't
govern the country."

            Yesterday Menem again
reversed himself, announcing that he'd retire at the conclusion of his
term.

            
               Beth Sherman's
200 th Edition Guest Extra
            

            Randy, I'm always true to
you, darling, in my fashion, but sometimes a girl needs to sow some wild
oats.

            

               BETH'S LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF ONLINE QUIZZES
            

            
               Mount
Vernon Online Quiz
            

            "Test yourself on your
knowledge of George Washington. If you get all the questions correct, you will
have the opportunity to be listed in the Mount Vernon Hall of Fame."

            Martha, Thomas Paine, me.

            
               Bat
Quiz
            

            "How much do you know about these flying, furry
creatures?"

            Not enough. Why do you think I stopped
spelunking?

            
               Guess the
Dictator/Sit-Com Character
            

            "Pretend to be your favorite dictator or television
sit-com character, and I'll try to guess who you're supposed to be."

            Only if you promise to stay the night.

            
               Bayer Aspirin Trivia
Game
            

            "No description available."

            Just the thing after a hard night of beer
trivia.

            
               Alcatraz Trivia Contest
            

            "Alcatraz: The Warden Johnston Years."

            And you thought Strom Thurmond's ass was a hack
answer only at 
                  Slate
               .

            
               Leadership U: Bible Literacy Quiz
            

            "Find out how much you really know about the
Bible."

            Moneylenders for $400, Alex.

            
               Miata
Trivia
            

            "An online quiz of basic information on the Mazda
Miata."

            Never drive your Mazda Miata if you are:

            a) drunk

            b) uninsured

            c) sole support of your family

            d) all of the above

            
               Famous Cats Quiz
            

            Plus those nude photos of
Socks you've been hearing about!

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Clinton the insatiable
campaigner.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
 Kosovo update:
1) NATO admitted that one of its planes bombed a caravan of ethnic
Albanians. Yugoslavia, claiming that the bomb killed 75 civilians, called
it a NATO "atrocity." NATO said the plane's crew mistook the caravan for a
Serbian military convoy. President Clinton said that such tragedies are
"inevitable" in war and that NATO must fight on to stop far worse Serbian
atrocities. 2) The U.S. military is reportedly planning to call up thousands
of reservists . 3) U.S. officials changed their definition of victory. Old
definition: Driving the Serbs out of Kosovo. New definition: Shifting the
"balance of power" from the Serbs to the Kosovo Liberation Army. The sunny
spin: Now we have a viable strategy. The cynical spin: Now we're allied with
vengeful, ethnic-separatist thugs. (4/16/99)
            

            
Astronomers
found another solar system . It consists of at least three huge planets
around a star 44 light-years away. The spins: 1) We are not alone! 2) There
can't be life on these planets, because they're too big, too gaseous, and too
close to their star. 3) Maybe they have moons capable of supporting life. 4)
Among the 200 billion sunlike stars in our galaxy, we're certain to find other
habitable solar systems. (4/16/99)
            

            
 Hockey legend
Wayne Gretzky is retiring . Known as "The Great One," he holds the
National Hockey League records for goals (894), assists (1,962), and most
valuable player awards (nine). As of Friday morning, his decision wasn't yet
official, but he indicated he would retire "unless a miracle happens between
now and Saturday." Hockey pundits lauded him in terms reminiscent of Michael
Jordan. The happy spin: Gretzky built hockey into a popular sport in the United
States. The sad spin: He's going out on a low note because his team, the New
York Rangers, is mediocre. (4/16/99)
            

            
President
Clinton was held in contempt of court for lying in the Paula Jones case.
Judge Susan Webber Wright called his testimony about his relationship with
Monica Lewinsky "false, misleading and evasive" and "designed to obstruct the
judicial process." The judge ordered him to pay court costs and Jones' legal
expenses that were caused by his lying. Pundits agreed that materially the
ruling is just a slap on the wrist (and therefore Clinton won't appeal it) but
that symbolically it's a huge blow to his legacy, since he's the first
president to be held in contempt of court. Conservatives hailed the ruling as
history's verdict on Clinton. Liberal editorialists paired it with the
acquittal/mistrial of Susan McDougal, which they portrayed as a similar rebuke
to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Cynics expressed satisfaction that each
man is being repudiated without vindicating the other. (4/15/99)
            

            
Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr testified against renewal of the independent counsel
law . He argued that it had failed in its stated purpose, which is to assure
the public that investigations of the government would be nonpartisan.
Democratic senators blamed Starr for discrediting the law by injecting politics
into his investigations. Starr replied that the courts had repeatedly rejected
assertions that he and his staff had "conducted ourselves inappropriately."
Elite opinion is divided into three camps: 1) in favor of Starr and the
independent counsel law; 2) against both; and 3) against Starr (as a bad
example) but in favor of the law. After Starr's testimony, all three camps took
a break from their quarreling to make fun of Starr for being the only advocate
of the fourth position--against the law but in favor of himself.
(4/15/99)
            

            
Dr. Jack
Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for injecting lethal
drugs into a terminally ill man with the man's consent. The case was based on a
videotape of the man's death, which was brought to CBS by Kevorkian and aired
on 60 Minutes . He can't be paroled until he has served at least six
years. Kevorkian's lawyer's spin: The death was a victimless crime, the verdict
is an injustice, the sentence was too harsh, and Kevorkian will starve himself
to death in prison. The prosecutor's spin: Kevorkian forced the issue by taking
the tape to CBS. The judge's spin: The case wasn't about assisted suicide, it
was about a flagrant challenge to the rule of law. The new liberal spin:
Kevorkian was an embarrassment to the assisted suicide movement, and we're glad
he's out of the way. (4/15/99)
            

            

               Susan
McDougal avoided conviction in her Whitewater cover-up trial. She was
acquitted 
               of obstructing Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's
investigation (by refusing to testify against the Clintons) and got a
mistrial 
               on the remaining charges of 
               criminal contempt
because the jury was deadlocked. McDougal's spin: The jury agreed that her
refusal to testify was based on a reasonable belief that Starr was trying to
get her to lie. The prosecutor's spin: She escaped justice by putting Starr on
trial, but we'll try her again. Her lawyer's spin: Go ahead, and we'll try
you again. (4/12/99)
            

            

               José
María Olazábal 
               won the Masters golf tournament. The sentimental
spin: It's the heartwarming tale of a golfer who came back to win one of the
sport's biggest prizes after being so seriously injured three years ago that he
couldn't walk. The counterspin: It's the heartbreaking tale of third-place
finisher Greg Norman, who, after blowing a six-stroke lead in the tournament's
final round three years ago, choked away his lead again this year. The
completely unsentimental spin: It's the tournament's worst winning score in a
decade. (4/12/99)
            

            

               Two of
the 
               Washington beavers were captured . The National Park Service
suspects them of gnawing down four cherry trees in the District of Columbia's
scenic Tidal Basin. Agents are pursuing a third beaver that is believed to be
still at large. The captured beavers were given medical checkups and were then
released in a secret location to protect them from public scrutiny. According
to the Washington Post , "Officials tried to determine the sex of the
second beaver, but the animal did not seem to appreciate the prodding." The
spins: 1) Hurray, the feds saved the trees! 2) Hurray, they caught the beavers!
3) Boo, let the beavers eat the trees! 4) This is another attempt to distract
attention from the bombing of Yugoslavia. (4/12/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Kosovo
update: 1) House Republicans, having voted down (on a tie vote) a
resolution expressing support for the NATO bombing campaign, then voted to add
several billion dollars in defense spending to the money President Clinton
requested for the bombing. Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy and
disloyalty. Republicans accused Democrats of squandering military resources on
a foolish war. 2) The Rev. Jesse Jackson brought a delegation of religious
leaders to Belgrade, seeking to persuade Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
to release three captured U.S. peacekeeping soldiers. 3) NATO bombed
Yugoslavia's army headquarters and interior ministry. 4) A NATO missile strayed
into Bulgaria but killed nobody because it didn't explode. NATO apologized. 5)
The top U.N. human rights officer criticized NATO for killing civilians and
making itself "the sole judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb."
(4/30/99)
            

            
The Colorado
high-school massacre is spawning copycats . A Canadian student shot
another student to death in a manner similar to the Colorado tragedy. Four kids
in Texas and five in Brooklyn were charged with conspiring to blow up their
schools. A kid in upstate New York was found with a bomb-making arsenal with
which he evidently planned to destroy his school. A pipe bomb was found in an
Oklahoma school. In various places around the country, schools suspended
classes, and kids were questioned or even arrested due to bomb threats and
rumors of grudge-bearing students with hit lists. Some schools have reportedly
banned dark trench coats. The spins: 1) School violence has become a national
crisis. 2) School violence is declining and has been absurdly overhyped. 3) The
overhyping is good because it is cathartic and encourages vigilance. 4) The
overhyping is encouraging the copycats. 5) Psychopathic kids are in the grip of
violent fantasies. 5) Hysterical parents are in the grip of violent fantasies.
(4/30/99)
            

            
The Palestinian
Central Council agreed not to declare a Palestinian state May 4. The
Middle East peace process was supposed to conclude that day, but rocky
negotiations and new elections in Israel (scheduled for May 17) have delayed
the process. The U.S. editorial spin: The Palestinians held off because the
United States and the European Union asked them to do so and promised to
support eventual statehood. The Palestinian spin: We held off to avoid scaring
Israeli voters, which might have helped re-elect right-wing Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom we despise for sabotaging the peace process.
Netanyahu's spin: They held off because I'm strong and vigilant, so re-elect
me. (4/30/99)
            

            
New evidence
supports the theory that Mars once resembled Earth . A magnetic pattern
on Mars indicates that it had dynamic, internal heat similar to Earth's,
increasing the likelihood that Mars had a warm atmosphere, water, and
elementary life. The trumpeted spin: Mars had life! The buried spin: Earth
faces death. (4/30/99)
            

            
The
environmental panic over deformed frogs was deflated. For years,
scientists have been finding frogs around the United States with deformed,
missing, or extra limbs. The old theory: The frogs are a harbinger of a
"poisoned environment," possibly caused by industrial chemicals or erosion of
the ozone layer. The new theory, based on subsequent studies: The frogs'
development was screwed up by parasites that infected them. The new version of
the old theory: The parasites are a harbinger of a poisoned environment.
(4/30/99)
            

            

               Update 
               on the Colorado high school massacre : 1)
The local sheriff said three kids in combat fatigues who knew the killers and
waited outside the school during the shooting are "subjects of our
investigation." 2) Investigators determined that a girlfriend of one of the
killers bought two of the guns they used. It is not yet clear whether she knew
what they planned to do with the arms. 3) A security camera reportedly captured
the shootings that took place in the school cafeteria. 4) The Marine Corps says
that just before the massacre it rejected an application from one of the
killers on "medical" grounds--evidently he had been seeing a shrink and taking
psychiatric medication. 5) Marilyn Manson canceled the rest of his U.S. tour,
explaining that there's "not a great atmosphere" for his music after the
shootings. According to the Associated Press, "Manson said he blames ignorance,
hatred, and access to guns for the tragedy." (4/28/99)
            

            
President
Clinton proposed new federal gun control legislation . It would raise the
legal age for handgun possession to 21, prohibit juvenile possession of
semiautomatic weapons, require trigger locks, make parents criminally liable
for "knowingly or recklessly" giving their kids access to guns used to kill or
injure, and extend background checks to gun show patrons and people who try to
buy explosives. Meanwhile, Republican congressional leaders proposed a national
forum on "youth and culture." The spins: 1) Clinton is cynically exploiting
public unease about guns in the wake of the Colorado tragedy. 2) Clinton is
courageously exploiting public unease about guns in the wake of the Colorado
tragedy. 3) Clinton's focus on guns is simple-minded and would not have stopped
the Colorado tragedy. 4) The GOP's focus on "culture" is simple-minded and
would not have stopped the Colorado tragedy. (For further analysis of Clinton's
new spin on gun control, see "" in 
                  Slate
               .) (4/28/99)
            

            
Florida
lawmakers have agreed to give kids in bad public school districts
state-funded vouchers to attend private schools . It is the country's
first state voucher program. Some cities already have vouchers, and some states
are considering similar proposals. Florida will rate districts by standardized
test scores and will let kids in the lowest-scoring districts switch to any
school that will accept them. The state will transfer $4,000 from the school
each kid leaves to the school where he or she enrolls. The arguments pro: 1) It
gives kids and parents a choice. 2) It breaks the stranglehold of bureaucrats
and teachers' unions. 3) It puts bad schools on notice that they must shape up
or lose their students. The arguments con: 1) The good parents will yank their
kids out of bad schools, making these schools worse and leaving kids with
indifferent or helpless parents trapped in them. 2) Using state money for
religious schools is unconstitutional. 3) The vouchers are too small to give
poor kids a real shot at a good private school. (4/28/99)
            

            
Denver Broncos
quarterback John Elway is retiring . He won the last two Super Bowls and
holds the National Football League records for games won (148) and game-winning
or game-tying drives in the fourth quarter (47). He is one of only two
quarterbacks to throw for 50,000 yards and is one of only three to throw 300
touchdown passes. Elway said he is retiring because his knee is damaged, he has
accomplished what he sought in football, and he wants to spend more time with
his family. The sunny spin: He's going out on top, just as Michael Jordan did.
The sad spin: He won't get a chance to try for a third Super Bowl. The cynical
spin: He's shrewdly getting out before the Broncos collapse.
(4/26/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , May 1
            

            The cover story predicts that the disappearance of privacy
will bring about "one of the greatest social changes of modern times."
Technology is destroying privacy that we took for granted 20 years ago, but the
corresponding benefits--better government services, cheaper products, less
crime--may outweigh that loss. ... An editorial sighs that Milosevic's firing of his most
liberal aide bodes poorly for a compromise in the Kosovo war. ... The
magazine slams the recent spate of millenially inspired "best"
books lists and recommends 
                  Slate
               's very own instead.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , May 17
            

            The cover story describes the Palestinians' shriveling
economy and corrupt political system. Palestinians now level their anger at
their own rotten leadership as well as at Israel. (Intifada-era graffiti has
been painted over with phrases such as "Confront corruption and patronage!")
Some right-wing Islamic factions aspire to replace the current government with
a theocracy similar to the Sudan's. ... Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen asserts that Serbia's crimes are "different from those
of Nazi Germany only in scale." He also argues that an allied victory could
stimulate a postwar democratic transformation of Yugoslavia similar to that of
West Germany after World War II.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , May 2
            

            The cover story contends
that eliminating affirmative action does not devastate equal opportunity in
higher education. Only six of 74 public colleges, universities, and graduate
programs in California and Texas suffered losses in minority enrollment
following affirmative-action bans. California's Proposition 209 sent minorities
"cascading" to less prestigious California universities but caused university
heads to adopt more "holistic" admissions criteria--e.g., giving more weight to
nonacademic achievements--to bolster minority enrollment. ... A profile
condemns the coach-choking (and uncoachable) Latrell Sprewell for crushing the
New York Knicks' NBA championship hopes: His nihilism and selfishness have
sapped his teammates' will to win. ... A Susan Sontag essay riffs on the
Kosovo crisis, concluding that it is a just war to deter "radical evil" and
that the allies will fail if they don't oust Milosevic.

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek
               
               , May 3
            

            The newsweeklies
reconstruct the Littleton massacre and solicit expert opinions on why it
happened. Newsweek 
               says that teen-agers kill when pre-existing biological flaws
are exacerbated by poor nurturing. Biological warning signs: low heart rates
and swollen brain lesions. Other post-massacre advice: Time 
               recommends that high schools provide counseling to "help
bullies deal with frustration," and Newsweek 
               writes that kids should vet their peers' comments ("Mrs.
Jones gave me a D, and I could just kill her for that.") for homicidal
tendencies.

            Both magazines print blueprints for a ground war in
Kosovo. Time 
               inventories the troops, time, casualties, and money necessary
to carry out four different plans, from limited force (10,000 troops, 2-3 weeks
of prep time, 500 dead, and $5 billion) to full-on occupation of Yugoslavia
(200,000 troops, 4-6 months of prep time, 5,000-10,000 dead, and $25 billion).
A retired Army officer tells 
               Newsweek that NATO could retake Kosovo in a
brief ground attack (100,000 troops, 2-3 months of prep, and 10,000-30,000
Serb casualties).

            
               Newsweek

               reports that black athletes are shunning white agents for
black ones. Among the black agents courting rookies are Puffy Combs, Master P,
and Johnnie Cochran.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , May 3
            

            The cover
story details the disturbing behavior of the Littleton killers
before last week's massacre. Every kid at school knew about the
Trenchcoat Mafia, but Columbine adults were unaware of its existence. A
sidebar stresses the dangers of bullying, which causes 8
percent of school kids to miss "a day of class monthly" and 43 percent to fear
using school bathrooms. ... A writer goes inside the Air Force surveillance planes
currently searching Kosovo for Serbian tanks. Despite the planes' detection
techniques, sometimes "you don't know if it's some civilian driving to the
grocery store, or a military vehicle," says an intelligence officer. ...
A piece calls Frank Lloyd Wright an awful engineer. His
masterpiece, Fallingwater, has been girded by steel scaffolding to prevent it
from crumbling.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , May 3
            

            An editorial warns that
the president may lose both the war in Kosovo and his strong popular support if
he continues to dither over the use of ground troops. ... Another
editorial defends the "incrementalist" positions that George W. Bush and
Elizabeth Dole have taken on abortion. Their hesitantly pro-life platforms are
useful token gestures "of occasional conformity with the governing [pro-choice]
orthodoxy." (For 
                  Slate
                Editor Michael Kinsley's take on this
topic, see the April 17 ".")

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , April 17
            

            
               (posted Friday, April
16, 1999)
            

            The cover story worries that the Kosovo crisis could
refreeze relations between Russia and NATO. Russia is so eager to reassert its
authority that it may "gamble away its standing in the democratic world in
support of a regime that has committed the most heinous human-rights abuses in
modern Europe." ... Another editorial charts the sinking status of the refugee.
During the Cold War era, Western countries viewed asylum as a symbolic triumph
over the Soviet empire, but refugees displaced by recent ethnic conflicts are
finding no havens. ... The magazine profiles Serbian filmmakers. The most talented of the
lot, a man who just released a penetrating movie about war and moral decay, is
now negotiating a deal to direct costume dramas and love stories for
Miramax.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , April 18
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
April 15, 1999)
            

            The first of six special
millennium issues picks "The Best Ideas, Stories and Inventions" of the past
1,000 years. The introduction defends the concept of ranking (it cuts through
late 20 th -century "data smog," and besides other magazines do it
too). Leon Botstein deems the human voice Best Musical Instrument, and A.S.
Byatt awards Scheherazade Best Story. Among the other winners: human
rights for Best Idea; Celestine V for Best Pope; India for Best Revolution;
penicillin for Best Invention; and Lucille Ball for Best Clown. The list is
decidedly Brit-heavy, with citations for Elizabeth I (Best Leader), Henry VIII
and Anne Boleyn (Best Sex Scandal), the purchase of the Suez Canal (Best Land
Deal), and Adm. Nelson's victory over Napoleon at the Nile (Best Naval
Battle).

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek
               
               , April 19
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
13, 1999)
            

            
               Newsweek 's cover story on Slobodan Milosevic, "The Face of Evil,"
recites the now familiar story of how he co-opted Serb nationalism to fuel his
own rise to power. Time 
               calls the Kosovo crisis "Clinton's War," but Newsweek

               suggests that Vice President Al Gore may eventually pay the
price for it during the 2000 campaign. Gore has defended the bombing-only
strategy so vehemently that he'll suffer if the president does send ground
troops. Time prints a map of the world's ethnic and civil conflicts,
color-coded to show the level of U.S. involvement, annotated with death tolls.
A Newsweek 
               sidebar reports that both the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation
Army have been trafficking in drugs to fund weapon purchases.

            
               Time 's cover story on the amateur genealogy trend sweeping the
nation points would-be researchers to the National Archives, Internet
databases, and prison records. The most avid practitioners are Mormons, who
believe that ancestors can be saved through posthumous baptism and have
established 3,200 genealogy libraries around the world to encourage
conversions.

            
               Newsweek

               features the findings of a psychologist who claims he can
predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a marriage will endure or dissolve.
The piece includes a handy quiz for couples who want to diagnose their
viability. (Yes or no: "My partner generally likes my personality.")

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               
                  , April 19
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
13, 1999)
            

            The cover story
debates whether NATO's goal should be to carve up Kosovo or
administer it as a protectorate. A caustic piece reports that war has improved life in Belgrade: There
are no traffic jams (because so many people have fled), and the crime rate has
dropped (because all offenses are tried under martial law). ... A
profile says Bill Bradley may be the slumbering giant of the
presidential race. He's raising cash fast and his once-derided brainy
folksiness is earning praise.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , April 19
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
13, 1999)
            

            A profile of the Ochs
and Sulzberger families suggests that their stewardship of the New York
Times was unduly influenced by self-consciousness about their Judaism.
Arthur Sulzberger intentionally underplayed the paper's reports of Nazi
exterminations. ... A long piece chronicles how a death row inmate from
Arizona named Paris Carriger was exonerated with legal support from a small
cadre of savvy East Coast friends. He didn't know any of them when sentenced,
but he cultivated epistolary friendships from his prison cell with reporters,
anti-capital punishment activists, and experts he saw featured on the
MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour . ... A New York chef reveals the
nastiness inside upscale restaurant kitchens: old fish, grimy meat, and rivers
of butter.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , April 19
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
13, 1999)
            

            The editorial lauds
hawkish Republicans for their willingness to send ground troops to Kosovo and
berates poll-wary Democrats for their hesitance to do so. ("Why don't they just
make Dick Morris the national security adviser and stop the charade?")
... A piece suggests that Americans are not as skittish about battle
casualties as the conventional wisdom dictates: During the Gulf War, 84 percent
of Americans backed the use of ground troops. ... The cover story likens
Serbian ethnic cleansing to the practices of Nazi Germany. Both are a harsher
expression of the same impulse that leads to "separate academic departments for
African-American studies, women's studies, Jewish studies."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Hillary vs. Bill

            If Hillary Clinton runs for
the U.S. Senate in New York next year, she'll have two crucial advantages. One
is that her last name is Clinton. The other is that her first name isn't Bill.
The emerging spin behind her candidacy is that she's her husband's moral
opposite: She's been his victim, she's been faithful, and now it's "her turn."
But that's only one dimension in which the Clintons differ. Republicans who
oppose Hillary Clinton's candidacy are gearing up to exploit another
difference: her comparative liberalism on matters of policy.

            A year ago, Republican
attacks on Hillary Clinton's involvement in Whitewater and Filegate might have
hurt her. But nowadays talking about those scandals reminds people less of the
Clintons' suspicious behavior than of the GOP's impeachment jihad. Indeed, part
of the logic behind her candidacy is to ride the anti-impeachment backlash.
"Mrs. Clinton would serve as a constant reminder of the GOP effort to oust her
husband," observes the Wall Street Journal . She "could help drive
Democratic voters to the polls," sweeping several of New York's congressional
Republicans out of office. A scandal-based Republican attack would only make
things worse. "If their campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton is to simply be
an extension of the Starr investigation," Sen. Bob Torricelli, D-N.J., the
Democrats' Senate campaign chairman, warned on Meet the Press , "they're
going to take a sizable Hillary lead and make it into a rout."

            It's true that the public remains angry at Mrs. Clinton's
husband. But the genius of her candidacy is that she gets to ride that
backlash, too. Her "advisers" told the New York Times that she's "very
enticed by the idea of at last having an independent voice, particularly after
her husband ... publicly humiliated her" last year. This story line plays to
moralists as well as to feminists. If you're mad at the president, the argument
goes, support the woman he cheated on.

            The media have fallen
head over heels for this spin. "Her Turn," says Newsweek 's cover. "A
Race of Her Own," agrees Time . A New York Times editorial says
her candidacy "could allow her to untangle herself from the political side of
her marriage and compete for a power base that is all her own. Many women might
ante up a campaign contribution just in the hopes of seeing Mrs. Clinton sworn
in on the day that her husband becomes unemployed. ... If the President
announces that it is now Hillary's turn to shine, and his to take on the jobs
of campaign cheerleader and family breadwinner, even many of the couple's
critics would agree it is about time."

            The pose of the wronged but ever-faithful wife also helps
Hillary Clinton in two other ways. It raises her to an even higher pedestal,
prompting the media to ask not whether she's up to the job of senator but
whether she's too good for it. Meanwhile, the pedestal lifts her above the
charge of carpetbagging. Torricelli says she "would be part of a great
tradition" of icons who have used New York's Senate seats as a "platform" from
which to "enlighten the whole nation."

            Hillary Clinton's likely
Republican opponent, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, understands the peril of the
impeachment mess and is wisely steering clear of it. "I was one who didn't
believe that [President Clinton] should have been impeached, so no, I would not
bring it up," the mayor declared on This Week . Instead, he vowed to
confront his likely foe on "issues" such as taxes, welfare reform, national
health insurance, and her advocacy of a Palestinian state. Superficially,
Giuliani's argument is that she's too liberal. But he has added a clever twist
to the argument, turning Hillary Clinton's strategy on its head. She's
different from her husband, all right, says the mayor. The difference is that
she's out of the mainstream.

            On This Week , Giuliani twice likened his own views
to those of President Clinton and contrasted them with Hillary's more radical
views. On the Middle East, said Giuliani, "I'm in the same position as the
White House, and Mrs. Clinton is out there much more heavily favoring the
Palestinians." Later, when asked about his initiative to require homeless
people to get jobs or leave their homeless shelters, Giuliani said the
initiative "emerges from the mandates of the welfare reform bill that was
signed by President Clinton. And what it says is that when you seek shelter ...
we will engage you in a process of trying to find work for you as opposed to
letting you become dependent." As for Hillary Clinton, the mayor allowed, "She
may be in a different position."

            Mrs. Clinton's strategists worry openly about this
line of attack. "Let's say she disagrees with her husband on trade policy," one
member of her team told the Times . "It will be trumpeted as a big deal."
In a mock strategy memo published in Newsweek , former Clinton adviser
George Stephanopoulos asked her, "What if the president undercuts your most
effective campaign issue by making a deal with Republicans on partial
privatization of Social Security and tax cuts? Will you take a stand or stand
by your man?"

            Therein lies her dilemma.
On Meet the Press , former Nixon strategist Bill Safire explained how she
could beat the extremism rap. "She can do what her husband has done over the
years, and that is reassess things. ... She can make a visit to Israel, be
embraced, get a lot of pictures over there, and move from the left [toward] the
center," talking more "about getting people off welfare and balancing budgets."
Torricelli is already working on this script, saying Clinton "would make very
clear that she supports this peace process ... from the perspective of an
administration that has probably been more helpful to Israel and its security
than any president in American history." One step to the left, two steps to the
right. That's what people love about her husband's politics--and what they hate
about his character.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  My
Dear,
               
            

            
               How could anyone
with all mental faculties intact believe that ? Good God, anyone can see that
"his" purse does not match "his" outfit.
            

            

               --Joanna
            

            Dear Jo,

            Prudie knows that purple
homosexuals everywhere thank you for your vote of confidence in their style
sense. And isn't the power of television characters wonderful? Murphy Brown was
a loose and thoughtless woman, thereby being a rotten role model, and now Tinky
Winky is sending secret messages.

            
--Prudie, conspirationally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I read with interest the letter from "." I am a
Young Entrepreneur and have had the sometimes unnerving task of interviewing
... a skill that is learned. Until it is perfected we young'uns rely on
business magazines and books as to how to interview. In fact, I have used both
the "Tell me about yourself" and "Why do you want to work here?" lines verbatim
because I was following the experts' advice about what makes a good
interview.
            

            
               What the gentleman may have perceived as
amateurish and obnoxious could have been a combination of nervousness and
inexperience. Here was an obviously experienced man coming into this young
upstart's company, probably extremely well-dressed and with credentials earned
before the CEO was even born. It is quite humbling for me to have people with
much more experience than I call and ask to be considered for a
position.
            

            
               I am sorry that the
writer didn't get a call back, but there still could be an opportunity there.
He could call back and offer to be a mentor. This would give both parties a
chance to learn about each other. Better yet, start a business as a
professional mentor in his area of expertise: charging a monthly retainer for
the privilege of calling him to ask questions whenever they wish. He has so
much experience and, as shown by the last interview, there are a lot of us out
there who could benefit from it.
            

            

               --Future Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Canada
            

            Dear Fu,

            Thank you for being a Prudie and offering a positive
suggestion to our Crank. It will no doubt lift his spirits to hear from one of
the young'uns who is respectful of his age and experience.

            The generation gap, as
you illustrate, has different ways of being bridged.

            
--Prudie, appreciatively

            

               
                  Madame,
               
            

            
               In a a person wrote wondering how to respond to
the "how are you question." Might I offer a suggestion from Maine?
            

            
               "I'm all right as long as you don't ask for
details."
            

            
               As an alternative,
"Middling."
            

            
               Yours,
            

            

               --RWH
            

            Dear R.,

            Prudie likes humorous responses to standard
questions. A Texan she knew used to reply to "How are you?" with, "Damn near
perfect." As Prudie has said before, the "how are you" gambit is really a
greeting, not a question.

            --Prudie,
responsively

            
               
                  Dear Ms.
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am a high-school
senior who has met with fantastic failure when attempting to interact with
women. It's not that they necessarily dislike me, nor I them, it's just that
everything feels so uncomfortable. Prom is coming up, and I am currently
wondering whether or not to ask anyone. Everyone around me is telling me I HAVE
to go, but it just seems like an uncomfortable hell. Yet if I don't go, I fear
I will regret it for the rest of my life. Any suggestions?
            

            
               Sincerely,
            

            

               --Apprehensive ( Slate reader since age 16)
            

            Dear Ap,

            To be 18 and experience difficulties "interacting
with women" means that emotionally and developmentally you are still working
things out. Everyone does not hop into the boy-girl thing with ease and
comfort. What supposedly comes naturally can take awhile to arrive.

            That everything feels uncomfortable may mean that
you're more than normally shy and insecure. Or it could mean that you're more
than normally shy and insecure. Time will reveal what is comfortable. As for
the prom, there is no need to push yourself into something you would be just as
happy skipping. Plus, it sounds as if you have no one in mind.

            You are 18, Prudie is
not. Trust her that if you decide to do an end run around prom night you will
not, decades from now, be bemoaning that fact.

            
--Prudie, promisingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I work with a guy
I've tried to befriend. In fact, I even introduced him to the woman he's going
to marry. The problem is that he does things like inviting me to lunch,
then--when I'm trapped in his car--says he needs to run errands first. He even
returned one of those grip-squeeze things I'd given him because he wore a hole
in it, and it was spilling the stuff inside. Is he just a jerk? And if so, how
do I continue my friendship with his fiancee, whom I still like?
            

            

               --Split Loyalty in San Rafael, Calif.
            

            Dear Split,

            Prudie is never sure what the word "jerk" means.
This chap, however, sounds like a clod, and certainly someone deficient in the
social graces and good sense departments. If you choose to continue with him,
you might try to fluff up his social skills by example. An instance might be if
he tries the lunch/errands stunt again, simply request that he do his chores
without you because your intention was to have lunch. If he is a super boor and
tries to override you, request that he stop the car and let you out.

            Your friend, his
fiancee, may be a lost cause as a continuing friendship if you call it a day
with Mr. Clunk. Them's the breaks, kiddo.

            --Prudie,
realistically

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Autobiographical

            I rode
my bike across the Argentine.
Marble arms raised for joy in the garden,
a slush of sculpture salvaged from wrecked ships
around Don d'Carlo's sandstone pen
carved from a boulder fallen from that cliff.

            When I
was a nude Sicilian youth, and had been
lounging on the piazza for a good hour,
above the sea, I heard a cry from the beach
and ran. A seal pup lay curled around
a stone. Someone--my brothers?--had beat it

            
senseless, so I heaved the sack of fur
back to surf, the body cooling my body,
and swam some yards until it sank to green.
Back up the steps, I dried on the wall
fell to sleep forgot the beast and grew

            
athletic and kept my tongue back of my head
obeyed the trainer loved a girl she climbed
a tree beside the training yard to whisper
my secret names from the arbor. War grew
as we slept. I fled across the sea

            to
escape conjecture; I biked all over
to build a body of forgiveness, the wheels
wearing down a new world of old roads.
I rode across the Argentine, my spokes
speaking for me, to the house of a friend:

            I swam in the sea there,
among the mangled steel.
A lost flotilla, the hemisphere
tapped in my ear, the ticking of whales
the warnings of sand. And when I drowned
I sank slowly and meant every fathom.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  Mod
Squad
                (MGM-UA). Vicious pans for this remake of the 1968-73 TV
show about three juvenile delinquents (Claire Danes, Omar Epps, Giovanni
Ribisi) pushed into police undercover work. "It could be the capper segment in
a Fox prime-time special on the World's Most Inept Movies " (Richard
Corliss, Time ) ... "really, really dumb" with characters who
"miraculously 'solve' the crime with a tape recorder and a lot of bad driving"
(Chris Kridler, the Baltimore Sun ) ... "one of the lamest films [MGM]
ever has foisted upon the world" (Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety ) ...
"torturously boring" (Lawrence Van Gelder, the New York Times ) ...
"almost unreleasable" (Mike Clark, USA Today ). And to add insult to
injury, the Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert uses the expression
"rumpy-pumpy" in his review for the third time in four months. The L.A.
Times ' Kevin "I Gave At First Sight a Good Review" Thomas, correctly
foreseeing that the studio would be desperate for advertising blurbs on this
one, pumps the thing up: It's "a great-looking picture that zips along with
grace, light on its feet." (Check
out this archive of Claire Danes photos.)

            

               
                  EdTV
                (Universal Pictures). Mainly positive reviews
for a Ron Howard Truman Show -ish comedy. In this one, the guy, Ed
(Matthew McConaughey), knows what's going on. Critics say it's not as subtle as
The Truman Show , but it's funnier: "There's a nice overlay of goofiness
in the satire" (Jay Carr, the Boston Globe ). Kenneth Turan of the Los
Angeles Times calls it "a grab bag that's both amusing and frustrating.
Simultaneously inspired and contrived, clever and crude." Some critics call the
Hollywood self-consciousness about stardom and the price of fame a tad too
navel-gazing; most find the movie pretty charming, especially the twangy
McConaughey's performance as Ed. (Read
this interview with McConaughey; David Edelstein's review in

                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  20 Dates
               
(20 th Century Fox). Critics are unanimously repulsed by Myles
Berkowitz's documentary about his attempts to find a girlfriend. He films a
series of dates, sometimes secretly. Many reviewers identify with the one who
stabs him in the hand when she finds out what's going on. Renee Graham of the
Boston Globe calls the film "excruciating," and Berkowitz "the biggest
jerk you're likely to see in a movie this year." Justine Elias of the
Village Voice compares him to "an obnoxious four-year-old who believes
everything he does is fascinating and adorable." Somehow in the course of the
film he manages to find a woman who'll continue the relationship, and the two
are allegedly now engaged. 
                  Slate
               's Edelstein says of the film: "I
found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious heterosexual Jewish
men the world over." (Read the rest of his review .)

            

               Television
            

            
               
                  Futurama
               
(Fox; Sunday, 8:30 p.m.; starting April 6, Tuesday, 8:30 p.m.). Mainly nice,
loyal reviews for Matt Groening's new animated sitcom; a few "this ain't no
Simpsons " complaints. Critics say the sci-fi spoof set in the year 3000
is more visually interesting but that it lacks the "bite" (Ron Wertheimer, the
New York Times ) and the "snappy rhythm and the kind of far-reaching
humor" (Ginia Bellafante, Time ) that make The Simpsons so good.
On the positive side, Tom Shales of the Washington Post calls it
"another satiric triumph," and the viewers turned out in force--its Nielsen
rating was higher than both The Simpsons and The X-Files .
(Find out more
about the show at Fox's Web site.)

            

               Books
            

            
               
                  All Too Human: A
Political Education
               , by George Stephanopoulos (Little, Brown). Idealist
or opportunist? Most reviewers find the Clinton adviser revealed in this memoir
more the opportunist. Garry Wills' lethal piece in the New York Times Book
Review blasts the book: "The self-importance underneath the self-criticism
is breathtaking." Wills calls the memoir as a whole "tiresomely moralizing" and
knocks the quality of the advising Stephanopoulos did for Clinton, noting that
it was after he left that the Clinton presidency really took off. The
Economist praises the book ("impressively honest and hugely enjoyable")
but doesn't have much company. Owen Ullmann writes in Business Week that
"[p]erhaps the book should be renamed All Too Ambitious ." ( Jacob
Weisberg and Christopher Caldwell's discussion of the book in

                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  For the Relief of
Unbearable Urges
               , by Nathan Englander (Knopf). This story collection
draws praise, along with raised eyebrows in regard to some extra-artistic
issues. The reviews are wonderful: "graceful and remarkably self-assured ...
unpretentious and powerful stories" ( Publishers Weekly ). The oohs and
aahs come over Englander's reported $350,000 advance, an unheard-of sum for a
debut short story collection. His stories mostly hinge on matters of faith. As
Albert Mobilio writes in the Village 
               Voice Literary Supplement ,
"the questions with which James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor pried at Catholic
doctrine he now aims at Orthodox Judaism." (Read an excerpt from the book
here.)

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  True Crime ;

               
                  Movie -- The King and I ;

               
                  Movie -- Forces of Nature ;

               
                  Television--The Oscars ;

               
                  Book-- Years of Renewal
                  , by Henry Kissinger.

            

             

            

               
                  
                     Movie--
                  
                  The
Deep End of the Ocean ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The
Corruptor ;

               
                  Movie--
                  The Rage: Carrie
2 ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Wing
Commander ;

               
                  Death-- Stanley Kubrick;

               
                  Book--
                  Black Hawk Down: A
Story of Modern War , by Mark Bowden.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Analyze This ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Cruel Intentions ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Lock, Stock & Two Smoking
Barrels ;

               
                  Book -- Monica's Story , by Andrew Morton;

               
                  Theater -- Annie Get Your Gun ;

               
                  Theater -- Bright Lights, Big
City .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  8MM ;

               
                  Movie -- 200 Cigarettes ;

               
                  Movie -- The 
                  Other Sister ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Houdini Girl , by Martyn Bedford;

               
                  Book -- Perfect Murder, Perfect Town , by Lawrence
Schiller;

               
                  Theater--
                  Not About Nightingales .

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 246: &quot;Unundercover&quot;

            
               "We're not hiding
it," says Capt. Michael Fallon of the Hartford Police Department, hoping to
ease community fears. In fact, they plan to take it to fairs so children can
climb on it and have their pictures taken with it. What?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 245)--"Dis Sent":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           Gerald Vollmer-Heurer has a plan, and
Dirk Adol hates it. "It is cheap, it is degrading, it is smelly," says Mr.
Adol, who has a plan of his own. "What I propose is something clean, useful and
solid." What is the subject of Dirk and Gerald's
disagreement?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "I
don't know, but Procter & Gamble wants a piece of it."-- Norman
Oder
            

            
"Gerard wants Harry Knowles to replace Siskel; Dirk prefers Michael
Medved."-- Matt Sullivan
            

            
"American cheese in a peelable plastic envelope. Oh, really? String cheese in
plastic. Oh, you're kidding. A thimble of gum surrounded by hard candy. Oh!
Well, never mind."-- Winter Miller
            

            
"Brands of household cleaners. You know, this is the kind of thing our
newspapers are going to be just filled with if we let gay marriage go any
further!"-- Dale Shuger
            

            "Like
everyone else, they're talking about ground troops."--Alex
Pascover
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Rare
Personal Wrap-Up
            

            Neil Simon himself flew
in for opening night of the München dinner theater production; that much I'm
sure of. And I remember the first scene; the boys are playing poker.

            Dirk: Gerald, you are such
neat! Too such!

            
Gerald: Nein, Dirk, das ist nicht ein Schveinhause!
            

            After that, all I recall
is searing intestinal pain. I think I had a bad piece of bratwurst. But whether
it was the deft comic performances (James Coco as Gerald; a 50-gallon drum of
sauerkraut as Dirk) or Doc's brilliant writing, something about that evening
left a lasting impression. Years later, in the middle of one of our
all-too-frequent quarrels, I said to my wife: "Oh, honey, what's happened to
us? We used to be so happy, and now we fight like Dirk and Gerald!" And she
replied, paraphrasing Dr. Johnson, "When a man grows tired of cheap, degrading,
and smelly, he's grown tired of life, you jerk." The next morning, we flew to
Vegas and renewed our vows.

            
               X Deutsche Marks
the Spot Answer
            

            The two men have competing ideas for disposing of
the 2,600 tons of German paper money that nation will discard as it switches
over to the euro.

            Vollmer-Heurer proposes mixing the old bills with
rotting garbage and animal excrement to produce compost. Adol has a method for
shaping shredded bills into pellets and using those as an ingredient in
lightweight bricks with excellent insulating properties.

            "Building pellets or
manure," muses a philosophical Karl Schnitzler of the Bavarian State Central
Bank, "the question is secondary. The mark will soon be history, and what
matters is the stability of the currency in use."

            
               Headline Haiku
Extra
            

            (Four lines with the
same number of words; each word-group found adjacent to each other in a
headline; all four headlines from the same edition of one newspaper.)

            To break impasse
over ancestral land
motions on crisis
must remain Serbian

            
               Irish Times , May 19, 1999

            -- Kieran
Healy
            

            Private Eyes
His Own
Free Can
Of Islam

            
               Village Voice , May 25, 1999

            
               --Francis
Heaney
            

            Joystick jockeys
Backstreet Boys
Torture Trial
White Noise

            
               Village Voice , May 25, 1999

            
               --Andrew
Silow-Carroll
            

            Fed stays
the course
of its bias
but warns

            
               Philadelphia Inquirer , May 18, 1999

            
               --Andy
Witney
            

            Fish on a bed
Writer radiates inner peace
Harmonic style and form
For under 35's only

            
               New York Times , May 19, 1999

            -- Beth
Sherman
            

            suit drops
so vulnerable
tattoo found
mission changing

            Associated Press, May 19, 1999

            
               --Scott
Baisch
            

            Quayle No Longer
Alone
In Grave Robbing Scheme
Class Action Trial Starts
Cheese Blamed in '97

            
               San Francisco Chronicle , May 19, 1999

            
               --Jeffrey
Brax
            

            Beautiful Baby? Just
Leaving The O.R.
Wriggle and Writhe
Over High-Dose Breast

            
               New York Times , May 18, 1999

            
               --Steve
Smith
            

            Dream Statement
Focus
U.S. Probe Confirmed
Work Backs Up
Good Eating Calendar

            -- Eric W.
Kopp
            

            Giuliani snubs
Mayor disparages
Little gripes
Mentally ill

            
               New York Times
            

            -- Nancy Rhode
            

            Thanks to the Amazon
Elvis and Lost Souls
Seek System to Review
To Explain Web Mania

            
               Wall Street Journal , May 18 1999

            
               --Heather
Harmon
            

            Her Party's in
Turmoil
Evasiveness May Run
Manhole Lids aloft
In a Sharp Rebuff

            
               --Winter
Miller
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Cheap, degrading, smelly things: cheese and Joyce
Maynard.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Account Overwrought

            Banking regulatory issues do not normally spark
interest, let alone outrage. But more than a quarter of a million furious
comments flooded the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to protest the "Know Your
Customer" regulations proposed by banking agencies last December. The regs
would have required that banks determine customers' sources of funds, create
client profiles based on transaction patterns, monitor accounts for deviations,
investigate irregularities, and report unexplained activities to federal
authorities.

            "Tyrannical" and "Gestapo-like," declared the
nation's editorial writers. Also fanning the public outrage were the Eagle
Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Libertarian Party, which
decried the invasion of privacy posed by the "KYC" regs, as they came to be
known. Of all the correspondence, only about 100 positive comments were
recorded, with "Go for it, and I'll see you in the place where there is no
darkness" counted as a laudatory sentiment by the FDIC.

            Heeding the outcry,
Congress introduced five measures by late March to kill the initiative. Also
running for cover were the plan's four sponsoring agencies--the FDIC, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of
Thrift Supervision--which withdrew the proposal. Today, as the bank regulators
mop up the damage, two questions need to be asked: 1) What made the government
think the public would stand for such gross intrusions into their privacy; and,
more important, 2) doesn't the public know that banks already have KYC
powers?

            By law, all U.S. banks snitch on their customers, reporting
to federal regulators every currency transaction greater than $10,000. Between
10 million and 12 million such reports are filled each year. Against a backdrop
of fines and sanctions, banks must also report all transactions greater than
$5,000 whenever a financial institution believes that the information is
"relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation." This includes
unexplained transactions that are "not the sort in which the particular
customer would normally be expected to engage" or that have no "apparent lawful
purpose." About 50,000 of these reports are filed annually. The federal
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network aggregates the reports and makes them
available to 59 government agencies and to all U.S. attorneys. This databank of
unsubstantiated allegations can be maintained indefinitely and is routinely
accessed by law enforcement authorities, who often go fishing for financial
data. The information, however, only flows one way: Banks are prohibited from
disclosing to customers that they tattled to the government, and an act of
Congress shields financial institutions from liability suits. There is no
penalty for overreporting.

            Law enforcement
authorities describe these detailed reports as essential in their battle
against drug traffickers, terrorists, Medicare crooks, and embezzlers, as well
as international money launderers. The FBI reports that 98 percent of the 2,613
convictions for financial institution fraud won in 1998 were initiated or
enhanced by suspicious activity reports.

            Although Congress howled about KYC and damned the
regulators for snooping, surely the fury was mock. Federal and state
legislators have passed new bank surveillance laws with an almost biennial
frequency since the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970. Legislators even boast about the
new laws at election time to prove that they're tough on crime. In late 1998,
the House of Representatives prodded federal banking agencies to require
more bank surveillance by overwhelmingly passing a bill that would have
forced regulators to issue KYC rules for comment within 120 days

            Taking the hint, the Fed composed the model KYC
regulations on its own initiative last fall after two years of research. One of
the Fed's KYC innovations would have required banks to develop programs to
verify the identities of new customers. It suggested that banks make visual
checks of businesses and corroborate phone numbers by calling new clients under
the guise of thanking them for their business.

            After completing a preliminary draft of KYC, the
Fed rallied the three other sponsoring agencies to follow its lead. The FDIC
now says that it had serious reservations about the proposal, the very proposal
that it nearly shepherded into law. The agency insists that it published the
KYC in the Federal Register for comment--which is the way of all new
federal regulations--to accommodate the Fed and to standardize the banking
regulations.

            Ordinarily, new financial regulations generate a
few comments from members of the financial community, the odd professor or
attorney, and the occasional think tank. But KYC touched off protests across
the board. The American Bankers Association complained about "a new, vastly
more expansive burden of investigating all customers to determine if anything
illegal has taken place." The California Banking Association argued KYC would
deter millions of Americans from opening bank accounts. Privacy groups
protested that they had not been invited to help design the new regs.

            But it was the
grass-roots opposition to KYC, sparked in part by the Libertarian Party, whose
protest Web site steered 171,268 e-mail complaints from netizens to the FDIC,
that elevated the subject to the national agenda. Acknowledging that they had
lost the KYC battle but won the regulatory war, the sponsoring agencies made
this joint statement when they withdrew the KYC regulations at the House's
March hearings: "Over the past 15 years banking organizations and law
enforcement authorities have forged a vital partnership to fight financial
crime."

            To be sure, KYC would have encroached on financial privacy
just as sensitivities about the Internet and other new technologies have
increased demands for privacy. Now that financial data are compiled and stored
digitally, it is cheap, easy, and tempting for the government to cast a wider
and wider financial dragnet to build increasingly intrusive computer profiles
of citizens. Attention must be paid lest the government further encroach on the
privacy of our data streams.

            But the KYC flap is less about the loss of financial
privacy than it is about the public's loss of naiveté regarding the myth
of financial privacy. People want to believe that checking accounts are
sacrosanct, even though they haven't been for a long time. This spring, the
government bolstered the myth of financial privacy by cynically folding its KYC
hand when its regulatory methods and practices were noisily scrutinized.

            In fact, while KYC was dying a very public death it
was thriving in the shadows. Thanks to current banking regulations, more than
85 percent of U.S. banks currently maintain KYC programs. The Fed's Bank
Secrecy Act Examination Manual all but requires the adoption of "Know Your
Customer" programs. Banks not heeding this "imperative" are subject to cease
and desist orders and to financial penalties of thousands or millions of
dollars.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Epitaph on a Hare

            William Cowper, an 18 th -century
Protestant, may be best known for tormented, eloquent poems of religious fervor
and despair. Apparently, he was convinced that he was already damned to
hell.

            This poem about his not
very nice but beloved pet rabbit, Tiney, is funny and charming, but those
qualities do not divorce the poem from Cowper's intense melancholy and dread.
The poem is about death and comfort, and it demonstrates the genuineness of its
humility by its careful attention to details. The straightforwardness and
smiling directness are sad, temperate, heartfelt, and moving, as well as
droll.

            

               --Robert Pinsky
            

            To hear Robert Pinsky
read "Epitaph on a Hare,", click .

            Here lies,
whom hound did ne'er pursue,

            Nor swifter greyhound
follow,
Whose foot ne'er tainted, morning dew,

            Nor ear heard huntsman's
hallo',

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,

            Who, nursed with tender
care,
And to domestic bounds confined,

            Was still a wild
jack-hare.

Though duly from my hand he took

            His pittance every
night,
He did it with a jealous look,

            And, when he could, would
bite.

His diet was of wheaten bread,

            And milk, and oats, and
straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,

            With sand to scour his
maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,

            On pippins' russet
peel;
And when his juicy salads failed,

            Sliced carrot pleased him
well.

Turkey carpet was his lawn,

            Whereon he loved to
bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,

            And swing his rump
around.

His frisking was at evening hours,

            'For then he lost his
fear;
But most before approaching showers,

            Or when a storm drew
near.

Eight years and five round-rolling moons

            He thus saw steal
away,
Dozing out all his idle noons,

            And every night at
play,

I kept him for his humor's sake,

            For he would oft
beguile,
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,

            And force me to a
smile.

But now, beneath this walnut-shade

            He finds his long, last
home,
And waits in snug concealment laid,

            Till gentler Puss shall
come,

He, still more aged, feels the shocks

            From which no care can
save,
And, partner once of Tiney's box,

            Must soon partake his
grave.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Loeb
Blow
            

            I am pained by the of me in

                  Slate
                for writing an essay on personal finance that ran
in a special advertising section in the March 22 issue of Time . Much or
all of the criticism is based on a false assumption: that I was paid by
Time for this assignment.

            In fact, I did not receive payment from
anybody--not one penny. Time did offer to pay me a fee, size
unspecified. I declined. But I suggested that Time might want to make a
contribution to one of the charities of which I am an officer and director,
Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Time , of course, was pleased to
do so. I do not know the size of this contribution. My name will in no way be
attached to it. I certainly will not receive a tax deduction for it. I will
receive no credit for it in any way. To reiterate as emphatically as I can: I
was not paid by Time , not paid by Time Inc., not paid by the
advertisers, not paid by anybody in any way. This a key point that I should
have clarified and corrected earlier.

            So why did I accept the writing assignment? I did
it because Time offers a magnificent platform, because I frankly don't
mind the limelight, and because I believe that the counsel and cautions I have
to offer about personal finance may be useful to other people.

            This is also a good time
for me to reiterate that the Columbia Journalism Review was, is, and
always will be independent, tough-minded, fair, and impartial in all its
judgments.

            -- Marshall Loeb
            

            
Editor, Columbia Journalism Review
New York City

            

               
                  Judith Shulevitz replies: When I interviewed Marshall
Loeb, he said, according to my notes, "I am paid by Time Inc." He did not tell
me that the payment had been made to charity and not to him personally. He now
says he does not remember whether the decision to give it to charity was made
before or after my item appeared. He also says that payment for the first two
advertorials went to his book publisher and that he also did not profit
directly or indirectly. This is something else he did not mention in our
interview. It seems clear that Loeb has not personally profited from writing
advertorials. I think my misunderstanding on this point is understandable, but
I apologize for suggesting otherwise. I still think it is wrong from someone in
Loeb's position to be writing advertorials, even for free.
            

            
               Game Over (and
Over)
            

            Your discussion of the winner's curse as it relates
to online auctions (see "") overlooked one very important point: the multiplier
effect that comes from the power of the Internet to reduce transaction
costs.

            Let's take video games as an example. Over the last
five years I have bought one or two new video games a year, ones that seemed so
great that they were worth the $50. The main reason I only bought one or two
was I knew that after playing them I would generally be stuck with them. Sure,
I might be able to sell them to a used software store, but I wouldn't be able
to get more than $5 or so because those stores must mark them up so
substantially to cover their own costs. Now, thanks to Internet auctions (eBay
being my personal favorite) I can do most of my game shopping online. When I
was interested in picking up the new smash hit Unreal , I went to eBay
and saw that over the past month some 70 or so copies of that game had been
auctioned for about $22 each. Over the following week or so I tracked the 20 to
30 auctions for Unreal that were going on, and I eventually won a copy
for $18.50 plus $4 shipping. The game arrived, I played it for a few weeks, and
then I put it back up for auction right there on eBay and made back almost all
of my money.

            Now that consumers know that there is a fluid
aftermarket for video games, they are more likely to go into a store and buy
one of these games for full price on the day it comes out. They know that they
can play it and auction it off right away online when its value is still quite
high. The net result is not only far more transactions at much lower costs but
also a sharp increase in market participation, thanks to the price
discrimination seen over time. (If you're not willing to pay $22 wait a few
months until the online market is only going for $16.)

            In addition, any effects of the winner's curse are
offset by the fact that "losing" bidders become "winning" sellers when they
re-auction products. The winner's curse can therefore be said not to exist for
products that we buy, enjoy, and resell without using up their inherent
value.

            The winner's curse may be
pervasive in auctions for Beanie Babies and Faye Dunaway's eye mask, but that
is in large part because those items have such little inherent value, and they
can lose their public appeal overnight. Even there, though, the magic of the
Internet auction helps out one last time: He who has overpaid for Faye
Dunaway's eye mask can enjoy it for a bit and then put it right back up for
auction.

            
               --Bart Scott
Epstein
            

            
Charlottesville, Va.

            
               A Kosovar by Any
Other Name
            

            Just a point of
clarification--these refugees from Kosovo are Kosovars, not "ethnic Albanians"
as much of the media keep singing. If they are not Kosovars, then Jesse Jackson
is an "ethnic African," Dan Rather is an "ethnic German," and Simon Wiesenthal
is an "ethnic Jew," and so on. Please label things correctly. Calling the
Kosovars "ethnic Albanians" makes it sound as if they are really Albanians,
though they have lived in Kosovo for over 500 years.

            -- Professor Samuel
Hamod, Ph.D.
            

            San
Diego, Calif.

            
               Clearing
Up
            

            "" asked, "Why did the weather prevent NATO from
hitting the Serbian forces purging the refugees, when it didn't seem to hamper
the bombing of Belgrade? ... The papers have shed little light on how poor
weather can impede various missions."

            Here's the answer:
Bombing buildings in Belgrade, or other fixed sites with known coordinates, can
be accomplished by GPS (Global Positioning System, a satellite navigation
service)-guided weapons, such as Tomahawk missiles. It is not necessary to be
able to see the target. Bombing mobile targets, such as troops performing
ethnic cleansing, requires the use of laser-guided weapons. Because we don't
know in advance where these targets will be, we can't use GPS-guided weapons,
and laser-guided weapons require clear weather to operate.

            -- Lt. Cmdr. Sean
Peters , U.S. Navy

            Chesapeake, Va.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 254: &quot;Too True To Be Good&quot;

            
               I give the New
York Times headline; you give a one-sentence summary of the story:
"Presidential Hopeful Displays Humanity."
            

            
               
                  (A tip of the
Hatlo hat to Daniel Radosh.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 253)--"Pesca Milagrosa":
            

            

               
                  "It is terrible that something so frightening should be given
the name of something so pure and beautiful," says Luz Marlene Sierra Mayorga,
a Bogotá engineer, referring to "miraculous fishing"--which is
what?
               
            

            "Wow,
the pro-choice movement has topped itself in the euphemism department with this
one!"-- Matt Sullivan
            

            
"Changing lepers into loaves and fishes."-- Leigh Bardugo
            

            "A
winter's day in New Hampshire for Dole and McCain."-- Dan Wolfe
            

            
"Reaching down the front of the pants of the guy standing next to you on the
subway platform just for the hell of it."-- Ken Tucker
            

            "The
Makah tribe's new strategy of whale hunting with plutonium-tipped
harpoons."-- Peter Carlin
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Quiz Regular M
Pesca's Nominal Torment Wrap-Up
            

            I have noticed that nearly every one-syllable first
name is a homonym for an actual word. (Jeff, Steve, and Clyde being
exceptions--and therefore unfortunately discriminated against during Zoom
casting calls.) If my name were the translation of Pesca (Fish) it would be
punnable but would preclude my moving to Pittsburgh.

            I have long maintained that in the '70s and early
'80s the Yankees acquired and promoted players based on how their names worked
in headlines. How else to explain the mysterious presence of Oscar Gamble and
Mickey Rivers?

            All the world's Michael Jacksons (like the Indians'
reliever) now go by Mike, simply because of one androgynously desiccated freak.
The exception is beer expert Michael Jackson, the explanation being 1) he had
the name first; 2) he's too drunk to realize; 3) no one would mistake a fat
pretentious hop-head for the king of pop.

            For the past few years I have gauged the popularity
of hockey by the fact that no one has linked my name to Mike Peca ,
captain of the Buffalo Sabres. This may speak more to the popularity of all
things Buffalo, but now that the Sabes are in the cup final, I still expect no
one to mention it. But maybe I'll catch a double take if I'm ever in the
Niagara Falls region.

            If this miraculous
phrase to the Pesca people becomes ubiquitous, I will join the ranks of the
punnable and will forever be able to step forth from the shadows of my maternal
ancestors Philip and Sylvia Lipshitz.

            
               Fishin' Magician
Answer
            

            Random group kidnappings.

            Here's how Larry Rohter describes it in the New
York Times : "A band of guerrillas appears out of nowhere, sets up a
roadblock on a main highway, stops every car or bus that happens along, takes
away all the passengers who seem likely to have a good job or a prominent name,
and holds them captive until a hefty ransom is paid."

            The practice takes its name from a Colombian party
game where kids reach into a barrel with a hook or with bare hands and pull out
a surprise gift.

            Since January 1996, at
least 4,925 people have been abducted.

            
               Bloated Indulgence
Extra
            

            Tim Carvell sought a
published sentence exemplifying conspicuous consumption 1999, like this from
the New York Times : "Today, the urinal has taken its stand alongside the
bidet and the working fireplace as the latest must-have in the well-appointed
bathroom suite."

            "When did you first notice
you had become quietly wealthy?"

            Bank of New York ad

            
               New York Observer
            

            
               --Tamara
Glenny
            

            " 'There are all these
people out there who have made all this money and don't know what the best
sheet is or what the best cufflinks are,' said Ms. Gross, who intends to help
them learn."

            
               New York Times
            

            
               --Chris
Hammett
            

            "[H]er favorite item in
the store is a pair of stone spaniels ($9,000). 'They're happy dogs--they look
like dogs I'd like to own.' "

            
               The New Yorker
            

            -- Heather
Williams
            

            "When, in the Course of
Human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to rise up against such
tyranny, we offer our own modest proposal: A Diners' bill of rights, one
designed to inspire a new dialogue between restaurant-goers and restaurateurs
and to make the dining experience as pleasant as it always promises to be."

            
               
                  Slate
               's own Zagat diary
June 3, 1999

            
               --Liz
Rounsavall
            

            "The house that is for
sale is located in the heart of Oregon's burgeoning wine country, and this
property could be converted into a small destination vineyard."

            
               --Alison "I Think
Opening Up the Vineyard to Anyone Other Than the Servants Is Really Tasteless"
Rogers
            

            "Explaining why
23-year-old Stephania Lo Gatto paid $6,000 over new sticker for a used Mercedes
CLK320 convertible, instead of getting on a one-year waiting list: 'If I waited
that long, I would be sick of it.' Now, wherever she and her boyfriend drive
around town, 'Everybody looks at us, which is what we wanted to achieve.' "

            
               Wall Street Journal
            

            
               --Barry
Fischer
            

            
               Mike Madden's
Headline Haiku
            

            Doors at 2 school
buildings
Face back-to-back crises:
Police trap rabid cat;
Business goes belly-up.

            
               Philadelphia

               Inquirer , June 3, 1999 (South Jersey Metro section only)

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Christians, cocaine, and dynamite--it's going to be
the best Burt Reynolds comeback movie ever.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Matisse vs. Picasso

            The
relationship between the artists Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso is the subject
of a new exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, called
"Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry." The theme of this show, and of the
book that accompanies it by the Harvard art historian Yve-Alain Bois, is that
the two masters of modern painting were playing a kind of chess game all their
lives. Picasso, the younger artist, was constantly trying to get Matisse's
attention by showing off, stealing from his work, and rudely parodying him.
Matisse, envious of Picasso's success, tried to ignore him until the 1930s when
he needed Picasso's influence to bring himself out of an artistic funk. After
that they traded paintings, visits, and little notes. But they were too
competitive to really be friends.

            I don't think Bois takes
this implication of this creative tension quite far enough. The Matisse-Picasso
rivalry is more than just the great artistic competition of the 20 th
century. It's a scheme for dividing all art into two parts. Side by side, a
Matisse and a Picasso can look amazingly similar. Yet at a deeper level, they
are fundamentally, radically incompatible. Although it's possible to admire
both artists, something impels you to choose sides. At the end of the day,
everyone is either a Matisse person or a Picasso person.

            Matisse is a cool, calm, Northern European artist. Picasso
is a hot, temperamental Spaniard. Matisse famously said that a painting should
be like a comfortable armchair. His paintings are harmonious, luxurious, and
soothing. Picasso can virtually copy a Matisse tableau without producing
anything like the same effect. In his rendition, the same fruit on a pedestal
contains an element of dissonance, disturbance, and even violence. Where
Matisse is sensuous, Picasso is sexual. Matisse loves fabric. Picasso loves
flesh.

            The division seems like a
version of the one drawn by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy
between Apollonian and Dionysian art. The Apollonian comes from the Greek god
Apollo, the god of light, who was associated with rationality and its
subspecialties law, medicine, and philosophy. The Dionysian comes from
Dionysius, the god of wine and fertility, who was worshipped with drunken
orgies in the woods at which nonparticipants were ripped to pieces. The
Apollonian spirit is one of measure, reason, and control; the Dionysian is one
of abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release. The clash between the two
principles was what produced Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche. That
Matisse is essentially an Apollonian artist and Picasso a Dionysian is evident
even from the backhanded compliments they paid each other. Matisse called
Picasso "capricious and unpredictable." Picasso described Matisse's paintings
as "beautiful and elegant."

            In dividing all art into two categories, Nietzsche rendered
the service of coming up with one of the great intellectual parlor games of all
time. Critics love to devise variations for their fields. Richard Martin, the
director of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City, divides the world into Giorgio Armani vs. Gianni Versace. Armani, with
his serene, muted tones and clean lines, is the Apollonian designer. The late
Versace, with his Miami colors, outrageous impracticality, and explicit
sexuality, is the Dionysian. And it's true: The models in Armani ads look like
Greek statues. In Versace ads, they look like drugged bacchants. The Apollonian
spirit is about good taste, elegance, and beauty. The Dionysian mixes bad taste
with good taste, pain with pleasure.

            You can
apply Nietzsche's dichotomy to just about any set of contemporaries or creative
rivals. With artists, you might start with Leonardo vs. Michelangelo. Leonardo,
the scientific rationalist and inventor, is an Apollonian (his work is owned
by, among others, the archrationalist Bill Gates). Michelangelo, though he
worked principally in the Apollonian medium of marble, expresses a more
animalistic violence and passion (work owned by the pope). Mark Rothko is a
Matisse type. Jackson Pollock is a Picasso type. The Beatles, with their
well-crafted melodies, are the Apollonians. The Rolling Stones, darker, more
subterranean, and with a deeper rhythm section, are more in touch with
Dionysius. Only Dionysians have sympathy for the devil. You might like both
bands, but ultimately you're with one or the other. You're either a Beatles
person or a Stones person, just like you're either a Matisse person or a
Picasso person.

            In American literature, Phillip Rahv devised the classic
division into two categories in a famous essay titled "Paleface and Redskin."
American writers were either Europeanized, literary wimps like Henry James, or
celebrants of the native animalistic spirits, like Mark Twain. The Apollonian
line begins with Washington Irving, the Dionysian with James Fenimore Cooper.
In the Apollo-Matisse-Armani-Beatles column we find Emily Dickinson. Opposite
her, in the Dionysius-Picasso-Versace-Stones column, is Walt Whitman. Nathaniel
Hawthorne is a Matisse. Herman Melville is a Picasso. In the 20 th
century, we come to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Matisse) vs. Ernest Hemingway
(Picasso) and John Updike (Matisse) vs. Norman Mailer, who wrote a biography of
Picasso.

            You can, in fact, apply the division to just about
any natural pairing and then use that pairing to redivide the world. (Of course
you can. Who's going to arrest you?) I've been soliciting examples from family,
friends, 
                  Slate
                colleagues, and random New York showoffs. To see
some of their nominees, . And you can play too: Send suggestions by e-mail to
browser@slate.com . Check , where we will post reader pairings
that meet or surpass our (pretty low) standards.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Reverse Domino Theory

            During the Cold War,
enthusiasts for American military action abroad invoked the domino theory: If
one country was allowed to fall to communism, many others would follow. In the
debate over Kosovo, opponents of American military action (including many of
those former enthusiasts) invoke a sort of reverse domino theory: If we save
anyone from mass murder or humanitarian disaster, we'll find ourselves doing it
again and again. Moral consistency requires us to do nothing in Kosovo because
we can't intervene every time a thug like Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
decides to start slaughtering his own citizens.

            That's not the only
argument against the Kosovo intervention. But is it true? Would it really be an
impossible burden to stop every moral outrage on the level of Kosovo?
Isolationist pundits give the impression that the world outside the United
States is a boiling cauldron of centuries-old ethnic rivalries, in which mass
slaughters are everyday occurrences. In fact, attempts at genocide are fairly
rare.

            The term "genocide" is often invoked rather wildly. Russian
newspapers love to talk about the "genocide" against Russian-speakers in the
Baltic states, for example, while European intellectuals like to accuse
Hollywood of committing "cultural genocide." But genocide has a precise and
universally accepted definition: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group," according
to the 1951 Genocide Convention.

            The United States has
been using the term genocide cynically. Washington studiously avoided the "G
word" in describing the killings in Rwanda, where it clearly applied. By
contrast, State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin has been tossing it around
liberally in the last few weeks, even though human rights groups say they
haven't yet been able to document that genocide is underway in Kosovo.

            Suppose the United States, along with its allies, put the
horse before the cart again and committed itself to stopping genocide wherever
it occurred. How many military actions would that have required in, say, the
past 10 years (before Kosovo)? Answer: three definites and one maybe. The
definites are Bosnia, Rwanda, and Iraq, while the maybe is Somalia.

            In Bosnia, genocide was
arguably underway as early as the summer of 1992, but the United States did not
take military action until 1995. In the interim, thousands of lightly armed
troops from NATO countries stumbled around Bosnia in their U.N. blue helmets,
trying to feed victims and stay out of harm's way. This was a gruesome farce,
and the United States should have acted much earlier, with substantial
firepower, to overwhelm the Bosnian Serb leadership.

            Unfortunately, the media have tended to explain genocides
as the spontaneous action of one group motivated by insatiable hatred of
another. But that's not how genocides work. Yes, ethnic hatred runs deep in the
Balkans, but Milosevic had to deliberately fan it in order to start the war,
and the genocide, like all genocides, was planned and executed by a relatively
small group of extremely evil people.

            Rwanda is an even more
salient example of this. Perhaps because Western journalists knew so little
about the country, their reporting suggested that the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was
so deeply rooted, it was unstoppable. One hears it endlessly from "experts" on
TV talk shows: "These people have been killing each other for hundreds of
years, and there's nothing we can do about it." (Even if you know nothing about
Hutu and Tutsi, this argument has no logic. The point is that the two ethnic
groups have been living in peace for a long period, and something happened to
destabilize that peace. That's why it's in the news, and that's why you, you
ignorant windbag, have been invited on television to discuss it.)

            In fact, a relatively small group of Hutu planned and
executed the Rwandan genocide. They had to coerce and intimidate many of their
fellow Hutu to go along with them--thousands of Hutu were also slaughtered in
the genocide for failing to join in. They used the mass media, especially
radio, to broadcast their bloody exhortations. And they used the silence of the
outside world--especially France, Belgium, the United States, and the United
Nations--to justify their actions.

            Saddam Hussein's gassing
of the Kurdish population in 1988 falls outside the arbitrary 10-year rule.
From March to September 1988, the Iraqi army seized every Kurd in a vast
"prohibited area" and carted off nearly 100,000 civilians for execution; it
also used chemical weapons against the Kurdish population. The outside world
did not know the full extent of the killing until reports after the fact. But
those reports established Baghdad as a genocidal regime. So, when the Kurds
came under Iraqi attack again, in 1991, there was good reason to fear that
another genocide was in the offing (although President Bush's real motivation
was defending the stability of Turkey, where the Kurds were fleeing).

            Somalia technically was not a genocide. The 1992-93 famine
lacked the central direction of a genocide, and its victims were not murdered
on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. But it was a
massive, politically inspired slaughter, which certainly justified foreign
intervention.

            The fact that I can't
resist including Somalia shows the difficulty of maintaining any clear line
between situations that justify intervention and those that don't. No doubt
there would be other occasions that clearly met the standard where intervention
was unrealistic. For example, no reasonable person would expect the United
States to invade or bomb Turkey to stop genocide against the Kurds.

            But even a fuzzy and occasionally failed standard would be
an improvement on the ad hoc and random decisions we make now. A standard for
intervention that was universally accepted and regularly if not uniformly
applied might even reduce the number of occasions when intervention would be
needed. If a Milosevic knew with reasonable certainty that ethnic cleansing
would be prevented and punished, he might not attempt it.

            The main point, though, is that there aren't
actually all that many Milosevics in the world. Of the three and a half
genocides in the past decade, the United States and others actually did
intervene--albeit too late or ineptly--in two and a half: Iraq, Bosnia, and
Somalia. Only in Rwanda did the West stand by and do nothing. A cleaner
conscience is not an impossibly ambitious goal.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Early
Developers
            

            I always enjoy Jacob
Weisberg but wanted to correct the impression from "" that teen movies began in
the '50s. While it is true that films such as Blackboard Jungle , The
Wild One , East of Eden , and Rebel Without a Cause tapped into
the baby boom audience, the teen demographic was identified at Warner Bros. in
the 1930s with the popular films starring the Dead End Kids. At MGM, Louis B.
Mayer produced the bourgeois counterpart, the obscenely successful Andy
Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, later teamed in the
archetypal teen pix Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway .
Universal made a likewise profitable series with Deanna Durbin, and over at RKO
in the '40s, the teen-age Shirley Temple starred in movies like The
Bachelor 
               and 
               The Bobby-Soxer . It is in 1949 that the
echt misunderstood teen film Knock on Any Door was made, starring
John Derek as the misfit who wanted to "live fast, die young, and leave a
beautiful corpse."

            -- Carrie
Rickey
            

            
Philadelphia

            
               Leak
House
            

            William Saletan missed a
clear third spin in his "" item on Charles Bakaly's investigation and
resignation: Starr is throwing Bakaly to the wolves for leaking to deflect
attention from Starr's own leaks in late January and early February of 1998.
Bakaly's disclosure would not violate the Rule 6(e), as it is more a legal
conclusion than evidence. Thus Bakaly suffers little and can be the whipping
boy for all leaks.

            
               --Bill Rudman
            

            Castro
Valley, Calif.

            

               Gunplay
            

            Jeffrey Goldberg's "middle ground" on gun control
(see his "") seems to be that only untrained people kill people. That
would be like the "untrained" 6-year-old who gets daddy's Glock down from the
closet shelf, or the drunk boyfriend who gets out his old service revolver and
goes over to ex-girlfriend's house, or your convicted-felon neighborhood drug
dealer who bought his streetsweeper from a guy who, it turns out, bought three
dozen of them at a gun show. See, it wasn't the guns' fault--it was the
goshdarned untrained people! If everybody just took NRA gun safety courses none
of this would've happened!

            Come on, Jeffrey. It's
really cool to be postmodern and hip; but you have to pick your targets a bit
more judiciously.

            
               --Michael J.
Berla
            

            
Columbia, Md.

            
               Beating Around the
Bush
            

            William Saletan's "" takes George W. Bush to task
for coyly sidestepping stands on significant issues. But the first primary is a
year away, and the general election a year and a half away. It's already crazy
that candidates have to run shadow campaigns for years and then form
exploratory committees before formally announcing their candidacies. I suppose
in the election cycle for 2004 (which, by my calendar, starts in about three
weeks) potential candidates will first announce plans to pick a committee to
determine if the potential candidates should form an exploratory committee to
determine if they should run for president.

            The absurdity here for
potential voters is that we don't want to hear a potential candidates'
positions repeated ad nauseum for 12 or 18 months. Take the spotlight
off of them until the Christmas tree lights come down in January 2000. If TV
lights aren't there, the candidates will be forced to do something practical to
bide their time. And potential voters won't have to be concerned about
establishing committees to determine if they should throw out their televisions
and delete their bookmarks to e-zines until a more reasonable time next
year.

            
               --Paul Clark
            

            Oak
Park, Ill.

            
               A Wife's
Defense
            

            There is a curious symmetry between David Plotz and
those government officials who would like to see my husband, Jonathan Pollard,
remain in prison forever. In "," Plotz presents his own damning opinions on the
Pollard case as if they were fact, in much the same way that these government
officials accuse my husband in the media of crimes for which he was never
indicted.

            Jonathan Pollard did not commit, was not charged
with, and was not convicted of the outrageous charges now being hurled at him
in the media. There is no substance to the latest pack of lies proffered by
Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker , nor to the charges invented by David
Plotz in 
                  Slate
               . Moreover, no evidence to support any of these
false charges was presented 14 years ago when my husband entered into a plea
agreement with the American government. In other words, these charges are very
recent fabrications that have suddenly surfaced in the press to serve political
ends. Based on the evidence that the government presented 14 years ago,
Jonathan was indicted on one count only--passing classified information to an
ally, Israel. He was not charged with intending to harm the United States. He
was not charged with treason.

            The one count of passing classified information to
an ally that Jonathan was charged with usually carries a sentence of 2 to 4
years. No one in the history of the United States has ever received a life
sentence for this offense--no one but Jonathan Pollard. As a result of a last
minute secret submission to the sentencing judge by then Secretary of Defense
Casper Weinberger--which Jonathan and his attorneys have never in 14 years been
given the opportunity to challenge--the judge ignored the plea agreement and
meted out a life sentence without parole. Who plea bargains for a life
sentence?

            The "new" crimes that Jonathan Pollard is now being
accused of in the media were, in fact, committed by a host of Soviet spies
including Aldrich Ames, David Boone, and Ronald Pelton. But that has not
stopped U.S. officials from continuing to publicly blame Jonathan Pollard--and
by extension, Israel--for the damage done by these enemy agents, nor has it
stopped irresponsible journalists from parroting these unsubstantiated lies.
What Jonathan Pollard did do is warn Israel that Saddam Hussein had amassed
American-approved and American-financed weapons of mass destruction, which he
intended to use to scorch the Jewish state. Jonathan deeply regrets that he
broke the law in order to warn Israel about this threat to her existence. He
had tried everything in his power to get the information released to Israel
through legal channels but was thwarted every step of the way, right up to the
top of the Pentagon. It would appear that certain U.S. officials--Casper
Weinberger, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, and others--were more concerned with the
world finding out that America was arming Iraq at that time, than they were
about covertly violating their information-sharing agreement with Israel. It
was in desperation that my husband acted on his fear for the Jewish state and
finally sought out the Israelis to warn them about this betrayal.

            Contrary to Plotz's contention, Jonathan has
expressed his remorse repeatedly--privately and publicly--and in various
mediums. He deeply regrets not finding a legal means to act on his concerns for
Israel in the face of the Iraqi threat.

            There is still enormous embarrassment in Washington
today over America's arming of Iraq and the ongoing threat from the "Madman of
Baghdad." The release of Jonathan Pollard would bring this shameful episode to
the forefront. For that reason fearful officials hurl false charges at him in
the media--never in court--to try to keep him in prison forever and to make
people forget about how he blew the whistle on a secret American pro-Iraqi
tilt, long before it became public knowledge.

            Today the Clinton administration is doing with
China just what the Reagan-Bush administration did with Iraq. For political and
economic reasons, a blind eye has been turned to Chinese espionage in the
United States for years. As a result, China is now armed with nuclear munitions
that could pose a major threat to the United States. This administration, just
like its predecessors, wants people to look the other way, so it can downplay
the story in the media and give implausible explanations for why a top level
spy who provided nuclear munitions information to a hostile country should be
fired from his job instead of being brought to trial!

            Interestingly enough, journalists like Plotz don't
see fit to utter a peep of protest about the mishandling of the Chinese spy
case. Mindlessly they swallow whole what they read in the press and continue to
focus their hostility and anger on the wrong target. Wen Ho Lee stole American
information on nuclear warheads for China and was fired. Jonathan Pollard gave
information to an ally, Israel, about a threat to that country's survival and
he got life. Proportional justice or political vengeance? Why is it that the
same officials who are so relentless and vociferous in their condemnation of
Jonathan Pollard and Israel are so utterly silent about all the other recent
spy cases where the charges were far more serious and the damage was
measurable?

            By mangling the truth
and presenting uninformed opinion as if it were fact, Plotz and

                  Slate
                have done a great disservice not only to the case of
Jonathan Pollard but to the ongoing battle he is waging to restore the
principle of equal justice for all Americans.

            
               --Esther
Pollard
            

            
Toronto

            
               
                  David Plotz
replies: I agree with Esther Pollard on one crucial point: The fact that
the most damning allegations against her husband were never made
publicly--though Pollard himself did see them--has muddied his case. No matter
how credible the allegations in the Seymour Hersh piece are--and they are
extremely credible--they are unverifiable and irrefutable as long as the United
States' damage assessment remains secret. This secrecy allows Esther Pollard to
make bold claims about her husband's innocence and to dismiss these damning
allegations as the malevolent fabrications of Pollard-haters.
            

            
               But observers who
aren't married to Pollard are left with a choice: Do we trust Jonathan Pollard,
an admitted, unapologetic spy, who told lie after lie after lie in the course
of stealing U.S. secrets, when he says he didn't take anything serious? Or do
we trust the judgment of the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the
director of the CIA, the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees, all of whom know exactly what Pollard did, and all of whom are
adamant he should be kept locked up?
            

            
               To Whine Own
Self
            

            In "" Michael Sandel makes the lovely point that
Monica Lewsinky might be guilty of a betrayal of herself. He notes that being
merely honest or truthful may not be the end-all of integrity, that integrity
is based on an identity, not primarily moral but ethical, the identity of and
with one's life-narrative. For Monica to be guilty of such a betrayal, though,
she would need to have a life-narrative, an explicit or implicit
understanding of the person she would like to be. She clearly doesn't.

            The given complexity of
desires and adaptations that make up the ego suffice. "Be true to yourself" has
been reinterpreted to mean either "Getting what you want" or, more
aggressively, "Express yourself (don't repress yourself)."

            -- Matthew
Feeney
            

            Washington

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 222: &quot;Zanimax&quot;

            

               The Iranian daily newspaper Zan (Farsi for "woman") and the
American movie company Miramax (English for "Big Mira"?) are in trouble for
similar offenses. What?
            

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 221)--"No Carrying On":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    Fill in the
blank on this comment by State Sen. Harry Wiggins, jubilant over the voting on
a new proposal: "Missourians do not want __________ carried into football games
and bars and
schools."
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "To be.
We like it at home."-- Kate Wing
            

            
"Scantily clad state senators."-- Heather Williams ( Dan Simon and
Floyd Elliot had similar answers.)

            
"Footballs, beers, and textbooks. What? Really? Well there goes my
re-election!"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            
"Chihuahuas ... or was it hand guns? No: Chihuahuas with handguns!"-- Tam
Doey
            

            "The
lifeless bodies of our vanquished foes."-- Michael Roche
            

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            One of the most
exhausting lessons of adolescence is discovering that just because you've
settled an issue in your head--i.e., racism is bad; my history teacher is such
a liar--does not mean it is settled in the actual world. Racism persists and
you must still write your report on the opening of the American frontier. One
of the most exhausting lessons of adulthood is discovering that just because
you've settled an issue in the actual world--i.e., abortion is legal; my
computer is fixed--doesn't mean you won't have to keep settling it again and
again. History is not a synonym for progress. No issue is ever settled. No case
is ever closed. And so, even after the death of Jesse James, the people of
Missouri must vote on the same policies over and over. But at least I won't
have to write an essay about it on my balky computer, and that's progress. Or
decrepitude.

            
               Unconcealed
Answer
            

            "Missourians do not want guns carried into
football games and bars and schools."

            Tuesday, despite a $3.7
million campaign by the National Rifle Association, Missouri voted down an
attempt to lift the ban on concealed weapons. Forty-three states currently
permit concealed weapons.

            
               Jon Delfin's Inside
the Industry Extra: M*A*S*H
               
            

            I'm told that every now
and then a memo would arrive from above, demanding a TV Guide -type
precis for the next episode. Since the episode might well not have been written
yet, they had a stockpile of generic descriptions: "It's winter at the 4077,
and all hell breaks loose in the OR" One week, hearing that CBS had begun
developing a new show, Trapper John, M.D. starring Pernell Roberts, they
sent in "Hawkeye receives word from home that Trapper John is dead." CBS didn't
see the humor in this.

            
               Ultradull Weekend
Bonus Question
            

            A big third-of-a-page ad on the op-ed page of
Wednesday's New York Times criticizing military procurement policies was
placed by Business
Leaders for Sensible Priorities, perhaps the most boring name ever devised
for an organization. Separately, each of these words is dense with tedium, but
collectively ... Sorry ... where was I? Must have dozed off.

            Participants are invited
to create an even more torpid name for an even more lackluster
organization.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Books--so illiterate are those illiterate
Midwesterners, they're just illiterate.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
Update on the
bombing of Yugoslavia : 1) Serbian forces captured three U.S. soldiers
who were patrolling the Macedonian-Serbian border. There is a dispute over
which side of the border they were on. The Serbs reportedly plan to
court-martial the soldiers. The U.S. government called the soldiers' capture
"illegal" and said it will hold Yugoslavia responsible for their safety. 2) A
Kosovar Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, was shown on Serbian television asking
NATO to halt the bombing and meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
to sign a document urging a "political" solution to the Kosovo conflict.
Skeptics are questioning whether Rugova has sold out or has been coerced and
whether the meeting with Milosevic was actually videotaped before the bombing.
3) Reports indicate that the bombing has begun to inconvenience Serbian
civilians and to cause shortages of supplies to Serbian forces in Kosovo. 4)
The new endgame under consideration is to bomb Serbian forces until their
capacity to fight in Kosovo is so impaired that NATO can easily recapture
Kosovo and set up an ethnic Albanian enclave under NATO protection.
(4/2/99)
            

            
Four white
New York City police officers were arrested on charges of second-degree
murder for firing 41 bullets at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man. He
died of 19 bullet wounds. The officers pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys
said the officers had fired their weapons in the "reasonable belief" that they
were in danger. The case has triggered protests in New York, passionate
defenses of law enforcement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other supporters,
and a national debate over police tactics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Johnnie Cochran and Barry Scheck are preparing a civil suit against New York
City once the criminal trial ends. The high-minded spin: It's a conflict
between public safety and civil liberties. The cynical spin: It's a conflict
between whites and blacks. (4/2/99)
            

            
The FBI is
tracking down the creator of the Melissa computer virus . The virus,
which replicates itself in e-mail messages it automatically transmits from
computers it has penetrated, infected more than 100,000 computers this week,
causing significant problems throughout the Internet. Federal agents have now
confiscated a computer in Orlando, Fla., that may contain clues to the virus's
author, and they have secured a court order to obtain apparently confidential
information from America Online, since an AOL account seems to have been used
to launch the virus onto the Internet. (4/2/99)
            

            
The Dow
Jones industrial average closed above 10,000 for the first time.
This marked a 30 percent rise in the last seven months and a 300 percent rise
since 1990. Newspapers wheeled out prepackaged articles boasting about the
breadth of stock ownership among U.S. households and the growing dominance of
U.S. companies in the world economy. The pessimistic spin: Asia and Latin
America are still a mess; U.S. stock valuations are completely out of whack;
the Internet investment mania will burst any day now; and the Dow will
collapse. The optimistic spin: That's what pessimists have been saying for a
decade. (4/1/99)
            

            
The University
of Connecticut won its first NCAA men's basketball championship . UConn
beat the consensus favorite, Duke, with outstanding defense and hot shooting.
Although observers agreed it was one of the best-played finals in recent
memory, the TV audience fell to a record low. Sportswriters credited UConn's
victory to its refusal to be intimidated by Duke's reputation. The New York
Times spin: Duke's defeat demonstrates the price of arrogance. The
counterspin: UConn's victory demonstrates the power of arrogance.
(4/1/99)
            

            
New York
authorities are sorting out an interracial embryo mix-up . A white woman
and a black woman went to the same clinic for in vitro fertilization. The black
woman didn't get pregnant, but the white woman gave birth to two children, one
white and one black, who are now three months old. Once the black child's
parentage was ascertained, the black couple sued the clinic. This week, the
white couple relinquished the black child to the black couple. The spins: 1)
What is in vitro fertilization doing to our concept of parenthood? 2) Would the
media be making such a fuss over this story if all the kids and parents were
the same color? 3) Would the mix-up have been discovered if all the kids and
parents were the same color? 4) How often do these mix-ups go unnoticed?
(4/1/99)
            

            
Dr. Jack

               Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder . He faces 10 years to
life in prison. The shallow analysis: The case was open and shut, since
Kevorkian taped the incident (in which he administered a lethal injection to a
terminally ill man, with the man's consent) and had the tape aired on 60
Minutes . The sophisticated analysis: Kevorkian tried to make the trial a
political debate over assisted suicide, but the judge and jury refused to go
along. Kevorkian's spin: He's a martyr for the assisted suicide movement. The
conservative spin: His conviction proves that assisted suicide is murder. The
dull liberal spin: He's an embarrassment to the assisted suicide movement and
good riddance to him. The clever liberal spin: His conviction shows that if
people can't get assisted suicide legally, they'll turn to murderers such as
Kevorkian. (3/29/99)
            

            
The navigator
of the Marine jet involved in last year's Italian ski lift accident, Capt.
Joseph Schweitzer, is pleading guilty to obstruction and conspiracy
charges. The charges relate to his alleged destruction of an on-board videotape
that recorded the accident. The interesting question now is whether the plea
deal means that the navigator will testify against the pilot (who was acquitted
of manslaughter in the incident by a military court several weeks ago) on
similar obstruction and conspiracy charges. (3/29/99)
            

            
An Ohio town has
banned the use of cell phones while driving . The ordinance allows
exceptions if the car is in "park" or if the driver keeps both hands on the
wheel (e.g., by using a speakerphone). It was prompted by an accident caused by
a cell phone user who wasn't paying attention to the road. This is believed to
be the first such ordinance in the nation. Similar legislation has reportedly
been considered in other states. (3/29/99)
            

            

               For more Kosovo coverage, click .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 249: &quot;Cam Com Can Gal&quot;

            
               The list includes
cameras, laptop computers, canvas bags of tools, and 665 gallons of water. List
of what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 248)--"Re Place":
            

            

               According to Justice Anthony Kennedy, it's a place where people
"practice newly learned vulgarities, erupt with anger, tease and embarrass each
other, share offensive notes, flirt, push and shove in the halls, grab and
offend." Where is this wonderful, magical place?
            

            
"HBO."-- Larry Amoros
            

            "The
Routledge Press."-- Dan Ricci
            

            "Los
Alamos Security."-- Beth Sherman ( Heather Williams had a similar
answer.)

            "Camp
Rosie O'Donnell."-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            
"drudgecharterschool.com."-- Ken Novak
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            It's much noted that if
you saw what goes on in a restaurant kitchen, you'd never eat out again.
Similarly, you're advised to avert your glance from the making of sausages, and
laws, and presumably laws about the manufacture of sausages to be fried up in
some restaurant that you won't be visiting. And yet, it really would be nice if
the Supreme Court were televised. Lower courts are televised without
diminishing our respect. Charlie Rose is on television every night, without
diminishing our ... OK, bad example. But what is the argument against putting
the Supreme Court in a glass-walled, street-level studio, cranking up the theme
music, hiring a second-tier comic to warm up the gallery, and ... OK, again,
there is no doubt some kind of case to be made against that. But if the court
could be televised discretely, in black and white, surely justice would not be
imperiled, and might even be improved. At least we'd get a more vivid idea of
how justice works. And each December, when the networks do all those
year-in-review shows, there'd be swell footage of mighty impressive fatuity.
And of some guy vomiting up sausage all over the waiter. And the name of that
guy? Anthony Kennedy.

            
               "In the Final
Analysis, This Case Is About Federalism" Answer
            

            Justice Kennedy fondly recalls his school days,
what he terms "the real world of school discipline."

            In a dissent that ran longer than the decision, he
argued against the federal government's tampering with school fun, just as it,
presumably, ought not have messed around with slavery, or what Kennedy would
call "the real world of agricultural labor."

            Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the 5-4
decision, found that school districts can be liable for damages for failing to
stop a student's severe and pervasive sexual harassment of a classmate. She
said that Kennedy's dissent, endorsed unsurprisingly by William Rehnquist,
Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, would "teach little Johnny a perverse
lesson in Federalism," but the majority found a way that "assures little Mary
may attend class."

            LaShonda Davis--little
Mary--was a fifth-grade girl subjected to five months of harassment from a
classmate. Her school refused to help her, even by changing her seat. Her
harasser was eventually charged and convicted of sexual battery in juvenile
court.

            
               Arlene Hellerman's
Infelicitous Metaphor Corner
            

            "These
theories have all been tried before and have all been shot down before."--Steve
Sanetti, vice-president and general counsel of Sturm, Ruger & Co., the
largest and only publicly traded gun manufacturer in the United States,
poo-poos legal arguments against his company.

            
               Tim Carvell's
Philosophy Corner
            

            Why is it that when J.D.
Salinger sends love letters to Joyce Maynard, she forwards them to Sotheby's,
but when I do, she sends them to the FBI?

            
               Rough Translation
Extra
            

            IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE:

            "It is particularly
disturbing in this instance that Trooper Burke jeopardized the public trust and
his career over less than $200."--Paul Zoubek, Acting Attorney General, New
Jersey

            IN ENGLISH:

            "This is New Jersey: big
bribes only."

            
               Headline
Haiku
            

            Anticipating family
grief

            Hadassah open meet

            Dressler, star of old

            Orthotics alter
walking

            
               --Stuyvesant Town & Village , May 20,
1999

            Barbara Lippert

            Battle for Funds

            GOP Upstarts Challenge

            A Home Movie

            As Overly Violent

            
               --Wall Street Journal , May 20, 1999

            Mary O'Driscoll

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            It's a flirty, pushy, shovey, grabby world after
all.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , April 24
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
April 24, 1999)
            

            The cover editorial warns NATO to do some birthday
soul-searching. The alliance must establish an international protectorate in
Kosovo that guarantees refugees the right of return, and it must reassure a
wary world that it will not make a habit of waging war on sovereign nations.
Failure could mean "terminal decline." ... A long, fascinating
survey of NATO says the narrow interests of some
European members conflict with America's "broader vision" and wonders whether
members' conflicting positions on Iraq, Iran, and Israel could strain the
alliance in the future. ... An article describes a kid-run Florida anti-smoking
campaign. One billboard features a bikini-clad tobacco executive, poolside with
cigarette and black socks. The campaign is demonstrably successful, but the
governor wants to slash its budget.

            
               
                  New
Republic , May 10
            

            
               (posted Friday, April
23, 1999)
            

            The cover story , "Milosevic's Willing Executioners," says that
Serbs actively support the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and the murder of
Muslims. Serbs honestly believe themselves to be victims. Milosevic did not
need to push them into violence. The piece is full of chilling anecdotes about
Serbs' "gratuitous sadism" and indifference to Kosovar suffering. ... An
article slams CNN for acting as a conduit for Serb
propaganda. Rather than try to subvert or oppose Belgrade's censorship, CNN has
happily accepted it in exchange for "access."

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , April 25
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
April 22, 1999)
            

            The cover story deplores
the Americanization of Israeli politics. The American political consultants
hired by the leading candidates for prime minister--Arthur Finkelstein for
Benjamin Netanyahu, James Carville and others for Ehud Barak--have brought
sound bites, attack ads, and wedge issues to the campaign. Sadly, this has
removed all the substance from Israeli politics and left it just as vapid as
the American system. ... A profile of Montenegrin President Milo
Djukanovic calls him the West's best hope for Yugoslavia. Once a Milosevic
stooge, he has become an anti-Milosevic, free-market democrat. Problem:
Milosevic may take the opportunity provided by the NATO bombing to depose
Djukanovic and install a more subservient leader. ... A feature marvels
at military food, which now includes a barbecue chicken sandwich that lasts
three years without spoiling and airdrop rations that "flutter, rather than
plummet, down to earth, lest they take anyone out in the process." Next step:
"a transdermal nutrient delivery system"--that is, a food patch.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , April 26
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
20, 1999)
            

            
               Time 's cover depicts soldiers in the
spring's most anticipated war--in other words, actors from Star Wars: The
Phantom Menace . Time 
               gushes over the "fresh, handsome, grand" new movie and
publishes a fold-out guide to its new characters and techno-military toys. Bill
Moyers interviews George Lucas about the series' "true theology."
(Moyers: "In authentic religion, doesn't it take Kierkegaard's leap of faith?"
Lucas: "Yes ... that is what 'Use the Force' is.")

            The real war in Kosovo is featured inside, as it is
in Newsweek . Time 
               berates NATO for its self-congratulatory and ill-timed
birthday celebrations. Newsweek 
               berates NATO for its obfuscation of civilian casualties.
Time 
               dusts off NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark's 1975 thesis,
which doubted the "coercive effects ... of air attacks." Robert McNamara
tells 
               Newsweek that "it is totally inappropriate for
an ex-Secretary of Defense, in the middle of a war ... in which there are great
difficulties ahead ... to be talking about mistakes." He then blames military
leaders for overestimating the effectiveness of bombing.

            
               Newsweek 's cover story argues that North America was first peopled by "a
Rainbow Coalition of ethnic types," not just the Bering Strait-crossing Asians
commonly depicted in history textbooks. New evidence suggests that Asians
migrated from the Pacific Rim in canoes and that Europeans followed the frozen
shoreline to the East Coast. An expert predicts that the research could
relegate today's Native Americans to "just another Ellis Island group" and
threaten their hard-won legal rights.

            
               Time reports on
new research showing that at least 450 animal species--including giraffes,
goats, and dolphins--become sexually aroused through homosexual rubbing,
entwining, and kissing. Dissenting researchers question whether close genital
contact is really sex. The piece does not include reaction from the White House
or Kenneth Starr.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , April 26
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
20, 1999)
            

            The cover story frets about widespread hearing loss. Noisy
appliances will soon sport warning labels, and earplugs and earmuffs will
become ubiquitous. ... The magazine reports that earlier this month U.S. officials met secretly
with Kosovo Liberation Army rebels but decided not to arm them. A story says that half the Kosovar refugees are children under
the age of 15. ... A piece says that Christian colleges and universities have
fueled an enrollment boom with deep tuition discounts and open enrollment
policies. ("It's against our Christian perspective to be elitist or
exclusionary," explains one administrator.)

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , April 26 and May 3
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
20, 1999)
            

            The magazine devotes a
double issue to money. One piece chronicles the frenetic days of Mary Meeker,
the investment banker who orchestrated stock offerings for Netscape, Priceline,
and America Online. ... A writer who once worked in a sweatshop defends
them. Conditions aren't as bad as union protests indicate, and immigrant
laborers grouse only about losing work to cheaper factories abroad. ...
An author gripes about how tough it was to grow up rich. She doesn't even know
how much is in her trust fund.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
                
               , April 26
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
20, 1999)
            

            A piece opines that
Richard Holbrooke, not Madeleine Albright, is responsible for U.S.
underestimation of Milosevic's obstinacy. Holbrooke is adding a dark afterword
to new editions of his book on Balkans diplomacy. ... The cover story
charts America's "struggle to rediscover a compelling patriotic language" and
exults in the "new, crunchier" patriotism embodied by John McCain.

            
               
                  The
Nation
                
               , May 3
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
20, 1999)
            

            The cover story charts Michael
Milken's attempt to become "the Sam Walton of gray matter" by acquiring a
"cradle to grave" series of education businesses, from preschools to vocational
training firms. The piece chides Milken for failing to include critical
assessments of the '80s junk bond markets in his textbooks. ... The
magazine publishes an anti-voucher screed by Ron Unz, the conservative activist behind
California's ban on bilingual education. Unz writes that public schools are
vital to social cohesion and proposes an ideological truce on the issue: If the
left will acknowledge that its efforts to reform public schools have failed,
the right will stop pushing "to turn our public schools over to ideological
zealots or the marketing division from Nike."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 214: &quot;Nutkin&quot;

            

               You give the brief lead; I give the headline from London's
Independent : "Letter Reveals Nutkin Was a Savage Squirrel."
            

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 213)--"Three for All":
               

               

                  
                     Fill in all three blanks with the same word in this remark by
Rudolph Giuliani: "There is no __________ ... I know what _______ is. There is
no ________ going on in the city."
                  
               

               
"Denial."-- Marshall Efron , Molly Shearer Gabel , Jennifer
Miller , and Adam Bonin
               

               "
'Dancing.' It's from the mayor's cameo in the recent Broadway production of
Footloose ."-- Daniel Radosh
               

               "Adobe
hut building. Well, not yet, but without rent control ... "-- Jennifer
Miller
               

               
"Arguing with the Disney Corp."-- Daniel Krause
               

               " 'Tim
Carvell.' And then added, 'Tim Carvell was my friend. And you, sir, are no Tim
Carvell.' "-- Barbara Lippert (similarly, Chris Kelly , Alex
Pascover , Greg Diamond , Mac Thomason , Michael Fein ,
and Charles Star )

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            Lenny Bruce began his
apologia this way--and I quote from bad memory--"The continuation of crime,
disease, suffering, and death is what keeps me, Albert Schweitzer, and J. Edgar
Hoover in business." But in assembling News Quiz, the persistent problem is not
trivializing the great events of the day (although that is an enduring
tradition both for us and NBC News) but neglecting them. News Quiz, after all,
runs but a single question, and it seldom refers to the day's most important
story. I am, perhaps, feeling a little uneasy over the question selected for
today when every front page reports the bombing in the Balkans. But remember,
although a question ostensibly neglects a vital story, its answer may be
piercingly relevant. And there is also this to consider--a squirrel! And it's
savage! And it's named Nutkin! Thank you, and from all of us here at NBC, good
night.

            
               Once, Twice, Three
Times the Answer
            

            "There is no unrest ... I know what
unrest is. There is no unrest going on in the city."

            No unrest. But plenty of arrests, 574 so far in
ongoing protests of the Amadou Diallo shooting--former mayors, congressmen and
other officials, religious leaders, actors, civilians. And there are also
ongoing investigations of the NYPD by both federal and state authorities.

            The mayor noted that most
cops don't use excessive force. Charles Manson noted that most days, he doesn't
kill anyone, either. Well, he didn't note it, but he might have.

            
               Try To ABC It My
Way Extra
            

            According to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting,
ABC's Oscars broadcast gave a distorted view of the Elia Kazan protest, grossly
exaggerating support for the director. Liz Smith reported that "most of the
audience did not applaud." Roger Ebert wrote "only 40 percent of the audience
stood up and clapped," while the Los Angeles Times put the figure at 25
percent, and Daily Variety at 20 percent. Oh, lordy, I've quoted Liz
Smith and Roger Ebert. I'd better go lie down.

            OK, I'm back. FAIR notes
that ABC devoted 85 percent of its crowd shots to people standing to applaud,
but only 15 percent to those refraining. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Surely this
was a directorial decision designed only to provide the most appealing shots,
frequently down the front of Gwyneth Paltrow's dress. A random check of ABC
file footage reveals the network's commitment to accurate reporting.

            
               EVENT: Anti-Vietnam
War demonstration, Washington, 1968

            

               ABC MOSTLY SHOOTS: A policeman's horse placidly nibbles a
blade of grass. LBJ placidly nibbles Raquel Welch's ear.

            
               EVENT:
Protest of U.S. policy in El Salvador, Chicago, 1988

            

               ABC MOSTLY SHOOTS: MacGyver blows something up using just a
can of peaches and a poodle.

            
               EVENT:
March against Persian Gulf War, New York, 1990

            

               ABC MOSTLY SHOOTS: Only 3,000 miles away, at SeaWorld, sexy
Cindy Crawford models swimsuits with Shamu the killer whale.

            
               EVENT:
Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople, 1204

            

               ABC MOSTLY SKETCHES: Some lovely fluffy clouds.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            New York lacks a mayor with self-knowledge, and Tim
Carvell.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <EM>Glasnost</EM> in Iraq?

            The German daily Die Welt reported "strong irritation" in Bonn over the
arrangements for President Clinton's visit to Germany. It quoted a source in
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's office as saying: "We must make it clear to the
Americans who the host is here." The paper said in a front-page report that as
late as Tuesday afternoon Washington still hasn't provided Bonn with a proper
presidential timetable. Government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye has frequently
used the word "chaos" to describe the situation, the paper said. Die
Welt 's main lead was about the German government's decision to send 1,000
more troops to Albania to help with humanitarian relief.

            Most British papers led Wednesday with a sudden
volte-face by the British government on the number of Kosovo refugees
Britain would accept. After being criticized, especially by the Germans, for
only accepting 330 refugees so far (compared with the 10,000 now in Germany,
5,800 in Turkey, 2,354 in France, and 2,166 in Norway), the government
announced Tuesday that from now on about 1,000 refugees a week would be flown
to Britain from the Balkans. The conservative Daily Telegraph called the
decision "overdue"; the liberal Guardian said the government's response to the refugee crisis
has been "slow and niggardly." But the Guardian 's front-page lead,
headlined "The Terror of the Twisters," was about the tornadoes in Oklahoma and
Kansas.

            The refugee crisis also dominated the main Italian
papers, which led Wednesday with the news that Italy has decided to take in
another 10,000 refugees from the overcrowded camps in Macedonia. To prevent
them dispersing throughout the Italian peninsula, 5,000 of them would be
sheltered at the former U.S. cruise missile base of Comiso in Sicily,
La Stampa of
Turin reported. "Bad has been turned into good," the paper commented on its
front page. "The instruments of death have been replaced by ones of survival."
La Repubblica
of Rome published a brief front-page comment by Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel
Prize-winning South African novelist, deploring the NATO offensive "because it
doesn't bring a solution to the horrors committed by Milosevic." "But the
terrifying aspect of the problem is that so many of us who believe this don't
have any other solution to propose," she added.

            All the French papers led not on Kosovo but on a
domestic political crisis resulting from the jailing for the first time in
French history of a prefect (provincial governor) in Corsica. The prefect,
Bernard Bonnet, who was sent to Napoleon's island by the socialist Prime
Minister Lionel Jospin to impose law and order on unruly Corsican nationalists,
is alleged to have ordered his police force to burn down a beach restaurant as
an example to them. Now France's Parliament wants to know how much, if
anything, Jospin knew about this illegal act. The Spanish papers led on a
politically controversial decision by the Spanish government to commit ground
troops to join an eventual NATO invasion of Serbia. El Mundo 's second
front-page story was about the German couple killed by three tigers in a safari
park in Alicante. The man had his throat torn out, and the woman was
decapitated.

            In Israel, Ha'aretz led
Wednesday with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's decision to
postpone the declaration of a Palestinian state. It also noted his riducle of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's election claim that this was his
government's achievement. "[Netanyahu] has no doubt in his mind that the sole
causes of this outcome were the pressures and threats that Israel applied to
Arafat and the crude hints about the possibility of annexing territories or
re-occupying them," the paper said in an editorial. But it pointed out that
Arafat had merely postponed the declaration and that, meanwhile, he had won
broad international support for the principle of Palestinian statehood. He has
"surpassed Netanyahu in status at the White House," the editorial said, while
"Europe stands united behind him, and the Arab states are only waiting for the
signal to send official representatives to the Palestinian state."

            Some Arab papers have been telling of
"glasnost " in Iraq, with Saddam Hussein reportedly easing government
restrictions on freedom of expression and political opposition. According to a
piece in Monday's edition of the Pan-Arab paper al-Quds al-Arabi , Saddam has
approved a number of "specific political and security" measures to tackle the
"political and social frustrations" caused by nearly nine years of U.N.
sanctions. These included a new law on "political pluralism," passed recently
by the National Assembly, which would allow certain "active political groups"
to hold meetings and form new political parties. Another was the decision to
show "various degrees of tolerance" toward public criticism of the Iraqi
government. The article was written by al-Quds al-Arabi 's Amman
correspondent, Bassam Badareeen, who reported from Baghdad last week that
ordinary Iraqis were becoming more openly critical of the authorities without
apparently fearing retribution by the secret police.

            Tuesday, Le Monde of Paris devoted its front-page lead and its
one editorial to the first decline in 15 years of the power and influence of
the French extreme right. An opinion poll conducted for the newspaper showed
that a recent split between the right-wing leaders Bruno Mégret and Jean-Marie
Le Pen has greatly reduced their popular appeal. Support for Le Pen's ideas has
fallen to 11 percent from 20 percent a year ago. The editorial said the bitter
battle between the two men has "totally destabilized" their followers who have
been raised in "the cult of the leader." It has also opened the public's eyes
to "the true nature of these leaders and their methods." Other factors in their
diminishing appeal have been their defense of the Milosevic regime in
Yugoslavia and the economic recovery in France. In another front-page story
Tuesday, Le Monde reported that, according to a British organization,
Global Witness, Cambodian forests are being illegally destroyed to feed the
garden furniture industry in Vietnam.

            Tuesday's Corriere della
Sera of Milan reported that Geraldine Chaplin has written to Roberto
Benigni, the Oscar-winning star and director of Life is Beautiful , to
thank him for reminding her of her father, Charlie Chaplin, with "his elegance
and class in every little gesture, his nobility of spirit, and, above all, his
ability to be moved." She said in an interview with the paper that during the
Oscars she gave Benigni the original bowler hat that Chaplin wore in The
Gold Rush .

            The British press gave extensive coverage Wednesday
to the putting up for sale of a London house for 35 million pounds (about $56
million), making it, according to the Daily Telegraph , "the most
expensive house in Europe." By grand mansion standards it is relatively modest,
with 10 bedrooms, nine bathrooms, four reception rooms, a small garden, and a
wine "cellar" that is "actually more of a cupboard." But it is very close to
Kensington Palace, where the late Princess Diana lived. The sale consists of a
lease of only 99 years, and the purchaser will have to pay an additional 1.2
million pounds ($1.9 million) in taxes and an estimated $328,000 in legal fees,
the Telegraph said.

            In Japan, Asahi
Shimbun reported Wednesday that raccoons imported from the United
States as pets have become an ecological and agricultural "nightmare" in Japan.
Escaped or abandoned raccoons have been breeding in the wild for the past 20
years and have damaged corn crops, watermelon and melon farms, and rainbow
trout hatcheries, the paper said. They have also driven native Japanese foxes
and gray herons from their natural habitats. Raccoons, particularly baby ones,
became fashionable as pets in the late 1970s because of a popular cartoon
program on television called Araiguma Rasukaru (Rascal the Raccoon).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Kosovo 
               update : 1) NATO leaders met in Washington
to mark the alliance's 50 th birthday. The media noted that this was
supposed to be a party but has turned into a grim strategy meeting, thanks to
Kosovo. 2) NATO bombed Yugoslavia's main TV network and leveled a home
belonging to President Slobodan Milosevic. President Clinton's spin: "We are
targeting his command and control facilities." Everyone else's spin: We're
trying to kill him. 3) Russia conveyed a proposal from Milosevic to allow an
"international presence" in Kosovo under U.N. auspices if NATO halts its
bombing and withdraws its troops from Yugoslavia's borders. Clinton and British
Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected the proposal but portrayed it as a sign that
Milosevic's will is breaking. 4) NATO leaders reopened the question of sending
in ground troops. Clinton says it's just a contingency plan. The half-cynical
spin: They intend to launch a ground war and are just using the "contingency
plan" shtick as cover. The completely cynical spin: It really is just a
contingency plan, showing once again how gutless and unrealistic they are.
(4/23/99)
            

            
Update on the
Colorado high-school massacre : Based on the discovery of a large propane
bomb and other explosives planted by the two killers, investigators think they
had accomplices. Meanwhile, several bomb threats and trench coat pranks at
schools in Colorado and elsewhere over the last two days are being treated as
copycat incidents. Editorialists and politicians continued to debate whether to
blame the massacre on 1) guns; 2) violence in the media; 3) secularism and
cultural decline; or 4) inadequate monitoring and counseling of troubled
students. (The assailants were allegedly devotees of shock-rocker Marilyn
Manson. Click for the 
                  Slate
                "Assessment" of Manson and
here
for an analysis of the wave of PR opportunism that followed a similar slaughter
in Oregon last year.) (4/23/99)
            

            
President
Clinton postponed the destruction of the U.S. government's last samples of
smallpox . The U.S. and Russian governments have the only known samples of
the virus, which was eradicated in the 1970s after it had killed 500 million
people this century. The previous world consensus was that the samples would be
destroyed this year to make sure smallpox never comes back. The new thinking is
that rogue states may already have obtained samples of the virus for developing
a biological weapon and that the United States should work with Russia to
develop a new vaccine and to test drugs against the virus. The political
question is what happens if the rest of the world wants the virus destroyed but
the Americans and Russians don't. (4/23/99)
            

            
The theory
that male homosexuality is genetic suffered a setback . A previous study had
found a specific genetic pattern among gay men, but a new study does not find
the same pattern. The most interesting version of the theory is that the gene,
passed along on the X chromosome, makes the bearer attracted to men--and that
this trait is supposed to be passed on to daughters but is sometimes passed on
to sons. The author of the old study says the new study is flawed, and
reporters agreed that the new study raises doubts but doesn't necessarily
refute the old one. The conservative spin: This proves homosexuality is a
choice, not a natural condition, so it's OK to stigmatize it. The gay spins: 1)
Homosexuality is genetic and therefore natural. 2) If it turns out to be
genetic, conservatives will just try to eradicate it with gene therapy. 3)
Forget the genetics debate and just treat us equally. (4/23/99)
            

            
Scientists found
a new candidate for the missing link between apes and humans . The 2.5
million-year-old creature, dubbed Australopithecus garhi , evidently used
stone tools to carve up the animals it killed and had much bigger teeth than
its apelike ancestors. The theory is that the creature's tools enabled it to
augment its diet with meat and marrow, which gave it the nutrition and energy
that eventually allowed it to develop a larger, more human brain and to spread
throughout the world. (4/23/99)
            

            
A government
study concluded that some New Jersey state troopers pulled over drivers and
searched their cars because they were black or Hispanic . At least 77
percent of drivers who were asked by troopers for permission to search their
cars were minorities. The ostensible reason for this racial "profiling" is that
New Jersey highways are a conduit for drugs and that the troopers think blacks
and Hispanics are more likely to be culprits. One consequence of the study
could be to help black and Hispanic defendants get the results of their car
searches thrown out of court as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The spins
from Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, R-N.J.: 1) I'm surprised. 2) This is awful.
3) The vast majority of troopers are not racist, and I'm issuing orders that
will stop this practice right away. The reactions from blacks and Hispanics: 1)
Duh. 2) This is the way the world is. 3) Right. (4/21/99)
            

            

               India's 
               government collapsed. The ruling Hindu
nationalist coalition lost a no-confidence vote because a small party pulled
out of the coalition. Now the opposition Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi
(former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's widow), is trying to form a parliamentary
coalition large enough to support a new government. The early betting is that
this will prove impossible and that new elections will have to be called. The
key questions at stake are 1) whether Gandhi will become a candidate for prime
minister; 2) whether the new government will sign the nuclear test ban treaty;
and 3) whether India will seek to cool tensions with Pakistan.
(4/19/99)
            

            

               CNN 
               is dumping Peter Arnett. Having kept Arnett
on its payroll but off the air for months, the network will reportedly use an
escape clause in his contract to get rid of him in July. Everyone assumes the
reason is Arnett's role as correspondent in last year's CNN Newsstand
report that alleged use of lethal nerve gas by the U.S. military in Vietnam.
CNN had retracted and apologized for the report but let Arnett stay on the job
after he argued that he had played no substantive role in the report and had
simply performed as an on-air mouthpiece. The pro-Arnett spin: It's unfair to
treat a reporter this way after 18 years of loyal service. The anti-Arnett
spin: His reputation has been dead for months, and it's about time CNN
mercifully pulled the plug. (4/19/99)
            

            
Kenyan runner
Joseph Chebet won the Boston Marathon . The heartwarming spin: He finally
won the race after finishing second in his last three marathons. The cranky
spin: Now that nine consecutive Kenyans have won the Boston Marathon--and four
of them finished among this year's top 10--how about giving some other country
a chance? Ethiopian runner Fatuma Roba reinforced the theme of dominance by a
single country, winning the women's marathon for the third straight year.
(4/19/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Who's the Wimp?

            
European reporting of the NATO war against Yugoslavia reflected mounting
confusion Wednesday over the way ahead. The Italian and German newspapers
prominently reported their countries' firm opposition to the use of ground
troops, following a meeting in Italy between the German and Italian heads of
government. The Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt also reported on their front pages that German
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder did not rule out an Italian-proposed bombing pause
in the event of a U.N. Security Council resolution supporting the G-8 peace
conditions. La
Repubblica of Rome and Corriere della Sera of Milan both gave front-page treatment
to new peace feelers from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Each said the
Serbs are now ready to accept the G-8 conditions.

            In
London, the liberal Guardian led on "stark differences" among the NATO allies on
war strategy. It said a rift was opening "between the more hawkish governments
in London and Washington and anxious European allies desperate, for domestic
political reasons, for a diplomatic and political breakthrough." But the
consistently hawkish Times of London led on popular protests in southern Serbia
against Milosevic's prosecution of the war. This was clearly intended to
strengthen the case for intensified military action. The Times said in
an editorial that "the growing demoralisation of Serb troops should be
ammunition reinforcing the case for the immediate use in combat of America's
Apache attack helicopters, as part of a more precise and sophisticated military
strategy to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo." Despite President Clinton's
widely reported refusal to rule out the use of ground troops, the Times
continued to portray him as a wimp. "Leadership, for the moment, lies with
London," it said.

            In the
Daily Telegraph , another hawkish conservative newspaper, political
commentator Boris Johnson wrote Wednesday on the op-ed page that all the talk
of British Prime Minister Tony Blair as "Blair the hawk" was "a gigantic
candyfloss illusion" created by his Downing Street spin doctors. "We are now in
the blame game," he wrote, "and Mr Blair is simply positioning himself." Blair
has never publicly spoken out in favor of an invasion of Kosovo but, thanks to
media manipulation, he is now in a "win-win" situation. "If NATO does prevail,
and every single Serb soldier is driven from Kosovo, and every last refugee is
repatriated, then Blair's brows will be crowned with the laurels owed to the
man who urged the Alliance on," Johnson wrote. "[A]nd if NATO fails, Blair will
be able to blame the flaccidity of the Americans, and of the Draft Dodger in
particular."

            
According to a report from Washington Wednesday in the Jerusalem Post , the Clinton
administration is "quietly euphoric" about the election of Labor Party leader
Ehud Barak as the new prime minister of Israel. There was some euphoria in
Europe, too. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung splashed the headline
"Barak Promises Rapid Progress in the Middle East Peace Process," and Die
Welt said that his election "arouses new hope worldwide for peace." In
France, Le Monde 's
headline was "Israel: A Massive Vote for Peace," and Le Figaro 's said "Barak
Wants To Relaunch the Peace." Le Monde , in an editorial titled "Israel:
The Good News," said there are now grounds for hope. But in Britain, there was
more skepticism. The Daily Telegraph , for example, said in an editorial
that the election was not "a referendum on peace." It was "a personal,
bare-knuckled contest, fought and lost on the banalities of local politics."
The Times said there can now be progress toward peace, "but only if all
sides are willing to subordinate rhetoric to realism." The Guardian said
that if Barak can't deliver peace, who can? If he can't, "the prospects are
grim."

            
Benjamin Netanyahu got bad press practically everywhere. Ha'aretz said in its
editorial Wednesday that he and "the recalcitrant political
fringes to which he was captive" had effectively frozen the Oslo agreements but
that Barak "now has a renewed opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians
and to attain a real peace with all our neighbors, with Syria at the head." The
Jerusalem Post 's editorial said, however, that Barak's landslide "was not
only a function of his opponent's failures, but of Netanyahu's success." The
paper said, "Netanyahu came into office as leader of the opposition to the Oslo
Accords; he is leaving having brought the Likud solidly and irreversibly into
the Oslo camp. By resolving the peace-and-security debate in Oslo's favor,
Netanyahu made himself obsolete and broke the historic deadlock over the peace
process."

            The
Arab world's reaction to Barak's victory was generally suspicious. An editorial
in the Syrian state-controlled newspaper Tashrin called the Netanyahu
regime a "three-year nightmare" and said Barak should "make drastic changes in
Israel's positions regarding a full withdrawal from occupied Arab lands and a
just and inclusive peace based on U.N. resolutions." The Syria Times
expressed some optimism, but the main thrust of Arab press comment was
negative. A number of Arab columnists argued that while Netanyahu alienated the
United States with his behavior, the "peace-loving" label that has already been
attached to Barak--even though he has done nothing yet to earn it--might allow
him to pursue much the same policies while retaining Western support.

            The
Palestinian Pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi went so far as to suggest that the day might
yet come when Palestinians will look back on the days of Netanyahu with
something approaching nostalgia. The Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat said it
feared that Barak might prove to be an even bigger headache for the Arabs than
Netanyahu, for he will pursue much the same hard-line policies as his
predecessor, but with Western backing. Jordanian commentator Fakhri Ka'war
accused state-controlled Arab media of having lulled people into the delusion
that the only obstacle to the peace process was Netanyahu, and that if Barak
won the elections he would prove to be "the great savior who rids the
Palestinian people of their ordeal." But he wrote in the Amman daily
al-Ra'i that the Arabs have learned from bitter experience that Labor
and Likud agree on essentials, share the same expansionist and hegemonic
agenda, and differ only in style. The daily al-Khaleej of the United
Arab Emirates also wondered whether anything has really changed in Israel.
"Barak the pianist has already started playing out of tune," it said. "And if
he finds anyone among us to sing along with him, then we can bid what remains
of peace one thousand good-byes."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  8MM
                (Columbia Pictures). Nicolas Cage plays a
straight-arrow private eye who enters the seamy world of hard-core porn in
pursuit of information about a girl in a snuff film. Critics' reactions are all
over the map. Roger Ebert gives the film three stars and says "it deals with
the materials of violent exploitation films, but in a non-pornographic way; it
would rather horrify than thrill ... it is a real film. Not a slick
exploitation film with all the trappings of depravity but none of the
consequences" (the Chicago Sun-Times ). Several critics take the exact
opposite stance: The Los Angeles Times ' Kenneth Turan calls it "an
unapologetically sleazy ordeal that delights in twisting the knife, a tawdry
piece of work whose only raison d'être is making the skin crawl in the name of
box office profit." Most reactions to the film are negative, but each critic
cites a different flaw. Odd man out: Stephen Hunter of the Washington
Post , so unfazed by the subject matter as to call the film "insipid" and
"mild." ( David Edelstein's review in 
                  Slate
               .)

            
               
                  200
Cigarettes
                (Paramount Pictures). Critics call this piece of early '80s
nostalgia a "dismally unfunny farce" (Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety ).
There are plenty of interesting stars (Christina Ricci, Courtney Love, Ben
Affleck, Janeane Garofalo), but the script, which follows a gaggle of young
folks on their way to a New Year's Eve bash in Manhattan's East Village, is
said to be unsalvageable. The film's only high note is a soundtrack with some
49 songs that evoke the era better than any of the actors do. (Check out the outfits on
the official site.)

            

               
                  The
               

               
                  Other
               
               
                  Sister
                (Buena Vista
Pictures). Sugarcoated and manipulative is how critics describe this Garry
Marshall film about two mentally handicapped young adults (Giovanni Ribisi and
Juliette Lewis) who fall in love. Ebert lays into the film, saying it's
"shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop, and a plot
device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find this film
offensive" ( the Chicago Sun-Times ). Those who condemn the film say its
real message is "[m]entally challenged people in love say the darnedest
things!" (Desson Howe, the Washington Post ). However, quite a few
softies like it: "Lewis and Ribisi eventually win you over" (Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ); "by the storybook conclusion I was cheering them on,
against all critical instinct" (Rod Dreher, the New York Post ). Stephen
Holden of the New York Times opens his review with what sounds like a
joke ("A beautifully acted love story") but isn't; he's the film's biggest fan.
(Check
out this site devoted to Ribisi.)

            

               Books
            

            
               
                  The Houdini
Girl
               , by Martyn Bedford (Pantheon). Bedford's sophomore novel,
after the acclaimed Acts of Revision , is called a gripping but flawed
work. The story follows a young magician uncovering the details of his
girlfriend's recent death and unpeeling the layers of deception that she had
wrapped herself in. The thriller side of the book is well crafted, and the
dialogue, pacing, and plotting keep reviewers engaged: "Bedford is the genuine
article, a writer of unmistakable flair and accomplishment" (Carey Harrison,
the New York Times Book Review ), but many reviewers say he does not show
the same skill level in revealing his characters' emotional lives. (Read the first chapter, courtesy of the New York Times
[requires free registration].)

            
               
                  Perfect Murder,
Perfect Town
               , by Lawrence Schiller (HarperCollins). Jumbled, messy, and
"frustrating to read" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the New York Times ) is
how most reviewers describe this rushed-to-press book about the JonBenet Ramsey
murder. Not only does the book repeat and contradict itself, but the author
doesn't even try to offer an answer to the most essential question of all:
whodunit? Some reviewers speculate that the shoddiness is a result of the book
being published before it was ready, in order to fill the post-Monica vacuum.
(Read this excerpt that ran in Newsweek .)

            

               Theater
            

            
               
                  Not About
Nightingales
                (Circle in the Square Theatre, New York City). This
recently discovered early Tennessee Williams play has been stunningly
staged--critics praise the acting, direction, and costumes--but they debate
whether the work itself is amateurish or fully formed. The New York
Times ' Ben Brantley concedes that "there are definitely moments to wince
over" and that it is "the work of a man still unsure of his voice" but still
sees enough flashes of brilliance to make the performance worthwhile. Daily
Variety 's Charles Isherwood agrees, saying the play "is manifestly not a
piece of juvenilia." Some critics are less generous and note a heavy reliance
on melodrama and film noir tropes; the Daily News ' Fintan O'Toole writes
that the play is no "lost masterpiece." (Find out more
about the show at sidewalk.com.)

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  October Sky ;

               
                  
                     Movie --Jawbreaker ;

               
                  Movie -- Office Space ;

               
                  Music--
                  The Hot Rock , by Sleater-Kinney;

               
                  Book--
                  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith ,
by Anne Lamott;

               
                  Book -- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and
the Quest for the Ultimate Theory , by Brian R. Greene.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Blast From the Past ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Message in a Bottle ;

               
                  Movie
                  --My Favorite Martian ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Testament , by John Grisham;

               
                  Book
                  --South of the Border, West of the Sun ,by Haruki
Murakami;

               
                  Theater--
                  Death of a Salesman (Eugene O'Neill
Theatre, New York City).

            

            :

            

               
                  Movie -- Payback ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Simply Irresistible ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Rushmore ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Dry Cleaning ;

               
                  Book -- Werewolves in Their Youth , by Michael
Chabon;

               
                  Theater -- You're a Good Man,
Charlie Brown .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  She's All That ;

               
                  Movie
                  --The 24 Hour Woman ;

               
                  Movie -- Still Crazy ;

               
                  Movie -- My Name Is Joe ;

               
                  Book--
                  What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness
Eludes the Modern Woman , by Danielle Crittenden;

               
                  Book
                  --Amy and Isabelle , by Elizabeth Strout;

               
                  Book -- Heavy Water , by
Martin Amis.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Unhappy Birthday

            The bombed shell of
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade residence was the favorite
front-page picture in the European press Friday. "Yesterday the war got
personal," commented the Daily Telegraph of London. "Slobba's Cracking," said the British
tabloid the Sun , claiming that Milosevic made a new peace offer only
because NATO had "blown his bed to bits." The main story in both the
Telegraph and the Times of London was the new hawkishness of British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. His statements in the United States that victory was the
only acceptable "exit strategy" from Yugoslavia are part of a new
Anglo-American deal, the Telegraph claimed. Blair and President Clinton
have "forged a new strategic partnership in which Mr. Blair is the leading hawk
and Mr. Clinton tacitly goes along with deeper involvement in the Balkans. ...
While Mr. Blair tried to stiffen spines among the other 17 Nato leaders
arriving for the Alliance's 50 th birthday, Mr. Clinton made it clear
that the world's sole superpower was underwriting the British-led
escalation."

            The Times '
front-page headline was "Hawk Blair stiffens US resolve." It compared his
behavior in the United States with "Margaret Thatcher's spine-stiffening
American visit before the Gulf War." The liberal Guardian highlighted
Blair's call for a new "doctrine of international community" and his explicit
statement in a speech in Chicago that his "Third Way" thinking offers a
framework for the entire globe. But the paper led on Milosevic's peace offer,
which it said included "a key Yugoslav concession"--agreement to an
international security force in Kosovo.

            In an op-ed article Thursday, Times columnist
Anatole Kaletsky attributed the triumph of the Third Way to the global economic
crisis of the past two years. This, he said, is "one of the luckiest breaks
that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair ever had, even in their amazingly lucky
careers." Kaletsky wrote, "Nobody seems to believe any longer that markets work
best if businesses are simply left to their own devices or that capitalism can
avoid booms and busts without active government intervention. ... In short, the
Third Way faith in 'smart' government seems to have triumphed completely over
the Thatcher-Reagan doctrine that government is the problem and market forces
the solution."

            In an analysis of Blair's
"new internationalism" on its editorial page, Le Monde of Paris described
it Friday as "a kind of humanitarian Wilsonism that wouldn't be limited to the
right of peoples to self-determination that Woodrow Wilson wanted to impose on
the defeated European empires after World War I ; it defends the rights of man,
the rights of minorities, and cultural and religious freedoms." The author
welcomed Europe's attempt in Kosovo to break openly with the spirit of Munich
but warned that the new internationalism contains paradoxes that could spell
trouble in the future. One is its willingness to use NATO, rather than the
United Nations, to enforce the aims of the U.N. Charter; another was
uncertainty about its geographical extension (should its writ run outside
Europe?); another the tendency of American "messianism" to mask egotistic,
nationalist policies; and yet another the clash of different national values
and principles around the world.

            In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung led on peace moves under the
headline "Bonn expects much from American-Russian co-operation." While
highlighting Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's three conditions for peace--an
immediate end to the use of force; a withdrawal of Serb military, paramilitary,
and police personnel from Kosovo; and their replacement by international peace
enforcers--it said in an editorial that NATO can only leave Yugoslavia as
"victors." The main Italian papers all led Friday on Milosevic agreeing to a
U.N. presence in Kosovo, while El Mundo of Madrid led with Clinton authorizing preparations
for a land invasion. In a report from New York, La Repubblica of Rome said
it is now clear that the NATO allies are divided into doves and hawks, with
Germany and Italy being the leading doves and Britain the leading hawk.
Corriere della
Sera of Milan carried a front-page report that the southeast Italian
region of Apulia has experienced a 40 percent fall in summer tourist bookings
because of the Kosovo conflict and has appealed to the Italian government to
declare it an economic crisis zone.

            According to the
Daily Telegraph , an interview in the Washington Post with NATO
Secretary-General Javier Solana revealing a dusting down of Kosovo invasion
plans was "arranged" by the White House. In an article on NATO's birthday
celebrations, the Times ' Brussels correspondent recalled how one week
into NATO's air campaign, Solana told visitors not to worry about Kosovo
spoiling the party. "I'm sure the problem will be solved before April 23," he
said then, with a reassuring smile.

            Among several British editorials on NATO's birthday, the
Times ' warned Blair against trying to woo America with "the moral
fervour which comes so naturally to him," since what was most needed to sway
U.S. opinion was "an informed case based on strategic interest, an argument for
committing US troops that explains why the future contours of European peace
are being decided in the Balkans." It warned him, too, not to "jump the gun" on
Clinton and to "avoid the slightest hint that this is a Bill-and-Tony show,
with the rest of Europe hanging on their coat-tails." The paper said, "US
troops in Kosovo are vital, because the key is the decisive thwarting of
Slobodan Milosevic's campaign, as destabilising as it is criminal, against its
people."

            The Guardian , under the headline "Unhappy
Birthday," said the celebrations were taking place "in the wrong place at the
wrong time" because "the war will need to be over--'won' is hardly apt--before
the profoundest question of this anniversary season can be addressed: whether
the North Atlantic Alliance can and should continue into the 21 st
century." The Daily Telegraph , however, extolled NATO as "the only
organisation capable of upholding the international order" and defended its
Yugoslavia offensive as a means of keeping the United States happy. "America,
with its Wilsonian moral impulses, could not be held indefinitely in an
alliance that sat back, fat and happy, while atrocities were being committed on
a large scale in Europe's backyard," it said. "Disgust with European
complacency would have led to fresh calls for withdrawal."

            In the Arab and Islamic
world, newspaper commentators were urging an Islamic contribution to solving
the Kosovo crisis. In al-Ra'i of Jordan Thursday, political analyst Fahd
al-Fanek said Islamic countries should put together a peacekeeping force that
would be acceptable to both the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians, while Clovis
Maksoud, writing in both al-Khaleej of the United Arab Emirates and the
Pan-Arab al-Hayat , said Arabs should work to take the initiative out of
NATO's hands and restore it to the United Nations, where it belongs. Maksoud, a
former Arab League diplomat now heading the Center for the Global South at the
American University in Washington, noted a "frightening and obscene"
convergence between Serbia's ethnic cleansing and the behavior of NATO, which
has taken international law into its own hands.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Peril of Faith

            For years it has been an
American article of faith--as cherished as our belief in free enterprise--that
politicians are corrupt, venal, and incompetent: This was established by
Watergate, left unshaken by Jimmy Carter, and reinforced by Iran-Contra.
Impeachment was supposed to affirm it once and for all. But now the unthinkable
has happened: Americans have regained their faith in politicians.

            Fully 60 percent of
Americans now trust the federal government to handle domestic problems, and
more than 70 percent trust the feds on foreign policy. President Clinton's job
approval ratings remain near record levels.

            Nowhere is this Great Awakening more alarming than in
governors' offices. A March Washington Post poll pegs job approval
ratings for governors nationwide at 73 percent, up from 49 percent in 1991.
Republican governors are especially favored. While Republicans in Congress
struggled in the 1998 elections, most Republican governors routed Democrats by
record margins. Some Republican govs, such as George W. Bush of Texas, now
score approval ratings above 80 percent.

            This faith in Republican
governors has two consequences for the GOP. The first relates to the 2000
presidential campaign. Desperate for a hot candidate, the GOP has--as Lamar
Alexander jokes--all but carved Bush's image onto Mount Rushmore already. And
the happy numbers have made any Republican who lives in a governor's mansion
think he deserves a promotion to vice president. Among those touted as
potential Bush running mates are New York's George Pataki, Wisconsin's Tommy
Thompson, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge, Michigan's John Engler, Massachusetts' Paul
Cellucci, Kansas' Bill Graves, New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman, Utah's Mike
Leavitt, and Montana's Marc Racicot.

            The second consequence of the govs' popularity is that it
is persuading Republicans that the governors have found the Holy Grail. The
governors, Republicans believe, have invented a brilliant new politics that
transcends ideology. The admirers of the governors (who include, not least, the
governors themselves) use the same phrases over and over to describe them: The
govs are a "third party" and a "new breed." They have "a distinct approach" and
"a new way of governing."

            What is this magical new
way? They combine fiscal conservatism and softer social policy. They have
turned deficits into gigantic surpluses while still cutting taxes. They have
slashed welfare rolls and unemployment. They have increased funding for popular
social policies: teacher training, health care for kids, environmental
cleanups. George W. wants to spend $1 billion more on teacher salaries and an
extra $116.5 million on child care for the poor. Pataki just boosted education
spending by $600 million.

            Unlike the savage congressional Republicans, the governors
have perfected the soothing language of politics. Bush, for example, has
abjured "English-only" education: He calls his program "English-plus."
"English-only says you don't count, you're not important. English-plus (says)
we recognize the treasures of your language and heritage," the governor's press
secretary told the National Journal . "The policy is the same , but
the tone is different" (emphasis added).

            The governors have
learned how to form multicultural coalitions, another feat that has eluded
their congressional confreres. Florida's Jeb Bush won a majority of the
Hispanic vote in his run; his brother George W. polls extremely well among
blacks and Hispanics. The governors have allied with moderates in the
Democratic Party and borrowed their best ideas. They are even willing to offend
the die-hards of their own party: Few of the governors talk much about
abortion. Bush has irritated conservatives by emphasizing public education and
largely eschewing vouchers.

            So, essentially, the new form of government invented by
Bush, Pataki, & Co. is ... Clintonism: fiscal conservatism, deficits into
surpluses, welfare reform, sweeteners for social programs, lots of euphemizing,
and a willingness to co-opt the other side.

            Not that there is anything wrong with what the
governors have done. Their accomplishments are genuine and their states are
thriving. But the GOP's eagerness to embrace them does suggest a certain
hypocrisy. Conservatives, after all, have spent the last year crediting
Clinton's polls to alchemy: He has lucked into the best economy in history. But
if Clinton's popularity is alchemical, then so is the governors'. (Likewise, if
the governors' popularity is legitimate, then so is Clinton's.) All of them owe
their sky-high poll ratings to the economy and a few ounces of good sense. Of
course the governors and the president managed to turn deficits into surpluses.
Of course they cut welfare rolls. Of course they have delighted voters by
goosing popular social programs with extra millions. You would have to be a
moron not to have been a popular governor while tax revenue surged,
unemployment vanished, and crime fell.

            It's easy to be a statesman when all the options
are good. The test of the governors' "new way"--and the test of America's
rediscovered political faith--won't come till the lean years follow Clinton's
seven fat ones.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , April 4
            

            
               (posted Friday, April
2, 1999)
            

            The cover editorial bluntly criticizes NATO's cautious
intervention strategy for Kosovo ("horribly wrong") and urges the West to
assume control of the region. The piece acknowledges that this will be
difficult "from the air alone" but doesn't directly recommend ground troops.
Another editorial berates President Clinton for foreclosing
the ground troop option, thus goading Slobodan Milosevic into further obstinacy
and tying NATO's hands. ... An article calls Microsoft President Steve Ballmer a
"tyrant," a "little boy," and a poor choice for the position. Ballmer is
neither restrained nor tech-savvy enough to lead the company through its
current legal and business challenges.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               
                  , April 19
            

            
               (posted Friday, April
2, 1999)
            

            The cover story claims
that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has become a victim of his own
achievements. Because his crime crackdown has succeeded, further reductions in
lawlessness are coming at the cost of increased friction with innocent
citizens. Racial hysterics and Dinkins Democrats exploit incidents like the
Diallo murder to sully the mayor's success. ... An analysis claims that
Republicans have abandoned foreign policy principles. The GOP was gearing up to
criticize Clinton for coddling dictators, but the Kosovo bombing
short-circuited this argument. So now some Republicans are criticizing Clinton
for attacking a dictator, claiming that humanitarian interventions exhaust U.S.
resources. ... An article argues that military exchanges with China are
foolhardy. Officials insist the exchanges help dispel Chinese perceptions of
American military weakness and give our guys a peek at China's military. But
there is no real reciprocity of access, and we find ourselves hosting such
dubious guests as generals who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               
                  , April 4
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
April 1, 1999)
            

            The cover story examines
"The Last Counterculture": the Catholic priesthood. It attributes the plummet
in the number of men entering the priesthood to pedophilia scandals,
disillusionment with celibacy, and "the increasingly secular nature of American
life." Contemporary seminarians try not to disengage from mainstream America,
but they are disgusted with a popular culture that celebrates contraception,
premarital sex, and godlessness. ... A profile of Dan Quayle suggests
that his presidential run is all about proving he's not an idiot. The theme of
his campaign--also the subtitle of his memoir--is that he's "America's most
misjudged public figure." Though there is some Quayle revisionism--Larry King
told him, "You're not a joke like you once were"--he is still widely considered
unelectable.

            

               
                  Time
               
               
                  , Newsweek , and U.S. News &
World Report , April 5
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
30, 1999)
            

            The newsweeklies all run worried, doubtful cover
stories on the Kosovo war and eavesdrop on the high-level conversations behind
it. Time 
               stresses the historical angle, calling the Balkans a
centuries-old "tinderbox" that the NATO airstrikes will ignite.
Newsweek 's history lesson: Henry Kissinger reminds readers that World War I started not because of
ethnic cleansing but because of outsider intervention. Time and

                  U.S. News
                argue that the strikes compromise both dicta of
the Powell Doctrine because the United States isn't acting with either maximum
force or an exit strategy. Both Time and 
                  Newsweek
                report that the president told his advisers,
"This isn't a 30-second commercial. This is going to be a sustained
effort."

            All three magazines profile Slobodan Milosevic.
Newsweek 
               psychologizes that his parents' suicides caused his "clear
longing for certainties, a need to be in control." Time 
               describes Milosevic as "one of the great losers of history"
but then wonders if he's crafty enough to outmaneuver NATO anyway. U.S.
News and Newsweek cheer Gen. Wesley Clark, director of NATO's
campaign against the Serbs. U.S. News 
               calls him "the smartest man in the Army," while
Newsweek 
               describes how Clark rappelled down a mountainside to rescue
soldiers in Bosnia.

            Rudolph Giuliani
defends  his handling of the Amadou Diallo shooting to
Newsweek . "[The New York Police Department] is not the KKK," he
offers.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               
                  , April 5
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
30, 1999)
            

            A piece by Seymour Hersh
blames the U.S. government for the disintegration of U.N. weapons inspection
efforts in Iraq. Eager to assassinate Saddam Hussein--and supported by
presidential orders--the CIA hijacked the intelligence operation designed by
the U.N. Special Commission for Iraq to track Iraq's weapons development, thus
destroying UNSCOM's credibility. Hersh also alleges that Iraq paid Russian
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov $800,000 for weapons know-how in 1997.
... A story describes the courtship between John Hinckley Jr. and a
woman who had murdered her 10-year-old daughter, when both were confined to a
D.C. mental hospital. The romance developed steadily until Hinckley began to
pester a hospital pharmacist who resembled Jodie Foster.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , April 5
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
30, 1999)
            

            The editors lambast the "pathetic
incoherence" of Republican foreign policy and urge a return to the more moral
and aggressive approach of the Reagan era. ... A piece calls the
protests against the Diallo killing "a ludicrous moral pageant" and an attempt
by the "prevailing ideological power structure" to delegitimize Mayor Giuliani
in particular and conservative governance in general. ... The cover
story argues that George Washington has been ignored by historians because he
was a paragon of virtue and praises recent efforts to spiff up his media
image.

            

               
                  Esquire
               
               
                  , April 1999
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
30, 1999)
            

            An exposé headlined
"DWB" (Driving While Black) slams Operation Pipeline--a Drug Enforcement
Administration-sponsored program to catch drug "mules"--which effectively
targets minorities. Cops are trained to pull over, interrogate, and search on
the basis of "indicators," such as air fresheners, fast-food trash, lack of eye
contact, and insufficient or excessive luggage. The indicators are often a
proxy for the motorist's race: One trooper admits he was trained to target
blacks.

            

               
                  Ms.
               
               , April/May 1999
            

            
               (posted Saturday, May
27, 1999)
            

            The feminist magazine
relaunches with articles on subjects predictable (female candidates for
president, abortion clinic violence) and less so (adultery, the benefits of
eating soy). ... A patient narrates her face lift. At first, she feels
like "female goods in a dick-driven market," but a few weeks later finds her
smoother, younger face a source of pleasure and confidence. ... A photo
essay, "In Praise of Women," features shots of impoverished or oppressed women
in Afghanistan, Africa, and Haiti, with lushly worded captions. ("Though worlds
apart geographically, we are all sisters in our souls.")

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Your reply to "" 
               regarding his
distress over his accent was insufficient, in that you more or less dismissed
his concern. His concern is real: In too much of today's America it does not
pay to be perceived as a foreigner--and the single biggest giveaway is an
accent.
            

            
               What should our young friend do? For one thing,
recognize that he came to the United States past puberty--when a young man's
voice changes, so do his chances for assuming a "native" accent. But all is not
lost! Our friend should buy a set of blank videotapes and set his VCR for one
or more of the Sunday talk shows. Why? Because all the Sunday shows offer
transcripts (typically from Burrelle's of Livingston, N.J.), so he can have a
tape of the show as well as the exact transcript of what each person is
saying.
            

            
               Our young friend should select a particular
accent he wishes to emulate. (I think Tim Russert of Meet the Press
has notably round, melodious tones.) Then read the transcript and repeat
the statement into a tape recorder. Repeat again and again until the recording
sounds exactly like Tim Russert in tone, inflection, and cadence.
            

            
               Does this work? Yes. I learned the technique
from a friend in Tokyo who is routinely mistaken for a native speaker (on the
telephone). It is how I learned to speak Japanese fluently at the age of
35.
            

            
               Sign me,
            

            

               --Cheering Him On
            

            Dear Cheer,

            What a fascinating and generous letter. Prudie must
confess that your advice is a tad more constructive than her own. And you have
made other people happy, as well. For one, the charming Mr. Wagner who owns
Burrelle's and also the astute Mr. Russert of the round, melodious tones.

            We must only hope that
our Pakistani friend does not get to sound too much like the aforementioned Mr.
Russert--or any of the other Sabbath gasbags, to use the phrase that the
wonderful Frank Rich has popularized. We must also hope that he does not weight
his conversation to talk of impeachment and partisan politics.

            
--Prudie, thankfully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               With current events
being what they are, I've been in several social situations where politics was
the topic of conversation. Since I am a very principled (and yes, opinionated)
person, I eagerly take part. Knowing that politics and religion can lead to
arguments, I try not to be the instigator. It seems that lately, however, many
people with whom I get into these conversations are not well informed. They
don't usually understand legal and ethical principles, and they don't know much
about history. Most of the time they're only going along with popular opinion
and haven't thought out their ideas. The flaws in their reasoning are easily
exposed, and I find that no matter how gently I state my case, I make
compelling arguments that frustrate and intimidate my talking partners. My
question is, what should I do?
            

            

               --Bruce Terry, Stamford, Conn.
            

            Dear Bru,

            It must be murder to be
smarter than the people you find yourself with. Prudie suggests you find more
informed friends, join a study group, or forswear serious conversations where
you will not have to sit on your principles and opinions and your superior
knowledge of history. When all else fails, you can always launch into Gwyneth
and Adam and Gwyneth and Brad and Gwyneth and Ben.

            
--Prudie, conversationally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am interested in a former co-worker who left
to go back to school but who still lives in the same city as me. The chemistry
between us is palpable, and we truly enjoy many things together in what is
currently a platonic friendship. After she left I was in a dilemma, wanting to
cross the divide between friendship and a relationship.
            

            
               Not wanting to get my hopes up, or embarrass
her with untoward advances, I found myself--after she had already quit her
job--standing in front of her cubicle. I noticed that her computer was still
connected and that her e-mail program was open. No one was around so I sat down
and started reading the titles of her e-mail. Needless to say, it wasn't too
long before I found an e-mail she had sent to a mysterious mf50 (not the real
handle) in her hometown. The message was one line, and it hit me in the solar
plexus: "Just wanted to say I love you."
            

            
               Was I wrong to read
her e-mail? Is this bad manners? (I found out, later, going back to her
computer, that "mf50" was actually her grandmother.) Should I pursue the
relationship?
            

            
               --
J. Pollard
            

            Dear J,

            Yes, you were wrong to
read her e-mail. It is really no different, in the integrity department, than
opening someone's letter. And, yes, it's bad manners. And, oh hell, pursue the
relationship, or at least give it a try. Prudie feels slightly ambivalent about
the cloak-and-dagger underpinnings involved. You might be "rewarded" with a
lovely romance. But on the other hand, if it hadn't been her grandmother,
Prudie knows you would have backed off. Complicated, this, but romance ranks
high in Prudie's book, so go for it and snoop no more.

            
--Prudie, tolerantly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I recently
interviewed for a position as Software Development Manager at a company that
produces shrink-wrapped packages for the corporate market. This is a small but
growing organization, and the CEO was voted "Young Entrepreneur of the Year."
My experience in the job interviews with the CEO and the Exec. VP was the most
obnoxious I have had in 36 years in the business. They came on as if I was a
suspect in a major crime rather than an experienced professional interviewing
for a key position. The specifics included squeezing my hand in a viselike grip
during the handshake and asking questions such as, "Why do you want to work
here?" and saying with a serious demeanor, "Tell us about yourself." My
response to all this was quietly but pointedly to let them know that I
considered their manner to be amateurish at best and downright insulting at
worst. I did not get an offer. Thank God for small favors. However, I am
wondering if this is the new style of the Gen X Wunderkind , or might
it have been an isolated case? What happened to social skills, or maybe I am
too old at 65 to understand that it has all been "deconstructed" with the rest
of Western Civilization.
            

            
               --
Call Me a Crank
            

            Dear Call,

            Prudie would not label
your experience a battle in the generational war, but a skirmish, perhaps.
"Tell me about yourself" in a job interview is regrettable and somewhat
imprecise, but might have played better with someone in their age group. As for
your age, you are on the shady side of the actuarial table for new
employment. Perhaps a company with a different outlook might fill the bill.
Young Turks are not always looking for a graybeard. Prudie just knows you are
feeling like everything's gone to hell in a handbasket but hopes you will
philosophically come to terms with things the way they are.

            --Prudie, solicitously

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Clark Ain't No Schwarzkopf

            For the first time since NATO started its offensive
against Yugoslavia six weeks ago, hope for peace dominated the European press
Friday. With the exception of the British and French newspapers--the former all
leading on the election of a new Parliament for Scotland, and the latter on
France's troubles in Corsica--papers throughout Western Europe devoted their
main front-page headlines to the NATO-Russia peace plan. Die Welt of Germany declared
"peace in sight" and La
Repubblica of Rome said it was "finally possible to talk of hope;" but
the British press was much more wary. The conservative papers, the Daily
Telegraph and
the Times ,
and the liberal Guardian all demanded an intensification of the war.

            Under the headline "Give War a Chance," the
Times ' editorial said the "general principles" agreed by G-8 foreign
ministers in Germany "are not principles at all. ... At best, they may be
understood as diplomatic circumlocutions, designed to ease Russia's political
dilemma in the Balkans and thus avert further frictions with Moscow," it said.
"The Alliance is nearing the point where Serb forces have been so damaged that
NATO troops could be committed at acceptable risk. It has never been clearer
that the best prospect for a peace worthy of the name is to give war a chance."
The Daily Telegraph said the peace plan could be "a trap for NATO" and
that the bombing campaign must continue. The Guardian continued to argue
for a land war "to capture Kosovo and turn it into an international
protectorate."

            In an op-ed article for the Times , British Prime Minister Tony Blair
insisted that peace could be only on NATO's terms and that "the corrupt
dictatorship of the Milosevic regime must be cast out," which is still not
officially an alliance war aim. He backed Gen. Wesley Clark's statement earlier
in the week that the only way the war would end would be "victory for NATO,
defeat for Milosevic, and the reversal of ethnic cleansing."

            On the other hand, the Daily Telegraph 's
defense editor, the military historian John Keegan, called for the replacement
of Clark as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Lacking Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf's "uncompromisingly soldierly manner," Clark appears "to have
fallen under the spell of the State Department, which believes that a
combination of diplomatic formulae and the indirect application of military
force can achieve desired foreign policy results," Keegan wrote. He blamed
President Clinton "for not appointing a real warlord," and asked: "Are the
peoples of the NATO states, whom the President and the Prime Minister have
committed to this lacklustre war not entitled to ask for someone who can match
Milosevic in single-mindedness and strength of character?"

            Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's motive in
freeing the moderate Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was in Rome this week
for talks with the Italian government, generated much perplexity in the
European press. In Albania, the independent daily Koha Jone described it
Thursday as "one of the most interesting developments in the Kosovo crisis
since the start of the NATO airstrikes" and part of a Milosevic "peace
offensive" for softening up the allies. Milosevic might also be wanting to
strengthen Rugova's international standing against the more militant Kosovar
politicians who have gained the upper hand since the Rambouillet agreement.

            In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald Friday
welcomed the U.N.-brokered agreement on self-determination for the people of
East Timor but expressed doubts about the policing of next August's referendum
by the Indonesian army, "which invaded East Timor, forcibly annexed the
territory, and has maintained a policy of brutal pacification" there. But the
paper saw hope in the fact that Jakarta was for the first time allowing U.N.
advisers and international observers into the territory. If things do go
smoothly, it said in an editorial, "it will represent a victory for
commonsense, for years of patient international diplomacy, but most of all for
the courage and determination of the East Timorese people."

            In the run-up to the Israeli election, a Smith
Research Center Poll published Friday in the Jerusalem Post showed that
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still slipping slightly against the Labor
leader Ehud Barak, and Center Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai is continuing to
decline. The poll put Barak at 49 percent, Netanyahu at 43.5 percent, and
Mordechai at 7 percent. Following the dissolution of the Kuwaiti Parliament
after a political row over misprints in a new edition of the Koran, the Kuwaiti
daily al-Qabas , which is associated with the liberal opposition, said
Thursday that it reflects a growing "climate of religious terrorism" in the
country.

            Columnist Abdellatif al-Duaij wrote that many
Kuwaiti members of Parliament supported a no-confidence motion against a
government minister on this matter "because they feared that otherwise they
would be accused of being insufficiently zealous about religious matters."
"Legislators and government alike felt obliged to make a huge fuss over the
misprinted copies of the Koran for fear of being accused of not being concerned
enough about God's Holy Book," he wrote. "Neither had the courage to say that
the matter was unimportant, though they all knew that what had occurred was
merely a printing error."

            Several Arab papers also pointed out that the
Kuwaiti elections scheduled for July 3 would take place in the height of summer
when temperatures would be around 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit)
and most of the emirate's wealthier citizens would be abroad. The Pan-Arab
Al-Hayat said this would create "real problems" for candidates who
traditionally erect large tents in which to hold banquets for their electors.
The Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat noted that an election in high summer
meant these tents would have to be air-conditioned, incurring costs that could
deter some potential candidates from running. However, Kuwaiti caterers who
have been expecting a summer slump in business are now looking forward to a
boom, the paper said.

            The front pages of most
British papers Friday carried the news that Mohammed Fayed, the controversial
Egyptian owner of the Harrods department store in London and the father of
Princess Diana's lover Dodi Fayed, who died with her in the Paris car crash,
has had a second application for British citizenship turned down. According to
an editorial in the Daily Telegraph , "The decision is cause for
collective rejoicing among those who deplore Mr. Fayed's malevolent influence
on our public affairs, particularly his disgraceful claim that the British
secret services assassinated Diana, Princess of Wales."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Lose One for the Gipper!

            During the past few years,
Republicans have dallied with social conservatism, libertarianism, and
Gingrichian "revolutionary" conservatism. Now they are flirting with a new--or
rather, an old--doctrine: nostalgism.

            The GOP has been trying
to recapture Ronald Reagan's magic ever since Reagan went west in 1989. So it's
not surprising that, at this moment of low ebb, Republicans are again evoking
the Gipper. They have placed two early '80s Reagan issues at the heart of their
platform: across-the-board tax cuts and a national missile defense.

            The tax cut notion enthralls the party's top echelon,
especially conservatives. Senate and House leaders pushed a 10 percent income
tax cut as the centerpiece of their legislative plan until they abandoned the
idea Monday. Last week, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott trekked to Macomb,
Mich.,--the wellspring of Reagan Democrats--to flog the tax cut. Presidential
candidate John Kasich is touting the income tax cut as the key to his campaign.
Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Bob Smith are equally enthusiastic. Someone has
also wound up the Jack Kemp doll, which declares the 10 percent proposal "timid
and pitiful." Tax rates, Kemp says, should be cut back to Reagan levels. Dan
Quayle, too, is dissatisfied with 10 percent off: He would slash rates 30
percent. (Even as I write this, a letter from the Heritage Foundation has been
dropped on my desk: It says the tax cut idea "harkens back to the supply-side
days of President Ronald Reagan. And not a minute too soon.")

            The national missile
defense has similarly claimed a top spot on the GOP's agenda. Conservatives
began talking about the Star Wars revival last summer, when a blue-ribbon
commission concluded that the United States was increasingly vulnerable to
missile strikes by rogue states. The enthusiasm has mushroomed since North
Korea shot a test missile over Japan. Lott calls missile defense "one of our
most critical" legislative priorities. Bauer is making it one of his lead
issues. (When I saw him speak at a conservative conference in January, the
missile defense exhortation was his biggest applause line.) Quayle and Smith,
too, are making missile defense a campaign priority. The Republican National
Committee is obsessed with the topic, berating the Clinton administration
weekly for failing to deploy a shield.

            The clinging to these two idées fixes is, in some
ways, a Republican failure to accept victory. Reagan's tax cuts and tax reform
were Republican triumphs. They lowered marginal rates from ludicrously high
levels to more reasonable ones, and they spurred the economic expansion of the
'80s (as well as the deficits of the '80s). Star Wars helped win the Cold War,
convincing Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could not compete.

            This Reaganite
fundamentalism is not ideology. It is faith: If he believed it, it must
be so. But the problem with idées fixes is that they are fixed. Tax cuts
and missile defense, circa 1999, are not wrong ideas. They are insignificant
ones. Like the Democrats of the '80s who campaigned on the New Deal, '99
Republicans are refurbishing bygone notions for an age that doesn't want them.
In 1981, Reagan cut taxes to spur consumption and revive a sickly economy.
Today, Americans are consuming voraciously, and the economy could hardly be
fitter. In 1983, Reagan funded Star Wars to intimidate the Soviet Union. Today,
we don't need a national missile defense to defend against Russia. Nor is a
missile shield a wise investment in the battle against rogues. Terrorists are
more likely to park a bomb-filled truck on Pennsylvania Avenue than lob a
missile. Better to spend the billions on intelligence and nonproliferation.

            What must be especially frustrating to GOP strategists is
Americans' indifference to this Reaganism. Republican dogma says you can never
err by offering to cut taxes. But Americans have greeted the tax cut schemes
with a shrug. Democrats have successfully (and accurately) painted the
across-the-board tax cut proposal as regressive. Clinton has countered it with
targeted, interest group tax cuts (child care, senior care, health care) offset
by targeted tax increases (tobacco). Republicans would spend much of the
surplus on a tax break. Clinton would spend it on Social Security, debt
repayment, and Medicare. Only about 11 percent of Americans favor spending the
surplus on a tax cut, while about 70 percent favor spending it on Social
Security or debt repayment. Polls have found that when it comes to taxes,
Americans trust Democrats (formerly "tax and spend Democrats") far more
than Republicans, and Clinton far more than congressional Republicans. Clinton
and the Democrats have won the tax issue so completely that congressional
Republican leaders have now abandoned the 10 percent tax cut plan. Instead they
are pushing marriage penalty tax relief. (The presidential candidates, of
course, are still clutching to the across-the-board cuts.)

            On missile defense, too, Clinton has outfoxed the
GOP. He killed Star Wars in 1993, but the budget he introduced several weeks
ago proposes $6.6 billion for missile defense research. (This is part of an
enormous proposed increase in military spending.) The missile defense money has
pulled the rug out from under Republicans, leaving them with the flimsiest of
criticisms. The president has delayed the decision on whether to actually
deploy a missile defense until June 2000. (The administration wants time to
conduct R & D and renegotiate the ABM treaty with Russia. The treaty bans
national missile defenses.) Republicans have been reduced to insisting that
Clinton declare now that he will deploy a defense. In essence, the GOP
argument is that we need to decide now, instead of 17 months from now, whether
to deploy something that doesn't exist today, won't exist in 17 months, and
probably won't exist until 2005. This is hardly enough to base a presidential
campaign on.

            There is another reason besides nostalgia why
Republicans started talking about tax cuts and missile defense. Clinton has
already co-opted Republicans on welfare, family values, the death penalty,
crime, etc. Taxes and missile defense were among the few issues he hadn't
stolen. But now he's the one who's got the tax plan Americans like.
He's the one who has set aside billions for a missile defense that won't
work. No wonder arch-Reaganaut Paul Weyrich is urging conservatives to give up
on politics: They can't even out-Reagan Clinton.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Guys and Dolls

            In 1968, an alcoholic,
mentally ill writer named Frederick Exley published a "fictional memoir" whose
subject was American manhood as embodied by football great Frank Gifford. The
book, A Fan's Notes , became a cult classic and in it Gifford is
everything Exley will never be: graceful, gifted, daring, physically perfect.
They attended the University of Southern California at the same time, and Exley
writes of Gifford's standing at the school, "I know of no way of describing
this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican." And
once, when their paths crossed, Exley writes, he wanted to shout at Gifford's
godlike figure, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football
game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss."

            Would Exley, who died
seven years ago, feel pity and fear for the life Gifford now leads as the
consort of monomaniacal talk show host and tabloid cover girl Kathie Lee
Gifford? Would he revel in or lament Gifford's two-year emasculation by
humiliation from his wife because he had a one-night stand with a megamammaried
miss? What would Exley make of this week's story in the National
Enquirer on the nightmare of being married to Kathie Lee by her first
husband, Paul Johnson, who offers this observation, "I see Frank Gifford with
the same confused look on his face that I used to get. To me it clearly says,
'What hit me? How do I get out of here?' "

            The tabs recently have been offering a series of unhappy
meditations on the nature of masculinity today. For example, also walking that
long road from gridiron glory to gelding is Joe Namath, 55. His 37-year-old
wife was so bored watching him golf away his retirement in Florida, according
to the Enquirer , that she fled to Los Angeles, leaving the couple's two
daughters with Namath. She is now dating plastic surgeon Brian Novack, who is,
according to the publication, "a renowned expert in penis and breast
enhancement." Namath, an insider reports, is "devastated." But Broadway Joe
should have seen it coming. When he got married, his wife's name was Deborah,
now she calls herself Tatiana. Any divorce lawyer can tell you that when Debbie
becomes Tatiana, it's time to freeze your bank accounts.

            The news about young
manhood is no more encouraging. According to the tabs, two young idols are as
exciting in the sack as a sack of wet oatmeal. The Globe reports that a
British barmaid, Linnea Dietrichson, says Leonardo DiCaprio picked her up at a
London nightclub and took her back to his room. "He looked flabby and pale. He
was drunk and fumbling. It lasted five minutes, then Leo fell asleep."
Devastating as this revelation is, it is unlikely to appreciably affect
DiCaprio's ability to lure more barmaids up for a five-minute fumble.

            And according to the Star , the late director Stanley
Kubrick had to hire "sex therapists" in order to show Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman how to make love on camera for the film Eyes Wide Shut . According
to an "insider" on the set of the sexually explicit movie, the real-life couple
was "totally unconvincing as lovers ... Tom and Nicole had absolutely no
chemistry." So Wendy and Tony Duffield, who had sex three times a day for three
weeks for a 1994 BBC documentary series (maybe PBS could broadcast this during
pledge week), were brought in as consultants. "They had a good look at Tom and
Nicole and then they shook their heads and kinda winced," reports the
Star . "They took over the set and showed how it was really done."

            On to the self-pitying
weenie Fabio. The long-haired model was hit in the nose by a goose while
promoting a roller coaster ride at Busch Gardens in Virginia. Since he
dispatched the goose with his own bare beak, did he proudly roast the bird and
serve it for dinner? No, he took to his bed. "He's still too shook up to talk,"
his mother, Flora, told the Enquirer . "He's been in bed for three days!"
And Fabio complained, "It's not funny--I could have lost my model good looks."
Let's see, he was hit in the schnoz by a goose and had to get two whole
stitches. If you cast your gaze over the world today, you'd be hard pressed to
find anything that is a starker example of tragedy.

            How about the fatuous? According to the Enquirer ,
Brad Pitt says he will marry Jennifer Aniston if she promises to "lose and keep
off an extra five pounds that always seem to plague her." In turn, he promises
to give up drinking. The publication does not say that if Aniston keeps off the
five pounds, he promises not to grow hair out of his ears or ever say, "Honey,
can you squeeze this thing on my back?" According to the Globe , the
reason Pitt is hesitating to marry the eager Aniston is that he is afraid of
alienating his gay fans.

            More charming are the
merely naughty. A few weeks ago, the Drudge Report published an
unsourced item claiming that an unnamed potential presidential candidate was
worried that a picture of this youthful PPC dancing nude on a bar was out there
somewhere. Well, now the Star has revealed that the PPC is Texas Gov.
George W. Bush. (Keeping Tabs was hoping it was the too-perfect Elizabeth Dole
but is also relieved it wasn't the so-far-from-perfect Steve Forbes.)
Ominously, Bush's spokeswoman has denied the story by saying, "Yeah, and green
aliens have landed on the lawn of the governor's mansion." It was Kathie Lee
Gifford who used almost the same space alien dismissal when stories of her
husband's affair first broke in the Globe .

            Then there are the creeps. Perennial bad boy Gary Busey is
again trying to put his marriage back together in his unique way, according to
the Enquirer . When Busey, 54, married his latest wife, Tiani, 31, he was
addicted to cocaine. But even after he stopped taking drugs, he continued to be
abusive to her. Tiani started reading codependency books by best-selling author
Melody Beattie, and the couple eventually met the writer, who, according to
Tiani, "bonded really well with Gary. She was helping us through some rough
times." Then, in January, he was arrested for beating Tiani. But Busey's
bonding with Beattie continued apace when he moved into her home. The actor
insists, however, that there's nothing going on between them and that he is
totally focused on repairing his marriage. Toward that end, he tells the
Enquirer , "I'm going to the Hoffman Quatrine Institute for anger
management classes." Maybe something beautiful will come of all this. It's hard
not to get choked up when you read Busey's promise to his estranged wife, "I'll
be there when the restraining order has expired."

            Perhaps only the antics
of Lynn Redgrave's estranged husband could top that. According to the
Enquirer , John Clark, who has been married to Redgrave for more than 30
years, fathered a child eight years ago by his personal assistant. (Note to
Hollywood wives: Try to hire someone who looks like Lillian Hellman to be your
husband's personal assistant.) The young woman, Nicolette, kept Clark's
identity as the father of her child a secret and went on to marry Clark and
Redgrave's son, Ben. When Ben found out he was married to the mother of his
stepbrother, he insisted that the truth be revealed. Ben and Nicolette split,
and Nicolette began seeing a married plumber who was doing work on Clark's
house. Clark demanded that the plumber not hang around Nicolette and their son
and Nicolette got so angry she filed a restraining order against Clark. He
retaliated by filing one against her. To Clark, the whole sordid mess comes
down to this: "If I didn't have a prostate condition that plumber would never
have gotten close to Nicolette. But sadly, I haven't had sex in five years."
Clark also expressed the hope that he and Redgrave could continue with their
marriage. According to the actress, they couldn't.

            OK, maybe someone can top Busey and Redgrave. That is
George Richey, widower of country singer Tammy Wynette. At Wynette's funeral
last year, Richey virtually had to be kept from jumping in her grave after her.
Now it appears that he may have been simply assuring himself she really was
dead, at least according to three of Wynette's daughters, who have filed a $50
million wrongful death suit against Richey and a doctor. The suit, reports the
Star , claims Richey ignored Wynette's doctor's advice that she be given
immediate medical attention (the doctor was 500 miles away), and instead
continued to administer narcotics--which had been prescribed by the doctor--to
the failing singer. According to published reports in the mainstream press, 911
was not called until hours after Wynette's death, nor was an autopsy
performed.

            Do the tabloids offer any hope for the male of the
species? Just this promise for the future. According to the Star , Mia
Farrow is adopting yet another baby, and she plans to name this one after her
late former husband. Welcome to the world, Frank Sinatra Farrow.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            High School Confidential

            It's no fun being a
highbrow if you don't sometimes swing low. I know an expert in 19 th
century English history who devours mystery novels by the shopping bag load, a
prominent intellectual journalist who loves Bruce Willis shoot'em-ups, and a

                  Slate
                editor who admits to being hooked on Felicity . In
this context, I am prepared to admit an entertainment vice of my own: the teen
flick. This is a genre that flourished in the mid-1980s, then fell into
abeyance for a number of years, and is now, I am happy to report, experiencing
a modest renaissance.

            The new rash of teen
movies seems heavily skewed toward quasi-remakes of the classics. The genre
revived in 1995 with Clueless , which was based on Jane Austen's
Emma . Cruel Intentions is the zillionth adaptation of the
18 th century French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses . She's
All That is loosely based on Pretty Woman , which was loosely based
on My Fair Lady , which was based on George Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion . Arriving at multiplexes in the next few months will be
O , a version of Othello set against a backdrop of high-school
sports, and 10 Things I Hate About You , an adaptation of The Taming
of the Shrew .

            But it would be wrong to think of these films as classic
comics for the Clearasil set. Most of them are movies that utilize classic
plots as new ways to frame their exploration into what it's like to be an
American teen-ager. At their best, these films immerse you once again in all
the joys and anxieties of adolescence. To me, they are the quintessential good
bad movies, because while seldom subtle or artful, they are capable of
recreating a familiar and utterly compelling world.

            The first teen movies
were made in the 1950s, but the genre was largely codified by screenwriter,
director, and producer John Hughes, who drew on his experiences at a large
suburban Chicago high school in the 1960s in a series of movies made in the
1980s. The first film Hughes directed was the romantic comedy Sixteen
Candles (1984). Molly Ringwald plays a quirky, intelligent sophomore who
wakes up to discover that everyone in her family has forgotten her birthday.
Insult is piled on injury as she confronts her so-called life. In the clip
available at right, she faces the daily indignity of the school bus. The plot
winds and unwinds a mismatch of affections. The freshman geek with braces,
Anthony Michael Hall, has crush on Ringwald. Ringwald has a crush on a cute
senior who is dating the feathered blond prom queen. The film has all the
commonplaces of the genre--the party that utterly trashes someone's parents'
house, the voyeuristic visit to the girl's locker room, the guys betting about
getting laid, and the happy comic resolution: The geek beds the prom queen,
Ringwald lands the cute senior.

             

            S ixteen Candles is awful in some ways. A racist
subplot revolves around a Chinese exchange student called Long Duk Dong. Yet
the movie sets up the basic theme of Hughes' subsequent--and I would maintain
all successful--teen movies, which is to overthrow the stereotypes that
comprise the basis of adolescent identity. The basic insight of the Hughes
films is that high school is built around a caste/class system, which is
basically vicious and unfair. Like his subsequent movies, Sixteen

               Candles is essentially a fantasy about throwing out this system: The
excluded are included and the exclusionary are either enlightened or humbled.
The geeks get to be cool, the cool kids get humbled, the druggies get smart,
and the smart kids get stoned.

            Hughes handled this
theme in a more self-congratulatory and heavy-handed way in The Breakfast
Club (1985). This was probably the most famous of the '80s teen flicks,
launching as it did the careers of several of the "Brat Pack" actors--including
Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy. Five different types--a geek, a
richie, a screw-up, a jock, and a sullen arty girl--are forced to spend a
Saturday in detention considering who they are. This is my least favorite of
the Hughes films, because it's a moral lesson with flashes of humor. Hughes'
best films are romantic comedies informed by good values.

            Happily, he returned to form in 1986 with Pretty in
Pink , which was stylistically the best of the lot. This time Ringwald plays
a sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has to choose between the
richie, played by Andrew McCarthy, and her loyal pal Duckie, played by Jon
Cryer. Pretty in Pink is tragically marred by the wrong ending: Ringwald
walks into the sunset with the preppie rich kid. But Hughes must have realized
his mistake, because the next year he essentially rewrote it as Some Kind of
Wonderful . The quirky and talented poor kid, played by Eric Stoltz, has a
crush on the prom queen, which breaks the heart of the orphan girl (!) who has
been secretly infatuated with him for years. Check out the clip available at
right for the scene in which Stoltz makes the right choice.

            The male Molly Ringwald
was John Cusack, who started his career with a minor role in Sixteen
Candles. The second coming of John Hughes was the writer and director
Cameron Crowe, who cast Cusack in Say Anything ..., a funnier and more
touching John Hughes movie than Hughes ever made. Cusack plays the funny kid
from a broken home who crushes on the A-student valedictorian played by Ione
Skye. In the clip available at right, Cusack answers her dad's question about
what he plans to do with his life after high school.

            At the end of the 1980s, teen films took a darker turn with
the black comedy Heathers . The three popular girls, who all have the
same name, take up Veronica (Winona Ryder), who can't resist the offer of
inclusion but detests their values (they make her ignore her old friends and
play cruel practical jokes on losers). Only this time, instead of humiliating
the jocks and cheerleaders, Ryder and her boyfriend, played by Christian
Slater, kill them. View the clip available at left to see them off the first
Heather. As black as it is, Heathers has the same theme as the
Ringwald/Cusack movies. It's a fantasy about high school as a kind rather than
a cruel place. Ryder realizes that murder is not the right approach and offers
to spend prom night with the fat girl everyone abuses.

            What makes these teen
flicks the ideal good bad movies? The first is the familiarity of the world
they portray. Not everyone in America goes to a big public high school, but
everyone goes to a high school governed by a hierarchy of popularity and
cliques. Films set at college are never as universally recognizable, because
people's experiences after high school are too different to generalize about.
Universities, unlike high schools, are not unitary social structures. The
second essential quality of these films is that they are all, basically, the
same. The formula allows one to savor minor differences and adaptations.

            For some reason, teen flicks died out for a while after
Heathers --perhaps because it took the conventions of the form as far as
they could go. Then, following the success of Clueless , teen films
started to trickle back. The trickle has suddenly become a torrent. The
economics are easy enough to understand, lacking major stars, these movies are
inexpensive to make and draw the ideal audiences: teens who are capable of
seeing Titanic 17 times. She's All That was made for a $10
million budget and has already grossed nearly $60 million.

            What's different about
the late 1990s' version? Teen films no longer glorify drug use, but other than
that, very little. As the genre has expanded, it has broken into sub-genres.
There's the black Heathers category , the most recent exercise being the
reportedly awful Jawbreaker . There's the self-referential horror
category as manifest in the Scream movies. There's a Masterpiece
Theatre for juniors category that started with the delightful Baz Luhrmann
version of Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

            But the reigning champ is still the Hughesesque romance,
the most recent example of which is She's All That . The heroine is an
artist from a broken home whose father cleans swimming pools. The most perfect
boy in her school, who dates the most popular bitch, makes a bet with his best
friend that he can transform the ugly duckling into the prom queen. Of course,
the perfect boy ends up ditching his snobby clique and falling in love with
her. Even the racy Cruel Intentions , set among rich Upper East Side
kids, is a spin on the old Hughes formula. The evil super-rich girl makes a
diabolical bet with her stepbrother that he can't corrupt the new girl at
school. The stepbrother falls for the good girl and the wicked stepsister is
humiliated in front of everyone.

            These films have been derided as "teensploitation,"
but I don't think the description is fair. Instead of pandering to the
prejudices of teens, they offer a fantasy about a freer and happier
adolescence. Their message is that there's life beyond high school, kids aren't
bound by what adults want from them, how their peers think of them, or the ways
in which they categorize themselves. All Hollywood films are exploitative to
some extent. But I'd say a sweet, dumb movie such as She's All That is a
lot less insulting to teen intelligence, and to the average adult one, than
Patch Adams or Message in a Bottle .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Whitney on Prozac

            Each of New York's big art
museums has its own, distinct personality. The Guggenheim is a noisy extrovert
that craves attention. The Met is deep, mysterious, and aloof--it takes years
to really get to know it. MoMA is a bit vain, justifiably so. The oddball of
the group is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which suffers from an
institutional version of bipolar disorder. One day it shouts obscenities in
your face. The next it's calm nearly to the point of affectlessness.

            Lately, the Whitney has
been taking its medication, in the form of new management. Until November 1998,
the director of the museum was David Ross, who left to run the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. At the Whitney, Ross created a glittery uptown showcase
for exhibitions of political and conceptual art that often took the form of
whirring installations and blurry videos. The most notorious of these was "The
Black Male in Western Art," at which patrons were handed buttons reading "I
Can't Imagine Ever Wanting to be White." This was a museum that so angered
traditionalists that one of the local weeklies used to run ads for a
Whitney-shaped trash can. The new Whitney, run by a dapper fuddy-duddy named
Maxwell Anderson, who came from the Art Gallery of Ontario, is just the
opposite in almost every respect. Anderson's museum is traditional,
art-history-minded, and eager to ingratiate itself with, rather than
flabbergast and dumbfound, up- and out-of-towners.

            The distillation of the Whitney's new sedateness is "The
American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950," the first half of a millennial
survey scheduled to occupy the entire museum for the next eight months. Drawing
heavily on works in the museum's permanent collection, some of which are rarely
displayed, Anderson's first attempt at a blockbuster eschews political
correctness, offers no historical revisionism, and even includes work by Norman
Rockwell without quotation marks. It is a bland, textbook summary of American
culture that eschews any explicit judgments at all for fear someone might
disagree. Broad surveys don't have to be dull. Robert Hughes' PBS series and
book American Visions managed to cover a much longer stretch of artistic
waterfront with verve, insight, and erudition. The Whitney show, by contrast,
makes no sense out of American art or culture. It merely drowns us in it.

            The phrase "the American
century" was the coinage of Henry Luce, who in 1941 declared the United States
"the intellectual, scientific, and artistic capital of the world." The first
question asked by Anderson in his introduction to the exhibition catalog is
whether Luce was right when it came to American art. How does the art created
by Americans during the last century stack up against that created by
Europeans? But having raised this issue, "The American Century" never gets
around to proposing an answer. It's as if such a massive assemblage is supposed
to speak for itself. Actually, this exhibition does make a clear statement, but
I don't think it's the one intended. The message is: basta !

            There are more than 700 works on display here, including
not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs but also sheet music,
music playing in the stairwells, clips from movies, movie posters, novels,
furniture, design objects, architectural models, and stills from dance
programs, plays, operas, and musicals. The Whitney presents this haul
chronologically. After finally getting through the line and into the museum,
visitors get a brief orientation on the ground floor, take the elevator to the
fifth floor, and work their way back down.

            By the time they reached
the 1930s, on the third floor, most viewers were exhibiting the dead-eyed
stares of the Dust Bowl farmers in the Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange
photographs on the walls. By Pearl Harbor, it was like Bataan on Madison
Avenue. People were collapsing on benches with advanced cases of art
prostration. The last section of the exhibition--Abstract Expressionism--was
nearly empty, the audience having surrendered. To see this show at a brisk
clip--say 30 seconds per object, and ignoring the banal wall text--would
require at least four two-hour visits. To curate is to choose, and by failing
to do so, the Whitney has abdicated its essential responsibility.

            Nor does "The American Century" divide up this motherlode
in any thoughtful or even coherent way. The top floor, covering the first two
decades of the century, begins with works that 19 th -century types,
such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
happened to produce after 1900. It ends with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, never
having given you much sense of how the vast distance from Point A to Point B
was covered. While the 1920s (the fourth floor) do stand as a plausibly
distinct "era" in American culture, the 1930s (third floor) and the 1940s
(second floor) don't. The various forms of politically driven realism that
flourished during the Depression continued to dominate American art through the
end of World War II. And the New York School of abstraction, which became
predominant after the war, was near its apex, not its end, by the arbitrary
cutoff date of 1950. If you're going to bundle art into packages, they should
at least be tidy. And what's the sense of imposing a rigid and arbitrary
deadline on the exhibition and then decorating the cover of the $60 catalog
with one of Jasper Johns' flag paintings from 1958?

            By shoveling so much in,
Barbara Haskell, the Whitney curator who put together the exhibition, seems to
be trying to build a case that American art in the first half of the
20 th century was up to the standard of European art. But for me, the
exhibition vindicated the conventional view that American art can't hold a
candle to what was happening overseas until after World War II. When you look
at the early American modernists such as Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John
Marin, and Joseph Stella, you see inventive and delightful things. But you
can't compare these guys to their European contemporaries, such as Pablo
Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani,
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, or Kasimir Malevich. Or maybe
you can, but the Whitney doesn't try. It is content to examine the American
modernists in relation to their far less interesting domestic contemporaries
and a broad cultural context that seems mostly irrelevant to their work. This
approach may not make you homesick for the tendentiousness of the old Whitney.
But it's an only slightly preferable alternative.

            So, what should the Whitney have done for the millennium?
I'm not sure a modern art museum needs to celebrate the 2,000 th
anniversary of Jesus at all. But one better possibility would have been a real
examination of how the century in art did finally turn American by way of
various attempts to absorb European influences without being smothered by them.
The raw material for that show is all here. Walking through the galleries, you
glimpse a series of moments when an art both new and distinctly American
appears. One was around 1915, when Paul Strand, Morton Schamberg, and Charles
Sheeler rejected the gauzy pictorialism of Alfred Stieglitz for a
cubist-inspired photography that also had a documentary purpose. Another,
related, bright spot was the 1920s' movement that has come to be called
Precisionism, which celebrated American industrialism as a new religion
(Sheeler called one of his paintings of Henry Ford's River Rouge plant My
Egypt ). And, finally, the greatest and most distinctively American modern
school was Abstract Expressionism, which blossomed after World War II and is
snipped in mid-bloom by the end of the exhibition.

            Another way to do it would have been a look at the
Whitney itself. Such a show might have opened with the same Robert Henri
portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney included here and brought many of the
same paintings she collected out of the vault for a fresh look. But such a show
would have meant the museum taking a hard look at its own, often controversial
part in the art world. And I don't get the sense that's something the Whitney,
or its conciliatory new director, is very eager to do.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               With the Oscars newly behind us, a question
begs for resolution. It's common knowledge that many big box office stars often
borrow glittery gems for special occasions from the likes of Harry Winston,
etc. At the Golden Globe Awards, in pixel-perfect color viewed from
Barcaloungers around the world, we all gasped in horror when Miss Redgrave (the
one now embroiled in an almost Kentuckian divorce drama) lost an earring.
There, in front of the breathless masses, it fell from her ear while she, being
the consummate professional, continued without even seeming to notice. One
might have assumed that as soon as the camera panned elsewhere, she scooped up
the errant earring. However, for the rest of the event she was photographed
with only one earring.
            

            
               My question is this: Did she find the earring?
Was it borrowed or her own? Ah, for the good old days when there was no doubt
that Liz's diamonds were her own.
            

            
               Teleficially
yours,
            

            

               --S.D.
            

            

               P.S.: Now that Slate is free once again, do I have to return my
groovy umbrella?
            

            Dear S.,

            What an amusing
"problem" to offer Prudie ... who of course has no idea whether Ms. Redgrave's
errant earring was 1) retrieved or 2) borrowed. Just to free associate, Prudie,
herself, loves jewelry and is known to intimates as Sparkle Plenty. Alas, no
jewelers have ever offered to lend her any baubles.

            
--Prudie, sparklingly

            P.S.:
Consider the groovy umbrella a keepsake from the Messrs. Gates and Kinsley.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               To return to the ""
discussion, my favorite response is "I'm told I'm great!" Gets a laugh every
time.
            

            

               --f.f.f.
            

            Dear f.,

            Tres charmante, and
risqué, aussi.

            
--Prudie, responsively

            
               
                  Dear
Prue,
               
            

            
               I have an old friend whom I dearly love who was
my roomie in college. We talk on the phone often and try to get together
regularly--shopping, dinner, etc.
            

            
               The only problem is
when she and her husband invite me over to their apartment. It's filthy and
disgusting! Cats crawl all over you, and the noxious fumes of the litter box
are enough to make you lose your appetite--or worse. The kitchen sink is filled
with dishes that have been there for days on end. From having lived with her
before, I always knew she was a clutter-bug but not unsanitary. I invite them
over to my place as often as possible, but I can only refuse going to theirs so
much before their feelings get hurt. How can I handle this?
            

            

               --Nauseously Yours
            

            Dear Nause,

            No one should be burdened by having to hold his
nose when paying a social call. Prudie offers you two ways to proceed. If you
are feeling faint of heart about leveling with your chum, simply refuse to
convene at the house that the cats have taken over. Prudie would hope, however,
that you would take a more direct approach, which might actually be doing a
kindness. Since you and this longtime pal have a history of warmth and
friendship, why not tell her the conditions in her home are way beyond the
"clutter-bug" stage, and you are worried about her health.

            Prudie has always felt there is something a little
nutty about people who are able to ignore an extreme mess and the sensibilities
of others. In the spirit of constructive advice, a word from you might focus
her attention and remedy the situation. If not, simply state that you can no
longer be a visitor to her home.

            --Prudie, hopefully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am about to launch
a campaign for public office. I would appreciate advice on how best to share
details of my life with voters. I grew up poor. My mother (from another
country) had an eighth-grade education and raised three children on her own. As
a result of poverty we were homeless a few times, and the kids spent some time
in foster care. Today we are all doing well. I have been able to achieve the
American Dream--a great postgraduate education, a good job, civic achievement,
and a wonderful family. I think this is an inspiring story of what is right
with America. My problem is that I want to avoid seeming as though I want
people to feel sorry for me because of the deprivations of my youth. At the
same time, I do want some credit for being able to overcome some serious
challenges. How do you think I should handle this information?
            

            

               --Democrat With a Dilemma
            

            Dear Dem,

            Prudie thinks you should relay this information in
your campaign speeches and literature just as you have in your letter. Your
remark about your personal history illustrating what is right with America is
the perfect approach. You would only elicit sympathy if the deck stacked
against you had caused you to fold your hand.

            Everybody loves a success
story, and triumph over adversity is always uplifting. Prudie wishes you
victory and, with luck, an opponent who prepped at St. Paul's before going on
to Harvard.

            
--Prudie, strategically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am constantly fighting the battle of the
bulge. Everyone in my family is overweight. I, however, am determined to lose
weight and keep it off. The keeping it off is the problem. When I eat at home I
can control what's going on. When in a restaurant, I can somewhat control
things. When at dinner parties, however, I am totally at the mercy of the
menu.
            

            
               Do you have any
ideas for people in my situation? I know we must be legion.
            

            

               --Fighting Being a Butterball
            

            Dear Fight,

            Short of bringing your own dinner in a paper bag
(only acceptable for Carol Channing and people with severe food restrictions),
Prudie suggests you incorporate the following two ploys: Do not finish
everything you are served, and push the unconsumed portion around on your
plate.

            Prudie is becoming aware
of more and more people having a bite or two of desert, for example, and then
eating no more. And she is sympathetic to your plight. For some reason, even
hostesses who themselves try to eat nutritiously feel that dinner party fare
requires a feast, where everything on the plate is essentially a butter
sculpture.

            --Prudie, sparingly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Soft-Core Tai Chi

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Entrapment
                (20 th Century Fox). A few
critics like this old-fashioned heist flick starring Sean Connery and Catherine
Zeta-Jones despite its unoriginality: "It works because it is made stylishly,
because Connery and Zeta-Jones are enormously attractive actors, and because of
the romantic tension between them" (Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times ).
A slew of critics finds the whole thing a bit off: Connery has 40 years on
Zeta-Jones, and the highlight of the film is Zeta-Jones' spandex-clad
"demi-soft-core tai chi" (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal ) as
she attempts to evade an optical security system in the process of ripping off
a priceless gold mask. 
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein says
"Entrapment is an A-list production, but despite ... a bevy of
state-of-the-art sensors, cybergizmos, and digital readouts, it can't manage to
brush off its B-movie cobwebs." (Read the rest of Edelstein's review .)

            

               
                  The Winslow Boy
                (Sony Pictures Classics). David Mamet
directs a G-rated family drama, based on Terrence Rattigan's 1946 play about a
schoolboy accused of petty theft and the legal battle that blossoms in the
accusation's wake. Critics praise Mamet's departure from his trademark profane
and sharp-edged films, but the reviews have a dutiful air about them: "a
pointed examination of the price of seeking justice" (Kenneth Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ) ... a "handsome, stately adaptation" (Janet Maslin, the
New York Times ). (Click to read the consensus view by

                  Slate
               's David Edelstein: "Beat by beat, Mamet turns
out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also
a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.")

            

               
                  The Phantom Menace
                (20 th Century Fox).
Though the premiere is still two weeks away, hype for the Star Wars
prequel is at full throttle. The soundtrack has been released, tie-in toys have
gone on sale (1,500 shoppers showed up at FAO Schwarz's Manhattan store on
Monday morning), thousands of Web sites have cropped up, and lines have formed
at theaters. The backlash has also arrived: Janet Maslin complains in the
New York Times : "When a film becomes the nexus of such a complex
marketing juggernaut, inevitable consequences include weariness and even déjà
vu. Nobody on this planet will be able to approach the Star Wars
prequel, The Phantom Menace , with a sense of discovery. So much commerce
rides on this product, so much advance flogging has been necessary, that the
film's own innate appeal is compromised." (Two well-maintained fan sites,
The Force.net and
Countdown to
Star Wars , present detailed information on the film as well as
photos and news on upcoming commercials. The film's official site offers several trailers
and an online store.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Keep It Like a Secret
               , by Built to Spill (Warner
Bros.). Excellent reviews for the latest album from the Idaho-based indie rock
band. Reviewers praise singer and lead guitarist Doug Martsch as the locus of
the band's appeal: His "particular genius ... is the vivid tension he generates
between earnest romanticism and howling discord" (David Fricke, Rolling
Stone ). Reviews compare the band's sound with predecessors as diverse as
Wire, Hüsker Dü, and Lou Reed, and several mark the similarity of Martsch's
voice to Neil Young's. The Wall Street Journal 's Jim Fusilli writes that
it's "the kind of disk you replay when it rolls to a close, just to delight in
all that cleverness once again." (For more on the band, check out this site, which has
photographs, lyrics, and a list of tour dates.)

            

               Book
            

            

               
                  The Lexus and the Olive Tree
               , by Thomas L. Friedman
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Early reviews lavished praise on the New York
Times "Foreign Affairs" columnist's study of globalization: "The author
uses his skills as a reporter and analyst to conduct a breathtaking tour, one
that possesses the exhilarating qualities of flight and the stomach-hollowing
ones of free fall" (Richard Eder, the New York Times ). Recent reviews
have been considerably cooler. Gripes: 1) Friedman's belief in global economics
and American-style capitalism's ability to solve the world's ills reads more
like cheerleading than analysis: "[O]nly a New York Times foreign
affairs columnist could write a book so relentlessly upbeat about the USA's
prospects in an ever more tightly integrated world without being accused of
unsophisticated boosterism" (David J. Lynch, USA Today ). 2) Some of his
theories have already been disproved: His "Golden Arches" theory of
international relations held that no two countries that both had a McDonald's
have ever gone to war. This "was proved false even before his book's
publication date by the war between NATO and Serbia (where the Belgrade
McDonald's franchises were promptly vandalized)." (Jacob Weisberg,

                  Slate
               ). 3) Friedman is blind to the negative aspects of a world
dominated by business instead of government: "The lack of skepticism toward
business--the tendency to adopt its view of the world--has had a deeper effect
on Friedman than just causing him on occasion to strike a tonally false note,"
writes Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker , because "in the era of
globalization business can constrict freedom and innovation just as governments
did during the Cold War." (Click to read Weisberg's review in

                  Slate
               .)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Movie
            

            

               
                  Idle Hands
                (Columbia Pictures). Another campy teen
horror flick. Shocker: Critics say it's trite and unoriginal (it follows a boy
with a demonically possessed hand). It's also "undeniably kinetic," and
director Rodman Flender (yet another WB alum) manages to generate "watchable
levels of splatter-happy delirium" (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment
Weekly ).

            

               Offspring
            

            

               Bechet Dumaine Allen. Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are in
possession of a child, "Bechet Dumaine Allen." The critics are dying to know:
Is the 5-month old girl adopted or not? Previn "didn't appear pregnant in
recent photos" (Shauna Snow, the Los Angeles Times ). The name comes from
legendary soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. 

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Freedom Trap

            It occurred to me, while
laboring to write this column and make a bit of money to support my family,
that it would do wonders for my stifled creativity to drive somewhere tropical,
sip single-barrel bourbon, and have sex with a tawny barmaid. Of course, when I
was at liberty to do all that I didn't. Instead, I'd think, if I could only
meet a woman of substance and put down roots, I'd be less anxious about earthly
impermanence and be really poised to cultivate my creativity ... By a
not-so-strange coincidence, this conflict is prominent in lots of recent
movies, among them A Walk on the Moon , Metroland , and Among
Giants , which explore the natural impulse to settle down vs. the equally
natural impulse to be wild and free--the yearning for permanence vs. the
claustrophobic dread of monogamy.

            No dilemma causes men
and women to fantasize so intensely about splitting themselves in two and
taking both roads. And none provides more fodder for melancholy middle-aged
comedy, from the heavyweight musings of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being to the fluffy screwball machinations of Forces of
Nature . In the latter, currently the most popular movie in the country, the
filmmakers strain to bring together free spirit Sandra Bullock and affianced
fuddy-duddy Ben Affleck. Then they do a bizarre about-face and deliver a paean
to the bliss of domesticity. That ending satisfies no one, but you can
appreciate the filmmakers' lack of options: Kundera resolves the conflict by
hurtling his lovers' pickup down an incline and crushing their bodies to a
pulp.

            It's worth remembering that Kundera's sexual parables
unfold against a backdrop of totalitarian repression, whereas our own grapple
with a more confusing legacy: the counterculture of the '60s and '70s. Set in
1969, A Walk on the Moon devises a deliciously resonant dual setting: a
Catskills summer community to which middle-class Jews from the city migrate to
swim and eat and play mah-jongg, and the gathering hippies at nearby Woodstock.
The proximity of New World '60s hedonism puts a sort of lunar spell on Pearl
(Diane Lane), a 31-year-old mother of two whose own "summer of love" was
cruelly brief. She got pregnant at 17 and promptly married the baby's father,
Marty (Liev Schreiber)--now a TV repairman who's stuck in the city fixing
broken sets in time for Neil Armstrong's moon walk--and settled into a life of
looking after kids and chopping vegetables. So, let's see: hot weather, free
love in the breeze, an anti-establishment, pubescent daughter (Anna Paquin),
and an absent husband. Into this sexually tremulous milieu comes Viggo
Mortensen, one of the van-driving peddlers who make regular trips to the
compound to sell shmattes to bargain-hungry Jewish ladies. A rangy,
purringly diffident blond gentile with blue eyes and a cleft chin, he watches
as Pearl slips on a tie-dyed T-shirt, then leans his lips toward her bare
throat--and bites off the dangling price tag. One can hardly blame Pearl for
saying, "Family shmamily."

            The elements in A Walk
on the Moon , which is directed by the actor Tony Goldwyn (the bad guy in
Ghost ) and written by Pamela Gray, feel miraculously right. Gray's
script seems meticulously worked out, right down to setting the moonwalk
against Pearl in her own libidinal orbit. But if the writing is tidy, it's
never glib--it has too much texture for glibness. I think back with pleasure on
the shared fascination of Marty and his young son over how many minutes it
takes him to drive from the city to the Catskills every week, the bubbly
nonchalance of the Catskills women, and the presence in the margins of Orthodox
Jews, who find it increasingly difficult to coexist with "Purple Haze,"
skinny-dippers, and women's lib.

            Diane Lane's performance puts her in the company of the
best young actresses alive. Her Pearl is at an age when you can see in her skin
the last traces of girlish pliancy but also where the cares have begun to leave
a residue. Alone in her kitchen with her cutting board, she seems to be
smelling her own faint over-ripeness; when Mortensen holds his stare a beat too
long, her body bends toward his as if it knows, on a cellular level, that this
way lies nourishment. Lane and Mortensen have an extrasensory rapport--they
magnetize each other. When you see them at Woodstock it's through the aghast
eyes of her daughter, who thought of herself as a groover until she caught a
glimpse of Mom in a most unmomlike state of sexual ecstasy--Dionysically
pickled.

            This kind of picture has
one of two thrusts: It either sides with the suffocated housewife who, like
Ibsen's Nora, strives to break free of a repressive patriarchal hold, or it
demonizes a culture that tempts men and women to put their own gratification
before their responsibilities as parents. A Walk on the Moon leans to
the side of "family values" but scapegoats no one--neither the decent but
insensitive Marty nor the opportunistic salesman. Even the moralistic mystic of
a grandmother, Lilian (Tovah Feldshuh), can't forestall Pearl's flowering.
Lilian embodies the culture's eternal wisdom but also its antediluvian folly.
Greeting the news of her granddaughter's first menses, she blurts, "Mazel
tov !" and then slaps the child--a tradition evidently meant to celebrate
the beginning of reproductive life, while reinforcing a girl's sense of shame
over the fact that she's now "unclean." A culture so stern would drive most
people into the tie-dyed bosom of salesman, even if he didn't look like Viggo
Mortensen.

            He might, for instance, resemble Lee Ross, who plays the
militantly nonconformist Toni, buddy of Chris (Christian Bale), in
Metroland , based on an early novel by Julian Barnes. The time is 1977:
After a five-year absence, Toni visits Chris at his suburban London row house.
He's there to deride him for having a genteel wife, Marion (Emily Watson), a
baby daughter, and a job snapping pictures for an ad agency--and to remind him
that once, in the '60s, they shared an ambition to escape such soul-quashing
homogeneity.

            Toni's point would be more pressing if he weren't
such an unpalatable poster boy for freedom--pasty with dissipation, with thin,
purplish lips. Plus, he's an unmistakable sponge. But Chris and his missus are
having an arid patch, sexually speaking, so Toni's exhortations prompt heady
flashbacks to less confining times: Chris' days as an arty photographer in
Paris, when he learned how to make love to les 
               femmes from a
lusciously soft-thighed coquette called Annick (Elsa Zylberstein). But that
idyll was cut short when he met Marion. Torn between French free-spiritedness
and the gnawing English sense that he ought to set about structuring a life,
the 21-year-old Chris drifted--more or less by default--into the Englishwoman's
arms.

            
               Metroland , while
poky and schematic, is full of disconcertingly sharp talk between lovers
before, during, and after sex. And while it's true that you can't pack as much
psychological detail into a movie as you can into a novel, director Philip
Saville and screenwriter Adrian Hodges bring out the yeasty subtext of even the
most brittle encounters: The suspense is in waiting to hear how characters will
phrase what you've already read in their faces. The movie's triumph is the
casting of Watson in an unusually self-possessed role. I found her prim little
Mona Lisa smirk and teasingly buttoned-up demeanor almost maddeningly
sexy--more alluring by miles than the smeary-mouthed French sexpot. Bale, a
wonderfully sensitive actor who here looks like Watson with an Adam's apple,
can only stare open-mouthed, helpless, knowing she's his destiny and not even
much minding that it will take him back to Metroland. Is it unfair to skew the
case for a life of suburban domesticity this way? Watson is such a diabolical
minx that she makes the prospect of a life amid those metros and under those
gray skies more seductive than an endless luau. I wish I could tell you for
sure that the "happy" ending isn't meant to be ironic, but that's not how it
felt to this aspiring suburbanite.

            In Among Giants , another English romance in which
freedom and security play footsie, the rover is a woman: an Australian
"climbah" named Gerry (Rachel Griffiths) who joins up with a cowboylike crew of
daredevil painters led by Pete Postlethwaite's Ray--they have 15 miles of
mammoth electric towers to coat in a mere three months. The director, Sam
Miller, goes in for Lewis Hine-like images of men high in the air, at once
dwarfed and exalted, with synthesized strings to provide a touch of foggy
mysticism. Much of Among Giants affords an agreeable blend of the gritty
and the synthetic, and the two main actors are a treat. "You love it up here,
don't you?" says Griffiths, whose character is starting to fall for the older
foreman. "Oh, I'm king up here, lass," says Postlethwaite, looking more
leathery and Asiatic than ever, like the mummified fossil of some early man.
Griffiths, who played a free spirit in Muriel's Wedding (1994) and the
simpy Hilary du Pré in last year's Hilary 
               and Jackie , has a large
nose and receding chin and looks quite homely from one or two angles. But from
the only angles that matter she's beautiful, and her Gerry has a darting
intelligence to boot.

            There's no reason Gerry and Ray couldn't have made
a lifelong adventure of it--scaling rocks, romping naked through abandoned
factories, gazing in awe at big rigs. But the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy
( The Full Monty ), has a thing about bringing macho men down to earth
with a thud. Last time the deflation was funny and it worked; this time the bad
vibes make the whole picture wither. If any couple could have synthesized the
impulses to rove and stay put, it's this one, but Beaufoy throws in the towel
at the point where the husbands and wives of A Walk on the 
               Moon
and Metroland are just getting warmed up.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , April 26
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
April 10, 1999)
            

            The magazine's redesign brings with it a new Web site and a slick,
decidedly un-wonkish new look. ... The "TRB" column argues that the intelligence community should use its
Cold War-era spying apparatus to monitor human rights abuses. Spooks have
generally shied away from such missions because of the moral and political
dilemmas created when an intelligence agency witnesses atrocities. ... A
piece describes wartime propaganda on Serbian TV. The
programming includes nationalistic music videos, scornful exposés of Western
governments (Hillary Clinton is gay, as is most of Tony Blair's Cabinet), and
repeated showings of the film Wag the Dog .

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , April 10
            

            
               (posted Friday, April
9, 1999)
            

            The magazine endorses the deployment of ground troops in Kosovo.
But a separate editorial says that partial defeat (concessions to the
Serbs, failure to repatriate Kosovars) will be NATO's "price of going to war
without the will to do the job properly." The West neglected to anticipate the
refugee crisis, and the subsequent dispersal of homeless Kosovars across the
already shaky Balkan region could cause "a potential collapse of terrifying
proportions." ... A piece bemoans Britain's inert tourism business.
Government and industry are squabbling over whether to promote the country as
the modern, hip "Cool Britannia" or as the tradition-soaked land of high tea
and Queen Victoria.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               , April 11
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
April 8, 1999)
            

            A writer visits two
veterans of the Tiananmen Square uprising who have moved to the United States
and become evangelical Christians. Both believe that "the root of democracy is
the spirit of Christ" and that democracy will only come to China through mass
religious awakening. ... The magazine profiles public radio hero Ira
Glass, host of This American Life , a weekly exploration of odd corners
of American culture. Glass is considering launching a TV version of the show,
but not on public television, which he deems too influenced by its corporate
sponsors.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , April 12
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
6, 1999)
            

            The newsweeklies slam the Clinton administration's
Kosovo policy. Time 's caustic cover story ("War, we are shocked to discover, is not a video
game") derides the White House's apparently unshaken faith in air power.
Newsweek 
               lambastes the president for "diplomatic errors and missed
opportunities": Security advisers originally told the administration to offer
President Slobodan Milosevic a face-saving compromise; when action became
inevitable, they recommended strengthening NATO's military threat; finally, as
airstrikes began, they urged planning for the refugee crisis sure to come. At
every turn, Clinton failed to heed. A sidebar reports that in the early '90s the CIA nixed a plot
by Milosevic's inner circle to overthrow the dictator. A Newsweek

               piece crudely indicts the entire Serb nation (they "didn't
need to load Kosovars into boxcars to look bad"). Since losing the Battle of
Kosovo in 1389, the Serbs have been "seasoned haters raised on self-pity." Both
magazines print huge, heart-rending photographs of Kosovar refugees.

            
               Time explains why the anti-sweatshop
movement is growing on college campuses: The AFL-CIO has jump-started the
protests by lavishing student activists with internships and trips to countries
with poor working conditions.

            
               Newsweek

               writes that Ernest Hemingway's soon-to-be published final
manuscript, True at First Light , a fictionalized account of an African
safari, contains some of his funniest and most complex work.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , April 12
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
6, 1999)
            

            The cover
story opines that the United States should have offered Milosevic a
better deal at Rambouillet. A sidebar suggests that the president's lingering anger over
impeachment has colored his approach to Kosovo crisis. Another sidebar , titled "Talking Casualties," scopes out what it
would take for NATO to win a ground war (200,000 troops and a month or two of
setup time). NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark is a "born-again advocate" of an
invasion. ... A story forecasts country music's Next Big Thing: African-American
crooners. Country originated in gospel and blues, but since the civil rights
era blacks have associated country music with white prejudice. Now record
executives are hoping that black country acts will boost lagging sales.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , April 12
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
6, 1999)
            

            
               The 
               New
Yorker excerpts Ralph Ellison's posthumous novel Juneteenth , the
story of a boy of mixed race who denies his black heritage and becomes a racist
senator. It will be published in June. ... The magazine profiles a
controversial British "what if" historian whose work examines European history
as it might have been. He has deemed that World War I was Britain's
fault and that allowing the Germans a partial victory then would have prevented
the Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, and the Holocaust. ... A writer
recounts the colorful rise and fall of the Rev. J. Charles Jessup, the "the
most preachable preacher that ever preached preachable preaching." The star
faith healer built America's first evangelical empire in the 1940s by
broadcasting his tent revival act on the radio. After collecting about $10
million in "faith donations," Jessup was locked up for mail fraud.

            
               
                  The
Nation
               
               , April 19
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, April
6, 1999)
            

            Much condemnation of
NATO's air campaign. An editorial says the bombing encourages Serb nationalism,
enables Milosevic to crack down on dissent, destabilizes Russia, undermines the
United Nations, and violates the principle that foreign powers should not
intervene in civil wars. ... A scathing article says the administration
is acting to make the world safe for American economic imperialism as much as
to avert a humanitarian disaster. Given U.S. brutality in South Vietnam and its
failure to stop other horrors (Rwanda, Sierra Leone, etc.), America "has no
moral ground to stand on" in condemning and attacking the Serbs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , March 6
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
March 6, 1999)
            

            The cover story warns that cheap oil, though a boon to
consumers, could bankrupt the poor and politically unstable nations that
produce it. ... The magazine diagrams the current Chinese-American diplomatic
impasse. The United States berates China for human rights abuses and illicit
transfer of defense technology; Chinese officials see U.S. policy as
inconsistent and hypocritical--President Clinton has sent mixed messages about
Taiwan and most favored nation status. ... A piece describes the monuments Saddam Hussein has
erected to himself. One is made from a fallen American missile melted down and
remolded in the image of agonized Western leaders groveling at Saddam's
feet.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , March 22
            

            
               (posted Friday, March
5, 1999)
            

            A profile accuses
Christopher Edley--the president's premier policy adviser, operative, and
ghostwriter on race--of being doctrinaire and intolerant of dissent. He
single-handedly closed the discussion on class-based affirmative action and
excluded conservatives from the president's race initiative. ...
Prostate cancer screenings are now de rigueur for men, says a piece, but
they may lead to premature and overaggressive surgery. The operations are often
deadlier than the cancer itself. ... The cover story calls CIA Director
George Tenet an energetic, clever, and appealingly iconoclastic leader but
questions his--or anyone's--ability to reform the stumbling agency. ...
A review savages Barbara Kingsolver and Anna Quindlen: Their writing is
heartfelt, but their politics are naive and their use of emotion is cheap.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , March 7
            

            
               (posted

               Thursday, March 4, 1999)
            

            The magazine's special
shelter issue, titled "The Human Habitat," self-consciously departs from
glossy, expensive interior-decorator culture. The opening essay rejects
overdesigned sleekness for the "flowing, tangled" realism of everyday mess.
Short pieces feature a family farm in India, repossessed houses in the Los
Angeles suburbs, and the many uses of storage lockers. There's even a special
section ("Making the Most of It") devoted to the poor, portraying
struggling-but-content families, living in a $30-a-month Tennessee mountain
shack and in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. A photo spread depicts how people
have made various unlikely settings--including missile silos, water towers, and
mausoleums--into cozy and functional homes.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , March 8
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
2, 1999)
            

            
               Time 's peculiar cover story announces and names the new "femaleist" movement:
biological feminism based on new research showing that women's bodies are
"tougher, stronger, and lustier" than stereotype dictates. According to
femaleism, ancient women hunted along with their male mates, the clitoris is
anatomically superior to the penis, and menstruation is an expression of
"primal female power." The story is oddly competitive, keeping score between
the genders on strength, agility, and aggression, and mischievously wondering
"which sex should rule." Photographs of scantily dressed, genetically gifted
women illustrate it. A sidebar traces political attitudes toward women's bodies,
from Margaret Sanger to ... Cybill Shepherd. It's a big week for women's health
at Newsweek , too. Its "Health for Life" supplement gives practical, soothingly written advice on a
long list of women's health concerns, from familiars such as pregnancy and
breast cancer to perimenopause (pre-menopausal hormonal irregularities) and
hormone replacement therapy.

            
               Newsweek 's regular issue is devoted to
Americans at war. The introductory essay argues that war has been the central
influence and organizing principle of the 20 th century. The bulk of
the magazine is given to firsthand narratives by veterans and others. A
sampling: The founder of the Navy SEALs recalls his near-drowning at Guadalcanal, David Halberstam
describes the military's spin apparatus in Vietnam, and Nancy
Reagan reminisces about the first Reagan-Gorbachev
summit.

            
               Time prints a
quick and dirty guide for rebel groups who aspire to statehood. From Chechnya
to Kurdistan to Quebec, independence is achieved through television, luck, and
location, location, location--no way for far-flung East Timor, maybe for
European Kurdistan.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , March 8
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
2, 1999)
            

            The grim cover
story explains why depression is so hard to treat effectively: Insurers
won't pay for the trial-and-error process of finding the right medication, and
the disease is still mistaken, even by its victims, for everyday doldrums. The
cover promises new treatments, but the story inside says very little about
them. ... A piece asks if Saddam Hussein is finally losing his
marbles--or at least his judgment. Unsettled by sanctions, riots, and the
West's steady bombing, the dictator has been firing military brass and
assassinating clerics. ... An article describes how American personal-injury lawyers
thronged to Nairobi after the U.S. Embassy bombing, convincing Kenyans to sue
both the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , March 8
            

            
               (Posted Tuesday, March
2, 1999)
            

            A profile of Goldman
Sachs argues that the investment house is a mirror of capitalism itself. The
firm's decision to go public was driven by unbridled individual greed and
represents the demise of the long-term, group-oriented thinking that spurred
the firm's original success. One telling detail about the firm's legendary
emphasis on teamwork: Employees have constant access to a database where they
can input evaluations of their co-workers' performance. ... Two
men--brothers, English professors, and gambling addicts--unrepentantly describe
how they blew their inheritance at Mississippi blackjack tables. ... A
writer finds head-spinning confusion at the National Archives, where librarians
are straining to keep up with the antiquatedness of old technologies and the
information sprawl caused by new ones. For example, a 1989 court case requires
all federal agencies to archive their computer files and e-mails, but it took
the Archives over two years just to copy the records of the Reagan White House.
And even those records "are gibberish as they currently stand," sighs one
former Archives librarian.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , March 8
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
2, 1999)
            

            The lead editorial
pleads with the media to pursue the Juanita Broaddrick story. ... The
cover
story opines that Bill Bradley should be the Democratic nominee for
president, because he's smart, principled, and destined to lose. Whereas
Republicans would have to play hardball to beat Al Gore, Bradley is a "listless
and uninspiring" candidate who could be vanquished quietly and nobly.
... An article sings the virtues of "alternative country music," which
is authentic and religious. Big-name country artists have forsaken the
form--not only for filthy lucre, but also because mainstream success helps them
"lose the sense of inferiority they've had since Appomattox."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 211: &quot;A and Q&quot;

            

               I give President Clinton's answer; you give the question from his rare
and recent press conference: "I think it's very important. And I think that
what young people will learn from my experience is that even presidents have to
do that, and that there are consequences when you don't."
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Thursday's Question
(No. 210)--"Let Us Now Praise Famous Me":
               

               

                  "You like me! You really like me!"-- Sally Field
                  
               

               

                  "I'm the king of the world and the lord of Monkey Island!"-- James
Cameron
                  
               

               
                  Every Academy
Awards broadcast yields one perfect remark. Participants are invited to predict
the comment from Sunday's Oscars that will be most quoted in Monday's
papers.
               

               

                  ( Topic courtesy of Greg Diamond. )
               

               
"Fernanda Montenegro: 'Why is the sickly girl holding my Oscar?' "-- Beth
Sherman
               

               
"Roberto Benigni: 'Yes I'm look nuts, but I'm the winner. I want to thank Stan
for 2,000 mics of acid. I am a lacto-vegetarian. You can give me milk and
spinach. I like cheese and radish. Now I am biting the moon.' "-- Marshall
Efron
               

               " 'Oh
God! Someone just shot Joan Rivers!' (or was that 'THANK God'?)"-- Al
Petrosky
               

               "James
Coburn: 'And I especially want to thank my life partner, Cardinal John
O'Connor; this one's for you, honey!' "-- Susan Vance
               

               
"Academy President Arthur Hiller: 'I'm terribly, terribly sorry.' (Rescinding
the Academy Awards given to Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Goldie Hawn, and Kevin
Costner, and reassigning them to Martin Scorsese, Judy Davis, Lauren Bacall,
and Albert Brooks.) 'Also,' Hiller added, 'Al Pacino's Oscar is no longer for
Scent of a Woman but for The Godfather . That is all.' "-- Tim
"They Don't Have the Met Here, but They Do Have Back to the Future: The Ride,
and That Counts for Something" Carvell
               

                

                

                

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            I no longer watch the
Oscars. They're neither good enough to take straight--the choices convey no
aesthetic authority; the performances make no earthly sense--nor consistently
awful enough to enjoy as camp. (Yes, Rocky was claptrap, but
Shakespeare in Love was indeed wonderful.) Or perhaps I've simply lost
my taste for cleavage and greed. There's a relentless evolution in this sort of
event, from genuinely interesting, to ludicrously bad, to soporifically bland.
The Oscars are in the terminal stage, having achieved the tone of a shopping
mall, a corporate charity event, frozen Cajun food, Al Gore. So each March,
instead or watching the Academy Awards, I rent All About Eve and heave a
smoke bomb through Democratic Party headquarters. And the best thing about my
evening: It's Whoopi-free.

            
               Politics and Poetry
Extra
            

            Both the New Republic and the Academy of
American Poets have announced major changes. A comparison.

            
               Most Apparent
Change:
            

            AAP: More people of color on board of
chancellors.

            
               NR : More color photographs of Rudy
Giuliani.

            
               What the Changes
Mean:
            

            AAP: "The board is more representative of the many
things going on in poetry today," says President Jonathan Galassi.

            
               NR : "It's going to be fresh and frisky," says
publisher Will Lippincott.

            
               Will it Be
Fuddy-Duddy?:
            

            AAP: No official position.

            
               NR : "It's not going to be fuddy-duddy,"
insists Mr. Lippincott.

            
               Biggest Prize
Offered:
            

            AAP: $100,000 Tanning Prize.

            
               NR : Winner of new subscriber sweepstakes
gets to attend NR editorial meeting; loser forced to attend two edi ...
oh, you know how this one goes.

            
               Possible Impetus
for Change:
            

            AAP: Maxine Kumin and Carolyn Kizer resign from
board in protest.

            
               NR : Stephen Glass dragged from office in
handcuffs.

            
               Means of Avoiding
Stasis:
            

            AAP: Rotation system instituted for board of
chancellors.

            
               NR : Frequent firings and resignations
instituted for editors in chief.

            
               Means of Avoiding
Pro-Gore Bias:
            

            
               NR : Martin Peretz's public pledge to do
less boosting of Al Gore.

            AAP: John Galassi's
implicit pledge to discourage erotic sonnets about Al Gore.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Elia Kazan.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Fortune and Men's Eyeballs

            Bill Gross, a Pasadena,
Calif., businessman, has a great moneymaking idea. His firm, Free-PC.com, will
ship you a free 333-megahertz Compaq computer. He'll also give you free
Internet access and a free maintenance contract. In return, all he wants is two
little things. Your soul and a pound of flesh? No, just your eyeballs and a bit
of demographic information. "Eyeballs" is Webspeak for the number of people who
see a Web page--and, presumably, any ad that is on it. If a Web page is served
to 100,000 computers, that counts as 100,000 eyeballs, although literally it's
more like 200,000, assuming two eyeballs per person.

            Gross' company will
place ads on a small portion of the screen as you use your free computer. And
with the information you give him about your income, tastes, and so on, he will
be able to sell you to advertisers whose products and pitches are aimed at your
sort of person. The more an advertiser knows about you, the more it is willing
to pay to reach you. On the Internet, such information is even more useful
because it's easier to fine-tune who sees an ad. The ad you see at the top of
this page may be different from the one your neighbor sees when she visits this
same article. Bill Gross can send each of his free computer owners ads for
precisely what he or she is most likely to buy. In this way Gross hopes to make
back his costs and then some.

            Of course, Gross is not the only one with this idea. The
Web is full of sites that give away valuable stuff free in the hope of making
it back in advertising. 
                  Slate
               , notoriously, for starters. And
this practice is not unknown in other media, either. Television programming is
still mostly free to the user. And even newspapers and traditional magazines
don't begin to cover their costs from what readers pay. Those readers are
heavily subsidized by advertisers hoping to sell them stuff. What's notable
about the Web is the profusion of free offerings that go way beyond mere
editorial content filling in the space between ads. There's an online store
called Onsale atCost selling computer equipment at the true wholesale price.
Onsale atCost may be the only store in the world to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers
to document that it is not going to make a profit. CBS's SportsLine.com
actually pays you to get sports scores from their site. The site counts the
number of times you visit SportsLine, and frequent users are given T-shirts and
sunglasses. Each time you visit you are even entered in $1 million prize
sweepstakes. And AllAdvantage.com promises to pay you up to $20 per month for
downloading an application that displays ads in the corner of your screen.
It'll pay you even more if you can convince your friends to sign up as
well.

            eFax.com will give you a
free fax number and allow you to receive faxes by e-mail--free. Everyone wants
to give you free e-mail. Free personal address books and calendars, free
mapping services, free personalized news and weather--all are available in
exchange for your eyeballs and a bit of information about yourself, either
asked for explicitly or gleaned from what you reveal in using the free
service.

            Which raises the question: How much can your eyeballs
possibly be worth? Suppose I could insidiously find out enough about you to
influence every purchasing decision you make. Suppose I could promise that
every ad I sold you would go straight to your spending reflex. What could I
sell that power for?

            Let's do some math.
Newsweek says Gross pays $600 for the computer. Add $100 a year for the
Internet connection and the service contract and assume the computer has a
usable life of two years. He's paying $400 per year for your attention. How on
earth is he going to make this back? Well, suppose some Chiat/Day ad wizard can
create a series of banner ads, which, by blinking in the corner of your screen,
compel you to go out and buy $400 worth of stuff. It's hard to imagine, but
it's not crazy. But $400 of sales isn't good enough. Hewlett-Packard isn't
going to pay $400 for your eyeballs if you're just going buy one $400
Hewlett-Packard printer. Hewlett-Packard needs $400 in profit , which may
mean 10 or 20 printers . That is, Gross must convince his advertisers
that they'll get $400 of profit per customer, which means, say,
something like $4,000 in sales . Each year. Just from you. And just
because of his ads.

            Now consider that advertisers spend an estimated $100
billion plugging goods and services to America's 100 million households. In
other words, advertisers, as a group, think that affecting the purchasing
decisions of an entire household of average eyeballs is worth $1,000 per year.
That's for all the ads you see in every medium, from television to billboards,
in the course of a year. Bill Gross is betting that his ads alone, aimed at
just one person, will be worth almost half that amount. Maybe he will manage to
find bigger spenders. Or maybe he'll be wildly more successful in affecting
their decisions. Or maybe he's nuts.

            His task will be easier
if his $400 doesn't have to come out of what advertisers are already spending
but by convincing them that it's worth spending more. That's where the
demographic information comes in. This is not a new concept, of course. John
Wanamaker, who built a department store empire in 19 th -century
Philadelphia, once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted ... I
only wish I knew which half."

            Targeting is a solution to Wanamaker's problem. You can
deliver Lexus ads to affluent customers pulling down more than $100,000 per
year. To less fortunate customers, you can deliver, say, Hyundai ads. To get a
sense of how valuable targeting is to advertisers, the New York
Times-- which makes you give demographic information in order to register
for the site--charges four cents for a banner ad that's shown to everyone and
six cents for one that is targeted. In other words, targeted ads are worth 50
percent more. Yahoo! can tell what your interests are by the search you're
entering. In writing this article, I entered "Lexus" into Yahoo! and, sure
enough, a banner ad for a Lexus popped up above my search results. And when I
entered "New York Times" I got a banner ad for the New York Times . Both
Lexus and the Times pay for this service. On average, these targeted
search engine ads cost 50 percent more than ordinary bulk ads.

            But is the Internet so
miraculous an advertising vehicle that Gross will be able to siphon off $400
per person from total ad spending of $1,000 per family--or persuade advertisers
to spend an additional $400 to reach each of his customers? This isn't so
obvious. After all, targeting is not unique to the Internet. A Lexus ad in
Car and Driver or Fortune is pretty well targeted at affluent
people who like fancy cars. And ads on the Internet, at least so far, lack
oomph. A banner at the top of a Web page just isn't the same as a luxurious
two-page color spread.

            Targeting may increase what advertisers will spend per
eyeball, but it also reduces the number of eyeballs they have to pay for.
Unless Wanamaker was willing to pay double for reaching the right half of the
people, his total ad spending would go down and not up. The apparent going
premium of 50 percent for a targeted ad on the Internet suggests that Internet
advertising may be as likely to reduce total ad spending as to increase it.

            Last year, advertisers spent $2 billion on the
Internet, compared with $35 billion spent on broadcast TV and $10 billion spent
on cable. That's 2 percent of the $100 billion total spent on ads in all media.
The Internet ad market is growing at two or three times the rate of any other
medium. So suppose advertisers direct one-fifth of their resources onto the
Internet. That would be a tenfold increase in the Internet's share. And
suppose the total market for advertising doubled . In this highly
optimistic scenario, Internet ad spending would be $400 per household. In other
words, Bill Gross could break even--provided he was the only advertiser on the
Web.

            Eyeballs are worth money only because they are
attached to wallets. And the size of the wallets is a strict limit on the value
of the eyeballs. So have I just argued myself out of a job by mathematically
disproving the theory on which my paycheck is based? Not at all--or at least I
don't think so. Free magazine articles are one thing, free computers are
another. Exchanging stuff for eyeballs makes sense as long as the cost of
providing the stuff is less than the value of the eyeballs to advertisers. What
it has cost 
                  Slate
                to provide this article by me can be the basis
for a very profitable ad-based business. Take my word for it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 221: &quot;No Carrying On&quot;

            

               Fill in the blank on this comment by State Sen. Harry Wiggins, jubilant
over the voting on a new proposal: "Missourians do not want __________ carried
into football games and bars and schools."
            

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 220)--"Sticks and Stones":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 The list includes
beasts, criminals, villains, thugs, fascist legions, and hordes of murderers.
List of
what?
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "The
'Important Numbers' section in Michael Eisner's Day Runner."-- Bill
Scheft ( Dennis Cass had a similar answer.)

            "Things
that 'do it' in Cole Porter's wisely discarded first draft."-- Daniel
Radosh
            

            "Maine
residents who had premarital sex."--Alex Pascover
            

            "I
don't expect you to believe me, but they're all thanked on that Dixie Chicks
CD."-- Chris Kelly
            

            "All
the cute, available guys."--Dale Shuger
            

             

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            It is instinctive to reject a patriotic list of
Official Enemies. The more these authorized villains are shot at in
Stallone-Schwartzenegger-Willis-Gibson movies, the more one wants to be a drug
dealer or terrorist when he grows up. Hollywood does glamorize everything.
(Except maybe Laurence Fishburne--what was he rambling on about in The
Matrix ? I dozed a bit there.)

            It is harder to rebuff a national enemies list when
bombs are falling, particularly when those enemies are implicated in appalling
deeds. It might, however, be possible to resist the grossest forms of jingoism.
Consider how badly certain World War II songs have aged--"I'm Going To Slap
That Dirty Little Jap." And those wartime Warner Bros. cartoons where Bugs
Bunny battles grotesque caricatures of the Japanese--they don't quite hold
up.

            So how to prevent outrage
at human suffering from tilting toward vile stereotyping? One guideline: The
more that anchormen get all huffy, the more you must be on your guard. When Dan
Rather reaches for the adjectives, be careful out there.

            
               Demonizing
Answer
            

            This is a list of terms used to refer to the NATO
alliance and its members, by order of the Serbian Information Ministry, reports
Steven Erlanger in the New York Times .

            On Serbian television,
President Clinton has been referred to as Bill Hitler, Adolf Clinton, and
Führer.

            
               Augmented
Quotations Extra
            

            Each final sentence added by News Quiz.

            

               "There is absolutely no evidence of cancer in his body. We were, however,
able to remove a large house cat that seemed to be making Minister Farrakhan
cranky and anti-Semitic."-- Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, on Louis Farrakhan's
successful surgery.
               

               "I shudder at the idea they will leave this haven. They are trusting. They
don't understand danger. They could end up inside the large intestine of
Minister Farrakhan.-- Stefania Caruso on the homeless cats of San Clemente, a
small island near Venice, Italy.
               

               "There's no scarring mark physically or mentally. Not like when we spank
their delicious bare bottoms with that nasty paddle ... ooooh!"-- George W.
Bush 
                  in a 1967 story about branding fraternity pledges with a hot wire
hanger, as recalled by Maureen Dowd.
               

               "I know there are going to be people who are cynical about this. I've been
mayor of New York City for too long not to realize that people will be cynical
about any good step that's made in the direction of decency. Idiots like that
should be shot 41 times!"-- New York's Mayor Giuliani 
                  on imaginary
criticism of his plan to give police officers wallet-sized cards listing tips
on interacting with the public. He seemed upset. It could be some kind of
feline intestinal blockage.
               

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Alpha Zeta

            Caper movies can often get
by with only one great visual idea; in the case of Entrapment , it's
Catherine Zeta-Jones in a black vinyl cat suit doing ballet amid a field of
laser beams. She's supposed to be an undercover insurance operative who's out
to catch legendary burglar Sean Connery in the act of stealing a priceless
Chinese mask--or is she actually a thief herself planning to bag the
scrumptious Scotsman along with the motherlode? A mystery, that. In the
meantime, Connery whisks her to his castle on an Inverness loch, where he rigs
a cat's cradle of red string to represent the lasers that she won't, at the
site, be able to discern. As she practices her moves, blindfolded, the
firelight casts a golden aureole around her sculpted bottom. But she's even
more alluring when she does the deed for real. She begins in the lotus
position, then unfolds and sends a long leg sideways in a neatly executed
fouetté . "On point ..." says Connery, peering into his laptop screen at
the beams that only he can see. "Now, lift !" The whole sequence has an
archetypal enchantment, made even more savory by its naughty underpinnings: The
aging master directs his prima ballerina in a sacred dance to larceny.

            
               Entrapment
doesn't hit the rest of its marks with comparable élan, but it's bearable. With
its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it
conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures
were routinely ground out as tax shelters--and sometimes cast with the
producers' model girlfriends, so that expensive vacations could be written off,
too. Entrapment is an A-list production, but despite Ving Rhames as
Connery's enigmatically surly cohort and a bevy of state-of-the-art sensors,
cybergizmos, and digital readouts, it can't manage to brush off its B-movie
cobwebs or to freshen banter that Rhett would have been too progressive to lay
on Scarlett. "Has there ever been anyone you couldn't manipulate, beguile, or
seduce?" asks Connery, after Zeta-Jones has stretched herself languidly out on
a plush four-poster. In the climax, the pair must walk a fraying tightrope
between the twin towers of the world's tallest building (in Kuala Lumpur) while
millennium fireworks explode around them. But the bad guy's dialogue remains
laughably mired in the last millennium: "They're rats in a trap!"

            E ntrapment is built around the object that is
Zeta-Jones, who, as the headstrong heroine of last year's The Mask of
Zorro , did a dazzling job of staring down Antonio Banderas. She has almond
eyes, a luxuriant black mane made for high-toned hair commercials, and an upper
lip that can flare or pout with silken ease. Supple physically, she is
nevertheless somewhat stolid--probably the upshot of a monotonous, untrained
voice of the sort that brings most goddessy supermodels crashing to earth. It
doesn't help that she's opposite an actor who can do a fouetté on every
syllable.

            Connery is also the
embodiment of everything unfair in nature--to men, but especially to women,
being one of the few male actors who actually makes a plausible heartthrob for
a female nearly half a century his junior. "You're the most beautiful crook
I've ever seen," he tells Zeta-Jones, toasting her with that voice while eating
her up with those bandit-chieftain eyes--and you can picture sundry Golden Age
Bond girls clucking, "I remember when he said that to me , sonny."
Connery mocks Father Time by disguising himself as an old guy with glasses and
a paunch: "This," he seems say, "is how men of my age are supposed to look." Of
course, one way that performers assist the aging process is by playing roles
that give their features and emotions a workout. Connery--superb actor though
he is--hasn't broken a sweat since The Untouchables (1987).

            David Mamet--who, coincidentally, wrote Connery's marvelous
dialogue in that movie--gave the American theater a brusque shove out of the
romantic realm of disillusioned lefties such as Eugene O'Neill and Arthur
Miller into a brutal capitalist realism, wherein every encounter was reduced to
an attempt by one party to hoodwink, psych out, or otherwise overpower another.
Who'd have thought that Mamet was secretly in love with the well-carpentered,
'40s and '50s drawing-room plays of the terribly English Terence Rattigan, whom
the Angry Young Men of the late '50s loutishly blew off the boards--thus paving
the way for Mamet's expletive-laced theater games? In choosing to adapt and
direct The Winslow Boy , based on one of Rattigan's most tidily crafted
problem pieces, Mamet points up an aspect of his own work that has increasingly
dwarfed all others: the drama as a procession of archly formal negotiations.
Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and
elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have
everything.

            Set in England before
World War I, the play (based on an actual incident) tells the story of an
adolescent boy expelled from a military academy for the theft of a
five-shilling postal money order, and the financially ruinous attempt of his
proper patriarch (played in the film by Nigel Hawthorne) to clear his son's
name. Relativist that he is, Mamet clearly loves the fact that young Winslow's
guilt or innocence is never satisfactorily resolved. What matters is that the
Winslow cause--at least when viewed from the perspective of the boy's
increasingly frail but determined father--has its own sterling truth. More to
the point, Mamet can have himself a whale of a time directing a series of
civilized confrontations that escalate in importance--from the young man who
asks Winslow senior for his daughter's hand in marriage (and the precise amount
of her dowry) to a cunning barrister, Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), who
uses every rhetorical trick he can think of to wear down a Parliament weary of
a twopenny schoolboy scandal.

            Hawthorne gives Winslow an air of gorgeously ineffable
sadness; he seems to carry on his ever shakier shoulders the knowledge that
this gray way of life, this England, is doomed. If only Rattigan had given him
a stronger second act! This the playwright ceded to Morton, the coldhearted
Establishment lawyer who unexpectedly throws himself into an anti-establishment
cause--and who Northam plays (brilliantly) as an alert snake increasingly
unsure of where to strike. For Mamet, however, the core of the piece is
Winslow's daughter, a snootily progressive ingénue and a suitable romantic foil
for the conservative Morton. She is played by Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon,
whom he means us to find weirdly irresistible--I find her weird and resistible
but not unattractive, having spent much of my early manhood pursuing similarly
small, dark-eyed girls who looked as if they had some lewd secret that would
only be divulged after a protracted psychodrama. (The secret, of course, was
that there was no secret.) Along these lines, the saucy Pidgeon's chief talent
is for looking as if she knows something that you don't and--even after
ravishing her--never will. Clearly, this is what gets Mamet through the
night.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 197: &quot;A Man Has Needs&quot;

            

               Fill in the blank as Bill Press assesses the about-to-be-announced
presidential bid of his Crossfire playmate Pat Buchanan. "He is
convinced that if Elizabeth Dole stumbles, if G.W. stumbles, in a field of
pygmies, he's the giant. This is not just a need for ____________ on his
part."
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 196)--"To Go":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           China has already got rid of 66,000, and by
year's end will remove another 800,000.
What?
                        
                     
                  
               

               
"Prisoners' kidneys."--Greg Diamond
               

               
"Foreskins. In the Chinese calendar, 1999 is the Year of the Rabbi. Or was that
a typo?"-- Evan Cornog
               

               
"Daughters."-- Paul Tullis ( Matt Sullivan , Nell Scovell ,
David Finkle , Winter Miller , Deb Stavin , Carrie
Rickey , Kate Wing , Brad Spencer , and Jim O'Grady had
similar answers.)

               "Pesky
U.S. dollars that rightfully belong in Democratic campaign coffers. (Multiply
all figures by 100.)"-- Doug Welty
               

               "God, I
hope it's Scientologists."-- Chris Thomas
               

                

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            If News Quiz were a radio
panel show--a sort of What's My Line / I've Got a Secret with Larry
Amaros as Bennet Cerf and Beth Sherman as Arlene Francis, or perhaps the other
way around, whatever they like--the great advantage (beyond the chance to hear
Ananda Gupta being audibly disdainful) would be posing several questions a day.
A dozen per program would form an interesting outline of the day, but choosing
just one is tough. Excellent topics are lost. For instance, in an effort to
counter its image as an occupying army brutalizing the people of New York City,
the police department plans to recruit more actual New Yorkers to its ranks.
The heart of the plan will be an ad campaign with a snappy slogan. Police
Commissioner Howard Safir says he wants "Be all you can be, or Uncle Sam wants
you, or something like that." Too militaristic? Just militaristic enough.
Participants are invited, in the privacy of their own thoughts, to devise an
NYPD recruiting slogan. It's my anniversary gift to you. Isn't it better than
something impersonal like a car?

            
               What's Mine Is Your
Answer
            

            China is clearing land mines along its border with
Vietnam.

            In other mine news, the
British army has destroyed its entire stock of anti-personnel mines four years
before the deadline set by the Ottawa Convention. This treaty, banning land
mines, has been signed by 125 countries, neither China nor the United States
among them. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that mines
kill 800 people and maim another 1,200 every month.

            For
more information, write to:
U.S. Campaign To Ban Landmines
Mary Wareham
Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation
2001 S St, NW, Suite 740
Washington, DC 20009
E-mail: mary@vi.org

            
               Jennifer Miller's
Anniversary Extra
            

            Please indulge me as I revisit some of the moments
that have made News Quiz so very special to me over the past year. Sadly,

                  Slate
                offers no soft-focus or RealAudio function, but feel free
to smear a little Vaseline on your monitor and hum an evocative tune to yourself as you reminisce with me.

            

               Strolling on the beach with Alex Balk, Peter Lerangis, and Winter Miller,
picking up sea shells and admiring Alex's superior sand castle building
technique, before Kate Galbraith suddenly appeared and stamped the delicate
structure to bits.

               Sitting quietly in a dark room with Deb Stavin, exchanging favorite
Schopenhauer quotes ("There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be
enjoyed, but to be overcome") until Kate Galbraith flicked on a harsh
fluorescent lamp and blasted the stereo.

               Enduring a tense dinner out with Ananda Gupta, Kate Wing, and Beth
Sherman--a meal marked by painful silences and women running sobbing from the
table every few minutes, and thankfully interrupted by Kate Galbraith calling
the Health Department and having the joint shut down.

               Enjoying this wonderful Web site featuring the extraordinary work of Michael
Wilde, though knowing at any moment Kate Galbraith could hack my gratuitous
plug to smithereens.

            

            Music up, fade to
pink.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Female infanticide.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             War of Wills

            Amid the saturation
coverage of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, the Serbian point of view is nowhere
to be seen. This weekend, while American military and foreign policy officials
made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, the only air time a Serbian spokesman
could get was a brief interview on CNN. It looks as though the media are
helping NATO win the war for American hearts and minds. But the real PR war
isn't about which side is right. It's about which side is choosing the course
of the conflict, and which side is imposing the consequences. And in that war
the American media are helping the Serbs.

            Virtually the first
question posed on every talk show Sunday was the same. "One of the unfortunate
consequences of our bombing seems to have been to unleash a bloodbath, where
the Serbs, military, paramilitary, are storming into Kosovo and driving people
away," Tim Russert declared on Meet the Press . "Some are suggesting that
the first phase of the air campaign has only intensified the alleged ethnic
cleansing, the atrocities being committed in Kosovo," Wolf Blitzer added on
Late Edition . On Face the Nation , Bob Schieffer suggested that
NATO's bombing "has simply backfired."

            American officials disputed these suggestions, but the
underlying damage was done: The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was framed as a
"consequence" of the bombing. This is the opposite of how the United States
envisioned the story: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was the actor, and
NATO was imposing the consequences. It's "an upside-down argument to think that
NATO or we have made this get worse," sputtered U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright when confronted on Face the Nation with the charge
that the bombing had backfired. "Milosevic is the one that is to blame. He is
the one that is making it worse. And what we were trying to do is to make sure
that he pays the heaviest price for what he is doing."

            The bombing can make
Milosevic pay a price, but it can't necessarily break his will. The longer he
holds out at home and escalates the genocide in Kosovo, the more the American
media pronounce the bombing a failure. "Allied Action Fails to Stop Serb
Brutality," says Wednesday's Washington Post front page. The New York
Times raises the possibility that Milosevic's defiance shows the bombing
strategy was "fatally flawed" and adds that "NATO officials here are on the
defensive, insisting day after day that it was not their bombing that sparked
the Serbian attacks or the huge civilian forced exodus from Kosovo."

            The bombing was supposed to force Milosevic to accept a
peace plan that would grant limited autonomy to the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
But Milosevic has shredded the peace plan by fomenting so much hatred between
Serbs and ethnic Albanians that coexistence is impossible. Instead, having
driven the ethnic Albanians from their homes, he's offering to let them
return--and even to remove "some" of his troops from Kosovo--if NATO halts its
bombing first. By framing NATO as the actor and the Serbs as the enforcers of
consequences, Milosevic gets to define the options and their costs. Rather than
play NATO's game--autonomy or bombing--he's creating a new game: ethnic
cleansing or bombing. In the new game, all NATO gets for backing off is what it
had in the first place.

            Milosevic is making
steady progress in turning the game upside down. European NATO leaders have
stopped demanding that he sign the peace plan and have started demanding merely
that he "stop his repression." "We are going to continue the bombing until we
can guarantee that the killings stop and will not restart," NATO
Secretary-General Javier Solana declared Tuesday. The new offer implicitly
emerging from the Europeans is: Stop the cleansing and we'll stop the
bombing.

            Will Milosevic play NATO's game or vice versa? That depends
on which side's will breaks first, which in turn depends on each side's
assessment of the strength of the other's will, which in turn depends on how
the media portray their morale. While the Times editorializes on Page
A28 that "NATO must muster all the air power it can and use it against Mr.
Milosevic's murderous troops," its front-page headline--"On 7 th Day,
Serb Resilience Gives NATO Leaders Pause"--gives him a huge lift. The media
also help Milosevic by playing up cracks within NATO over how far each member
country is willing to pursue the bombing. Knowing the limits of NATO's will
bolsters Milosevic's confidence and helps him dictate the terms of the
game.

            President Clinton did his
best Tuesday to reframe the war in NATO's terms. The ethnic cleansing isn't a
consequence of the bombing but was planned long beforehand, Clinton argued. The
Serbs' terms for ending the bombing are "unacceptable," he added, and NATO is
"united" and "determined to stay with our policy." If Milosevic continues the
cleansing, said Clinton, he will suffer further costs: the devastation of his
military and the loss of Yugoslavian sovereignty over Kosovo. And by
accelerating the bombing, NATO is warning Milosevic that it is willing to match
him escalation for escalation. Eventually, the consequences will become
unbearable to one side or the other. It's a head game. War always is.

            

               For more Kosovo coverage, click .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Message to My Enemies

            There's a well-known online
stock maven who calls himself TokyoMex. Like me, he manages money for clients
and also writes publicly about stocks. As we reported last week in
TheStreet.com, TokyoMex is concerned the Securities and Exchange Commission is
building a case against him for "pump and dump." That means hyping a stock he
owns so the price goes up, and then dumping his shares on the public.

            Unlike me, TokyoMex has
no formal disclosure policy about stocks he is writing about. In other ways--in
my opinion, based on press reports--he is clearly less responsible than I am
about the hazards of writing about small-capitalization stocks, which he can
move. Yet not a single newspaper, magazine, or broadcast entity picked up
TheStreet.com's scoop that the SEC is investigating him. His online following,
judging from press accounts, is much bigger than mine. And my record of giving
good financial guidance, publicly and privately, is better than his. So why the
fuss over me while other portfolio managers write every day about their stock
picks and get no heat?

            Let's establish some things up front. First, there is no
difference between a portfolio manager who recommends stocks in an interview to
a reporter--which is the meat and potatoes of financial journalism--and a
portfolio manager who recommends stocks in a column of his own--which is
considered controversial--except that the second portfolio manager reveals his
holdings while the first one doesn't have to.

            Second, the public would much rather hear from
managers with real money on the line than it would from journalists who are
trying to talk about a market that they are actually forbidden to invest in.
The success of Squawk Box on CNBC--the top-rated business show, which
has real live managers as daily co-hosts--tells us this.

            Third, journalists who
take an oath never to invest can't possibly be as good about the inner workings
of the market as those who do invest. I am in the trenches every day.
Journalists aren't allowed in the trenches. If you think the trenches matter
and, believe me, they matter as much in business as they do in war and in the
NFL, then you want me to write. You aren't going to get it another way.

            On the Net there are hundreds of money managers writing
every day. But in the off-line press there are very few. Why? The heat, the
intense anger felt by the traditional off-line press as we invade their turf,
is searing. One look at the horrible press I get from other business writers
who are not portfolio managers would scare off almost anybody.

            The off-line writers
sincerely want to see me fail. They want to drive a wedge between my partners
and me. They write with glee about my poor year last year--I was up 2 percent
vs. much higher S&P results. What can I say? For 15 years I trounce the
averages and I blow it one year. But I can tell you this: They don't take your
previous years' gains away, and that is where my credibility comes from. I
wasn't the only hedge fund manager who did poorly last year, I was just the
only one who was out front about it, constantly writing about how I blew the
October bottom in an endless series in TheStreet.com.

            The off-line journalists want me to stop writing and
trading. OK, let's say I stop trading. Would I be as good at writing about the
market as I am now? No way. I would just be another journalist scrounging info.
To these folks, the fact that I was editor in chief of my college paper more
than two decades ago might be considered a plus, but the fact that I am
actually doing this stuff is a big minus. Especially because in the third
quarter of 1998 I lost money! Holy cow!!

            OK, then how about if I
stop writing? My wife and kids would like it. My legions of enemies would love
it because it would leave them the playing field to themselves. Ah, but there
is a problem. I don't write for the money, and I don't write for the notoriety,
so giving them up wouldn't hurt. So why not?

            Because I believe that the public needs to know more about
its own money. Because, until recently with online trading, the whole industry
I work in was predicated on the ignorance of the client. The industry wants
people to be kept in the dark so it can charge more for its services. The
journalists who would stop me are complicit with that ignorance and are willing
tools of those that would like the reader to have to rely on those who charge
high commissions or high fees to unknowing, worried consumers of finance. I
want to use my successful background as an insider to change that. In other
words, I write because I think it is right.

            Unless the established business journalist
community wants to repeal my First Amendment rights, they are stuck with me. I
am not going away on my own accord. Ultimately, what I say in my defense is
completely meaningless. If my comments or reports from the trenches are
worthless, nobody will read them and I will disappear from the writing
firmament.

            So then, what's behind
all the brouhaha about my writings? (See Alan Abelson's column in the current Barron's .) I believe
it is because of their popularity that I draw such heat and it is the fear of
the marketplace that drives my journalist opponents to such distorted attacks
against me. They could care less about my ethics.

            
               (Conflict alert: The
editor of Slate is an investor in Cramer's fund. The amount is small for
Cramer but large for the editor of Slate . TheStreet.com competes, to
some extent, with Slate 's sister MSN site MoneyCentral and even, to a
lesser extent, with Slate itself. Etc. Etc. Etc.)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Iran Comes in From the Cold

            The visit to Italy this
week of President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, the first by an Iranian leader to
western Europe since the Islamic revolution of 1979, was a major international
story Wednesday across Europe and the Middle East. In the Saudi daily Asharq
al-Awsat , Amir Taheri, a prominent Iranian newspaper editor under the shah,
now living in exile, urged the West to give cautious support to the reforming
president, while pressing for further changes in Iran's policies. Khatami, he
wrote, is the first Iranian president to have been "elected through a more or
less acceptable process" and a leader who has ended Iran's acts of terrorism in
Europe and its "active campaign against the Middle East peace process." He has
also established an indirect dialogue with Israel and invited French and
British Jewish leaders to visit Tehran.

            In Germany, Die Welt and the Süddeutsche Zeitung of
Munich both saw the visit as a demonstration of the extraordinary progress that
has been made in Iran's relations with the West since Khatami came to power two
years ago. In an op-ed article Wednesday, the Financial Times of London said Khatami's objectives in
Italy were threefold--to win Western endorsement for his reforming efforts, to
foster international acceptance of Iran as a regional power with legitimate
security interests, and to entice urgently needed foreign investment. The
FT claimed that the recent municipal elections backing his reform
program were "the first local elections in over 2,500 years of Persian
history." But Khatami's charm offensive is being impeded by Iran's apparent
attempts to develop nuclear weapons, fueling the drive for more sanctions by
the U.S. Congress. "The nuclear issue and US sanctions on Iran greatly
complicate the Khatami government's efforts to reform the economy," the
newspaper said.

            In Italy, La Stampa dwelt on the
coincidence of Salman Rushdie's arrival in the country, on the same day as
Khatami, to receive an honorary degree from the University of Turin. The Turin
newspaper said that while Rushdie, the object of a fatwa issued 10 years ago by
the Ayatollah Khomeini, still can't be free of the nightmare that some Muslim
fanatic might try to kill him, "it is certain that Iran, whatever it does,
cannot get free of Rushdie."

            The "banana war" between the United States and Europe was
cited in the Pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi as a reason for Arabs not to trust the
United States. In its main editorial Monday, the paper said the British had
particular cause for dismay over the United States' "punishing tariffs" on
their products, because they have given "unquestioning and unhesitating support
for all U.S. policies and actions--even to the extent of exposing their own
citizens and interests to danger, and calling into question their true
commitment to Europe." The paper said, "The British are learning that the
'special relationship' they have spent the last 20 years nurturing with the
United States is worthless when economic interests collide. ... This behooves
us to ask: If the United States treats her most trusted ally, Britain, in such
an ungrateful manner, is she going to treat those Arabs who think they can
befriend her any better?"

            In Paris, Le Monde devoted a full page
Wednesday to the banana war, predicting fiercer trade battles to come on
hormone-treated beef and genetically modified foods, and on the European A3XX
Airbus, which is due to be launched next November in direct competition with
the Boeing 747. Le Monde said the United States was isolated on bananas
and had managed to unite the whole of Europe against it by "maladroitly"
including Scottish cashmere among the European products it has chosen to
penalize.

            But the main story in French papers Wednesday was the
acquittals of former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and one of his Cabinet
colleagues on charges of criminal negligence and manslaughter in the deaths of
hundreds of people who contracted AIDS in the 1980s from transfusions of
contaminated blood. The Paris evening paper France-Soir reflected
widespread outrage at the verdict with a front-page headline saying the dead
had been "mocked." Referring to the late President François Mitterrand's
establishment of a special court to try Fabius et al., the paper said that "no
ordinary accused have ever been treated with such consideration in the annals
of French justice." Special justice means that the strong always triumph, it
added, and to this there was only one solution: "The same court for everyone,
which would be a revolution in our judicial customs."

            In India, the
Hindu of
Madras carried an editorial Wednesday about the rapid growth of crime in
cyberspace. It said that India needed both changes in the law and advanced
technological training for police operatives in order to combat the "nefarious
activity of a well-educated and highly accomplished tribe which is making its
debut in cyberspace." The police, it added, must be kept "in pace with the
galloping pace of high-tech in brilliantly planned and executed operations
which could transform electronic gadgetry into burglar's tools when the
20 th century is in its last gasp."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bombing Kosovo To Save It

            After much previous
controversy, there was surprising unanimity in the western European press
Wednesday over the necessity of a NATO air war against Serbia. There were a few
dissenting voices. In the Times of London, one of its former editors, Simon Jenkins,
wrote in his op-ed column that Western meddling in Kosovo's separatist struggle
"has now brought Nato possibly and Kosovo certainly to a catastrophe." He
asked, "Why does a bloodstained shroud only have to wave over a Balkan village
for otherwise intelligent people to take leave of their senses?" An op-ed
article by David Buchan in the Financial Times of London stressed the threat to NATO's
relationship with Russia, which is "likely to go into the deep freeze." He
concluded, "Over the longer term, the argument with Russia may cast a pall over
further enlargement of Nato--'collateral damage' of the operation against
Serbia before it started."

            But most editorials in
the papers of Britain and other NATO countries were almost unanimous in
supporting the bombing of Serbia. In Britain, the conservative tabloid the
Daily Mail called on NATO "to strike relentlessly and hard"; the
conservative Daily Telegraph said the alliance should "be prepared to conduct an
extended bombing campaign to be followed, as in Bosnia, by the introduction of
ground forces"; and the London Evening
Standard said it was essential for "all the states involved--including
the notoriously short-sighted American administration--to recognise that they
must now commit themselves to the long haul, ground troops and all."

            In the main French papers, the Kosovo crisis ranked second
to the main story of the day--the enforced leave taken because of a
sex-and-money scandal by Judge Roland Dumas as head of the Constitutional
Council, the French equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court. Libération saw this as a
welcome blow to the traditional arrogance of the French ruling class. The Paris
evening paper France-Soir , on the other hand, said Dumas should have
resigned properly instead of taking an "illegal" temporary leave, which
logically nullified all future decisions by the Constitutional Council, "the
essential guarantor of the good functioning of our democracy."

            In Germany, Die Welt said in a front-page
commentary on Kosovo that Europe will overcome its history only when it is able
to preserve peace across the whole continent without the help of Richard
Holbrooke. The paper said that a European summit on security policy and the
coordination of European diplomatic and military structures is overdue.
Melancholy reflections on European weakness and division also dominated the
Italian press. Vittorio Zucconi, Washington correspondent of La Repubblica of Rome,
highlighted President Clinton's remark that 20 th century history is
largely the history of massacres carried out in Europe by Europeans, and said
that Europe is "once again forcing Americans to take up the sword and die for
villages whose names they don't even know."

            In another front-page commentary in La Repubblica ,
Paolo Garimberti said Clinton was "merciless" in drawing attention to the truth
that even now Europe can't curb its extremist regimes without America's help,
and he added that the NATO intervention in Kosovo "dramatically underscores the
inadequacy of the political and military instruments of which the European
Union disposes." On the front page of La Stampa of Turin, commentator Gianni Riotta heralded
the return of the Cold War. "The NATO alliance that won the Cold War against
the Soviet Union without firing a single bullet is now mobilized against the
Serbs whom the Russians often consider brothers of blood, culture, and
religion," he said, adding that Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov would
certainly exploit this situation to strengthen his uncertain power at home.

            In Madrid, an editorial in El Mundo Wednesday took
Primakov to task for justifying Russia's opposition to the bombing of Serbia by
citing the example of Basque separatism in Spain. People aren't bombing Spain
"because the Basque problem hasn't been resolved," he said. This is a "very
crude comparison," the paper commented: The case of the Basque country, with
its advanced political autonomy, has nothing in common with "an open war and
'ethnic cleansing' against 90 percent of a territory."

            An editorial in the
Independent
of London headlined "This war, at least, is silly and unnecessary" referred to
a new trade war between the United States and Europe over the labeling of
American exports of beef from cows that were fed a bovine growth hormone. The
Independent supported Europe's position on this, but an op-ed piece in
the Financial Times strongly supported the United States against Europe
in the "banana war," which, it said, might "do irreparable damage" to the World
Trade Organization.

            The Times of London carried a report from Bonn
Wednesday that the Kosovo Liberation Army is "a Marxist-led force funded by
dubious sources, including drug money." It said the police forces of three
western European countries are separately investigating growing evidence that
some of the KLA's money comes from drug trafficking. "Should the West back a
guerrilla army that appears to be partly financed by organised crime?" the
paper asked. "Could the KLA's need for funds be fuelling the heroin trade
across Europe?"

            In Albania Sunday, the pro-Democratic Party daily
eAlbaniai blamed the Albanian socialist government's alleged involvement
in organized crime for Italy's recent decision to freeze aid to the country.
Despite Italian protests, trafficking in drugs, weapons, and prostitutes
between Albania and southern Italy has increased rather than diminished, the
paper said. "Moreover, an Italian delegation that visited Tirana two months ago
said that the authorities in Rome had evidence proving that high-ranking
officials in the socialist administration were involved," the paper added.

            On the same day, another
Albanian paper, iKoha Jonei , published some impressive statistics about
corruption in the Albanian government. Attributing its facts to a report by the
country's High Audit Commission, the paper said that 43,000 state officials had
been found to have abused their positions for illegal financial gain. The
guilty officials worked for the ministries of public economy and privatization,
defense, justice, employment, and immigration, as well as in the courts and in
regional customs and tax offices, the paper said. It added that, according to
the Ministry of Social Affairs, 57,306 Albanian firms had paid no taxes at all
in 1998. Meanwhile, the independent daily eGazeta Shqiptarei said
Albania might become the first country in the world to be wholly privatized,
because the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have concluded that
its ruined economy could only be revived by the privatization of all its
national assets.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            On With the Show

            One of the pleasures of
working in theater or film is hanging out with actors and sundry showbiz
exhibitionists. True, they tend to have the emotional autonomy of 8-year-olds,
but they're less of a labor to "read" than ordinary mortals: It's their
business--you might say their existential orientation--to communicate their
thoughts and feelings in an engaging fashion every millisecond . I
mention this because the first thing that struck me about the much-hyped
satirical comedy EdTV , which purports to show the effect of TV cameras
brought into the homes of real people, is that almost no one on-screen seems
ever to have met a real (i.e., nonshowbiz) person, let alone to be able to
embody one. The director, Ron Howard, and his screenwriters and actors have
spent much of their lives in the business, and I'd trust them to depict the
anxieties of TV executives and the madness of network board meetings. I'd trust
them to skewer the vanity of models and actors and directors. What I don't
trust is their ability to convey what it's like simply to have a meal with a
loved one or to walk across a street or to wake up from a sound sleep without
the self-consciousness that comes from a constant proximity to media. When they
project their particular self-consciousness onto society as a whole, the upshot
is a sour, self-congratulatory muddle.

            
               EdTV is based
on a 1994 French Canadian film that no one I know has seen called Louis XIX:
King of the Airwaves . (The mock imperial title alone suggests more wit than
the whole of its Hollywood counterpart.) EdTV takes off from the
increasingly less outlandish idea that a cable network might, in the face of
declining ratings, decide to have its cameras traipse around after an
"ordinary" person 24 hours a day--a scenario somewhat different from last
year's The Truman Show , in which the cameras were hidden, the universe
manufactured, and the TV protagonist unwitting. There is already something like
EdTV--albeit with one camera--on the Internet, and the number of auditioners
for MTV's Real World and for a spot on various "trash" talk shows
suggests that the United States has no shortage of exhibitionists who'd love to
be "validated" by TV cameras. (On these terms, Monica Lewinsky is the most
valid human being on the planet.) Under the leadership of a gung-ho producer,
Cynthia Topping (Ellen DeGeneres), the network holds auditions in public places
around the country and comes up with Ed Pekurny (Matthew McConaughey), a
31-year-old San Francisco video store clerk who is cute and unthreatening and
unformed. ("I have a dream, I just don't know what it is yet.")

            The problem with EdTV is that Ed's life looks and
sounds like a tedious sitcom before the TV cameras ever show up. McConaughey's
manner is TV-talk-show bashful. (Is this supposed to be the point? That he's
deformed by television before he's ever on television? I don't think so.) Ed's
rambunctious brother Ray is played by Woody Harrelson, a Cheers veteran,
and his mother by Sally Kirkland, who could never be anything but an actress.
His wheelchair-bound stepdad is Martin Landau, who makes sitcom-style, raunchy
old guy wisecracks. His brother's squeeze--and, later, his own--is Jenna
Elfman, of television's Dharma and Greg . At one point, the door swings
open and there stands Dennis Hopper. "What an inspired touch!" I thought. "A
lazy, ham actor shows up to explain to poor Ed the secrets of Lee Strasberg's
"Method"--how to be "private in public"--just like on Bravo's Inside the
Actors Studio !" It turned out that this wasn't Dennis Hopper, however, but
Dennis Hopper in the role of Ed's long-lost father--and few things can dispel
the illusion of watching real people than a hack actor feigning naturalness via
mannerisms recycled from James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

            Before the movie even gets going (it doesn't seem to
begin for half an hour), it's clear that Howard and his frequent collaborators
Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel are too deep inside the mentality that they're
trying to satirize to come up with anything fresh. EdTV has none of the
edge of such "mockumentaries" as Albert Brooks' Real Life (1980) or
This Is Spinal Tap (1984) or even HBO's The Larry Sanders Show ,
all of which exploit in hilarious fashion the tension between just being and
performing for a camera. Where the filmmakers are most comfortable is back in
the studio, so they throw in Jay Leno, RuPaul, and a panel of repugnant
pundits--Harry Shearer, Michael Moore, George Plimpton, and Arianna
Huffington--to discuss the "Ed phenomenon." Howard and his writers are so in
love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't
feature film critics discussing their movie.

            As it turns out,
EdTV isn't really about the impact of television on ordinary people.
It's about the problems of being famous--like how you can never get any
privacy. In common with The Truman Show , the film eventually evolves
into a melodramatic revolt against a repressive corporate patriarch, here an
executive (Rob Reiner) who doesn't want to turn off the cameras and leave Ed
alone when Ed's life is in a shambles but his ratings are high. ( The Truman
Show took a higher, more metaphorical route; in EdTV , liberation
comes down to exposing the fact that Dad has a penile implant.) Reiner has the
fatted, self-centered TV exec's demeanor down pat, but the movie degrades him
while holding the same attitude toward human beings that he has. As Ed's
unconvincing life runs its increasingly public course, Howard cuts to the folks
at home--a Black Couple, a Gay Couple, an Old Couple, a bunch of Single
Guys--who wince at him cutting his toenails or cheer on his conquests. When
USA Today polls show that The People overwhelmingly prefer a flagrantly
insincere model (Elizabeth Hurley) to the sweet and awkward UPS girl (Elfman)
with whom Ed has found love, you have to ask: Are The People supposed to be
shallow boobs? Or is this just how the world looks from certain Beverly Hills
ZIP codes?

            A more true-to-life--alas--version of EdTV is 20
Dates , a microbudget documentary directed by and starring Myles Berkowitz.
At the beginning of the film, now in wide release, Berkowitz--thirtyish and
divorced and unable to get his directing career off the ground--explains that
he has received a sum of money from a private investor (heard cursing the
director via a hidden tape recorder) to go on 20 dates with 20 attractive women
and thereby capture something unglimpsed in commercial movies about the single
life, the nature of love, etc., etc., ad nauseam. All that is captured, of
course, is Berkowitz's ambition to put himself in your face: He comes out of
20 Dates with a trophy fiancee and a feature film in major release, but
absolutely no insight into dating, love, or human chemistry. The audience,
meanwhile, ends up cringing and squirming on behalf of his dates, some of whom
are appalled to the point of violence and litigation by the revelation of a
hidden camera. (Only two of the 20 had the camera concealed from them--both
sued.) The masochistic fascination of 20 Dates is something that the
makers of EdTV can only dream about, but I wouldn't exactly call it
entertainment; I found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious
heterosexual Jewish men the world over. I also wondered: What about those
women, some of them pretty, bright, and articulate, who admirably recoiled from
this clown when they discovered they were fodder for his Hollywood ambitions?
When they saw Berkowitz on the big screen with a 20 th Century Fox
logo behind him, did they think, "Wow, I really missed the boat on this one. I
should never have let him get away"?

            The best reason for seeing Forces of
Nature --a sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy in
which straight-arrow Ben Affleck is tempted from his imminent nuptials by free
spirit Sandra Bullock and assorted natural disasters--is a scene in which the
heartsick jock ex-boyfriend (David Strickland) of Affleck's fiancee (Maura
Tierney) sings an a cappella version of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds (Take a
Look At Me Now)" into her ear in the middle of a party. The gesture is as
embarrassing for the character as anything in EdTV or 20 Dates ,
but Strickland sings with such quavering soulfulness that the bit lifts up and
floats out of the movie like a weird but beautiful balloon. I was going to
mention this scene anyway, as the picture's highlight; I dwell on it because
word comes that the 28-year-old Strickland, a regular on the sitcom Suddenly
Susan , has been found dead in Las Vegas, apparently having hanged himself.
It's no consolation, but he has left behind an exquisite moment in film.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Was Bob a God?

            Americans--at least those who own stock--have not
only endorsed the infallibility of the markets, they have also endorsed the
infallibility of the people who watch over those markets. Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan was long ago elevated to divinity. And Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin, who announced his resignation today, has joined
Greenspan in the pantheon of Money Gods. (There are no atheists in bull
markets.)

            For the past few years, but especially since rumors
of his departure began circulating this spring, Rubin has been bathing in media
slobber. He has been credited with eliminating the deficit, captaining the U.S.
economy through seven fat years, vanquishing the Asian financial crisis,
transmuting base metals into gold, and generally doing eight impossible things
before breakfast.

            Does Rubin deserve this sanctification? Is there,
in fact, anything wrong with Bob?

            As with Greenspan,
Rubin's godliness rests on a foundation of genuine accomplishment. In 1993,
Rubin was one of several Clinton advisers who urged deficit reduction rather
than economic stimulus. This tightfistedness set the table for the current
boom, leading to low interest rates, job growth, the Wall Street explosion,
etc. Since then, Rubin's cautious advice has helped ensure that the
administration did nothing to screw up the prosperity. Rubin lobbied for NAFTA
and GATT. His friendly relations with Greenspan--a dramatic contrast to the
Bush administration's squabbling with the Fed--has soothed bankers and
investors. His deft manipulation of the debt ceiling during the 1995-96
government shutdown prevented a U.S. default and guaranteed that the political
war between the president and the Republican Congress would not derail the
thriving economy.

            And as a conservative Wall Street veteran in a White House
of Democratic political operatives, Rubin brought market credibility to the
Clinton administration, reassuring the New York money folks that Washington
would not go loopy on them. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of Rubin's
accomplishment may be, perversely, Wall Street's yawn at his resignation. The
Dow dropped more than 200 points on the news, then gained most of it back
within the hour. This is testament to Wall Street's faith that Rubin has been
so successful that the White House won't dare change his pro-market
policies.

            But Rubin's deification
is not simply the result of having done a good job. Who hasn't done a
good job during the past few years? His reputation depends on style as much as
substance. In a Republican administration, Rubin would be another gray suit,
another dull rich guy moonlighting as a politician. But Rubin has been blessed
with a boss and colleagues who make him look good by comparison. Clinton is
emotional, loud, chaotic, horny, and enveloped by Monica sleaze. Rubin is
ascetic, controlled, rational, quiet, and untouched by any of the zillion
Clinton scandals. During Flytrap and since, Rubin's chilliness has been a
welcome adult relief from the childish president.

            In a more democratic Democratic administration, Rubin's
wealth--estimated at $125 million or more--would have made him suspect. But
among the Clintonians, it has burnished him. He seems the Cincinnatus of
Washington: Unlike the political types around him, he has proved himself in
another arena. He doesn't need the power and prestige of Washington and feels
no compulsion to claw his way up. This is rare among D.C. pols. Having been
assigned the role of the Amateur Politician, Rubin seems pure next to the
sleazy pros. (He is not, of course, an amateur. Click for an example.)

            Rubin has another rare
quality. He does not seek press coverage, and when he is covered, he speaks
with blandness in order not to make news. This silence impresses those
who cover him: Compare the media's worshipful treatment of Rubin with its scorn
of publicity-seekers such as Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo or Treasury
Secretary-designate Larry Summers, Rubin's longtime deputy. Rubin's reticence,
as well as his praise of underlings and colleagues, has earned him an enormous,
though not fully deserved, reputation for humility. "This humility stuff is
nonsense," says a former White House colleague of Rubin's. "He does not need to
elbow others out of the way and brag, but it's not because he's humble. It's
because he is totally confident."

            Rubin subtly enhances his own reputation for perfection by
talking frequently about his imperfections. In interviews, he repeatedly
emphasizes the uncertainty of his job. He describes to reporters how he focuses
on weighing and reweighing percentages until he makes the best possible
decision in ambiguous circumstances. This is a fine way to make decisions, as
Rubin has proved, but it is an equally good way to protect your image. If a
decision turns out well, it's because you calculated it would. If it turns out
badly, it's not your fault: You made the most rational choice you could.

            Rubin agnostics will be
glad to learn that there are two weak spots in his record. He arrived in
Washington as a supposed champion of the poor. He was expected to use his
position as head of the National Economic Council and later as treasury
secretary to redirect federal resources toward inner cities and the underclass.
But Rubin's cautiousness has got the better of him. Although he strongly
disagreed with the welfare reform bill, he didn't battle hard to prevent
Clinton from signing it. And instead of lobbying for large-scale anti-poverty
or urban revival programs, Rubin settled for mini-government: small efforts to
prod banks to extend credit in troubled neighborhoods, micro-loan programs to
encourage entrepreneurship among the poor. In Rubin's defense, his stewardship
of the economy has done more to help the poor than any federal grant program
could have.

            The secretary has also been excessively obeisant to Wall
Street. Though Rubin has bucked Wall Street by opposing a capital-gains tax
cut, he comes from Wall Street, and most of his closest friends and advisers
are Wall Streeters, and he generally heeds the street. During the global
financial crisis, Rubin has halfheartedly warned Americans not to invest
cavalierly in weak foreign economies, but anytime foolhardy American investors
have been threatened, Rubin has rushed to save them. During the Asia, Russia,
and Brazil crises, Rubin constructed bailout deals that benefited outside
creditors above all. He insists he was not trying to help Wall Street.
According to Rubin's logic, safeguarding investors in these troubled economies
prevents contagion from spreading. If American investors thought they were
going to lose the billions they had unwisely put in Korea, they might pull out
of Latin America, Eastern Europe, or the rest of Asia.

            But many economists, especially non-Americans,
complain that Rubin has been far too obliging toward his old colleagues and
indifferent to the poor Russians and bankrupted Koreans damaged by his
decisions. (After all, when Wall Streeters say today that the Asia crisis is
"over," what they mean is that American exposure is over. The economies of Asia
are still a mess.) Rubin's relief for Americans has encouraged a "moral
hazard"--an inducement for people to speculate excessively because they know
the United States will rescue them.

            The regulatory capture of Rubin by Wall Street has
not only benefited Wall Street, it has also polished Rubin's reputation. When
Rubin makes decisions that aid Wall Street, analysts and traders reciprocate in
the financial media, telling CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg,
et al., just how wise the good secretary is. Rubin himself probably does not
care about such back scratching, but it is a lesson that heir-apparent Summers,
an eager press hound, has surely absorbed. Be nice to Wall Street, and perhaps
you can be a money god, too.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine, Feb. 28
            

            
               (posted Thursday, Feb.
25, 1999)
            

            A piece argues that Newt
Gingrich serves as both whipping boy and ghost for the dispirited Republican
Party. Gingrich is blamed for the party's sinking popularity, but leaders still
practice his brand of antagonistic, moralistic politicking. ... New
physiological research into fear has found it surprisingly and unfashionably
reminiscent of Freudian notions of the unconscious. Irrational anxiety,
suggests the research, is learned, permanent, involuntary, and inaccessible to
the conscious mind. ... A writer visits rural Utah communities where
polygamy has long been officially outlawed but is quietly tolerated. Now angry
former wives are organizing outreach groups, and vast polygamous clans are
facing charges of pedophilia and sexual abuse.

            

               
                  Time
                
               and

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , March 1
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, Feb.
23, 1999)
            

            The first lady is flirting with a Senate run, and
the newsweeklies flirt right back with cover stories and ample advice.
Newsweek 's ebullient cover story calls Hillary Clinton "the hottest commodity in
American public life," urging her to run because: 1) She has sacrificed enough
of her own ambitions for her husband's career; 2) she's a born policy wonk; and
3) it would strengthen the Clintons' marriage. In a sidebar , George Stephanopoulos dissents: The New York press
will eat her alive, the Senate's a grind ("you won't fly on Air Force One or
ride in escorted motorcades"), and she'd eventually make an even better
presidential candidate. Time 's cover story is more restrained: New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
("makes Ken Starr look like a patsy") would rip her to shreds, and it's not
clear she even wants to run. The White House may be floating the idea simply to
dissipate the last whiffs of the impeachment scandal. Sidebar advice from Geraldine Ferraro and Dick Morris: Wait
for the Illinois race in 2004.

            
               Newsweek

               chronicles Osama bin Laden's evolution from wealthy Saudi
scion to hunted terrorist/Islamic fundamentalist icon. Bin Laden first
formulated his doctrinaire philosophy of jihad at a religious Saudi university,
refined it among American-backed Islamic rebels in Afghanistan in the '80s, and
used an international, Sudan-based terrorist network to launch it in the '90s.
... Is Madeleine Albright a great diplomat or merely a competent one? A
Time article suggests that Kosovo will be a litmus test for the
"Albright Doctrine," which consists of carefully nursed personal relationships
backed up by American military might.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , March 1
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, Feb.
23, 1999)
            

            The world is aging,
frets the cover story . Life expectancy is climbing, fertility is
sliding, and the cost of supporting the elderly could cause a global recession.
The first casualty is Brazil, whose fat public pension program is eating up
government resources. ... A piece suggests that Americans aren't seduced by Republican
offers of a generous federal tax cut. Polls show that Americans are willing to
shun instant gratification to accomplish long-term goals such as repaying the
federal debt or revamping Social Security. ... The magazine reports that Ouija boards are passé; today's teen-age girl
turns to her witch handbook for spiritual advice. One popular version includes
the Bad Bus Driver spell, the Un-Ground Me spell, and the Just-Say-No
spell.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , Feb. 22
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, Feb.
23, 1999)
            

            The cover story asserts
that Dan Quayle is a seasoned, ideologically consistent, genuinely religious
candidate who could restitch the Reagan coalition of economic and social
conservatives. Even his Murphy Brown speech has aged well: "People will
see that her sitcom has been canceled and that he's back on the scene," insists
his pollster. Quayle may be a formidable candidate, but the subsequent article
explains that George W. Bush has already been anointed the inevitable one. His
ideological and geographic support is wide, his fiscal support is deep, and his
kitchen Cabinet is already cooking up policy. ... The author of
California's Proposition 227, which replaced bilingual education with
English-only instruction, insists that immigrant voters will shun feel-good
appeals to diversity and tolerance. Instead, they're attracted by unabashed,
ideologically strict insistence on assimilation through English education.

            
               
                  The
Nation
               
               , March 8
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, Feb.
23, 1999)
            

            An editorial reports what first motivated Hillary Clinton to
consider a bid for office: the possibility that Elizabeth Dole would be on the
Republican ballot in 2000. Reluctant to cede the precious gender gap to the
Republicans, the first lady initially wanted to be Al Gore's running mate.
... A liberal writer fantasizes about the conservative party he'd like
to debate: Unlike the Republican Party, it would be sober, earnestly religious,
and environmentalist. ... A piece argues that the impeachment process was driven by big
business in general and Big Tobacco in particular. Kenneth Starr had
represented the industry while in private practice and was appointed on the
advice of North Carolina's tobacco-indebted Republican senators.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Lethal Weapons

            Tuesday, a week after the Colorado high-school
massacre, President Clinton proposed new gun control legislation and asked
Americans to rethink the issue. "We've got to keep working until people start
thinking about this stuff the same way they think about X-rays and metal
detectors at airports," he declared at a White House ceremony. "We have to
redefine the national community so that we have a shared obligation to save
children's lives." To the gun control advocates in attendance, Clinton pleaded,
"You change the culture, we'll change the laws."

            Clinton's speech was a textbook illustration of how
to use a national trauma to reframe an issue. Congress has opposed gun control
for years. By changing the "culture"--i.e., the way voters "think about"
firearms--Clinton hopes to swing public opinion in favor of gun restrictions.
In the past, he observed, rural Americans have thought of guns in terms of
hunting and the right to bear arms. In the future, Clinton wants Americans to
think of guns in new terms: bombs and kids. His strategy is threefold.

            
               1. 
               Co-opt the "culture"
argument. Opponents of gun control have framed the debate as a choice
between blaming weapons and blaming people who abuse them. "Guns don't kill
people; people kill people," goes the famous slogan. Since conservatives tend
to oppose pornography and divorce as well as gun control, they get a twofer by
attributing tragedies such as the one in Colorado to a degenerating "culture."
Monday, Republicans put out the word that House Speaker Dennis Hastert and
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott were going to kick off a "national dialogue
on youth and culture" to address nongun-related causes of the massacre.

            Clinton tried to neutralize the importance of
culture by acknowledging it. In her opening remarks, Hillary Clinton invoked
prayer and religion and repeatedly charged that the "culture of violence" in
television, movies, music, video games, and the Internet "is having a profound
effect on our children" and "causes more aggression and anti-social behavior."
"We must resolve to do what we can to change that culture," she proposed. Both
Clintons claimed that several of their pet causes and projects were
ameliorating anti-social conduct: V-chips, children's television, Internet
filters, and mental health awareness. By suggesting that the cultural causes of
violence were being sufficiently addressed, they sought to shift attention and
pressure to the remaining factor: guns.

            
               2. 
               Focus on kids. Adults
who can't stand the idea of the government telling them what to do are usually
willing and often eager to have the government impose identical restrictions on
teen-agers. So the Clintons aimed their legislation and rhetoric at kids and
young adults. "Guns and children are two words that should never be put
together in the same sentence," argued Hillary Clinton, who managed to squeeze
off countless criticisms of guns in between her eight invocations of "our
children." President Clinton repeatedly drew applause as he announced proposals
to "raise the legal age of handgun possession from 18 to 21 years" and "prevent
juveniles who commit violent crimes from ever buying a gun."

            
               3. Equate guns with bombs.
Americans love rights and recreation but hate crime and mayhem. The most
important element of Clinton's strategy, therefore, is to get the public to
stop associating guns with hunting and self-protection and to start associating
them with explosives and terrorism instead. "We have a huge hunting and sport
shooting culture in America," Clinton observed. But "I want to make a plea to
everybody who is waiting for the next deer season in my home state to think
about this in terms of what our reasonable obligations to the larger community
of America are. ... Next time you get on an airplane, think about how you'd
feel if the headline in the morning paper right before you got on the airplane
was 'Airport Metal Detectors and X-Ray Machines Abolished as Infringement on
Americans' Constitutional Right To Travel.' ... And right next to it there is
another headline: 'Terrorist Groups Expanding Operations in the United States.'
"

            To fortify this unorthodox analogy, the Clintons
bound guns and bombs together in their legislation and in their analysis on the
Colorado tragedy. While Hillary Clinton preached against juvenile access to
"bomb-making materiel" and decried "the arsenal of guns, rifles, and bombs that
the two young men in Littleton were able to bring into their school," President
Clinton earned another ovation by proposing to "require Brady background checks
on anyone who wants to buy explosives."

            If opponents of gun
control don't recognize soon how the emerging prominence of kids and explosives
is transforming the nation's image of deadly weapons, Clinton may succeed in
reshaping the debate and turning the political tide against guns. Advocates of
gun rights say Clinton is "exploiting this tragedy in Littleton to further his
gun control agenda." Of course he is. They're missing the point. Politicians
don't ban guns. Politicians with persuasive arguments ban guns.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 193: &quot;Whoa, Canada&quot;

            
               The Poitras Report,
recently released in Montreal, describes an inept organization that routinely
broke the law, lacked ethics and professionalism, and embraced a code of
silence that thwarted whistle-blowers. What organization?
            

            

               ( Question courtesy of Matthew Singer.)
               
            

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question
(No. 192)--"Where It's At":
               

               

                  
                     Fill in the blank in Dr. Orville Gilbert Brim's report on a 10
year study funded by the MacArthur Foundation: "On balance, the sense we all
have is that ________ is the best place to be."
                  
               

               "The
MacArthur Foundation."-- Ellen Macleay , Daniel Krause , Jon
Delfin , and Michael Roche
               

               "During
a showing of Message in a Bottle , the lobby."-- Jon
Hotchkiss
               

               
"Starbucks. (Is this a trick question or something?)"-- Cliff Schoenberg
( Larry Amaros had a similar answer.)

               "New
York state. (The study centered on where you are likely to find women starting
new careers after being publicly humiliated by their husbands.)"-- Brooke
Saucier
               

               
"Renaissance Florence. Now would one of those fucking geniuses we keep funding
build us a time machine?!"-- Steve Smith
               

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            One way to judge a grant
program is to count the number of projects that but for that grant would not
have come to fruition. By this measure the MacArthur "genius grants" are a
failure. Awarding much of their money to established academics, the MacArthurs
tend to fund those happy in their work, people who simply continue what they've
been doing for years, but in more stylish clothes. Another way to judge a grant
program is to count the number of summer houses the grant recipients have
bought; by this measure the MacArthurs are a triumph.

            
               AARParific
Answer
            

            Middle age is the best place to be.

            Brim's associates found
the years between 40 and 60 to be a time of well-being for most of the 8,000
Americans they studied, with only 23 percent reporting a midlife crisis. Even
menopause emerged as a less traumatic transition than is usually reported. Dr.
Alice Rossi, who analyzed that data, said, "The Gail Sheehy image of the
menopausal woman with sweat running down her face is just not true."

            
               All Gall's
Extra
            

            One last romp through the
catalog of "America's
largest supplier to public safety professionals." Can you match the trademark
to the product?

            
               Brand
Name
            

            1. RAT TRAP

            2. SUPER STINGER

            3. STREET HAWK

            4. THE ADVANTAGE 1000

            5. MIAMI CLASSIC

            6. ELIMINATOR

            
               Item
            

            A. Gas mask (also available: The Phalanx Alpha
Plus)

            B. Holster (also available: Tornado, Grabber, White
Lightning)

            C. Socks (also available: Professional)

            D. Pocket-sized spikes to flatten car tires at road
blocks (also available: Checkpoint Charlie, MetroSpike)

            E. Flashlight (also available: Wow, TopSpot,
Surefire)

            F. Light bar for patrol
car roof (also available: Excalibur, Vector, Code 3)

            

               Answers
            

            
               1-D,
2-E, 3-F, 4-A, 5-B, 6-C.
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Ten years?!

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of 
               
                  Slate
               

               and will be published at 
               
                  Slate
               
               's
discretion. 
               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its
site in connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Stop Making Sense

            
               New York Times
investigative reporter Jeff Gerth is famous for being a terrible writer. Here,
for example, is a sample from the series that won Gerth a 1998 Pulitzer Prize
for national reporting, announced last week:

            
               The President's decision was valuable to
Ms. Liu because it enabled her company to do more business with American
companies, but it had also been sought by American aerospace corporations,
including Loral Space and Communications and the Hughes Electronics
Corporation, a subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation, seeking to do more
business in China.
            

            That may not seem so bad, until you consider dozens
of such sentences strung together. And take a closer look. Why the "but"?
Something was "valuable to Ms. Liu" but "had also been sought by"
others? "But" suggests a contradiction, but there is nothing contradictory
about the notion that an item valuable to one person would be sought by others
as well. Many investigative reporters are bad writers, and the impenetrable
prose is held to be the price you pay for the dirt they unearth. But this small
example illustrates how bad writing can actually help an investigative reporter
to paper over the holes in his case. He can imply something without saying
so--in this case, that "the President's decision" must have been motivated as a
favor either to this Ms. Liu, a Chinese government agent, or to those
companies.

            Stripped of clutter and
confusion, the gist of Gerth's Pulitzer Prize series was that President Clinton
had helped a campaign contributor to leak important military secrets to
China.

            The longer version (still a lot shorter than Gerth's) is
this: Several U.S. aerospace firms would like to hire the Chinese space agency
to launch satellites for them. They are legally prohibited from doing so
because the U.S. government worries about sharing aerospace technology with
China. But the law also allows the president to waive this rule on a
case-by-case basis if doing so is in the "national interest." Both Presidents
Bush and Clinton have granted these waivers, and by 1998 around 20 launches had
been approved.

            In 1996, a Chinese missile carrying an American
satellite exploded just after takeoff. The satellite's owner, a Manhattan
aerospace firm called Loral, subsequently helped Chinese scientists figure out
what went wrong. In April 1998, Gerth revealed a Pentagon study concluding that
Loral had spilled national security secrets during the 1996 accident review.
The Pentagon's conclusions led the Department of Justice to begin a criminal
investigation.

            But Clinton, Gerth
reported, had dealt the Justice investigation "a serious blow" in February
1998. He had "quietly" permitted Loral to export to China the same technology
supposedly leaked in the 1996 incident. He ignored Justice Department concerns
that approving this technology transfer in 1998 would make it harder to convict
Loral of harming national security by leaking it two years earlier. Gerth also
reported that Loral's chief executive was a generous contributor to the
Democratic National Committee.

            In other words: 1) a Democratic donor helped China,
possibly in violation of the law; 2) this imperiled U.S. national security; but
3) Clinton "quietly" let the donor off the hook. Let's take these claims one by
one.

            First, the claim that
Loral helped China. Gerth says Loral had a "corporate mindset in which the
priority was to fix" the failed Chinese rockets. Gerth makes this sound bad,
even treasonous. But this is an example of useful bad writing that implies more
than it delivers. After all, if you're in the business of launching satellites
from Chinese rockets--with U.S. government approval--it's not unreasonable to
take some interest in making sure the rockets work.

            Furthermore, tucked away in part of the Loral series (a
piece not nominated for the Pulitzer) are the following three facts. 1) The
post-accident report was initiated not by Loral but by its insurers. 2) The
report was released to China by accident: An engineer's secretary faxed it off
before Loral's lawyers vetted it. 3) Loral's lawyers tried in vain to block the
transmission just after it had occurred. The Washington Post , not Gerth,
reported that Loral voluntarily revealed this breach of security to the
government, precipitating the Pentagon investigation. None of this proves that
Loral wasn't disloyal or criminally negligent in its dealings with China. But
it certainly complicates the story, and Gerth either downplayed it or left it
out.

            Second, the claim that
Loral hurt U.S. security. Gerth's prize-winning articles do not mention a CIA
report concluding that U.S. security was not harmed by the 1996 accident
review. The CIA report was revealed in the Washington Post in June 1998,
but even subsequent Gerth pieces make no mention of it. Gerth's original piece
in April said that the Pentagon believed Loral had "significantly improved the
reliability of China's nuclear missiles." By June, Gerth was writing, with a
tinge of desperation, that the Pentagon "did not find grave damage but did
conclude that the United States national security had been harmed." Gerth also
failed to mention that the Pentagon agency reaching this highly qualified
judgment had a long-standing grudge against Clinton. This information is also
courtesy of the Washington Post , which quoted public testimony from a
senior Pentagon analyst that Clinton had "neutered" the agency.

            Third, the claim that Clinton "quietly" approved the second
Loral launch in February 1998. Gerth means to suggest that Clinton was
attempting to hide an out-and-out favor to a political crony. But a subsequent
Gerth article (also not nominated for the Pulitzer) revealed that Clinton
immediately notified Congress of his February decision. Can Gerth really
be serious? Submitting a decision to the U.S. Congress counts as "quietly"?
Moreover, after Gerth's article the White House released a series of documents
detailing the decision. The documents show, as Gerth himself acknowledged in
reporting them, that the State Department and all Clinton's top national
security aides recommended that Clinton approve it. The Washington Post
added that even the Pentagon --Loral's initial accuser!-- recommended
approval.

            Gerth waited until June,
two months after his leadoff article, to mention that Clinton's predecessor,
Bush, had approved all the waiver applications that reached his desk and that
Clinton himself "routinely followed the practice ... signing 10 waivers." Bush
and Clinton allowed launches by the Hughes Electronics Corp., an aerospace firm
also subsequently accused of giving secrets to the Chinese, which backed Bush
in the 1992 campaign. Late in his prize-winning series, Gerth wrote some harsh
things about Hughes, and Hughes' lobbying of Clinton, but he scarcely mentioned
Hughes' Republican connections.

            Gerth's series of articles did illustrate how, under
current campaign finance law, a president is certain to make national security
decisions affecting firms to which he is beholden. If he'd presented it that
way--as an example of the need for campaign finance reform--he would have had a
more honest piece, though one less likely to win a Pulitzer. But what Gerth
alleges, and fails to prove, is the much more glamorous charge that Clinton
short-circuited existing laws to allow a major Democratic donor to sell
ballistic weapons secrets to China. If true, it would probably count as
treason, which is why House Speaker Newt Gingrich briefly considered adding
this charge to the list of impeachable offenses. But Gerth's reporting fell far
short of demonstrating this--a fact that would be obvious if his writing were a
bit better.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Disgust in Canada

            The NATO bombing campaign
against Yugoslavia was declared "a disaster" Wednesday in Toronto's Globe and Mail ,
which could not have condemned it more severely. It has been "an unrelieved disaster
not just for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but for the very people
the bombing was meant to protect," it said. The NATO attacks have brought about
a wave of righteous nationalism as Yugoslavs rallied behind the man that many
of them loathed.

            "Safe in their high-tech
jets and distant command posts, NATO forces have so far escaped without a
single casualty," the paper said. "It is the Albanians--and of course the Serbs
of Yugoslavia too--who are paying the price for the bombing. And what does NATO
plan to do about it? Why, bomb some more, of course." The Globe and Mail
said that NATO's motives had been good--"it wanted to stop Mr. Milosevic,
protect the Albanians and save its own reputation in the bargain. Too many
times, the West has threatened dire consequences and then done nothing. It is
right to feel guilty about acting too late in Bosnia, and not at all in Rwanda.
But true atonement requires sacrifice. In expiating its guilt over past
failures, the West has instead sacrificed the lives of the helpless civilians
of Kosovo. That is unforgivable."

            In interviews published in various European newspapers
Wednesday, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana denied that the NATO attacks
had increased the violence in Kosovo. "No, no," he told Corriere della
Sera of Milan, Italy. "NATO's campaign began specifically to stop the
violence. ... And we are doing everything we can to stop it." Corriere
also carried an interview Wednesday with President Kiro Gilgorov of Macedonia,
who took the same line. Slobodan Milosevic had been planning the "ethnic
cleansing" for months, he said. Gilgorov called for NATO humanitarian aid for
the Kosovar refugees pouring into his country and said the Russians were the
only people in a position to influence Milosevic. The only outcome he ruled out
was a world war. "The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, so whom would a world
war be between?" he asked. "If there is a risk, it is that the conflict will
destabilize other countries."

            In the British liberal
press, which has been strongly supportive of the bombing campaign, the focus
shifted Wednesday to humanitarian aid. The Guardian of London
said in an editorial that aid was now the priority. "The same concentration
of effort and the same plethora of assets lavished on the aerial war against
Serbia must now be applied to the task of housing and caring for the refugees
reeling out of Kosovo," it said. "That no preparations of this kind were made
by the governments dealing with Milosevic or by the alliance military staffs as
they laid their plans, is worse than a pity. It shows how feckless Europe and
America have been in their approach to this crisis, and should at a later time
be the subject of a serious inquiry."

            The Independent of London exposed its bleeding heart by filling
its entire front page with a picture of two families of refugees under the
headline: "This is the reality of the war. Two mothers, five children, seven
days of bombing, 250,000 refugees. And no hope." In an editorial, the
Independent called attention to "the other casualty of the bombs"--"the
co-operation on foreign policy and military matters which the West and the
Russians have developed since the end of the Cold War." It said the West would
have to struggle to reintegrate Russia into international institutions and that
the International Monetary Fund should begin this process by providing Russia
with a generous loan.

            Among the conservative British newspapers, still
regarding the use of ground troops as both desirable and a distinct
possibility, the Times of London said in an editorial that Milosevic's "peace"
offer to Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov had been just "a feint to
split the Alliance" and urged the continuation of the war until Milosevic
capitulated. But Russian newspapers, published Tuesday before the offer was
made and rejected, were enthusiastic about Primakov's attempt at mediation.
Nezavisimaya
Gazeta said the conflict had given Russia an opportunity to be a key
player again on the international stage, while Moskovsky Komsomolets
said that Primakov could not lose out in any event. "If his mission fails, he
will have the full moral right to say, 'I did all I could'; and if he succeeds,
the rewards would be tremendous." The paper went on, "He would not only greatly
increase his international standing, but the achievement of any peace, however
fragile, in the Balkans would slow the deterioration of Russia's political
situation at home."

            Albanian papers
highlighted President Rexhep Meidani's appeal for international help in dealing
with the vast influx of refugees and the establishment of a judicial task force
in Albania to investigate Serb atrocities against the Kosovars. The papers were
full of patriotic breast-beating. Under the headline "We Must Go to Pristina,"
the Democratic Party daily iRilindja Demokratikei called on Albanians to
liberate the Kosovar capital from the "wounded beast" Milosevic. The refugees
must return to Pristina, it added: "We will go to Pristina. There is no other
way."

            In the Middle East, Iraqi writer Abdelamir al-Rakabi warned
in the Pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi that if NATO's airstrikes lead to the
capitulation of Milosevic, Iraq should prepare for an all-out Anglo-American
drive to topple Saddam Hussein. But in the Jordanian daily al-Ra'i ,
Saleh Qallab argued that this fear is misplaced and should not be used as an
excuse for Arabs to oppose the NATO action in the Balkans. Even if NATO has
reasons for attacking Yugoslavia, the fact that one of them is to end the
slaughter of Kosovar Muslims is a good enough reason for Arabs to support it.
"There is no justification whatsoever for constantly invoking the idea that my
enemy's enemy is my friend," Qallab wrote.

            In Israel Wednesday,
Ha'aretz condemned
the Israeli government for refusing to take sides in the Balkan conflict. It
said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon had
made only "vague declarations condemning genocide wherever it may be" and that
Sharon had refrained from mentioning the Serbs, "as though both sides were
massacring each other." Ha'aretz said it understood why some Israelis
felt they owed the Serbs a debt of gratitude for their tenacious opposition to
the Nazis during World War II, but added: "A much-persecuted nation, well
versed in pogroms, cannot stand on the side, watching an institutionalized
process of exterminating civilians based on religion and ethnicity. The Jewish
debt to the Serbs from the time of the Holocaust does not justify Jewish apathy
to the horrors the Serbs are perpetrating on the Albanians."

            

               For more Kosovo coverage, click .
            

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Hold That Martyrdom

            On May 7 the first (and probably last) trial of
Julie Hiatt Steele for lying and obstruction of justice ended with a hung jury.
The low-key coverage of the event reflected several pre-established media
themes: a) Steele is a "peripheral" figure hounded by a vindictive special
prosecutor, Kenneth Starr; b) the Steele trial is a pathetic coda to Flytrap's
now-finished symphony ("Starr's Last Gasps," says Time ); and c) the sole
remaining function of the case is to help determine the credibility of Kathleen
Willey, the Richmond, Va., socialite who accuses President Clinton of crudely
groping her near the Oval Office in 1993.

            All wrong, I'd argue.
What follows is a short primer on the Steele case for those who,
understandably, have been paying more attention to the wars, tornadoes, mass
murders, and nuclear espionage that constitute the rest of the news:

            
               Who is
Steele?
            

            Steele is a former friend of Willey's. The issue is
whether Steele provided the truth to Starr's grand juries about what Willey
told her about Clinton's supposed grope. Steele, it's been alleged, has at
various times offered three different stories:

            Story No. 1: That Willey told Steele of a
presidential pass the very day it occurred, in November 1993--and that
it was a sexual advance that left Willey "humiliated, scared, embarrassed."
Steele told this story to Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff in March 1997
(according to his book Uncovering Clinton ) after Willey had suggested to
Isikoff that he could check out the grope story with Steele.

            Story No. 2: That Willey only told Steele "about
the incident weeks after it happened, saying only that the president had made a
pass at her," not necessarily an unwelcome pass. According to Isikoff, Steele
told this version to him in the summer of 1997, just as he was preparing to
write up the Willey story for Newsweek . Steele at that time said that
Story No. 1 was a lie she had told him at Willey's request. Isikoff reported
both Steele's initial story and Story No. 2 in his first piece on the Willey
episode, published in Newsweek in August 1997. Isikoff has reported that
Steele repeated Story No. 2 to him as recently as early 1998, and at Steele's
trial, two of her friends said she told them something like Story No. 2 before
Isikoff even appeared on the scene.

            Story No. 3: That Willey
"never told [Steele] of any sexual advances made by President Clinton," even
welcome sexual advances, and that the first Steele heard about any such thing
was in 1997 when Willey called her and asked her to lie to Isikoff. Steele took
this position in an affidavit she signed in February 1998, after the Lewinsky
scandal broke. It is the story she told Starr and claims today is the truth.
Steele also denies that in recanting Story No. 1 she confirmed to Isikoff that
Willey had told her about any pass. In effect, Steele says she never
told Story No. 2.

            President Clinton's story, which he repeated under oath to
a grand jury, is that he never made any sort of pass at Willey (i.e., it jibes
with Steele's Story No. 3). Willey, in her Steele trial testimony, stuck to the
story that she told Steele of an unwanted pass the day it happened (Story No.
1), although she said that she only knows she told Steele immediately because
Steele once reminded her of it!

            The prevailing
perception, of course, is that there were only two Steele stories, one
pro-Willey, one anti-Willey. Press accounts--even Isikoff's account in his
book--tend to omit Story No. 2, presumably for simplicity's sake. But Story No.
2 is what makes Starr's prosecution of Steele seem rational.

            
               So why has Starr
pursued Steele?
            

            The basic press take is
that Starr is pursuing Steele to vindicate Willey. That's doubtful. Starr might
like to believe Willey--and Willey's story was bolstered more than undermined
by the testimony at last week's trial. (Click to find out why.) Still, Willey's
story has serious problems, quite apart from Steele, as a recent, endless
analysis in The Nation makes clear. Starr is much more
likely to be interested in Steele herself and in why she changed her story.

            This is where Steele's Story No. 2 becomes important. The
key thing about Story No. 2 is that while it helped clear Clinton of the charge
of making an aggressive, unwanted sexual overture, it still contradicted
the Clinton camp's official line, which was (and is) that there was no
sexual overture at all , not even a welcome one. Story No. 2 was only
semi-exculpatory.

            If Steele really changed
her story a second time, to Story No. 3, that might suggest she was trying to
fall in line with the official White House account, which in turn suggests that
someone from Clinton's side somehow "got" to her. That, at least, is what
Starr's camp seems to believe. Starr's goal--as Bruce Shapiro, in a perceptive
anti-Starr Salon 
               essay , recognizes--is most likely not to vindicate Willey but
to unravel a presidential cover-up conspiracy.

            
How? By convicting Steele of lying and then
getting her to "flip" and finger in the Clinton camp got to her to change her
story to version No. 3. Starr's theory may be a bit florid in its paranoia, but
it's not crazy, given what we already know about current White House
operations. Significantly, the White House could have pressured Steele to
falsely switch to Story No. 3 even if Willey is lying about Clinton's grope,
and even if Willey at some point asked Steele to lie to Isikoff for her.

            
               What makes Starr so
sure Steele lied?
            

            He's got evidence. At the
trial, three friends of Steele's contradicted her account. One said Steele told
him she'd heard Willey's account long before 1997; the other two said she'd
actually told them something like Story No. 2 before 1997. All this is quite
apart from Willey's testimony and Isikoff's reporting.

            
               But Steele's still a
peripheral figure, right?
            

            She is now, but she
wouldn't be if she flipped and finked. Security guard Christoph Meili was an
extremely peripheral figure in the Swiss Holocaust banking scandal until he
blew the whistle on the destruction of bank records. Detective would have been
a peripheral figure in the O.J. Simpson trial if the defense team hadn't made a
big fuss over whether he was or was not telling the truth about his use of a
racial epithet.

             

            Y et Steele had no obvious, sufficient motive for lying
...
            

            Right, but that's the
point. If she did in fact lie, what made her do it? Starr may be wrong in
thinking the reason was intimidation by a Clintonite conspiracy. But there's
only one clear way left for him to try to find out.

            
               At least Steele's a
sympathetic figure?
            

            Steele is a divorced
single mom (and grandmother) who has had to set up a Web site to solicit
money for her "defense fund." On the other hand, her lawyers are representing
her pro bono. And of all the "peripheral" figures in the Lewinsky scandal,
Steele has been among the most industrious at marketing herself. Indeed, Steele
seems to have followed Strout's Law, which summarizes the advice of legendary
journalist Richard Strout to "sell every story three times." Long before she
was threatened with prosecution, Steele sold a photo of Willey to the
National Enquirer for $7,000. (At the same time, she also met with an
Enquirer reporter.) Then she was paid $500 for sitting down with Richard
Gooding of the tabloid Star to see what else she might have to sell.
Then, most surprisingly, after the Lewinsky scandal broke she was paid $5,000
by Time magazine. (Click for more on why Time is .)

             

            B ut didn't Starr threaten to take away Steele's adopted
9-year-old son?
            

            As even Steele-philes
like Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic acknowledge, Starr was trying to
find out whether someone in Clinton's camp might have somehow threatened
to take away Steele's adopted Romanian son, and thereby gotten her to change
her story. So, Starr asked questions about the legality of the adoption.
Whether in asking these questions Starr himself was pressuring Steele--and
whether that constitutes a "vicious attempt to threaten Steele's adoption"
(Shapiro) in "genuine Gestapo fashion" (Al Hunt in the Wall Street
Journal )--is a question the current criminal proceeding will not
answer.

            
               So 
               w
               as the evidence at trial
enough to prove Steele guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
            

            After reading the
transcript, I'd say probably not. But that's because Starr, mindful of Justice
Department guidelines discouraging compelled testimony from journalists, never
even tried to get the testimony of his best potential witness, . Meanwhile,
Steele could not be called by the prosecution, thanks to the Fifth Amendment,
and did not testify in her own defense. (Her lawyers rested their case without
presenting any evidence of their own.) Only a criminal justice system as
sophisticated as ours could hold Steele's trial without hearing testimony from
the two most important witnesses.

             

            
               In other words, Steele
won and Starr lost?
            

            After the jury deadlocked, Steele proclaimed
victory--and victimhood. ("It's time to start my life again," she said.) But
the Steele jury--unlike the jury in the recent trial of Susan McDougal, with
which Steele's trial is often twinned--did not acquit her of any of the
four charges against her. Jurors didn't say which way they were split and vowed
not to talk to reporters (though it came out that one thought Willey's skirt
was too short). Starr could seek to retry the Steele case. He hasn't announced
whether he will.

            Pssst! If you do, call
Isikoff this time!

            F ull 
               disclosure: I worked for
Newsweek in the second half of 1998 and am still listed on the masthead
as a contributing editor. I'm also friends with Isikoff. Steele is suing
Newsweek and Isikoff, claiming Isikoff broke an "off-the-record"
promise. Isikoff denies making any such promise. I suspect Steele's suit is
groundless, but whether it is or is not, it has had the effect of more or less
silencing Newsweek on the subject of Steele. Starr's prosecutors told
the judge at Steele's trial that one of Steele's former friends was ready to
testify that Steele said "the lawsuit was filed to shut [Isikoff] up." The
judge did not allow the testimony.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Firing Blanks

            In
recent days, the National Rifle Association and its allies have argued that
additional gun laws would not have helped avert the April 20 Colorado
high-school massacre, because gun laws already on the books proved useless. Why
propose "more gun laws" since the Colorado killers had broken "17 laws" anyway,
asked House Republican Conference chairman J.C. Watts Jr., R-Okla. Republican
presidential candidate Gary Bauer ("18 gun laws were violated") and Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., ("17 to 19 laws ... We have lots of laws
on the books") echoed this construction. The NRA's latest tally, provided to

                  Slate
                Tuesday, lists 20 laws allegedly violated in the massacre.
But on closer inspection, the list evaporates.

            

               A. Distractions. The first four laws cited by the NRA concern
bombs.

            
               1. Possession of a
"destructive device" (i.e., bomb).
            

            
               2. Manufacturing a
"destructive device" (i.e., bomb).
            

            
               3. Use of an explosive
or incendiary device in the commission of a felony.
            

            
               4.
Setting a device designed to cause an explosion upon being triggered.
            

            What
do bomb laws have to do with gun laws? According to the NRA, nothing.
"Incredibly, we've been asked if we would support an instant check on
explosives purchases," NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre noted with disgust in
a speech at Saturday's NRA convention. "Well, I don't have to tell you, we're
not the National Explosives Association." So, why does the NRA include bomb
laws on its list? To pad the total.

            

               B. 
               Tautologies. Nine other laws on the list
concern the use of guns to commit the massacre.

            
               5. Use of a firearm or
"destructive device" (i.e., bomb) to commit a murder that is prosecutable in a
federal court.
            

            
               6. Possession of a
firearm or "destructive device" (i.e., bomb) in furtherance of a crime of
violence that is prosecutable in a federal court.
            

            
               7. Brandishing a
firearm or "destructive device" (i.e., bomb) in furtherance of a crime of
violence that may be prosecuted in a federal court.
            

            
               8. Discharging a
firearm or "destructive device" (i.e., bomb) in furtherance of a crime of
violence that may be prosecuted in a federal court.
            

            
               9. Conspiracy to
commit a crime of violence prosecutable in federal court.
            

            
               15. Possession of a
firearm on school property.
            

            
               16. Discharge of a
firearm on school property, with a reckless disregard for another's
safety.
            

            
               18. Intentionally
aiming a firearm at another person.
            

            

               19. Displaying a firearm in a public place in a manner calculated to
alarm.
            

            The
salient feature of these nine laws is that the killers violated them
during the massacre, not beforehand. To say that these laws were
violated is merely to say that the massacre happened, i.e., that two kids
walked into a school and brandished, aimed, and discharged firearms in a manner
calculated to alarm people, endanger the safety of others, and further a crime
of violence. It is meaningless to bring up these laws in a discussion of
prevention. Like murder laws, they are designed to prevent a killer's second
crime, not his first.

            

               C. 
               Laws not violated or not known to have been
violated.
            

            
               12. Possession of a
handgun by a person under age 18.
            

            
               13. Providing a
handgun to a person under age 18.
            

            
               14. Licensed dealers
may sell rifles and shotguns only to persons age 18 or over, and handguns to
persons age 21 or over. ... Persons under age 18 are prohibited from possessing
handguns from anyone (dealer or not).
            

            
               17. Possession,
interstate transportation, sale, etc., of a stolen firearm.
            

            

               20. Possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
            

            "It is
not known, however, whether the 17-year-old perpetrator possessed the handgun
used in the crime," concedes the NRA. The other perpetrator was 18 years old.
According to the New York Times , the man who evidently bought the gun
and passed it to the killers was 22 years old, and investigators don't know
whether he "sold, gave or lent the gun or which gunman ... was the recipient."
As for the other three guns, the Times says the 17-year-old
perpetrator's 18-year-old girlfriend "has admitted buying two shotguns and a
rifle for him. But she was not charged because it is legal in Colorado for a
minor to own shotguns and rifles." There is no evidence that any of the guns
was stolen. Also, the NRA concedes that it has only been "suggested that at
least one of the firearms used in the crime had an obliterated serial
number."

            

               D. 
               Duplicates. Two statutes on the list ban
possession of certain kinds of weapons, essentially duplicating other statutes
on the list that ban acquisition of those weapons.

            
               10. Possession of a
short-barreled shotgun.
            

            

               12. Possession of a handgun by a person under age 18.
            

            

               E. Formalities. So the list of relevant laws known to have
been violated boils down to one:

            

               11. Manufacturing a "sawed-off" shotgun.
            

            This
law prohibited the two perpetrators from making a sawed-off shotgun. However,
no law prohibited them from acquiring both a shotgun and a saw. So this law
means nothing.

            Would
the additional laws proposed by President Clinton last week have made any
difference? One of them would prohibit 18- to 20-year-olds from possessing
handguns. If that law had been passed and effectively enforced, it would have
prevented the elder gunman from acquiring the handgun used in the massacre.
Another of Clinton's proposals would hold negligent parents liable for crimes
committed with guns by their kids. This law might or might not have prompted
the parents of the Colorado killers to intervene before the massacre.

            It is
always possible that more gun laws would not have helped. But the NRA's bogus
list proves nothing.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 238: &quot;4-Meta-4&quot;

            
               "The so-called
low-hanging fruit has all been picked."
            

            
               "All of the cards
have fallen the wrong way at the same time."
            

            
               "If all you do is
fix the watch, nobody ever builds a better watch."
            

            
               "Everyone's in
deep yogurt."
            

            
               These four lines
have something in common. What?
            


             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 237)--"Flawed and Tailored":
            

            

               The bombing campaign--15,000 bombs and missiles so far--is working,
says Germany's Gen. Klaus Naumann, NATO's senior military officer. "We will see
how they will feel after a few more weeks and months or what have you of
continuously pounding them into pieces." However, he adds, "We may have one
flaw in our thinking." What?
            

            "What
if they just don't have feelings? (Music swells ...)"-- P. Mattick
            

            "The
Chinese won't tell us how to use any of our really good bombs."-- Beth
Sherman
            

            "Some
of the pieces we pound them into may still be large enough to commit
genocide."-- Greg Diamond ( Al Petrosky had a similar answer.)

            "Oh,
sure, Randy, the war may seem funny now, but what if our killing all those
people inspires a violent video game? What about the children?"-- Chris
Kelly
            

            
"Because when you are up in the woods shooting with kids, you just think, 'Hey,
they like weapons.' OK, that's not really my answer to this question. It's
lawyer Robert L. Ransome's answer to an entirely different question about what
might inspire his client, Mark Manes, to sell a TEC-DC9 to two minors. Still, a
very good answer, isn't it?"-- Jennifer Miller
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            There was much less
resistance to today's Kosovo question than to yesterday's Columbine quiz.
Perhaps because today's has a clear foil, in uniform, speaking German. It
doesn't get any comedier than that. Or because rationalization is worth
observing and mocking. Columbine T-shirts, on the other hand, are a minor
crime; it is unbecoming to chide weeping friends of the deceased for not
reacting in a more stylish way. It is appropriate, of course, to attack
hand-wringing commentators who offer lame explanations for teen violence, and
many of you did--target commentators; not offer lame ... well, you know. (It is
curious how few pundits connected Kosovo and Columbine, two stories displayed
side by side on every front page for weeks--hmmm, where would these kids get
these violent ideas?) One tactical problem emerged in Gen. Naumann's
discussion. Because the bombing is continuing for longer than had been
anticipated, NATO risks running out of targets. This is not a problem for News
Quiz.

            
               The Flawless
Answer
            

            The flaw: Our plan won't
actually work because Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is, like, so
irresponsible. As Gen. Naumann puts it, "This flaw may be that we believe that
no responsible man who is at the helm of a country like Yugoslavia can wish to
run the risk that his entire country will be bombed into rubble before he gives
up."

            
               Either/Or
Extra:
            

            

               "This is absolutely not about buying and selling organs."--Howard Nathan,
adviser to Pennsylvania's governor, refers either to his state's new "Give a
Kidney, Get a Toaster" plan, or to its offer of a $300 death benefit to the
family of any organ donor.

               "We're letting people, particularly kids, personalize their food."--Kenneth
Keller, marketing director for Heinz Ketchup, refers either to biologically
altered chickens born in the shape of letters of the alphabet, or to putting
ketchup on stuff.

               "It's not like they are just sort of randomly whacking away and knocking
off whatever happens to come off."--Geologist Craig Feible refers either to the
NYPD or to the extraordinary skill of ancient stone toolmakers revealed at a
newly discovered site in Kenya.

               "What's frightening to me about such changes is not the specific change,
but the direction they suggest."--Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school
at University of California, Berkeley, refers either to Pamela Anderson's
breast reduction, or to USA Today 's decision to run ads on their front
page.

               "Readers can tell the difference."--Karen Jurgensen, editor of USA
Today , refers either to the previous joke, or to the difference between
news and ads.

               "I don't know how stupid they think we are."--Peter McDonough, spokesman
for New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, refers either to your ability to
make up your own joke, or to Hillary Clinton's thwarting the governor from
shaking hands with newly arriving Kosovo refugees.

               "It's a disease of our time."--TV producer Norman Lear refers either to
shows like Friends or ... well, actually, he does refer to shows like
Friends .

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Goofy Teutonic confidence unwarranted by
history.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bathing Suit vs. Birthday Suit

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               Dear Prudie,
            

            
               Here's the scoop.
Our female boss (she's in her 40s like the 15 guys and gals who work for her)
is installing a new, rather large hot tub at her and her husband's secluded
home. All 15 of us have been invited to a picnic/hot tub grand opening party,
to use her words. She said, "Of course, nobody will be wearing suits, so don't
bother bringing them." We feel pressured to attend and partake in the nude
socializing in and outside the tub. Some of us are completely comfortable,
others are less sure. Your thoughts?
            

            
-- Wondering
            

            Dear Won,

            Do not naked into that hot tub go. Your boss must
have oatmeal cookies for brains as well as a complete lack of judgment.

            It sounds to Prudie as though you are not the only
one feeling uncomfortable with the birthday-suit event. Luckily, you have
options.You and the crew from the office can all agree to bring suits--and so
inform Nature Girl. If you're not all in agreement, which may be the case
because you say, "Some of us are completely comfortable," then you can decline
... either with an explanation or without one. If you totally chicken out about
stating your reservations, there is always the 24-hour flu.

            Prudie assures you there
is no need to feel "pressured." There can be no retaliation for employees who
choose not to socialize in the altogether with their co-workers. As Prudie's
aunt used to say, "The very idea."

            
--Prudie, resolutely

            
               Dear Prudie,
            

            
               My girlfriend is perfect, but ... Ah, it's
always the big but. What's my big but? Fun, smart, beautiful, but my girlfriend
just won't give me any space. If we don't spend seven evenings a week together,
if we don't talk on the phone each day during work, if I want to spend any time
alone, my girlfriend pouts and gets angry, or cries.
            

            
               We have talked about this over and over again
(and almost broke up over it several times), and she is getting better, but ...
I put my foot down and insisted that there are just times I need to be by
myself, and while she accepts that in principle, I often feel on my guard, as
she often gets extremely upset with little provocation if I don't give her
enough attention.
            

            
               Can this hostile
dependency be cured? Can I, should I, even, expect her to change? I hate the
idea that I love her "except for this one thing I want to change," but really,
she is absolutely wonderful. Except that too much of a good thing is still too
much.
            

            

               --
               Sated and Then Stuffed
            

            Dear Sate,

            It is interesting that you write Prudie that your
inamorata is demanding and wants to spend every minute together--which is not
what you want--but that she is "absolutely wonderful." This is like saying the
soufflé is the most delicious one ever, save for the ground glass mixed in.

            Lovers are not reform
schools and you will not get your "perfect ... but" girlfriend to change this
aspect of her personality. This leaves you two choices. You can accept her
possessiveness and kiss time to yourself goodby, or ring off now and preserve
some autonomy. If you choose the first option, Prudie predicts your
hostility will build until you wind up choosing the latter. This woman's
demands suggest an underlying jealousy and immaturity that time will most
likely aggravate. It's your call.

            
--Prudie, honestly

            
               Dear Prudie,
            

            
               I have a very close friend (we were in junior
high together in 1984) who seems to have just dropped out of society. He
doesn't look for work, having been let go from his last job. He rarely washes,
smokes and drinks too much (amongst other similar vices), and spends the time
he's not watching infomercials until 4 a.m., pining over a girl who broke up
with him long ago. He's living off unemployment, and that's going to run out
soon. 
               Oh, did I mention? He's living on my couch.
            

            
               To his credit, he's not hard to live with. He
cleans up after himself, gives me my space, and doesn't eat too much of my
food, and when he does he eventually replaces it. Plus, he's great company.
We've got very similar sense of humor and we have great conversations.
            

            
               I guess what kills
me is that he's a talented, smart, able guy and he's just tossing it away
without a care. He doesn't hit me up for money, but I'm a little worried with
the government funds ending in a month. I've tried hints from subtle to overt
that I don't really approve of what he's doing, but I don't want to kick him
out. Any advice?
            

            

               --Friend in Need
            

            Dear Fren,

            And you are a friend, indeed. You are also clearly
conflicted. Your roommate is an unemployed, unmotivated, slovenly vidiot who
smokes and drinks while being fixated on a long gone girlfriend. He is also
depressed. You find him, however, a good-humored chap who's a great
conversationalist, as well as someone who replenishes the groceries.When you
say he is "tossing it away without a care," you are telling Prudie you would
give anything to redo this guy's thinking. But alas, you can't. We each get a
life to make of it what we will ... and this is what he's doing with his.

            You say you don't want
to kick him out and also mention that his unemployment benefits are soon to
end. Be prepared for this sad fellow to become your ward if you don't insist he
get some mental health help and leave your nest to make a life.

            
--Prudie, realistically

            
               Dear
Prudence,
            

            
               I'm an 18-year-old
student majoring in psychology. I like psych but don't love it. What I really
want to be is a singer, but my parents are against it. I know I'll never be as
happy as a psychologist as I would be as a singer. I have the talent but not
the moral support. I have been tempted many times to run away from home because
my parents are unsupportive of my ambition. I'm embarrassed because I can't
stand up for myself.
            

            

               --Carpe Diem
            

            Dear Carp,

            Prudie, too, is for seizing the diem, so give your
dream a try and go for it. You are only 18, after all, which gives you a few
years to play with.

            Prudie is taking you at your word that you have
talent -- though sometimes even that isn't enough to achieve your goal. But
forget your parents' opposition and trust your instinct. Whether you make it or
not as a singer, you will not have to look back and regret that you never
tried. And P.S.: It is not considered "running away from home" when one is 18.
That is the age, after all, when people go to college or into the military.

            If good fortune strikes,
send Prudie a CD.

            
--Prudie, melodically

            
               Dear Prudie,
            

            
               I think I hate my
job. I must hate my job because I dread getting up every weekday
morning. I have used all my personal days and my sick days, which is making me
feel trapped and frantic. What should I do?
            

            

               --Freaked
            

            Dear Freak,

            You've used up all your
sick days? Well, you could always call in Dead. Then you should quit. Prudie
can imagine nothing more sad-making than to loathe one's job. Use an employment
agency, the want ads, friends, anything, but find a more satisfying way to keep
body and soul together.

            --Prudie, gainfully

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Racist <STRONG><EM>Slate</EM></STRONG>?

            On
March 23, the House of Representatives debated a proposed resolution condemning
the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott has come under fire for addressing. Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. of
Oklahoma pre-empted consideration of the bill by introducing an alternative
resolution denouncing all forms of racism and bigotry without mentioning the
CCC specifically. After Reps. Charles Canaday of Florida and John Coyners of
Michigan criticized the Watts substitute (which failed to get the two-thirds
vote required for passage), Watts answered them from the floor:

            
               ... I would
just say to my friend, the gentleman from Florida, that it is an amazing thing
to me that over the last 4 years when I have been attacked, when I have had
racist comments made about me, my friend from Florida never came to the floor
and spoke up. The gentleman from Michigan, when I have had racist attacks made
against me by people in the white community back in Oklahoma, the State
Democrat Party back in Oklahoma, 
                     Slate
                   magazine,
which is a national magazine, no one ran to the floor to condemn
that.
            

            Bruce Gottlieb of our
Redmond office called Rep. Watts' office to ask what he thought

                  Slate
                had done that constituted a racist attack.
Watts's press secretary Pam Pryor pointed to a "Strange Bedfellow" column that
I wrote in May, 1998, titled "The Football Caucus." Gottlieb then forwarded the
article by e-mail and asked what in it Watts found racist.

            
               From : Pam
Pryor

            
               Sent :
Thursday, March 25, 1999 3:16 PM

            

               To : Bruce Gottlieb

            Bruce, the part in the story that says, "But despite
his go-along, get-along ... (through) if he weren't black," is the part we find
offensive in particular. Doubtful you would have said that about a Black
Democrat.

            And if you did, many
voices would have risen against you ...

            I then replied:

            
               From:
Jacob Weisberg

            
               Sent:
Friday, March 26, 1999 3:45 PM

            

               To: Pam Pryor

            Dear
Ms. Pryor,

            I can understand how Rep. Watts might be annoyed by
my article, and how any number of people might disagree with it for a variety
of reasons. But on what basis did he go onto the floor of the House and call

                  Slate
               , and by implication me, "racist"?

            You cite this passage: "But despite his go-along,
get-along affability, Watts is unlikely to accomplish much in the House. The
problem is that Watts would never be given a leading role in his party if he
weren't black."

            I can only guess at what Rep. Watts might have
found offensive here. The phrase "go-along to get-along" has no racial
implication that I'm aware of. It's a standard description of party loyalty,
applied most often in my experience to white Democrats.

            Next we come to the phrase, "unlikely to to
accomplish much in the House." This is my prediction based on my assessment of
Rep. Watts' record thus far and my opinion of his abilities. I might be wrong
in this forecast. But either way, it's got nothing to do with the fact that
he's black. Indeed, I say nearly the same thing about Rep. Largent elsewhere in
the same article.

            The final sentence in the passage you cite contends
that Rep. Watts has been elevated within the Republican Party in part because
of his race. In other words, I think that affirmative action has played a role
in Rep. Watts' rapid ascent within GOP. Do you actually dispute this? Would you
seriously maintain that Rep. Watts would have been chosen to give the
Republican response to President Clinton immediately after the 1994 election
and to speak at the San Diego Convention in 1996--to name only a few of his
honors and distinctions--if he happened to be white? But again, whether or not
I'm correct in my analysis, there's nothing racist about arguing that a member
of a minority group--whether a Democrat or a Republican--has benefited from a
desire for diversity.

            Supportive of the party line ... not especially
capable ... beneficiary of affirmative action. I most certainly would say any
of these things about a black Democrat to whom they applied. In fact, I did say
them in a column about Alexis Herman a few months earlier. No one accused me of
bigotry. And if someone had, I would have been just as offended as I am
now.

            Unless I'm missing
something here, I really think Rep. Watts owes 
                  Slate
               ,
and me, an apology.

            Yours
sincerely,

            Jacob
Weisberg

            To date, we have received no answer from Rep. Watts
or his office. 's a link to my original article. Readers can make up their own
minds about whether it constitutes a racist attack.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 219: &quot;Not&quot;

            

               The slogan in Maine, promulgated at government expense, is "Not Me, Not
Now." Not what?
            

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 218)--"You Smell Something?":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           "It stinks in God's nostrils, and I
know it stinks in the law's nostrils, and it stinks to me." Who said this about
what?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Noted
attorney and amateur theologian Alan Dershowitz, protesting a parking ticket
with his usual élan."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "New
York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jules Polonetsky, ever vigilant about
Passover gouging, has discovered some fake gefilte fish produced by the Posse
Comitatus."-- Norm Oder
            

            "Fidel
Castro, on the suspiciously effective performance of the Baltimore Orioles'
bullpen."-- Al Petrosky
            

            
"Candor, gossiping about Stench at the recent Abstract Concepts Potluck and
Bingo Night."-- Bill Wasik
            

            "A
dog's highest praise."-- Dale Shuger
            

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Judging by News Quiz
participants--and I do--the two groups likeliest to express nasal disdain are
film critics and political opponents. This is a disturbing ceding of the field
to professionals. It is, for instance, the right of every American to carp
about his boss (I believe that's in the Constitution) and his relatives (the
Bible). But there is a recent reluctance to fire at certain targets unless one
has impressive credentials, a professionalizing of contumely. This is
lamentable and unnecessary. Remember (using Ginkoba if need be) what Johnson
said about literary criticism: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a
bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make
tables." Although as any trained Johnson scholar can tell you, the Great Cham
clearly did not mean you should criticize News Quiz because you're discontent
with the replies selected for Page 1.

            
               Really, Really
Sorry Answer
            

            The Rev. Henry Lyons was describing his theft of the
$250,000 that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith had donated to rebuild
black churches destroyed by fire.

            The weeping minister
spoke in Largo, Fla., as he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison
for swindling more than $4 million from the National Baptist Convention USA,
the country's largest black denomination, while serving as its president. "I
cannot shake the feeling that I have let so many people down," he added. Well,
yeah.

            
               Alma Mater
Extra
            

            In the fierce struggle
for first-class students who can write first-class tuition checks, many
universities have begun advertising. Can you name the schools that used the
following slogans in recent magazine ads?

            

               Slogans
            

            1. Sacrifice Nothing

            2. Sacrifice Nothing for Nobody Nohow

            3. Service, Pride and Excellence

            4. Write ... Explore ... Discover

            5. Dream, Think, Become

            6. Drink, Vomit, Repeat

            7. A True Education Creates a Lifelong Thirst for
More

            8. A True Education Creates a Lifelong Thirst for
More Money

            9. Sorry About the Vietnam War

            10. Now 50 Percent
Whiter

            

               Answers
            

            1. Bennington

            2. Yale*

            3. State University of New York

            4. Sarah Lawrence

            5. College of New Rochelle

            6. Dartmouth*

            7. Iona College

            8. Harvard (Business School)*

            9. Harvard (political science department)*

            10. University of
California*

            *May be
the liquor talking.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            A delightful potpourri with a faint but disturbing
note of disdain for the delightful Shakespeare in Love .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Politics of Port

            "There are some things so
intangible that only culture explains them," a friend said to me many years
ago. It had been a long, wine-filled dinner, and the talk had turned to serious
matters. My friend, an Englishman, was warming to his subject: that the British
love affair with claret--red Bordeaux--was one of the great, and for him
joyous, mysteries of life. Another, he continued, was the Englishman's
proclivity for port. As you can tell, his interests were limited, but he was
making a (vinous) version of an argument that has been given great credence in
intellectual circles of late.

            Culture is hot. By
culture I don't mean Wagner and Abstract Expressionism--they've always been
hot--but rather culture as an explanation for social phenomena. People now use
the concept of national or ethnic culture routinely to answer seemingly complex
questions. Why is the United States economy bursting with growth? It's obvious:
our unique entrepreneurial culture. Why is Russia unable to adapt to
capitalism? Alas, it has a feudal, anti-market culture. Never mind that
American culture was around to witness stagflation, not to mention the Great
Depression. And Japan's and Germany's feudalism seem to have adapted nicely to
capitalism.

            Cultural explanations persist because intellectuals like
them. They make valuable the detailed knowledge of countries' histories, which
intellectuals have in great supply. And they add an air of mystery and
complexity to the study of societies. But beneath them usually lurks something
more simple and straightforward--such as politics.

            Consider claret. The
British drink Bordeaux because for hundreds of years the wines of that region
were given preferential tariff treatment for powerful political reasons. In the
11 th century, when our story begins, the English actually liked and
imported vast quantities of somewhat acidic wines from La Rochelle (now the
Charentes region north of Bordeaux), a sunny and frost-free area, whose wine
exports were aggressively promoted by its ruler, the Duke of Aquitaine. (The
duke's lands included Bordeaux.) The duke died, and in 1152 his daughter,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy. Two years
later, he became Henry II and Eleanor became queen of England. (Their fiery
relationship was memorably replayed by Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn in
The Lion in Winter .)

            Initially, little changed, since Eleanor, like her father,
still favored La Rochelle. But the Bordelais coveted the English market and
worked tirelessly for special favors. Over time, as it always does, the
lobbying worked. Henry's grandson John set up a classic political trade that
would make any K Street consultant proud. In return for support against the
King of France (who knows why, they were always at war in those days), John
would exempt Bordeaux from the principal tax on its exports. The merchants of
La Rochelle miscalculated and did not counteroffer, infuriating King John, who
decided to favor Bordeaux further. The king ordered that all his household
wines would come from Bordeaux--a huge order, since it included the army's
supplies. "What finally decided it against La Rochelle was not the acidity of
its wines, but the disloyalty of its citizens," writes wine historian Hugh
Johnson. Thus was born the special, mystical relationship between England and
Bordeaux.

            As for port, in the
17 th century the naval rivalry between England and Holland, on the
one hand, and Spain and France, on the other, was still intense. In this
diplomatic game, keeping Portugal happy was crucial so that its seaports,
particularly Lisbon, would not become enemy bases. In 1703, England struck a
deal, the Methuen Treaty, which got Portugal to ally itself with England and
Holland against the Catholic powers. Naturally, Portugal got something out of
it--a lowering of import tariffs on its products and some royal patronage. When
war between France and England did break out, the English consumer market
needed substitutes for Bordeaux. Portuguese wines proved cheap and--within a
few years--readily available. Amusingly, the wines that created the English
interest in port were not actually the sweet wines of today but rather normal
table wines. Far from having a natural affinity for port, the English simply
drank it because the Portuguese had already made inroads into the consumer
market.

            The moral of this story is not that taste, let alone
culture, doesn't matter. After all, once the English got hooked on Bordeaux
they stayed with it even after most preferential treatment abated (around
1453). And the Englishman's love of red Bordeaux wines has had massive, global
effects. For one thing, it created the modern Bordeaux wine industry. Whole
swaths of Bordeaux, including much of what is now considered the best wine
country, were cultivated in response to English demand. Also, since the British
were the global superpower and style setters of the 19 th century
world, everybody copied their tastes. That's why today, from Australia to South
Africa to California to Chile, the most expensive wines in the world are made
from the same grape (cabernet sauvignon) and in the same style as red Bordeaux,
down to the shape of the bottle.

            But culture itself can be shaped and changed. Behind
so many cultural attitudes, tastes, and preferences lie the political and
economic forces that shaped them, even in something as intangible as wine and
food. All of which makes me glad that the two great powers that lost out in
this century's power struggles were Germany and Russia, or we might be savoring
the delights of borscht, potatoes, and sauerkraut, washed down by gallons of
vodka!

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Learn Politics While You Drive

            If you want to be a Republican candidate--and who
doesn't, really?--you need "a core set of principles," "a core set of beliefs,"
"a core vision," and "fire in the belly." You must "be true to yourself," "show
that you care," and treat every voter like "a precious soul." And don't forget
to involve yourself with a high-profile cause before you announce your
candidacy--it'll really help your fund raising.

            I know all this because I have spent the past week
listening to Prepare To Win , a program of audiotapes and accompanying
"workbooks" (I'm not kidding) from the Republican National Committee--four
hours, 28 speakers (senators, House members, etc.), and advice on everything
from fund raising to hiring staff to wooing the media. The RNC is distributing
Prepare To Win to hundreds of potential 2000 candidates for Congress,
state legislatures, county commissioner, and other offices. Would-be candidates
are supposed to listen while they sleep, eat, or drive. (Here's RNC Chairman
Jim Nicholson urging Republicans to listen "over and over again" to the tapes.
[.]) It was inevitable that self-improvement culture, which has infected every
other aspect of American life, would eventually contaminate politics. At last
it has.

            Washington, where
members of Congress are all well-coiffed, well-spoken, well-dressed, and
well-prepped, makes it easy to forget that politicians are made, not born. For
every Bill Clinton who springs from his mother's womb wearing a blue suit and
speaking in sound bites, there are scores of awkward, ambitious Rotarians
needing guidance. In days of yore, aspiring pols learned their trade by sitting
in the party clubhouse. But political education has become alarmingly
sophisticated since the late '80s, when Newt Gingrich's GOPAC began mailing
tens of thousands of strategy tapes to Republican activists. Both parties now
offer seminars training candidates how to run. But Prepare To Win marks
the first time either party has tried to educate prospective
candidates.

            Unlike GOPAC's tapes, which mix strategy with red-meat
ideology, Prepare To Win is pure process. It mostly ignores Republican
positions and concentrates on campaign mechanics. Speakers urge you to pay
attention to filing deadlines, hire a lawyer, form a kitchen Cabinet of friends
who can rein you in if the campaign unhinges you, court community leaders and
seek their endorsement before you announce, choreograph your
announcement to maximize media coverage, etc. It's all sensible
enough--especially the presentation of Sen. Susan Collins of Maine--but it's
thunderingly obvious. After a couple of hours, I began to ask myself: How dumb
does the Republican Party think I am? Listen, for example, to New Mexico party
Chairman John Dendahl's leaden account of how to use humor in your campaign.
(.)

            The workbooks exacerbate
this condescending simple-mindedness. The 10 written questions that accompany
each speech are of the sort I haven't seen since sixth-grade reading
comprehension: "How [according to Rep. Jennifer Dunn of Washington] do you
become an Initiator, Innovator, and Leader?" "What did [Rep. Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen of Florida] learn as a girl scout leader?" Answer: Be
prepared.

            At heart, however, Prepare To Win is neither
commonsensical nor condescending. It is deeply--so deeply that the speakers
aren't even aware of it--cynical. The superficial premise is that politics is
about harnessing your beliefs, your honesty, and your caring heart for the
common good. The political veterans dispensing advice genuinely seem to be
preaching idealism. Speaker after speaker insists that your campaign
must be founded on your "core principles" (beliefs, vision, whatever. My
favorite workbook question is: "What are your core principles?" If you have to
ask ...). The tapes overflow with Polonius platitudes: "Be true to yourself";
"People don't care what you know till they know that you care." Sen. Sam
Brownback of Kansas repeatedly insists that you see people as "precious souls,"
not as voters or contributors.

            But it's odd to be
celebrating "precious souls" on a tape series designed to teach candidates
exactly how to wring money from contributors and seduce skeptical
voters . While saying that candidates should be true to themselves, the
speakers spend the bulk of their time detailing how campaigns are artifice and
how candidates must learn to manipulate voters, contributors, images, and
reporters.

            This fundamental cynicism reveals itself in countless small
ways. Here, for example, Georgia party Chairman Rusty Paul instructs how to
make a candidacy announcement "political theater" with the candidate as the
"main actor." (.)

            The otherwise admirable
Sen. Collins counsels listeners to embrace a cause before they become
candidates, but not because the cause itself matters: The cause is a great way
to build a contributor base. Listen to Rep. Dunn as she gives cheerful,
happy-talk advice about how to use anecdotes to show voters that you care about
people and not just policy. Women, she notes, "are much more responsive to a
strong positive message than they are to attacks." Then, in her final sentence,
Dunn offers her real advice: "Leave those attacks for the advertising
campaign." (.)

            
Overwhelmingly, I had the sense that my
Prepare To Win instructors had no idea how cynical they sound. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the presentation of Sen. Kit Bond, a folksy
Missourian. In this clip (), Bond details his fund-raising philosophy. He
proudly describes how, during his first congressional campaign, he refused a
large contribution from someone who wanted him to change his position on an
issue:

            
               At that moment I made the decision that I
am running this campaign. I am not going to be told by any contributor that I
should take a stand they want me to solely because they would give me money for
it. I told 'em, "no thanks." If they want to support me in the objectives I
have outlined, that's fine, but I don't take positions or make votes in
response to offers of contributions.
            

            Bond says this as though recounting some remarkable
achievement. In fact, what his grand principle amounts to is: no vote for cash.
Sen. Bond does not take bribes! Prepare To Win is this passage writ
large. Beneath its pious talk of visions and core beliefs, it is teaching a
lesson about politics that is much shabbier and much more real than the one it
pretends to teach.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Male/Female

            To hear Patricia Clark
read "Male/Female," click .

            He would cut into the
belly
of one, at the kitchen
sink, Mother squabbling
in the background, and he'd be
up to his elbows in silver,
blood shining from the knife,
the room smelling of sweat,
boots, coffee, smoke, and though
I'd been at home,
in bed the whole time, I could
see the Puyallup River, the herons
rising, cattails and redwing
blackbirds with their bottlebrush
shapes and streaks of color,
from shore to shore a thick fog,
but rolling up and off like smoke, a reel
singing as the steelhead ran
with the line, the hurry, the thrash
and splashing, feet stumbling
along the shore to keep up,
to keep the line from getting cut.
Surely this was a victory for them,
Father saying it's a female , then
he's pulled out the whole orange clump
to show my brothers.
Yes , he is saying, we'll use the roe
as our next bait , and How about
Saturday, early? He holds them up
in front of the window, though I was never
actually there to see it, scales smeared
on the faucet, on the hump between
the two sinks, his forearms
all silver and orange on fire. The guts
and severed head lay in a mass on
papertowels. Light glinted thick
through the raised orange
globes. Yes, good thing this was a female.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Full Monica

            At the start of Monica
Lewinsky's great week--the Andrew Morton book, the Barbara Walters interview,
and an interview with British television's Channel 4 (for a reported
$640,000)--the British press is full of her. "Britain will see more of Monica
in March than any other country on the globe," the Independent of London
boasted Monday, saying she would be touring bookshops, TV
stations, and radio studios in a dozen British cities. "With all of us--or all
of us who can still summon the interest--Monica will share the emotional
journey she took when she fell in love with the leader of the free world and
later fell into the cross-hairs of special prosecutor Starr," David Usborne
wrote from New York.

            London's Sunday Mirror started
the ball rolling with an "exclusive" interview with Andrew Golden, who described himself as the person
who introduced Lewinsky to Morton and was "the first journalist ever to talk to
America's most infamous woman--ahead of Barbara Walters, Jon Snow [her Channel
4 interviewer] and even before special prosecutor Kenneth Starr gave her the
go-ahead to tell her side of the story." Lewinsky is quoted as saying, "I'd
like to think I would live on in a book. I like to be able to reach up on my
book shelf for one of Shakespeare's plays and I would like to think that people
will do that with this [Morton's] book." The Sunday Mirror interview was
widely picked up across Europe Monday, with La Stampa of Turin,
Italy--under the headline "Sexgate, the last secret: a green skirt"--focusing
on Lewinsky's account of her first meeting with Clinton at which, according to
her, he admired the skirt but said he would like to see what was underneath it.
She obliged.

            The British celebrity
magazine Hello! ran an interview last week with Monica's father, "the
man who knows her best." Dr. Bernard Lewinsky said, "The entire family has been
stressed to the limits, and Monica feels terrible about it." Asked if Monica
carried a share of the blame for her relationship with President Clinton, he
replied that it had been "a relationship between two adults," but that "it was
totally irresponsible for the president to get involved with Monica to begin
with." He added, "I respect him as a president, but I don't respect him as a
man." Dr. Lewinsky said that Monica's stepmother Barbara had "taught Monica to
knit, which was something that has been extremely helpful" and that he had
never reproached her "or told her that what she did was right or wrong--I just
told her I loved her."

            The Guardian of London reported Monday that Osama bin Laden,
America's most wanted foreigner, has been spirited away from his pursuers with
the connivance of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia. The Taliban "actively
orchestrated" his disappearance, the paper said, and sent him with 10 armed
guards to an abandoned mountain guerrilla base. He was traveling "with about 25
men, including trusted lieutenants who are also wanted for the bombing of US
embassies in Africa, and Amin al-Zahrawy, the leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad,"
the paper added. "The Taliban has deliberately stoked the confusion surrounding
his disappearance earlier this month to protect him when he is at his most
vulnerable." The Guardian said the Taliban has admitted that bin Laden
might still be in Afghanistan.

            The British papers are by
the controversy over allegations of institutionalized racism in the London
police force, made by an independent judicial inquiry into a botched police
investigation into the murder of a young black man. The conservative press is
strongly critical of the proposed solutions to the problem. The Daily
Telegraph said
Saturday in an editorial that some of the report's conclusions "border on the
insane," such as one recommending criminal prosecution of "offences involving
racist language or behavior where such conduct can be proved to have taken
place otherwise than in a public place." The editorial also attacked the
government for adopting numerical targets for the recruitment of ethnic
minorities by the police. "The American experience has shown that voluntary
forms of affirmative action can be beneficial, but once quotas are mandated by
law, they soon become counter-productive," it said.

            According to the Pan-Arabic weekly Al-Mushahid
Assiyasi , prospects for ending the long-running Lockerbie dispute have been
boosted by a complicated deal with Saudi Arabia under which Libya will buy $1.7
billion worth of weapons from South Africa --weapons that the Saudis had been
due to purchase but have now decided not to. In exchange, Saudi Arabia will
work to lift the sanctions that have been in force against Libya since 1992.
The sanctions are due to be "suspended" once the two Libyan citizens suspected
of involvement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a PanAm plane arrive in the
Netherlands to stand trial before a Scottish court.

            According to a report in
the Pan-Arabic al-Quds
al-Arabi Friday, Saudi Arabia is not the only Gulf state to have
shelved arms deals. Editor Abdelbari Atwan reported that all the Gulf states,
hard hit by the collapse of oil prices and blaming Western countries for it,
have taken an unpublicized decision to "freeze" arms purchases so that their
Western suppliers will also feel the pinch.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Listomania
            

            

               
                  Slate
               's readers name the era's silliest books.

            New York University's
journalism department recently bade adieu to the millennium by picking the
20 th century's 100 greatest pieces of
journalism . NYU's ranking of Jonathan Schell's 1982 book The Fate of
the Earth --an overheated and self-edifying prophesy of nuclear disaster--at
No. 59, inspired Michael Kinsley to 
                  Slate
                readers in naming the
century's 100 Silliest Books Taken Seriously (By Serious People).

            Although we received a wide variety of entries,
consensus emerged around these eight books and authors, in this order:

            1. The Greening of America , by Charles
Reich

            2. Earth in the Balance , by Al Gore

            3. The Bell Curve , by Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray

            4. Das Kapital , by Karl Marx

            5. The Population Bomb , by Paul Ehrlich

            6. The End of History , by Francis
Fukuyama

            7. Mein Kampf , by Adolph Hitler

            8. Various works of Ayn
Rand

            What makes a book silly? Some readers selected books that
state the obvious: Bill Gates' The Road Ahead ("Computers will be
important in the future--gosh!" writes Tim Evans). Gore's Earth in the
Balance was accused of both fuzzy thinking and naked political promotion.
Others nominated titles whose silliness was revealed by time, public debunking,
or both. The easy winner--and easy target--in this category is Ehrlich's 1976
The Population Bomb , a neo-Malthusian tract, which predicted a
population explosion that would cause global shortages, raise prices, poison
the environment, and lower life expectancy. Ehrlich's theories lost steam after
he lost a famous 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon, who wagered that any
basket of resources Ehrlich might name would be cheaper at any date in the
future. Nonetheless, Ehrlich's book was treated to a 21 st
anniversary reprinting in 1997.

            Our more aggressive respondents, excited to nail
entire bodies of work in one go, bypassed books and went straight for the
authors themselves. Ayn Rand garnered the most votes for any single author. A
sampling of other targets:

            
               Kathryn Harrison ("I can think of
no other writer I'd rather unilaterally disarm," fumes Adam Mazmanian);

            
               Gore Vidal ("the consummate
pseudo-intellectual who disguises his bilious prejudices as profound insight,"
writes David Greenberg);

            and the entire Michel
Foucault canon ("or should I say oeuvre ?" asks Ken Baker).

            Others took a more literal approach to silliness. "I
suppose Alice in Wonderland is not exactly what you meant," writes
Andrew Solovay. Maybe not, but you illustrate beautifully our point about
interpreting standards.

            Second, what did we mean by seriousness? Some
readers measured it by amount of attention devoted by the chattering classes on
the pages of prestigious periodicals. Reich's The Greening of America --a
celebration of the hippie ethos--debuted around the same time as the New
York Times op-ed page and dominated that forum for weeks. Other answers
interpreted seriousness--well, more seriously, mentioning Das Kapital ,
Mein Kampf , and Mao's Little Red Book for their enormous impacts
relative to their shaky intellectual foundations. Reader Jeff Staiman argues,
"People devoted their lives to [ Das Kapital ], set up national economies
and whole countries based on it. Of course, only a minority believed in it
deeply, but many of them were serious people." He adds, "if any group is more
shrilly serious than the few hard-core socialists I met at Berkeley, I hope
never to meet them."

            Like NYU's list, 
                  Slate
               'slist has only
two discernible effects: It validates already popular opinions (Did you already
think Reich's book deserved a comeuppance? Well, others did too.), and it makes
the authors feel very bad (or in the NYU list's case, very good) about their
work.

            Actually, our list does
provide one more, far more practical, service: It should serve as grave warning
to anyone who is even remotely contemplating writing a book on the fate of the
environment.

            

               --Jodi Kantor
            

            
               More Fellas for
Hillary
            

            Seven days ago,
Chatterbox asked readers who Hillary Clinton should date if she and the
president ever split (""). Chatterbox suggested, among others, Leon Wieseltier
and Robert Torricelli, but his e-mail inbox overflowed with reader picks.
Herewith, a sampler (and please don't send any more!):

            
               Ralph Nader
            

            
               Hugh Grant
            

            
               Thomas Geoghegan (winsome lefty
labor lawyer and author of The Secret Lives of Citizens (click

here to buy the book)

            
               Al D'Amato
            

            
               Jerry Brown
            

            
               Former President Suharto of
Indonesia
            

            
               Antonio Banderas
            

            
               Mohammed al-Fayed
            

            
               Maurice
Templesman
            

            

               --Timothy Noah
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hardball High School

            American satire rarely
comes more winning than Election , an exuberantly caustic comedy that
shows the symbiotic relationship between political go-get-'em-ism and moral
backsliding. That's hardly a new theme, but the director, Alexander Payne
( Citizen Ruth , 1996), has a Preston Sturges-like gift for going against
the grain of his own cynicism, so that the movie fairly drips with irony
without ever losing its raffish energy or its sense of wonder. It feels
miraculously fresh.

            
               Election
unfolds in an Omaha, Neb., high school, where its go-getter, Tracy Flick (Reese
Witherspoon), mounts a tireless run for presidency of the student council.
Flick's name is clearly an hommage to Sammy Glick, the Hollywood hustler
of Budd Schulberg's classic portrait of '30s ambition, What Makes Sammy
Run
               ? Glick was viewed through the eyes of Al Manheim, a jaded
lefty alcoholic who regarded this new species of capitalist human with contempt
but also with awe: Sammy was a force of nature. The Al Manheim of
Election is a teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who watches
Tracy's hand shoot up in class and can't bring himself to call on her. Her
know-it-all persona makes him sick, and without fully realizing what he's
doing, he sets about trying to sabotage her candidacy.

            Some achievers--call them carpe diem -ists--have
talent and passion and deserve to rise, but many are rockets without payloads.
That's Tracy. Friendless, encased in a hothouse terrarium of her own ambition,
she has no goals beyond furthering her own career. At the same time, there's
something maddeningly attractive about her: She's a hot little number. Payne
freezes on her face at its most nauseatingly self-congratulatory, while
McAllister recalls (in voice-over narration) how his fellow teacher and best
friend, Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik), initiated a wildly destructive affair with
her and got himself booted out of the school and his marriage. Tracy grew up
without a father and with a mother (Colleen Camp) whose hobby was writing to
successful women and asking how they did it. In class, her legs cross primly
under her desk while her hand snaps up like a Sieg Heil . When she stamps
out "Tracy Flick for President" buttons on her hand-operated button press, she
sets her big jaw and grits her teeth and bears down as if eliminating her
rivals with every squeeze. The cogs in her brain turn feverishly. Scanning a
rival's nominating petition, she seizes instantly on an unfamiliar name: "Who's
he? I've never heard of him."

            
               Election will
make Witherspoon a star. The actress came into her own three years ago in
Freeway , a B-movie Red Riding Hood story that was a little too campily
self-conscious for its own credibility. But its central section, in which the
runaway trailer-park teen climbs into a car driven by a serial killer (Kiefer
Sutherland), made for a ghoulishly amusing psychodrama, and Witherspoon's
mixture of soulfulness and incorrigibility was enchanting. She's OK playing
victims, as in Cruel Intentions , but she goes into the comic
stratosphere when her characters have a mighty will--when she can use that
steel jaw and laser-light delivery. Announcing that "the weak always try to
sabotage the strong," Tracy instantly sizes up Broderick's McAllister. The two
work magically well together. Broderick provoked a lot of nasty reviews in
Godzilla (1998), but it wasn't his fault that his worried wiseguy act
came to embody everything that was lightweight and fatuously noncommittal about
that awful movie. In Election , he has his first fully rounded grown-up
role, and he's perfect: He makes the teacher's anguish absurdly funny without
caricaturing the pain. Broderick's McAllister is a kid who wakes up one day and
realizes he's grown and has nothing to show for it. Stuck in a sexless and
childless marriage (he retreats to the basement to watch porn tapes) and
presented with a certainty--Tracy's election--he makes the fatal decision to
fight the power. He picks his own candidate, a sweet, injured jock named Paul
Metzler (the delightful Chris Klein), a kid so unlike Tracy that he can't even
bring himself to check off his own name on the ballot.

            E lection is scaled small. Working from a trim novel
by Tom Perrotta, Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor don't squander their resources
on crowds or parades or elaborate spoofs of ceremony, the way most political
satires tend to do. Nor do they feign an understanding of the populace, in this
case a student body that seems uninterested in which of the candidates ends up
getting a job that usually consists of planning the prom. They keep the focus
narrow, on the individuals. But each private act has rippling and tumultuous
public consequences. The geometry of the movie becomes dizzying. When the
girlfriend (Frankie Ingrassia) of Paul's lesbian sister Tammy (Jessica
Campbell) has a bout of homosexual panic and throws herself at the unwitting
jock, the vindictive Tammy jumps into the race as a third candidate, adopting a
nihilist "Who Cares?" platform that nearly sandbags the whole election. And
through some weird transference (displaced lust for Tracy?), McAllister becomes
fixated on Linda Novotny (Delaney Driscoll), the wife of his exiled best
friend. His desperate attempts to bed her make him reckless and seal his doom:
Stung by a wasp outside her window, he staggers into school on Election Day
with his eye as swollen and saggy as Quasimodo's--and morally hunchbacked, to
boot.

            It's difficult not to
overpraise Election : It's perfect. Some will complain that McAllister's
slapstick-tragic lust for Linda shifts the focus too much from the campaign to
the bedroom, but the movie means to be more than a study of electoral
machinations. Unlike Mike Nichols' glib Primary Colors (1998), which
seized every opportunity to take cheap shots at its characters, Payne seizes
every opportunity to give his characters more dimension. When Tracy comes upon
Paul at a table, gathering signatures for his nominating petition, she responds
with cold fury, but she also scrawls her name on his sheet--a complex, defiant,
irreducible gesture. And when she glimpses defeat, her pain is truly
heartbreaking. She curls herself up in her mother's lap and weeps with the
agony of the empty. That's what makes Election so much more insightful
than Primary Colors : Tracy isn't fatted and self-satisfied like Nichols'
version of Clinton. She's insatiable because the hunger to succeed is what
formed her. She has no self to deform.

            I'll try not to eviscerate the laughably dour
eXistenZ , a virtual-reality guessing game of a thriller in which David
Cronenberg, evidently licking his wounds over the calamitous receptions of
Crash (1996), M. Butterfly (1993), and Naked Lunch (1991),
goes back to the terrain he once profitably mined in Scanners (1981) and
Videodrome (1983). Cronenberg's early movies were somber but had
horrific metaphors that ate into the mind, and he showed signs in The
Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988) of actually developing a sense of
humor to complement his paranoid-gynecologist's vision. But eXistenZ is
a return to the lugubrious. It's named for a virtual-reality game that the
characters play with "biopods"--living disk drives that plug into vaginal holes
at the base of people's spines. (The only time Cronenberg seems to be having
fun in the film is when he's exploring these squishy openings.) As the game's
ingenious designer, hunted by militant "realists" who want to stamp out virtual
reality, Jennifer Jason Leigh is just the kind of drudge heroine that
Cronenberg doesn't need. Trying to underact these days, she still can't walk
across a room without looking self-conscious, and the rest of the performances
(by Jude Law, Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Eccleston, and Don McKellar)
are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that
much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write
for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            China Loves America's Bombs

            
According to the South China
Morning Post of Hong Kong Monday, the "minimum requirements" of even
moderates in the Chinese Politburo are that Washington issue a full apology for
the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, pay adequate compensation, and
allow China a bigger role in resolving the Kosovo conflict. But hard-liners,
who include generals of the People's Liberation Army, are calling for an
overall scaling down of U.S.-China relations unless NATO agrees to stop its
offensive against Yugoslavia, the paper said. In a report from Beijing on
emergency weekend meetings of senior Chinese cadres, the paper noted that the
PLA's Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Xiong Guangkai insisted that the embassy
strike had been a deliberate attempt by the United States to trample on Chinese
sovereignty. Noting that the Chinese government has reserved the right to take
"further action," the generals said "they would do their best if that 'action'
contained a military component." Quoting "a Beijing source," the paper said,
"government-organized protests would continue at least through this week." It
also predicted that Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng and Prime Minister
Zhu Rongji will now reverse some of the concessions they granted to U.S. trade
negotiators.

            
According to a report from Beijing Sunday in the Straits Times of
Singapore, China's Liberation Army Daily , the mouthpiece of the PLA, had
been much impressed by America's bombing methods in Yugoslavia before the
embassy strike. Only last week, it urged China to change its defense strategy
so as to master U.S. precision-bombing techniques. In an article published last
week, the Liberation Army Daily said, "We have to use the Kosovo crisis
to raise the alarm, and work towards high-technology warfare, create new
warfare techniques and training methods." The newspaper said Beijing has not
done enough research on long-distance precision missile strikes. The Balkan
crisis will accelerate China's military modernization drive, it said. The
Straits Times said that, because of the Kosovo conflict and the United
States' promise of a new theatre-missile defense system for Taiwan, the PLA is
expected to intensify the development of intermediate or long-range missiles
and military communications technology.

            In an
editorial Monday, China Daily expressed its "stalwart moral support for the
protests that are blazing across the country against the US-directed NATO
atrocity." Insisting that the attack on the embassy was deliberate, the
editorial said it was "too smart to be explained as a 'mistake in target
identification' or a technical error." It asked, "Then what is the reason that
can convincingly explain Nato's provocation? ... Is it because of our country's
persistent opposition to their barbarity?" In its editorial Monday, the South China Morning Post
deplored the "blind arrogance" of NATO in believing it can drive a man like
President Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate through airstrikes alone, and it
said that the orchestrated protests in China are "understandable." But it also
said that claims that the bombing was no accident are "simply ludicrous," since
"Nato stood only to lose by its action." Calling on the United States and NATO
to "undertake a damage-limitation exercise in earnest," it said the most
important thing is for the United States to make "a proper and public apology.
Not words of sadness, but a formal expression of apology."

            The
papers in European NATO countries generally agreed that the bombing of the
Chinese Embassy was the worst thing that could have happened. They widely
credited it with having destroyed all hope for the peace principles agreed in
to Germany last week between the G-8 countries and Russia. There was bitter
mockery, too, of reports that the CIA was using old maps of Belgrade from a
time before the embassy was built. The Times of London published a headline Monday reading
"CIA planners failed to check phone book" and a map with an arrow pointing at
the Russian Embassy and the words "Note to CIA: 32 Deligradska Ulica, Belgrade
11000." Having been the most hawkish in Europe throughout the war, the British
press has started to show small signs of defeatism. On Sunday, for example, the
liberal Observer , which previously supported the bombing as a
prelude to a successful ground campaign, called Sunday for it to be scaled
down, deciding that a land war is no longer a practical possibility. "Without
it, compromise may allow us to achieve most of what we want," it concluded
hopefully.

            But
the Sunday
Times urged "escalating NATO's attacks to maximum pitch, redoubling its
efforts to avoid civilian targets, pushing ahead with plans for the use of land
forces, and keeping the diplomatic pressure on Milosevic to agree to terms." It
even said that "the fact that the embassy bombing has focused the attention of
the UN Security Council may be no bad thing." The Sunday Telegraph also urged
NATO to intensify the war effort, saying that "the problem with NATO's conduct
of the war is not that it is employing too much force. It is that NATO has not
used enough force to persuade the Serbs to behave in accordance with the
minimum of humanity." Accusing NATO's political leaders of pusillanimity, it
said: "NATO's equation seems to be simple: half a million Kosovars are not
worth one NATO pilot."

            The
Daily Telegraph Monday took the same line, criticizing President Clinton
for his "studied ambivalence" during his visit to Europe and saying that it
"suggests that he is still looking for a settlement on the basis of bombing
alone." Describing the attack on the Chinese Embassy as "a crass mistake," the
Telegraph said it made Clinton's aim harder to achieve than before, with
the result that "the air campaign will be prolonged as Kosovo is emptied of
ethnic Albanians and the support of Western public opinion for Alliance action
wanes. In such a quandary does the fear of taking casualties land you." Unlike
the Telegraph and the Times , which seem to have given up hope of
a land invasion, the liberal Guardian said Monday that the Chinese reaction to the embassy
bombing showed that "American interests are intimately bound up with the speedy
resolution of the Kosovo crisis." "Speed cannot now mean more bombs," it said.
"Speedy resolution could denote ... greater willingness by the Americans to act
on the ground."

            In
Paris, Le Monde
warned in an editorial Sunday that because of China's attitude a U.N. force in
Kosovo might no longer even have a NATO "core" if the Russian and Ukrainian
presences in it were too strong. Deploring this prospect, it said the essential
aim of getting the Kosovo refugees back to their homes could only be achieved
if the Kosovars have confidence in the force. "Its composition mustn't seem to
them like a compromise favorable to Belgrade , " Le Monde said, for
"if the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars chased from their land cannot return
there freely to reconstruct their future, the allied forces will have lost the
war."

            In Spain, El Mundo Sunday described
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark as
"total incompetents." And it said that the heads of government who appointed
them "have taken on a grave responsibility by making themselves accomplices of
their imbecilic 'smart bombs,' thus delegitimizing the noble aims with which
this intervention was undertaken." In La Repubblica of Rome Sunday, the paper's founding
editor, Eugenio Scalfari, wrote, "We wanted an 'intelligent' military
intervention, but we have had the stupidest intervention imaginable," and he
proposed that NATO should definitively stop describing its war aims as
"humanitarian" so as to protect itself from ridicule. Scalfari described
Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as "unconscious extremists" who
were militating against peace as effectively as the extremists of Israel and Al
Fatah. "The latter are clear-headed, the former probably unaware, which is
almost worse."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tepid <EM>Tea</EM>

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Tea With Mussolini
                (Universal Pictures). This story
about a group of English and American ladies living in 1930s Florence--sort of
an "Enchanted Fascist April" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment
Weekly )--receives tepid reviews. Surprisingly, Cher is the highlight of the
movie and holds her own among Lily Tomlin, Judi Dench, and a gaggle of other
British actresses: "Cher is terrific here doing what she does best: Wearing
heavy makeup and being flamboyant"(Mike Clark, USA Today ). Aside from
her performance, though, the film isn't much more than "a kind of
sub-Merchant-Ivory mix of eccentric ladies and enchanting scenery" (Roger
Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times ). (Check out this collection of
Cher photos through the ages.)

            

               
                  The Phantom Menace
                (20 th Century Fox).
More negative responses: The critics are resentful about the fact that the film
will rake in money despite their reviews. A few, such as the Chicago
Sun-Times ' Ebert, defend the film: "If it were the first "Star Wars" movie,
'The Phantom Menace' would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. ... How
quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders." The Weekly Standard 's John
Podhoretz also praises the film, saying "it will strike a chord with audiences
for the same reason that its predecessors did: It is earnest, well-meaning, and
delightfully free of irony. ... The jokes in Phantom Menace are broad
and childish in a way that may displease sophisticates but will be endearing to
everyone else." The more high-flown critics are flush with Schadenfreude
at what they see as director George Lucas' fall from glory. Some even take jabs
at the gullibility of eager fans. Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker :
"It is, of course, profoundly gratifying that "The Phantom Menace" should
emerge as a work of almost unrelieved awfulness. It means, for one thing, that
the laugh is on all those dweebs who have spent the last month camped out on
the sidewalks beside movie theatres, waiting for the big day." ( David
Edelstein's take on the film in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Turn of the Century
               , by Kurt Andersen (Random House).
Former New York magazine editor, Spy co-founder, and current
New Yorker writer Kurt Andersen's satire of late-'90s culture wins good
reviews, but many carp about its weaknesses. 1) The irony is laid on too thick:
Andersen is "so arch you could almost drive through him" (Daniel Okrent,
Time ). 2) Turn of the Century is not a novel with a plot so much
as a collection of riffs, observations, and set pieces on subjects such as
Microsoft, Hollywood, and Manhattan power couples. Although it "bristles with
sharply observed detail" (David Gates, Newsweek ), the book runs into
trouble in terms of developing characters and maintaining any sort of pacing or
momentum. (Click to read 
                  Slate
               's "Book Club" about the novel;
click here to read an excerpt [requires free registration].)

            

               
                  Close Range: Wyoming Stories
               , by Annie Proulx
(Scribner). The words "bleak," "harsh," and "tough" show up in almost every
review of Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx's collection of stories set in her
adopted state of Wyoming. The word "powerful" shows up frequently, too.
Cowboys, ranch hands, and the unforgiving nature of life out west are her main
subjects, and by all accounts she handles them with extraordinary skill and
control. The critics can't say enough about her tight, honed prose: She gets
the speech patterns just right ("a stunningly authentic voice," declares
Michael Knight in the Wall Street Journal ), she writes "sentences whose
specific gravity mysteriously exceeds their size" (Walter Kirn, New
York ), and her characters have an "absolute authenticity" (Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt, the New York Times ). (Listen to this CBC interview with Proulx.)

            

               
                  Why We Buy
               , by Paco Underhill (Simon & Schuster).
Critics say this exploration of what factors affect a shopper's behavior within
a store is interesting, but several grouse that at times it reads as if the
"book is really one long advertisement for Envirosell" (Michelle Marchetti,
Sales & Marketing Management ), Underhill's consulting company. If
the subject sounds familiar, it's because The New Yorker reported
Underhill's findings in 1996 (the Wall Street Journal , Paula
Throckmorton Zakaria). Many reviewers are fascinated by the sociological
details of retail shopping--things like the "butt brush factor" (a woman often
won't buy something if another customer accidentally brushes her behind while
she's shopping) or how the positions of signs and chairs in a store affect a
shopper's likelihood of actually purchasing an item. (Click here to read
a chapter.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Music
            

            
               
                  Take Your
Shoes Off
               , by Robert Cray. Great reviews for Memphis soul-blues
singer and guitarist Cray's 11 th album: "A sheer blast of rocking
good times" (Amy Linden, People ). It may not break any new ground, but
it nevertheless impresses the critics--Joe Rosenthal of Rolling Stone
writes that it is "a slow-burning soul record--and one of the most focused
album's of Cray's 25 year career."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Unforgiven

            Seconds after the Senate
voted last Friday not to remove President Clinton from office, network
producers stamped the words "ACQUITTED" and "NOT GUILTY" across the nation's
television screens. "This is a real slap at the House prosecutors," declared
CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer, echoing colleagues on other networks. "CLINTON
ACQUITTED DECISIVELY," announced the New York Times . Sunday's talk show
pundits scavenged the battlefield, pronouncing Republicans the losers.

            Not so fast. Though the
Senate has cast its votes, history's verdict remains in doubt. The spin war
over who was right or wrong doesn't end with Clinton's acquittal. And the early
conventional wisdom--that the GOP has lost the fight--rests on three erroneous
assumptions.

            The first fallacy is that the debate over Clinton's guilt
is an up-or-down question. Actually, it's a spectrum. Pundits, crippled by
short memories, focus on the public's opposition to Clinton's impeachment and
removal. But this was only the last stage of a gradually escalating scandal.
The first question, unresolved until Clinton's Aug. 17 confession, was whether
he had done something immoral. The second question, debated throughout the
Starr investigation and the House Judiciary Committee's inquiry, was whether
Clinton had done something illegal. The third question--whether he had done
something impeachable--didn't come to the fore until the House impeachment
debate and the Senate trial.

            It's true that by the
time the Republicans got to the third stage, they had lost the public. But on
the first question, the polls remain squarely on their side. In a
post-acquittal Los Angeles Times survey, only 24 percent of respondents
say Clinton shares their moral values. Likewise, in a CNN poll, 57 percent
express a negative opinion of him as a person (only 35 percent express a
positive opinion), 59 percent say he has diminished the presidency's stature,
and 54 percent say he would "commit adultery if he knew he could get away with
it." Only 39 percent say the Senate's verdict vindicates Clinton, 53 percent
say it does not. These numbers show how Republicans can rewrite the scandal: by
sliding the debate back across the spectrum to the moral question and
portraying every vote to acquit Clinton as a vote to exonerate him.

            This is why Democrats have scrambled to avoid a fight over
Clinton's morals and to assure the public that he's been sufficiently
castigated. They denounce his conduct at every opportunity. Having failed to
pass a censure resolution Friday, they signed it anyway and put it in the
Congressional Record . They denied that in acquitting Clinton they had
voted to exonerate him morally. They even touted the 45 to 50 Republican votes
to convict Clinton--which they had unanimously opposed--as suitable punishment.
The votes for conviction "confirmed the humiliation of the president," Sen.
Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., observed approvingly. Senate Minority Leader Tom
Daschle, D-S.D., called the verdict "a rebuke" of Clinton and asserted that
"this whole process ... has been a level of punishment that was commensurate
with the failures of the president to act appropriately."

            Several Democratic
senators, assisted by the media, depicted the House prosecutors' failure to win
a majority vote in the Senate as a disgraceful setback for the GOP. This
argument reflects a second fallacy: that the Republicans are out to get Clinton
and that their vindication depends on his repudiation by Congress. In
post-acquittal comments, some Republican senators did try to portray the Senate
as united in its denunciation of the president. "We're going to end up with
two-thirds of the Senate either having voted to convict or to censure," Sen.
Robert Bennett, R-Utah, told ABC. "And that, I think, sends a very strong,
historic message to our children." ABC commentator George Stephanopoulos seized
on Bennett's remark, "It's the first Republican talking point you see: that
two-thirds have voted either to convict or censure."

            But Stephanopoulos is missing half the story. There are two
Republican camps. The pedagogical camp, led by Bennett and Sen. Orrin Hatch,
R-Utah, wants to unite the country in condemnation of Clinton's behavior,
thereby resolving the impeachment issue. The political camp, led by Sen. Phil
Gramm, R-Texas, and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, wants to divide the
country and keep the issue alive for the next election. The pedagogical
Republicans want Clinton punished and repentant. The political Republicans want
him un punished and un repentant, so the public will stay angry at
him and his party. They're not interested in using congressional Democrats to
hurt Clinton. They're interested in using Clinton to hurt congressional
Democrats.

            The political
Republicans' first objective was to kill the censure resolution. They argued,
correctly, that Democrats were using it for "political cover." But the GOP's
decision to kill it for the same reason was no less political. First DeLay
blocked it in the House, then Gramm killed it in the Senate, insisting that
senators render an all-or-nothing verdict. According to the New York
Times , Gramm had warned his Republican colleagues that censure would muddle
the partisan rift over impeachment, making the issue less potent in 2000.
Friday evening, he got what he wanted. In a tone of disbelief, Schieffer told
CBS viewers, "The trial ended without even a verbal reprimand from the
Senate."

            Gramm's allies proclaimed far and wide that Clinton had
escaped untouched. "[It] looks as though, as the Democrats put it, a reckless,
reprehensible, and irresponsible man will remain our president for the next two
years," said DeLay. "He won. He always wins," agreed Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H.
"Children now have the lesson that lying, cheating, and breaking the law are
permissible," moaned Christian Coalition leader Randy Tate. On Meet the
Press , Republican strategist Mary Matalin accused the White House of
"gloating." On This Week , the chief House prosecutor, Henry Hyde,
R-Ill., called Clinton's acquittal another "skirmish in the ongoing culture
war." Former Vice President Dan Quayle signaled his intention to pound Vice
President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign for having defended
Clinton's character.

            Democrats think they're
immune to this attack because they've got both ends of the spectrum covered: On
the removal question, the polls are on Clinton's side, and on the moral
question, on which the polls are against Clinton, Democrats have acknowledged
and condemned his misconduct. This is the third fallacy: Democrats have
overlooked the legal question in the middle. On that question, they have failed
to reconcile themselves to the polls. In a Gallup survey shortly before the
Senate verdict, 73 percent of respondents said Clinton was guilty of perjury. A
post-acquittal CBS poll finds that 78 percent think he's guilty, though only 32
percent think his crimes merited expulsion from office. And in a post-acquittal
Washington Post survey, 48 percent still say Clinton should "face
criminal charges at some point."

            Yet every Democratic senator voted "not guilty" last
Friday. A few have conceded Clinton's guilt on the perjury charge, but the rest
have either denied that the case was proved or have dodged the question by
arguing that either way, the alleged crimes wouldn't merit the president's
removal. And while their censure resolution may immunize them against the
charge of moral indifference, it doesn't protect them from the charge of
indifference to Clinton's apparent lawbreaking. Its language pointedly avoids
accusing him of perjury or obstruction of justice.

            Republicans smell their
opportunity. At their press conference after the Senate verdict, several House
prosecutors interrupted their sermons against "the polls" to point out where
the public agreed with them. "We take great satisfaction ... that [one poll]
showed that 75 or 80 percent of the people ... recognized that the president
had committed falsehoods under oath," said Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa. Rep. Jim
Rogan, R-Calif., cited the same figure. The public, "by 80 percent or more,
believes that he's committed perjury," chimed in Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah.
"The political cleansing that did not happen through the impeachment process"
leaves Clinton "with a great and serious burden."

            Republican strategists will make Democrats carry that
burden into the elections. On Fox News Sunday , when Democratic Party
chairman Roy Romer ritually expressed his "disappointment in [Clinton's]
personal behavior," GOP chairman Jim Nicholson shot back, "I find it
interesting that Roy Romer would say [Democrats] are on the high ground, when
73 percent of the people say his president lied to them, and over half of them
say he obstructed justice." On Face the Nation , political consultant
Ralph Reed went further, calling the scandal Al Gore's "albatross" because "he
acted as an advocate for a president who 73 percent of the American people
believe committed perjury and only 24 percent think is honest and
trustworthy."

            Pundits often say
history is written by the winners. They think this maxim shows how clever and
cynical they are. Actually, it's half of a circular argument, and their failure
to grasp this irony exposes their naiveté. Thirty-five years ago, Barry
Goldwater was a landslide loser. Today he's the father of the conservative
movement. Winners, it turns out, are written by the historians. And the contest
to write the history of Bill Clinton's impeachment is just beginning.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Europe Goes Bananas

            With the Italian government
involved in what Corriere della Sera of Milan last Friday called "the gravest
crisis in relations between Italy and America since the end of the Cold War,"
Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini declared in an interview Monday with the same
paper that "the alliance with the United States and Italy's loyalty to NATO are
not in question." The same point was emphasized in an interview with
La Repubblica
of Rome by Italian Justice Minister Olviero Diliberto, who said that he would
nevertheless go to the United States "as soon as possible" to discuss with
Janet Reno how to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of 20
skiers in the Italian Alps last year when a plane flown by U.S. Marine Capt.
Richard Ashby sliced through cables carrying a gondola and sent it crashing to
the ground.

            National outrage over
Ashby's acquittal last week on charges of involuntary manslaughter encouraged
Communist leader Armando Cossutta to demand the removal of American bases from
Italian soil and generated an internal crisis within Italy's coalition
government, La Repubblica reported. Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema was
caught in cross-fire between the Communists and the Atlantic loyalists, it
said.

            The U.S. Marine court decision provoked an outburst of
anti-American comment in the Italian press that is without parallel in recent
years. As Prime Minister D'Alema left for Washington last Friday to meet
President Clinton, he was warned by Corriere columnist Ennio Caretto not
to be "too diplomatic" because the United States was guilty "almost of an act
of war in our country" and, if Clinton wanted the continued unconditional use
of bases in Italy, he must be told to stop "treating it as a province of his
empire."

            Sunday, after the
Clinton-D'Alema talks, Eugenio Scalfari, the founding editor of La
Repubblica who is now a columnist at the paper, was hardly less harsh. "Any
court that wasn't a Marine court would either have condemned the pilot of the
homicidal plane or would have shifted the focus of the trial onto the
responsibility of his superiors," he wrote. The justice "solemnly promised" by
the United States after the tragedy had been denied, he added, with "the
arrogant contempt that the military of the empire shows toward satellite
countries and their citizens." Scalfari rejected anti-American posturing, but
said that, given the transformation of the situation since the U.S. victory in
the Cold War, there was now an urgent need for a revision of NATO "to construct
an international community in which there would no longer be masters and
servants but free and equal men."

            The death of Stanley Kubrick was big front-page news in
Britain, Italy, and France, but not in Germany. In Britain, perhaps because he
lived there from 1961, hermitlike in his country house north of London, he was
generally saluted as a genius. Even more so in Italy. In Corriere della
Sera , a front-page comment by Tullio Kezich, headlined "Shame on you,
Hollywood," complained that "this undisputed giant of the Seventh Art" won only
one Oscar, and that only for the special effects in 2001: A Space
Odyssey . In La Repubblica , in which his death was the main
front-page lead Monday, Michele Serra compared him to Salman Rushdie, but as a
fugitive from "another kind of fatwa, a typically Western one: condemnation to
fame, photographs and interviews, television and awards ceremonies, juries and
society; because he was, after all, the most famous and celebrated living
author of the most important language of the century, the cinema."

            The "banana war," another source of major tension
between Europe and the United States, rumbled on noisily in the British press,
with the Financial Times leading its front page Monday with a story
saying that, in retaliation for Washington's stance on the matter, Caribbean
countries were threatening to renege on a treaty with the United States to
fight drug trafficking. "The Caribbean Community (Caricom), a 15-member
regional trade group, said at the weekend that its members were reconsidering
the drug control pact and would also not honour several economic treaties
because of Washington's decision to impose sanctions on European imports," the
FT said.

            The liberal Guardian of London said
Monday in an editorial, headlined "US must not go bananas," that only 9 percent
of European Union bananas now came from the Caribbean, compared with over 40
percent from the three giant American corporations--Chiquita, Del Monte, and
Dole. "Free trade has obvious benefits," it went on, "but the rules must take
into account the needs of developing nations and the new world of multinational
companies." Pointing out that "the latest US complaint came within 24 hours of
another big Chiquita donation to the Democratic Party," the Guardian
said it supported the view of the International Institute for Environment and
Development that "trade disputes brought by governments that have received
financial support from likely beneficiaries should be null and void."

            The Daily Telegraph of London led Monday with the looming crisis in the
Northern Ireland peace process as a result of the Irish Republican Army's
failure to make even a token hand over of weapons to allow a new Ulster
executive to be formed. Britain's Daily Express reported that everything now depends on
President Clinton achieving a compromise between Republican and Unionist
leaders at a meeting in the White House next week. In Israel, Ha'aretz led its
front page Monday with a report that Yasser Arafat is to ask Clinton, when they
meet in Washington March 23, to give formal support to the Palestinian right to
establish an independent state. "Arafat's meetings with Clinton without
parallel invitations to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu are viewed
in Israel as an international affront to Netanyahu during an election period
and as encouraging Arafat's promised declaration of independence,"
Ha'aretz said.

            By the time Monica
Lewinsky arrived in Britain Sunday to begin an 18 city book signing tour, the
British press seemed to have exhausted its interest in her. After massive
coverage last week, her arrival was peremptorily reported, but interest will
doubtless build up during the week. In London's Evening
Standard last Friday, firebrand columnist Julie Burchill called
Lewinsky a saint and a sister. "The sweet, sly, man-pleasing sister of all of
us who don't know whether to hit or hug, who gives herself in a heartbeat to
the wrong men for all the right reasons," Burchill wrote. "Let's love her while
she's here, and be thankful that she never took that swallow dive off the roof,
for truly she has added to the gaiety of nations as no-one ever will
again."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            France in the Doghouse

            France has been barred from
some of NATO's top-secret military plans because the United States fears they
will be passed on to the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic,
the Daily Telegraph reported Friday from Washington, quoting "a senior
Western military source." The source said, "Washington has started cutting
Paris out of the loop on some operations because of the worry of information
being handed either to the Serbs direct or indirectly through the Russians." In
an editorial headlined "Send in the troops," the
Telegraph said that, with an impetus building to NATO's advantage, the
alliance "should seize this moment to announce a new goal and new means to
achieve it. The first is the independence of Kosovo; the second is the
commitment of ground forces, a move that senior military leaders consider
essential to success."

            The deployment of ground
troops has been gathering ever-greater support in the British press since it
became clear that the bombing is strengthening rather than weakening
Milosevic's resolve to complete the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. A majority of
papers, both conservative and liberal, have now come out in favor of it, with
one important exception: Rupert Murdoch's tabloid Sun , Britain's
largest-circulation paper. While the upscale Murdoch papers the Times and the
Sunday
Times now support ground intervention, the Sun backs Prime
Minister Tony Blair in his promise not to send in British troops. While it
bursts with aggression against Milosevic--"Clobba Slobba" being its rallying
cry--the Sun threatened Monday to withdraw its support for Blair if he
changed his mind. "Don't Send Our Troops off To Die" was its front-page
headline.

            The weightiest British opponent of the war remains the
Times ' op-ed columnist Simon Jenkins, who, writing from the United
States Friday, said that "the misreading of Mr Milosevic by Nato deserves to
rank with Gallipoli and Pearl Harbor in the annals of military incompetence."
He wrote, "It is grimly intriguing that the American pro-war lobby is made up
of mostly younger people who do not remember (or have forgotten) the Vietnam
escalation. The issue, once again, is not the plausibility of the operation but
the esteem of Uncle Sam and confidence in America's military omnipotence. As
for whether a Kosovan war will be anything but an American one, you can hear,
read and talk about this subject from dawn to dusk and not hear a word about
British involvement--beyond the complaint that 'America is having to rescue
Europe from another of its messes.' "

            French papers Friday
contained reports from Kosovo by a group of French journalists who spent time
with combatants of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Le Figaro reported that the
KLA claims to control "just about 40 percent of Kosovo" and to be in close
contact with NATO forces, from which it could call in air support at any time.
It quoted Capt. Florin Kulaj, commander of the KLA's 850-strong
136 th Brigade, as saying that he had identified ground targets for
NATO attacks, such as a bridge used by Serb forces, which had been bombed on
Wednesday. But Capt. Kulaj also admitted that the KLA was surrounded by Serb
troops and short of weapons. "New recruits hardly get one Kalashnikov between
two of them," he said. "We don't ask the West to send ground troops. If our men
are given the means to fight, we will be able to defend the civilian population
of Kosovo." But Libération reported from Washington that the United States is
still reluctant to arm the KLA because it doubts its democratic
credentials.

            According to Le Monde Friday, most of the Russian media are "deaf and
blind" to the Kosovo refugee crisis. "After two weeks of conflict, most
newspapers continue to see it only as a showdown between NATO, confused with
the United States and considered the 'aggressor,' and the regime of Slobodan
Milosevic, 'president of Yugoslavia,' " it reported. "Accordingly, not a single
newspaper has devoted a front-page story, or even a headline, to the exodus of
hundreds of thousands of [ethnic] Albanians from Kosovo." Russian press
comments from the past week, selected by Le Monde 's Moscow
correspondent, included the following: Vremia said, "The horrible
descriptions of massacres of Albanian Kosovars in the West are wrong and
exaggerated"; New Izvestiya offered, "While the president of the Unites
States plays golf, tens of thousands of innocent people are fleeing from the
hell unleashed by NATO airplanes"; and Nezavissimaya Gazeta said that
NATO was conducting "barbaric bombardments ... under the false pretext of a
humanitarian catastrophe."

            While Le Figaro
in a front-page editorial said that the tide is now turning in NATO's favor and
marveled at the "astonishing unity" of the alliance so far, Milan's Corriere della
Sera berated Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema for condoning open
revolt against the war within his coalition government. Noting that Communist
Party leader Armando Cossutta was seeking a meeting with Milosevic and that
another coalition party was calling on the government to distance itself from
NATO "while Italy is at war and its airmen running the risk of being shot
down," Sergio Romano wrote in a front-page comment, "I have tried to find a
precedent that would allow me to justify these initiatives and the prime
minister's silence, but I cannot find one."

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 224: &quot;Spring Break&quot;

            

               Back in Washington after the two-week congressional recess, Trent Lott
answered a reporter this way: "I would describe it one word--quizzical. Like,
why? And what?" How did Sen. Lott spend his vacation?
            

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 223)--"You Who?":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    
                                       
                                          
"I'm on top, I'm 35 years old, I don't want to get hurt anymore, and I've got
nothing left to prove." Who said this about
what?
                                       
                                    
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Drew
Barrymore's liver."-- Adam Bonin
            

            
"Katharine Hepburn, turning down the lead in yet another remake of
Gloria ."-- Cliff Schoenberg
            

            "George
Stephanopoulos, on his publisher's insistence that for the next book he use a
ghostwriter and, for the media tour, lose the rug."-- Barbara Lippert
( Marilyn L , Bill Burton , and Mary Anne Townsend had
similar answers.)

            "Every
single one of the guys who broke up with me last year."-- Alison
Rogers
            

            "Julie
Krone, telling Bill Clinton why she's going to kill him."-- Richard A
DeCamp
            

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Let's take a rare glimpse
inside the News Quiz Tower (it's not yet killed as many people as that new
Condé Nast Building, but next week we start heaving copies of Vogue off
the observation deck) and learn what it takes to get a hefty 400-pound hog from
the farm to your table to the president's desk where it is signed into law. By
which I mean: How did we select today's question? By rejecting these three:

            1. "Fill in the blank in
this remark by Susan Webber Wright, the first judge to hold a U.S. president in
contempt of court. 'I don't think a judge should be __________. My focus is to
be fair to all sides.' "

            A good way to get at an
important story, but nixed on formal grounds. We ran a fill-in-the-blank just
last week. We try for variety in form as well as in subject matter.

            2. "Texas Rep. Charlie
Gonzalez said, 'You've seen someone else handle it up close and personal, so
you know you can survive it. It's not so foreign to you.' Handle what?"

            A nice ambiguous remark
that participants would do well with, but it refers to too trivial a story,
children of former officials--Bush/Dodd/Kennedy--going into the family
business.

            3. "The Leonardo DiCaprio
film The Basketball Diaries , the computer game Mortal Combat, and the
Internet sex site Meow Media--what's the connection?"

            A pleasing juxtaposition
of elements, and it's sure fun to type out "sex site Meow Media," but rejected
for both form and content. We've used this structure recently, and it's a
lightweight story.

            I began hoping to do
something with either the war or the president's contempt citation, and eager
to use "I give the headline; you give the lead," or "I give the answer; you
give the question," or "I give the caption; you describe the photo," three nice
forms we've not used lately. But nothing turned up that worked that way. I'm
relieved that Trent Lott's back in town.

            
               100-Pound
Answer
            

            Jockey Julie Krone said it about retiring.

            In her 18-year career,
Krone won 3,541 races, earned over $80 million in prize money, and broke more
than a dozen bones. In 1993, she won the Belmont Stakes and rode five winners
in one day at Saratoga. Last November, at the Meadowlands, she broke her right
knee riding a winner; she won two more races before going to the hospital.

            
               Have Another
Candied Egret, Your Grace, It's for Charity Extra
            

            The "Benefits" column in
Sunday's New York Times listed more than two dozen events coming up this
week. A few highlights:

            
               Event
               : Sting is
among those singing a tribute to Sinatra.

            
               Tickets
               :
$2,000.

            
               Beneficiary: The rain forest.

            

               Downside: Sting is singing tribute to Sinatra.

            
               Event: Young professionals throw
Cinco de Mayo party.

            
               Tickets: $75.

            
               Beneficiary: Leukemia Society.

            

               Downside: Open bar means hundreds of young professionals
gooned on margaritas and their own benevolence.

            
               Event: MC Charlie Rose honors
Cardinal O'Connor.

            
               Tickets: $1,000.

            
               Beneficiary: Museum of Jewish
Heritage.

            

               Downside: Chance that O'Connor could stop by Cinco de Mayo
party on way over, get tanked on margaritas, make crude pass at Charlie
Rose.

            
               Event: Steve Martin and others read
from their own stuff, honor Rupert Murdoch.

            
               Tickets: $500.

            
               Beneficiary: Adult literacy
programs.

            

               Downside: Could be the night God's wrath descends on Rupert
Murdoch, killing hundreds of literacy volunteers in corollary damage from
lightning strike.

            
               Event: One hundred restaurants
including Four Seasons and Nobu, hold Sunday Night Supper.

            
               Tickets: Free! A percentage of each
bill goes to charity.

            
               Beneficiary: Groups that provide
meals to the homebound.

            

               Downside: Overt use of phrase "crumbs from rich man's table"
could cause scores of diners to die of embarrassment.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Andre Agassi, Brooke Shields, George Stephanopoulos,
and that darned beaver. There's your wacky sitcom, Mr. Bigshot development
jerk.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Lord, What Fools

            You need to labor mightily to mess up A
Midsummer Night's Dream , which is the only one of Shakespeare's
masterpieces to be virtually production-proof. It is the most magical of
bedroom farces--the ur-bedroom farce, so vast in scope that a bedroom can't
contain it. Its boudoir is an entire forest, symbolizing Nature itself, where
mortals and fairies, regals and bumpkins, make love and war, where passion
becomes arbitrary and paramours interchangeable; and its last act is a
riotously bungled tragedy-within-a-comedy (a celebratory performance by a
troupe of "rude mechanicals") that's an ironic comment on the trivial pursuits
that have preceded it.

            I've seen Midsummer in a dozen
productions--with adolescents at a drama camp, with high-school students, with
Meryl Streep, with Kenneth Branagh, with contrapuntal Purcell airs and limpid
Mendelssohn strings, in settings romantic and anti-romantic--and it has never
come close to not working. Until now. Michael Hoffman, the director and
"screenwriter" of the all-star movie called William Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream (evidently to distinguish it from Stephen King's
A Midsummer Night's Dream ), has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite
setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has
miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare
staggers through, mutilated but triumphant.

            The playwright set
Midsummer in an ancient, vaguely mythological Greece in which
intercourse between mortals and fairies is meant to be commonplace. Titania,
queen of the fairies, has already seduced Theseus, duke of Athens, and the
struggle between her and her mate, Oberon, for possession of an orphaned
changeling boy has generated hurricanes, floods, and "contagious fogs." With
perverse anti-insight, Hoffman has updated the play to a sunny, atmospherically
untroubled Tuscany in the 19 th century and has filled his frames
with scampering street urchins and matrons kneading dough. The fairies that
swirl around these settings, first as Tinkerbell-ish balls of light and then as
conventional storybook sprites, belong to a different age and culture. (The
lines, mysteriously, continue to refer to Athens and Athenians.)

            Hoffman evidently thinks that he has chosen the last
Western society in which a young woman, Hermia (Anna Friel), could plausibly be
threatened with death for not obeying her father's command to marry his choice
of suitors, in this case Demetrius (Christian Bale)--although David
Strathairn's Theseus is such an apologetically lightweight patriarch that the
threat seems incongruous. It doesn't help that Theseus' own erotic pas de deux
with Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau, divested of most of her lines along with her
Amazonian spirit) is less sexually charged than an average coffee
commercial.

            Hoffman adds plenty of
meaningless cinematic bustle, then translates Shakespeare's own set pieces
soggily. The illicit lovers Hermia and Lysander (Dominic West) flee "Athens" on
bicycles, which are supposed to symbolize modern liberation. But once he gets
the couple into the forest, where they're furiously pursued by Demetrius and
his scorned mistress, Helena (Calista Flockhart), their nocturnal circlings
might as well be set in a TV studio--they're stage-bound. Nearly every piece of
comic business is campily extraneous to the text, while the lines are blithely
disregarded. Oberon's famous barbed greeting "Ill met by moonlight, proud
Titania," makes little sense when Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer) sits glowering
behind a curtain. Commanded by Oberon (Rupert Everett) to squeeze the juice of
an aphrodisiac flower into the eye of a man in "Athenian garments," the impish
Puck (Stanley Tucci) falls on a naked Lysander. ("Weeds of Athens he doth
wear," says Puck. Doth not!) Hoffman uses nudity for laughs, to the point where
Theseus' hunting party stumbles on the lovers in their birthday suits--a
discovery that would surely result in their arrest on the spot instead of the
genial interrogation provided by Shakespeare. For reasons only Hoffman
understands, he has saddled Nick Bottom (Kevin Kline), one of Shakespeare's
most delightfully shameless extroverts, with a nagging wife and added bits in
which the braggart is poignantly humiliated by children. Idiocy!

            I can't be sure what Everett's languid, bare-chested Oberon
is up to--posing for a Calvin Klein ad, maybe--and his relationship to Tucci's
jaded, aging frat-boy Puck is that of a prissy gamekeeper to a wayward Alvin
the Chipmunk. Pfeiffer comes off the worst. She can be a great movie actress,
but a key to that greatness is how her dryly sardonic voice--with its edge of
neurotic insecurity--plays against her ethereal features and brings her down to
earth. When she speaks Shakespearean verse, that nervy edge deserts her: She
makes her face a blank and pipes her lines arrhythmically, like a clueless
high-school thespian. Yes, she looks like a dream, with cascading blond curls
framing those exquisitely suspended cheekbones. But every time she opens her
mouth she becomes an airhead.

            The mortals fare better.
Friel and West, a couple of able Brits, actually know how to speak verse,
although Bale is more at home in naturalistic parts. With her twiglike frame
and pinched features, Flockhart is a born Hermia. Cast as the discombobulated
Helena, she does reasonably well: As she demonstrates every week on the dire
Ally McBeal , there's no one more adept at flinging herself into
mortifying situations with masochistic relish.

            Thank heaven for the rustics and for the final act, the
wedding-night performance of "The most Lamentable Comedy and most Cruel Death
of Pyramus and Thisby," which even Hoffman can't completely screw up. At times,
he's in his element. He has devised a neat bit of business for the great Max
Wright, whose speech about impersonating "the horned moon" is now a hasty
impromptu. The tongue-tied lion of Bill Irwin is so eloquent in his
inarticulateness that I never wanted him to leave the stage. Roger Rees, under
a heavy barbershop mustache, is the sweetest Peter Quince imaginable--both
Bottom's biggest fan and his most sympathetic critic. And even Hoffman's
sentimental interpolations can't strangle the comic spirit of Kevin Kline. The
beauty of Kline's Bottom is its childlike straightforwardness and simplicity.
Kline understands that whatever happens, Bottom remains essentially himself:
The ass's head makes him more serenely Bottom-like. His "Bottom's Dream" speech
is a joyous discovery of the dreamlike essence of life--a truth unglimpsed by
any of the play's other characters. It's too bad that Hoffman belabors the
point by giving Bottom a tender finale in which he stares moist-eyed into the
moon. At moments like that, you can almost see the ass's head materialize on
the director.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Talking
Black
            

            Is 
                  Slate
                racist, or is Rep.
J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) crazy? ("?") To paraphrase The X-Files, the
truth is somewhere in between there. To say that J.C. Watts would not have a
prominent role with the House Republicans if he were not black is not
necessarily racist. Rather, it demonstrates a rather remarkable journalistic
sloppiness (employed, on occasion, by those on the right as well as on the
left) that permits the writer to look at a subject's basic physical traits and
ignore the many other attributes and characteristics that make the individual
worthy of being viewed, objectively, as a legitimate leader.

            As a matter of full disclosure: I am
African-American, a Republican, and I work for the Republican Party. I have
worked with Rep. Watts on several projects. (The comments here, however, are
solely my own and do not necessarily reflect either Watts' viewpoint or the
Republican Party's.)

            It strikes this conservative African-American as
bordering on liberal racism for Jacob Weisberg to ask, as he does in this
response to Watts' press secretary, if Rep. Watts would have been chosen to
give the Republican response to President Clinton's election and to speak at
the San Diego Convention in 1996 if he had been white and to assert that
"there's nothing racist about arguing that a member of a minority
group--whether a Democrat or a Republican--has benefited from a desire for
diversity." The implicit insinuation is that Watts has been given a "pass" on
that defectiveness because of the color of his skin. Weisberg doesn't find
anything even possibly racist--or at the very least, paternalistic--in
that argument?

            First, as Weisberg himself admits, the Class of '94
was a very vocal, visible, and aggressive group. To demonstrate how important
they were to the "revolutionary" Republican change that was happening, many
were given rather attractive leadership positions not usually afforded House
freshmen. Watts and Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.) both came out of this class.
It's not too surprising that they would each assume prominent roles as public
faces of the insurgent class. They are both photogenic, both athletic, both
conservative. The post-'98 election House leadership results demonstrated that
a sizable percentage of Largent's peers were ready to elevate him into a
leadership role, as well as Watts. Now, does Watts gain a slight edge because
he is black? Perhaps, but recall that the media immediately gravitated toward
Watts, partly because he was the lone black Republican in the Class of '94. It
seems rather ironic for Weisberg to assert that the Republicans are playing
affirmative action politics by promoting Watts, when part of that promotion is
a reflection of how much the media have already elevated him as a
celebrity-politician by gravitating toward him. What came first, the chicken or
the egg?

            Second, it is not simply a matter of Watts'
melanin. Otherwise, former Rep. Gary Franks (R-Conn.), who was elected to
Congress four years before Watts (and served with him in '95-'96), would have
received the same attention and promotion from the media and his peers. The
different treatment afforded those gentlemen indicates that, though both are
African-American, they are substantively different men--physically,
politically, and oratorically. The media know a good story when they see one;
J.C. Watts is, simply, a better individual story than Gary Franks. Given
this distinction between two men who are the same, isn't it presumptuous of
Weisberg to proclaim that Watts has the role he does just because he is
black?

            Third, J.C. Watts was chosen to give the State
of the Union response in 1997 for the same reason that he had a prominent
role at the Republican National Convention in the previous year: The man gives
a damn good speech. In fact, of all the speeches at the convention that year,
Watts' was almost universally cited as one of the more memorable--up there with
Colin Powell's and (for poignancy) Nancy Reagan's. Even a Democrat pollster
said recently on a panel, "We are fortunate that J.C. is not [running for
president], because he is a powerful speaker and, unlike many Republicans,
doesn't terrify the average American." Putting aside the obvious partisan gloss
in the statement, it still clearly explains why Watts has managed to take (or
been placed in) a leadership role within the party: He articulates a
conservative Republican agenda in a style that is straightforward, uplifting,
and non-judgmental.

            Finally, it is virtually impossible to figure out
exactly what a "white" J.C. Watts would look like. It is almost as impossible
as imagining that a "white" Jesse Jackson would become Jerry Falwell or Billy
Graham. J.C. Watts is a black man; a football player; a Republican; a
businessman; a member of Congress; a family man (despite admitted mistakes as a
teen-ager); and countless other things that have all served to mold him into a
specific unique individual.

            

               
                  Slate
                and author Jacob Weisberg are likely not
racist. However, J.C. Watts is most assuredly not crazy for being
offended by some of the implications of the original "" article. Thus, I would
think that Weisberg might be waiting a while for an "apology." In the meantime,
he might think about drafting one of his own.

            
               --Robert A.
George
            

            Director, Coalitions for
the Republican National Committee

            
Washington

            
               Prize
Fight
            

            One thing you didn't
mention in your dead-on is that, for the first time to my knowledge, the
Pulitzer committee decided commentary on the biggest story of the year was more
worthy of a prize than anyone's reporting on the story. Perhaps the only
adequate response to Flytrap was cynicism and pointed barbs, but you would
think a story resulting in the impeachment of the president would have had some
reporting worthy of the committee's notice.

            
               --J.J.
Sutherland
            

            New
York

            
               Pleading Not
Guilty
            

            I must take issue with a
recent Chatterbox about Nelms vs. Overnight Transportation Company.
Chatterbox wrote:

            
               As presented in the fact sheet, this is a
classic case of special pleading disguised as a violation of civil rights. Even
assuming that the boss was a double-crossing jerk who hated kids, what is he
(or she) really guilty of? Failing to cut some slack!
            

            Although this paragraph is
correct as far as it goes, you make it sound like "special pleading" is a bad
thing.

            All civil rights legislation (to one way of
thinking, all legislation, period) is the result of one group successfully
convincing Congress that its interests are more important than the freedom of
others. (This sounds more cynical than it is; one way to so convince Congress
is to speak to their sense of justice as well as to their pocketbook.) An
illustration: In most states, if I were your employer I could fire you just
because I don't like you, even though there's no good reason for my dislike.
However, if I also have a female employee who I dislike merely because she's a
woman, I can't fire her. In this way, current civil rights legislation requires
that: 1) my freedom is impaired; and 2) I am required to treat men and women
differently.

            Take a look at the
Family and Medical Leave Act. Suppose again that I'm your employer and that,
due to an illness, you have to take off work for nearly three months. If I'm
smart, I'll want to get someone else to write Chatterbox for that time (which
is legal). But what if, in order to lure someone as perspicacious as you away
from her current, stable job, I have to promise to give her the gig
permanently? (Which is complicated, but basically illegal.) In this case,
Congress has decided that your interests as an ill person should trump my
interest in keeping an important feature of 
                  Slate
               
available to attract readers and the interests of your putative replacement in
getting a long-term job with Microsoft. I agree with you that the proposed
parent-friendly legislation is a bad idea, but not because it involves special
pleading. I'm against it because, unlike the special pleading which resulted in
the Civil Rights Act or the FMLA, the rights that are being specially pled for
are not worth the cost in freedom they will engender.

            
               --Alex
Pascover
            

            Alexandria, Va.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Do You Mean by &quot;Violence&quot;?

            At his White House summit on youth violence this
week, President Clinton summed up the prevailing wisdom about entertainment and
its connection to the Littleton, Colo., murders. "We cannot pretend that there
is no impact on our culture and our children that is adverse if there is too
much violence coming out of what they see and experience," he said. In other
words, the issue is the quantity of violence that kids absorb from
television, video games, and movies. Countless academic studies frame the
problem this way. They seek--and usually find--a correlation between how much
violent entertainment children consume and how aggressively they behave.

            This view isn't wrong, it's just way too crude.
Asking whether violence on screen foments violence in life is like asking
whether drinking liquids leads to car accidents. In a dumb way, the answer is
yes. But you're not going to get anywhere until you distinguish between
alcoholic beverages and nonalcoholic ones.

            Hollywood types prefer
to address this issue at this level of generality because it lets them off the
hook. "If you're looking for violence, what about the evening news?" David
Geffen asked in the New York Times just before the White House
conference. "America is bombing Yugoslavia; it's on every day. It's not a
movie, it's real." If the problem is merely the quantity of violence kids see,
Geffen is right. Teen-agers can get plenty of gore without ever renting a
slasher film. But we all know from personal experience that different sorts of
screen violence have drastically varying emotional effects. Some depictions
whet our appetites for brutality, while others do just the opposite. These
all-important distinctions are not ones that epidemiologists or sociologists or
psychologists can measure very effectively, because they involve a strong
subjective element. But until we begin to distinguish among the different ways
violence is portrayed, we can't begin to understand what those portrayals may
do. Here are some categories that may be helpful in thinking about the
issue:

            T ragic 
               Violence: Needless to say,
tragedy is often very violent. Take Kenneth Branagh's four-hour film version of
Hamlet . Having punctured Laertes and launched him over a balcony,
Hamlet, in the climactic scene, impales Claudius with a flying sword, brains
him with a swinging chandelier, and force-feeds him poison. (View the scene
above.) A 12-year-old watching this sequence in isolation might say that the
violence is "cool," in a low-tech sort of way. But how does this violence make
the adult viewer feel? In the context of the play, the most prominent emotions
it arouses are the ones Aristotle identified as the essence of tragedy: pity
and fear. We pity a tragic hero such as Hamlet because his misfortune is
undeserved, and we tremble at the realization that he is like us. Tragedy
doesn't stir violent urges but rather inhibits them. That is why war films like
All Quiet on the Western Front are often described as "pacifistic." The
tragic context of the violence sensitizes us to its horror and makes us revile
it.

            

               Righteous Violence: The Aristotelian opposite of the pity and
fear is righteous indignation. This is the feeling we get when we see bad
people flourish. It is stoked when we see them get their just deserts. That's
what Clint Eastwood movies are all about. Typical of this type of drama is the
1976 film The Enforcer , a sequel to Dirty Harry . Eastwood pursues
a gang of hippie terrorists who murder assorted innocents and kill his female
partner in a shootout. (See Clint remedy the situation with a handheld mortar
above.) The way you feel watching this act of violence is very different from
the way you feel at the end of Hamlet . You experience satisfaction and
glee, not pity and fear. You want to exclaim "Yes!" instead of "No!" In this
category are most war movies as well as the oeuvres of Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, and Steven Seagal. In such films, the bad guys
become increasingly subhuman and thus deserving of more and more grotesque
forms of torture and dismemberment. In this sense, the old Hays Office
production code, which required that films teach a moral lesson by having
evildoers punished, had it backward. If you want to discourage violence, you
should show the innocent suffering, not the guilty.

            G raphic 
               Violence: Is a more
realistic depiction of gore, in which someone's head is chopped off, affording
a glimpse of severed tendons and gushing arteries, worse in terms of inuring
viewers to violence than generic mayhem, in which the bad guys fall over dead?
The body-counters tend to assume that graphic violence is worse. But more
realistic depictions may prevent violence from becoming an abstract idea. Once
again, the context is what matters. In a tragic story, graphic violence makes
horror more horrible. A retributive context makes extreme gore less horrible.
If I were a parent of adolescents, I'd try to keep them away from Marked for
Death but not from Saving Private Ryan , even though the latter is
far more vividly gruesome.

            

               Pornographic Violence: In horror films such as the Friday
the 13 th
               , the issue of whether anyone deserves torture and
dismemberment is immaterial. The deliciousness of the violence is the whole
point. (Watch a clip from Scream , in which Drew Barrymore gets stabbed
in the breast and dragged about her yard by a masked serial killer above.) If
you're squeamish, you may cover your eyes when seeing this in a theater. But
the horror is undeniably thrilling, in a sexual way. There's an obvious
parallel between the blood-splatter climaxes in horror movies and the "money
shots" in sex-porno. Indeed, the only difference between this kind of slasher
film and snuff films is that no animals are harmed in the making of the
former.

            I ronic 
               Violence: There
are people who will tell you that Scream and the meta-horror subgenre
that developed from it are not crudely sexualized violent films. They're
self-conscious, postmodern comments on crudely sexualized violent films.
Critics of violent entertainment tend to hate this defense. It doesn't matter,
they say, whether people are butchered ironically in films such as Oliver
Stone's Natural Born Killers or Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir
Dogs . Here, I think the difference between the response of an adult and
that of a child becomes crucial. (Check out the torture-dungeon scene from
Tarantino's Pulp Fiction , in which drug dealer Marsellus promises sweet
revenge to the man who has just raped him, above.) Adults, or at least most
adults, recognize this as a species of black comedy, albeit one that expresses
a real sadism on the part of the director. But to immature minds, the message
may be simply that brutality is cool and funny. In other words, ironic violence
may be desensitizing and stimulating to the young in the same way that
pornographic violence is.

            

               Cartoon Violence: What of films such as Lethal Weapon
4 , in which the violence is not quite ironic but rather so hyperbolic and
unreal that it becomes a cartoon? Or, for that matter, what of cartoons
themselves, which are filled with calamities without consequences? (Watch Wile
E. Coyote blown up, reconstituted, flattened, and reinflated above.) You might
think that such portrayals teach the false lesson that violence doesn't have
real effects. Perhaps for those too young to distinguish fantasy from reality,
that's the case. But there's not much basis for thinking that this confusion
persists. By the time a child is old enough to borrow his dad's guns (say, 10),
he understands that cartoons and comics don't describe the real capacities of
human beings.

            S chool 
               Violence: Since
the Columbine killings, there's been a special focus on depictions of
adolescents committing mayhem in school. The two films cited most often are
Heathers , in which Christian Slater is foiled in an attempt to detonate
his school, and The Basketball Diaries , in which Leonardo DiCaprio
fantasizes about gunning down his classmates and a priest
Terminator -style while his buddies cheer. (View a clip from the movie,
above.) This scene is now the centerpiece of a lawsuit by parents in Paduchah,
Ky., who say the 14-year-old shooter who killed three children was motivated by
the movie.

            Of course, it is always possible that an unbalanced
individual will misunderstand something in a crazy way, as John Hinckley did
with Taxi Driver . But you can't protect yourself against the criminally
insane by cutting off their sources of possible inspiration, which are
limitless. Sane adolescents seeing either of these films would understand that
it is the violent characters who are supposed to be deranged--in the case of
The Basketball Diaries because of drugs. I'd worry more about The
Rage : Carrie 2 , which mixes righteous indignation with pornographic
violence in a school setting. The issue isn't how much violence. It's what
kind.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 232: &quot;Summoning DiMaggio's Ghost?&quot;

            

               The list includes whistling, making certain hand gestures, and carrying
bottles, baseball bats, or flashlights. List of what?
            

             

             

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 231)-- "Ultracolossal":
            

            

               An announcement Sunday roiled the world of the superjumbo. Who plans to
do what?
            

            "In a
concession to economy, Long Dong Silver is downsizing, but he promises to
continue his fine work under the name Medium Dong Silver."-- Larry Amaros
(Gary Steinkohl had a similar answer.)

            "Air
France plans to reclassify children under 9 as carry-on luggage. They must be
stowed in overhead storage compartments or slipped neatly under the
seat."-- Stanley Marcus
            

            
"7-Eleven plans to recall 2 million cups designed to hold its newest
extra-extra-large soda, 'The Big-Ass Gulp,' after it was discovered that a
printing error had placed the hyphen between 'Ass' and 'Gulp' "-- Tim
Carvell
            

            "Gloria
Steinem announced that in the new incarnation of Ms. , fat is no longer a
feminist issue. 'No wonder we couldn't sell magazines,' Steinem said. 'This
time around, it's all about thin thighs and firm butts.' "-- Daniel
Radosh
            

            
"Superjumbo? Superjumbo? Well, I'm sure as hell not buying Jumbo
anymore!!"-- Dale Shuger
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Fat
Wrap-Up
            

            Posing this question meant risking fat jokes, but
mercifully most of you steered clear. The fat joke assumes that the body is a
physical manifestation of the mind, an outward sign of inward gracelessness. It
assumes that weight is volitional, that the fat person chooses to be fat--i.e.,
lazy, greedy, undisciplined, self-indulgent--and thus ought to be mocked. Not
so, of course. Like most things about the human body, genetics play all too
indomitable a part. Unless the human is Pamela Anderson. She's still classified
as human, right? After the surgery and all?

            Much is made of the
modern focus on weight, but it's an old form of unkindness. In George Orwell's
1938 novel Coming up for Air , the protagonist muses on how years of such
mockery transform a man:

            
               I've been both fat and thin in my life, and
I know the difference fatness makes to our outlook. It kind of prevents you
from taking things too hard. I doubt whether a man who's never been anything
but fat, a man who's been called Fatty ever since he could walk, even knows of
the existence of any really deep emotions. How could he? He's got no experience
of such things. He can't ever be present at a tragic scene, because a scene
where there's a fat man present isn't tragic, it's comic. Just imagine a fat
Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo.
            

            This was, of course, not
meant to be good news. But what is?

            
               Massive Capacity
for Everything Except Pleasure Answer
            

            Boeing may develop an 800-passenger airplane.

            Fending off rival Airbus Industrie, the Seattle
company will invest $3 billion either to build a 550-seat version of its 747 or
to start from scratch on something even bigger and more uncomfortable. Current
versions of the 747 seat between 272 and 386 passengers, depending on
configuration and how much the pilot is distracted by pathetic whimpering akin
to that of caged animals.

            In a countermove, Airbus today announced plans to
build the A318, a 107-seat passenger jet that will pose a challenge to Boeing's
737, a still-popular commuter plane derived from 1960's technology.

            And in a countermove to superjumbo fat jokes, the
Food and Drug Administration has approved Hoffman-LaRoche's orlistat, the first
in a new class of anti-obesity drugs that block the body's absorption of
dietary fat.

            
               Errata
            

            Due to an editing error,
yesterday's Afternoon Delivery ran the wrong quiz question. Sorry. Those
interested can write in for the editor's name and a detailed map to her house.
That Global Positioning Thingy--it's a marvel!

            
               Roiled Riled
Retort
            

            What? It's a perfectly
fine word! What's the problem?

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            1) Fat people, 2) fast-food portion control, 3)
penis size, and 4) breast size.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Kosovo Con Games

            For
weeks, critics of the war in Yugoslavia have pronounced it unwinnable. The
atrocities continue unabated , they say. Air power alone will never get
the job done. It's another Vietnam. President Clinton has blown it. Everything
we do makes the situation worse. Whether Clinton and his allies can win the
war remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: They can't win the
debate over the war as long as critics are allowed to rig it with the
following hidden premises:

            
               A. Selective
Scrutiny
            

            
               1. Policies. Critics observe that
many things have gone badly since the air war began: Ethnic Albanians have been
killed and expelled from Kosovo and anti-American nationalism has grown in
Russia. It's easy to associate bad outcomes with the current policy. But
critics seldom apply the same kind of scrutiny to alternative policies. If NATO
had forsworn the use of force against the Serbs, what would the Serbs
ultimately have done to the Kosovar Albanians? If NATO had launched a ground
war, what would Russia be doing now? If, as critics observe, the Serbs have
managed to cleanse Kosovo in less than four weeks, what difference could NATO
have made by beginning a ground force buildup (which takes considerable time) a
month ago?

            
               2. Policy-makers. American
reporters think their job is to examine U.S. policy-makers not foreign
policy-makers. So they discount Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's
behavior as an objective consequence of Clinton's subjective decisions. When
Serbian ethnic cleansing follows NATO bombing, reporters treat the Serbian
action not as the product of free will but as a reaction determined by NATO's
action. So while journalists on the ground report on Serbian atrocities,
journalists in the studios and the newsrooms in effect pass the blame to NATO
and Clinton.

            This bias has produced a bizarre
blame-America-first spin on the right. "We have ignited the very human rights
catastrophe the war was started to avoid," declared Pat Buchanan on Face the
Nation . Columnist Arianna Huffington compared Kosovo to Waco, arguing that
just as Clinton's actions six years ago "precipitated" the murder-suicides by
the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, his intervention in Kosovo "has
unwittingly produced one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the
20 th century." While some conservatives allege that Clinton's
unnecessary belligerence provoked the Serbs to ethnic cleansing, others say his
timidity about using ground troops "emboldened" the Serbs to the same effect.
Clinton even gets the blame for Russian hostility. On Meet the Press ,
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., accused Clinton of "pushing Russia into a corner and
putting them in a position where they're no longer able to do anything but to
react in an aggressive way towards our action."

            
               3. Moral
actors. When the Serbs butcher another 50 Kosovar Albanians or drive
another 100,000 out of Kosovo, it's a dog-bites-man story. When NATO bombs what
it thought was a military convoy and instead hits a caravan of civilian
refugees, killing scores, it's a man-bites-dog story. For several days, the
media treated the casualties caused by NATO as the lead story from Kosovo,
overshadowing far greater casualties caused during that time by the Serbs.
"This may have cost NATO the moral high ground," declared John McLaughlin,
invoking the moral-equivalence formula usually despised by conservatives.
Meanwhile, the Serbs' role in pushing the refugees onto the road in the middle
of a war zone was scarcely mentioned.

            
               B. Sleight-of-Hand
Inferences
            

            
               4. Unachieved to unachievable.
Today's media report news instantaneously and expect it to be made
instantaneously as well. In less than two weeks, their verdict on the bombing
of Yugoslavia leapt from unfulfilled objectives to failure to impossibility.
Since air power hasn't brought the Serbs to their knees in four weeks, the
media conclude that it never will. Congressional Republicans have decided it's
"doomed to failure," according to Fred Barnes. Never mind that under NATO's
plan, the bombing will become more severe each week.

            
               5. Vietnam to Kosovo. Critics
constantly compare Kosovo to Vietnam. They infer two lessons from Vietnam: that
"gradual escalation" never works and that "bombing" can't break an enemy's
will. The trick in invoking such analogies is to ignore the differences: that
the war in Kosovo is being waged by 19 countries against one; that no
superpower is willing to prop up the targeted country; and that today's air
power and surveillance are vastly more precise than the "bombing" technology
used in Vietnam.

            
               6. Sinner to
sin. Critics on the right argue that because Clinton is untrustworthy,
so is the war. As George Will put it last week, the contempt of court citation
against Clinton for falsely denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky is "a
timely reminder of the mendacity that drenches his presidency, including his
Balkan policy." Meanwhile, critics on the left argue that because the United
States failed to intervene in Rwanda, its intervention in Kosovo is morally
suspect and probably racist.

            
               C. Hidden
Dichotomies
            

            
               7. Empirical/moral. Centuries ago,
scientific philosophers invented a strict separation between talking about the
way the world is and talking about the way it ought to be. Today's media,
following this premise, separate "editorial" from "news" judgments. The only
standard by which "news" organizations feel comfortable evaluating a policy is
success or failure, not right or wrong. So the media's consensus about Kosovo
is that NATO's policy is "not working." As Tim Russert put it to Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Meet the Press , "The atrocities
continue. What success can you point to that any of your strategy has worked?"
The alternative perspective goes overlooked: that the question is what NATO
must do, that atrocities are a challenge rather than a verdict, and that
NATO should persevere precisely because they continue.

            
               8. Political/military. Critics say
Clinton should have destroyed Serbian TV networks by now and never should have
sworn off ground troops. They deride these as "political decisions" and mock
NATO for refusing to bomb Milosevic's palace because it contains cultural
treasures, including a Rembrandt. "The idea that Italy and Greece object to
ground troops and therefore we shouldn't do what is necessary to win this war,
is, in my view, ridiculous," protested Bill Kristol on This Week . But
what's the definition of winning? Clinton and other NATO leaders say they're
not just seeking a one-time victory over Milosevic. They're trying to develop
what is essentially an international policing consortium. This is a political
as well as military project. It entails compromising with allies who are more
cautious about applying force and authorizing targets. Otherwise, the United
States would have to police the world alone, which is unsustainable politically
(thanks in part to vociferous opposition from many of these same critics), not
to mention militarily.

            
               9. Harm/help. Skeptics maintain
that the bombing isn't helping the Kosovars. "I don't care about dropping any
more bridges into the Danube River," Buchanan fumed on Face the Nation .
"I don't know how that helps those people" in Kosovo. The question, he argued,
should be "What is the best way to help these people and save these lives? Not
how we can bomb another oil plant or oil refinery." Minutes later, host Bob
Schieffer ended the show by noting that the Kosovars were still being purged
and asking "whether what we are doing is doing any good."

            This dichotomy rules out
the fallback strategy that NATO and U.S. officials have articulated from the
outset: to make the cost of Milosevic's "victory" outweigh the rewards.
Conservatives used to defend this concept (which they called "deterrence") when
it was preached and practiced by President Reagan. If the punishment you
administer to the current troublemaker fails to stop him, the theory goes, at
least it will make the next troublemaker think twice.

            
               D. Self-Fulfilling
Doubts
            

            
               10. Practical futility. The
pundits' verdict is in: The war is "doomed" and "already lost." On Late
Edition , Wolf Blitzer observed that Milosevic "doesn't give, after a month
of this, any impression that he is backing down." Quoting a report that U.S.
military leaders see no sign "that Milosevic is changing his strategy or about
to break," Russert asked Talbott, "Are we losing this war?" Other talking heads
asserted that NATO is "not united" and won't be able to "stand up" as the
conflict wears on. "Time is not on our side," warned former National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft on Late Edition . "It is going to be very
difficult to keep the alliance together."

            Of course, the best way to assure that Milosevic
doesn't break, that NATO comes apart, and that the United States loses the war
is to predict that Milosevic won't break, that NATO will come apart, and that
the United States will lose the war. These predictions bolster the Serbs'
morale while undermining NATO's. As Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., observed on
Face the Nation , "Patience and resolve are as important a weapon today
as actually the airstrikes are."

            
               11. Moral authority. Rather than
call Clinton a liar, many pundits pass this off as a widespread perception by
others. They call it a "moral authority" and "public relations" problem, asking
how it will "impact" his "ability to lead" Americans and NATO in war. "There is
a common drum beat on the airwaves," a reporter asked Clinton on April 15,
"that you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief."
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warned that Clinton "does not
inspire" great "loyalty," adding, "He may have a conflict of interest if he
sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the
same time." By questioning Clinton's moral authority in this pseudo-objective
way, journalists destroy what's left of his moral authority.

            
               12. NATO credibility. Self-styled
hawks fret that NATO will lose the war and thereby expose its impotence. This
"lumbering and clumsy" alliance, incapable of "managing such brush fires as
Kosovo," could "lose the Kosovo war in a month against the ruin of a rump
state," warned columnist Charles Krauthammer. "If the perception is that for 26
days tiny little Yugoslavia ... has withstood NATO and the United States,"
asked Russert, will NATO and the United States be exposed as "a paper tiger"?
Russert's guest, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., grimly intoned, "Many are
predicting that this will be the funeral of NATO." And all because, in
Krauthammer's words, Clinton "staked the survival of the most successful
alliance in history on bright new academic ideas cooked up far from the
battlefields on which they now flounder."

            Having defined anything
less than the total recapture of Kosovo and the restoration of its refugees as
a failure, Clinton's critics are ensuring that such failure will be interpreted
as catastrophically as possible. As for their suggestion that NATO's
credibility is too precious to be risked in war, you can understand their
reluctance. Even tough guys have their Rembrandt.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 233: &quot;Courtly&quot;

            

               "I couldn't do my current job without them," said Justice Antonin
Scalia yesterday as he waved something in the air. What?
            

             

             

            by noon
ET Thursday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 232)--"Summoning DiMaggio's Ghost":
            

            

               
                  The list includes whistling, making certain hand gestures, and
carrying bottles, baseball bats, or flashlights. List of
what?
               
            

            
"Telltale signs that your teen-ager might be troubled. That and having a bomb
factory in your garage."-- Barbara Lippert ( Andrew Kickertz ,
Francis Heaney , and Michael Jenkinson had similar answers.)

            "Things
I'm not allowed to do within 50 yards of Dame Judi Dench."-- Daniel
Radosh
            

            "Why,
West Side Story dance steps, of course."--Steve Lyle
            

            "Ways
to ward off Peter Lorre in M ."-- Andrea Carla "Been in a Coma Since
1932" Michaels
            

            
"Chapter headings in Wendy Shalit's new book, When Modesty
Fails ."-- Ananda Gupta
            

             

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Kate Wing's
Question Critique
            

            Oh, Randy, this is one of
those questions where you taunt us with the open arms of the obvious.
You--sitting in a well-upholstered recliner, casually sipping something
top-shelf and free of little umbrellas, poking lackadaisically at a morsel of
takeout--have only to dance your fingertips across the keyboard to condemn us
as we fall prey to writing "things prohibited in high schools" or "new ways to
pick up interns." We are so weak, Randy. Pity us.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            "The whole system should be blown up." No, not Eric
Harris or Dylan Klebold on the Littleton schools--that's Rudolph Giuliani on
the New York schools. Metaphorically? Wadda ya, an idiot? It's just an
expression. "I can understand why people would pick on it. Because they want to
deliberately misunderstand it," said the mayor. "And if anybody misunderstands
it, they're honestly doing it on purpose. To get me," he added, except for
those last three words.

            News Quiz participants
mostly associate the activities in today's question with Littleton or Kosovo,
two locales that President Clinton seems unable to connect, even when his
hand-wringing about teen violence runs on the same front pages that report NATO
bombs and refugee suffering. It's a violent country. Who knew? I'm no fancy
social reformer but maybe, just maybe, the whole system should be blown up.
Metaphorically. Don't pretend not to understand me, the way those robots do
when they follow me around. Idiots.

            
               There's No Such
Thing as a Free Association Answer
            

            All are illegal under the anti-gang statutes of
various California towns.

            Betty Loren-Maltese, town
president of Cicero, Ill., wants to fight even harder; she proposes exiling
gang members--banishing them from Cicero--and coming down hard if they ever
return, even to visit their families. The people of Cicero overwhelmingly
supported a nonbinding referendum on her plan.

            Q: How
will Betty Loren-Maltese identify gang members?
A: The town has a list of 600 "known gang members" including several minors.
They'd have 60 days to get out of town.

            Q: How does Betty
Loren-Maltese propose to round up these young thugs?

            A: She
might consider gating neighborhoods and establishing police checkpoints.

            Q: Cicero has a reputation
for racism and government corruption. What did the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
call it?

            A: The
Selma of the North.

            Q: Does Betty Loren-Maltese
think her law should apply to convicted felons like her late husband and to
those in organized crime?

            A: "If
they get involved in drive-by shootings."

            Q: How does Betty
Loren-Maltese respond when constitutional scholar Mark Tushnet notes: "You can
punish people for what they do; you can't punish people for what that are."

            A: "The
ACLU says gang members have rights. How about our civil rights?"

            Q: Is there something else
Betty Loren-Maltese kind of calls her proposal?

            A: "I
kind of call it tough love."

            
               Prelude to a Kick
Extra
            

            

               "This is an all-out war on people who do bad things," said San Francisco
Mayor Willie Brown, just before strangling Michael Eisner with the entrails of
Rupert Murdoch. Or perhaps he was planning to arrest some more jaywalkers.

               "Any visit-and-search regime, of course, has to have the appropriate rules
of engagement," said Gen. Wesley Clark, just before rummaging through Julia
Roberts' lingerie drawer. Or perhaps he was clarifying NATO plans to board
Balkans-bound oil tankers.

               "There's still a lot of old equipment out there," said Mick Mack, just
before using a laser pointer to highlight surprising features of Cher's
anatomy. Or perhaps he was commenting on dangerously outmoded playground
apparatus.

               "I want to make a plea to everybody who is waiting for the next deer season
in my home state," said President Clinton, just before telling newly mobilized
Air National Guardsmen that bombing Serbs would be a lot like shooting
ruminants, only safer. Or perhaps he was about to announce a new gun control
package.

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Littleton and Kosovo.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            More Bang for the Buck

            A friend of mine offers a theory about why Bill
Clinton's poll numbers stayed so high throughout the Lewinsky scandal: The news
made it possible for serious-minded people to spend lots of time--at the office
and over lunch--talking about semen stains, vaginal insertions, and blow jobs.
And the people were grateful.

            That's probably because they're not getting all
that much themselves. A recent University of Chicago survey of 10,000 adults
found that Americans are having considerably less sex than was generally
thought. Only one American in 20 has sex three times a week. One in five didn't
score at all last year.

            If that's true, many of us could use a little
sexual self-improvement. Not me, of course. I have been happily married for 26
years, since the age of 21. Deb and I have what seems to us to be a perfectly
fine amorous life, yet everywhere I turn the culture tells me--almost mocks
me-- you can do better! What would happen to our sex life then, if Deb
(who participated in this story because she loves me and because she has
tenure) and I tried for the first time to make something happen to it?

            And so it was that we
found ourselves for the first time ever in a sex-toy store, A Touch of Romance,
located near our home in Los Angeles, across the street from a Macy's. The idea
behind shops like these is to make obtaining the materials of sexual
experimentation as ordinary as purchasing plumbing supplies or housewares.

            Which sort of works--the only sexual thrill I got from the
visit was knowing that Microsoft just bought a cock ring. Choosing it wasn't
easy. Most of them came in presized sets of three. I couldn't figure out which
would fit right and intuited that try-ons weren't an option. So I opted instead
for an adjustable circumference version, a little strip of vinyl with snaps for
$11.95. Man, what a rip-off! Unless it works.

            It doesn't. Back home, I derived a certain depraved
buzz in cinching the device on, but that was soon eclipsed. The thing works on
the Roach Motel principle--your blood gets in but it can't get out. But then I
got to thinking: Under battlefield conditions it doesn't get out anyway. And
while I should have been paying more attention to other things, this led to
thinking about the old joke with the punch line "... and right ball go POW." My
wife hadn't noticed any difference at all.

            
               Overall rating,
on a scale of 1 to 10: 2 toes curled.
            

            A woman I know says women's magazines are the best places
in America to find sex tips. She's right--go ahead, just try to find a sewing
pattern in Redbook . You're much more likely to land on "Try phone sex,
dirty notes, porn videos, fantasy games and sex in new places. ... Try lingerie
and no underwear. ... Try talking dirty and silk scarves. Try anything at all,"
or articles such as "Eight New Games for the Foreplay Challenged."

            An article in the April Cosmopolitan , "The
Six Best Sex Positions," seemed more promising than the Redbook
playbook. Each position was accompanied by a succinct write-up and a
stick-figure diagram. The position we settled on was "The Butterfly," which we
had to read three times to comprehend. The man stands, the woman remains supine
on a bed or counter-top with her feet up on his shoulders. The whole idea is to
produce a pelvic tilt for better access to the G spot. Instead, we experienced
an uncomfortable pretzel feeling that stick figures must be immune to. And in
general, Cosmopolitan 's exotic sex positions require the sort of body
placement you can't remember in the moment of passion and even if you could,
for proper alignment, you still might need mood-killing accessories such as a
plumb line and a laser pen.

            
               Rating: 3 toes
curled.
            

            Next we tried those "Better Sex" instructional videos
advertised in the New York Times 
               Book Review. I ordered Better
Sexual Techniques , Advanced Sexual Techniques , Making Sex
Fun , and Advanced Oral Sex Techniques (priced about $11.95 each, not
including shipping and handling). My wife couldn't bear to watch them; I
persevered but must admit it was a chore. The oral-sex tape starts with
"well-known sex therapist" Diana Wiley, in her poofy hair and broad-shouldered
blue power suit, looking like she was about to explain how the sales force
could increase its third-quarter productivity. Instead she runs through all the
euphemisms for oral sex and then the video cuts to XXX action with gratuitous
commentary.

            Wiley's overexplanation of everything two people can
do to each other with their mouths raises this question: Do you really need a
five-minute video segment on whether or not to swallow? In the great tradition
of hotel and travel ads, the guys tend to be markedly less attractive than the
women. No way he'd be with her if this wasn't an instructional sex video! The
inanity of the experts and the dubious casting make these films about as erotic
as ... well, as the New York Times . You could learn more from any
randomly selected porn video.

            
               Rating: 0 toes
curled.
            

            Another approach is food. The notion that certain foods,
such as oysters or rhino horn, are aphrodisiacs has been pretty much
discounted. But it's plausible to think that cooking a meal together and then
dining on it, just the two of you, could be erotic. Especially if (like me)
your schedule frequently forces you to eat alone and you often find yourself
standing in front of the microwave, screaming, "Come on, goddammit!"
Intercourses , by Martha Hopkins and Randall Lockridge ($24.95, Terrace
Publishing, 1997), preaches that for every time of day and every phase of a
relationship there is a type of eating experience that will heighten sexual
response. (There's also a chart showing which foods are good for eating off
which body parts.) Deb and I blocked off a whole Saturday afternoon and evening
for the Intercourses experiment, settling on rosemary-scented lamb over
pasta (Page 87) followed by frozen coffee almond dessert (Page 31). According
to the book, rosemary is sexy because of its fragrance (used in many perfumes)
and because of its texture, which, so the text assured, tickles nerve endings.
The dessert was mostly coffee, rum, and Kahlua, which has worked before.

            We shopped for the food together and cooked
together, drinking wine and beer along the way. At one point while I was
working on the dessert, I asked my wife how long to beat the heavy cream
mixture. "Till it's stiff--it's an aphrodisiac," she said. Preparation took
less than an hour, and everything came out perfectly. Eating at our dining room
table for the first time ever without guests, we were having fun by
candlelight. But the mood was romantic, not erotic.

            
               Overall rating:
4 toes curled.
            

            That's when we went for the Viagra ($212.50 for 10 doses,
which includes a "consultation" fee). The drug was prescribed by a doctor, whom
I've never met, and ordered from a pharmacy in Miami Beach, Fla., where I've
never been. I completed the transaction via the Internet after filling out a
cover-their-ass questionnaire in three minutes.

            We each decided to take one pill, clinked our
glasses, and gulped. And then what? It felt awkward sitting in our bedroom,
knowing that it could take up to an hour for Viagra to "work." I suggested that
we play strip poker, something I'd never done. Deb had never even played poker,
so I had to explain the rules. I won in about six hands, auspiciously I
thought, with three aces. But we still weren't really in the mood yet.

            So then I got out the other purchase I'd made at A
Touch of Romance--"Dirty Dice" ($4.95). One of the two pink cubes is marked
with these words instead of dots: "lips," "above waist," "ear," "breast,"
"below waist," and "?". The other cube is labeled "kiss," "squeeze," "lick,"
"blow," "suck," and "eat." We took turns throwing the dice, but the activities
generated seemed forced and arbitrary. Finally, as they say at NASA, there was
word from the pad that the launch sequence was initiating. It was pretty much
like all other sex, except for a slight lightheadedness. Deb said she noticed a
remote tingling sensation. On the plus side, there was no priapism and neither
of us experienced disruption of our color vision nor a fatal heart attack,
which was nice.

            
               Overall rating: 5
toes curled.
            

            St. Augustine held lust to be a fitting punishment for
man's disobedience to God: the body's disobeying of the mind, the will, the
spirit, and even of itself. (The paradigm of this for him is the unbidden
hard-on.) Jean-Paul Sartre discovered something similar, although celebrating
it rather than deploring it: Essential to the erotic is the body's defiance
of design and control. (The paradigm of this for him is the jiggle.)
Sartre's view yields a sort of sexual Heisenberg principle: There is an
inherent tension between physically abandoning yourself to another on the one
hand and sexual planning on the other. The more of the one, the less of the
other. And this, I discovered, is the chief obstacle to sexual self-help.
Getting an erection is sexy. Making one is not. As my wife said about Viagra,
"You start to have a new feeling and then you realize where it came from and
then you don't have it so much. ... Anything that makes you think about it like
that is just creepy."

            This is not to say there isn't a way out of this
conflict between desire and design. With homage to our potent POTUS, there is,
I think, a Third Way that's neither sexual complacency nor standard self-help.
If the intrusion of consciousness is the problem, then maybe the answer is to
block it out. Sure, you could do this the old-fashioned way: with alcohol and
drugs. But then you have all the traditional drawbacks, including diminished
physical attractiveness and degraded sexual performance.

            So how about this instead? Go for all the sexual
self-help you can, but do it covertly . Watch a sex video (or porn flick)
if you want--but by yourself, and then try to share what you learned without
sharing how you learned it. Don't tell your partner you took Viagra. Or give
each other standing permission to slip it into the odd after-dinner drink,
saying nothing. (Of course, when you do it you'll still know, but having an
unselfconsciously turned-on partner is a real compensation for that, and next
time, your partner can surprise you. And yes, this requires trust. But why
would you be having sex with someone you don't trust?) My main conclusion is
that contrary to our blabby culture, the key to a better sex life is less
communication.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            From Here to Exurbia

            "Not since Field of
Dreams has a film so touched the heart and filled the soul!" proclaims a TV
reviewer in an ad for October Sky . That would be enough to keep me
away-- Field of Dreams didn't fill this particular soul, it functioned as
a sort of soul laxative--but I'm happy to report that the comparison is wide of
the mark. The ways in which October Sky does not evoke Field of
Dreams would fill a book. In fact, they do fill a book-- Rocket
Boys , on which the movie is based. It's a memoir by Homer Hickam Jr., a
retired NASA engineer who grew up in Coalwood, W.Va., and who got himself out
of the mines (where his father was the superintendent) by throwing himself into
the fledgling science of rocketry. To describe the Homer of the movie (Jake
Gyllenhaal) as a lad with coal dust on his face and stars in his eyes would be
both softheaded and imprecise. Homer's eyes aren't fixed on the Spielbergian
heavens but on earthly means of getting off the ground: the mix of saltpeter
and sugar that causes a rocket to soar without exploding, the shape that keeps
it from spiraling into populated areas, the thickness of steel that prevents
its nose cone from melting, the trigonometry that's employed to track its
trajectory. October Sky isn't a paean to fancifulness but to
trial-and-error perseverance, to a process and not an end. At its best, the
movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two
chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be
standing there in one piece.

            On its most basic level,
October Sky is a square, inspirational "go for it" picture, but it's
agreeably guileless for such a manipulative genre. The director, Joe Johnston
( The Rocketeer , 1991), works in a straight-ahead manner that doesn't
rough you up. The movie builds to a couple of climactic science fairs, but
they're presented almost as afterthoughts, and in moments of tragedy one's
tears are quietly coaxed instead of jerked. The tension between Coalwood's
malignant, subterranean caverns and the allure of space exploration has so much
resonance that the story doesn't need the hard sell. It opens at one of the
Cold War's cultural turning points: the appearance of the Soviet satellite
Sputnik 1 in 1957, when the people of Coalwood (and everywhere else) gathered
on their lawns to get a glimpse of the moving dot of light in the October sky.
"They could be dropping bombs from up there," says someone. "Don't know why
they'd drop a bomb on this place," comes a voice of reason, "Be a waste of a
bomb."

            Sputnik is the spark for Homer's impulse to build rockets,
but in rural West Virginia the know-how and materials are almost nonexistent. A
popular student with only so-so grades, he seeks the help of the class brain,
Quentin (Chris Owen), a skinny redhead with a complexion that could charitably
be likened to the surface of the moon. His buddies O'Dell (Chad Lindberg) and
Roy Lee (William Lee Scott) can't believe that Homer would befriend such a
geek, but it's a measure of the movie's grace that after a couple of early
gibes the four begin to work together with a breathlessness that leaves no room
for geek bigotry. Barred by Homer Sr. from launching test rockets on mining
company property (the whole town is mining company property), the Rocket Boys
trudge eight miles to a flat gravel plane, on which they build a block house
and raise a flag. The flag-raising isn't milked for its patriotism: It's a
deeply goofy gesture and totally consistent with its heroes' sense of
momentousness. At the behest of a vivacious teacher, Miss Riley (Laura Dern),
they're working toward entering the state science fair and competing for
college scholarships, but their true goal is simpler: making those rockets go
straight and long.

            Most movies about science
aren't as lucky as October Sky , which features failures more hilarious
than the slapstick set pieces of any 10 Jerry Lewis pictures. There is nothing
quite like a rocket that goes wrong--the power of nature harnessed to a blind,
petulant dervish. There are rockets that defiantly explode before they leave
the pad and rockets that spitefully take fences and vegetation with them. There
are rockets that spin around in an escalating panic before blowing up and
rockets that somersault off their bases and make a beeline for the nearest
population center. The centerpiece of the movie is a montage of disasters to
the tune of "Ain't That a Shame," but it ain't a shame, really: It's an
exhilarating spectacle.

            Exhilarating and a little sad. October Sky evokes an
era when information was precious, when a kid could get excited about the
appearance of a text called Principles of Guided Missile Design that
hardly anyone knew existed. There was a connection, however small, between a
thingamajig one could build in one's garage and the stuff that was heading for
outer space on NASA rockets. But there are other aspects of Homer's existence
that don't leave you feeling so nostalgic. Worshipping Werner Van Braun (to
whom the boy writes letters) seems creepy in our post-Tom Lehrer era. And just
looking at the coal dust in the air made my lungs ache and an old cough come
back. I won't spoil the coda by revealing it here, but it's the kind of coup
that only movies can bring off and, watching it, I shed my first unashamed
tears in nearly a year of filmgoing. (Not my first tears--the first tears I
didn't desperately attempt to conceal.)

            
               October Sky is
a good movie, but Hickam's memoir could have yielded a great one--less
formulaic, more nuanced. Homer's father (Chris Cooper) is shown bullying the
boy into abandoning his education and going into the mines, a perspective less
tragically shortsighted than plain moronic, given the fact that miners are
dying all around him either from cancer or cave-ins. The real Hickam Sr. didn't
want his son to be a miner but a mining engineer ; he longed to see the
boy follow in his footsteps but to go beyond them, too, and to use his science
to make people safer. The Rocket Boys weren't as out of sync with their culture
as the film implies. By 1958, the Sputnik-shaken Eisenhower administration had
made science and math a top priority in schools--one reason why science fairs
had so much funding and national attention. It's hard to buy the trumped-up
scene where the principal--another myopic patriarch--warns Dern not to give her
students "false hopes" (although this does give Dern a chance to do her rubber
lips specialty, gazing at the principal in wordless horror while her mouth
continually reforms itself like some strange Gumby creature). October
Sky suggests that if it weren't for the mothers and the female teachers,
the Russkies would still own outer space!

            O ffice 
               Space , a comedy written and directed
by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the
Hill , is about what happens to those miners when they move to exurbia and
don white collars. A take-this-job-and-shove-it movie about the crushing
malevolence of the corporate environment, it's on the verge of being really
good. The hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), an engineer at a generic software
company, is suffocating under his boss, Lunbergh (Gary Cole), a dictator who
punishes underlings from behind a strenuously mellow affect--each demand or
rebuke prefaced by a seemingly upbeat "Yyyyeah." It's not the viciousness
that's making Peter seethe in his cubicle, but the relentlessly
nonconfrontational confrontationalism of it all. When a hypnotherapist keels
over from a heart attack in the middle of giving him instructions on how to
relax and follow his instincts, Peter emerges with an aura of serene
indestructibility and a gonzo rebelliousness that makes him, paradoxically,
more attractive to the faceless consultants whom his company has hired to
downsize the labor force.

            The gags in Office Space aren't
anything-goes: They're rooted in what sociology professor Lynn S. Chaucer calls
Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness
(the title of her 1992 book). The powerless become exquisitely sensitive to the
insults of modern society: copy machines that jam, drivers who cut them off in
traffic. And you can't get away from it. As he has proven on King of the
Hill , Judge has radar for corporate BS. Peter falls for a mousy waitress
(Jennifer Aniston) at a theme restaurant where the bosses all look like "Weird
Al" Yankovic, and employees are forced to "express themselves" by selecting a
minimum of 15 pieces of "flair"--buttons with stupid slogans to be pinned on
their uniforms. The sneak preview audience laughed gratefully at this, finding
something liberating in Judge's depiction of a business world that
has--doubtless taking its cues from one of Judge's own employers,
MTV--institutionalized zany informality.

            In fact, the audience
laughed all the way through the Office Space preview, experiencing
shocks of recognition big and small. But they still left disappointed. For a
start, the actors' faces are so much less interesting than the mythic,
totem-pole visages in Judge's cartoons. More cripplingly, Judge has spent too
long in television, and his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's
a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that
he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.
Judge leaves us the way his bosses leave his workers: smoldering in our cells,
hungering for a little confrontation.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Viktor Chernomyrdin 

            Russian president Boris Yeltsin generally uses
political appointments in two ways: first, to demonstrate that he's still the
boss; and second, to catch people off guard. Most recently he picked, as his
special envoy to Yugoslavia, a man known neither for an effective negotiating
style nor for foreign policy expertise but, rather, as a man of strong will,
few convictions, and a tendency to move slowly. The Russian prime minister from
1992 until 1998, a Soviet apparatchik before that, Viktor Chernomyrdin remains,
oddly, a cipher. To his supporters, Chernomyrdin is a moderate who kept the
Russian political machine steady for an unusually long time. To his critics,
he's a politician who has never had a clear strategy or articulated an
unambiguous position.

            His diplomatic experience is limited. Chernomyrdin
was the co-chairman of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, a biannual meeting
that addressed much and solved little, aside from keeping Russia's decrepit
Mir space station in orbit. He also helped Russia out of the hostage
crisis that occurred in 1996, when a group of armed Chechens took 1,200
hostages at a hospital in a southern Russian town outside Chechnya. Federal
troops surrounded the terrorists and hostages, and Shamil Basayev, the leader
of the hostage-takers, demanded to speak with Yeltsin, who was in Halifax,
Canada, with the leaders of the G-7 nations.

            Chernomyrdin got on the phone and, in a desperate
and fragmented conversation broadcast live on Russian TV, negotiated the
release of the hostages. In exchange, he allowed the terrorists to return to
Chechnya, taking a busload of hostages with them as human shields (they were
later released). The incident was initially viewed as a triumph for
Chernomyrdin--until the terrorists, now Chechen national heroes, used the
incident to propel themselves to power. His critics point out that
Chernomyrdin's order to the troops not to storm the hospital ensured the
Chechens' ultimate victory. Of course, had Chernomyrdin authorized the attack,
he would have been blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians.

            So, what was
Chernomyrdin's position on Chechnya? Nobody knows. Although he was prime
minister during the war in Chechnya (which has more than surface similarities
to the war in Kosovo: It was a war against an ethnic minority seeking greater
autonomy, a war that Russia could neither win nor negotiate its way out of for
two bloody years), Chernomyrdin has yet to take a stand on it or on what the
republic's relationship ought to be with the Russian federation. The agreement
that halted the war was negotiated by a presidential appointee who was not a
member of the Chernomyrdin government.

            Inside Russia, Chernomyrdin is remembered as the man who
presided over the country's transition from a period of utter economic and
social desperation to one of relative stability. On the other hand, when
Yeltsin fired Chernomyrdin in March 1998, the Russian economy was on the brink
of collapse. The debate over Chernomyrdin's premiership centers on whether his
policies of gradual reform helped postpone the breakdown or whether his chronic
inaction led to the stagnation that ultimately destroyed the economy. Either
way, throughout his tenure he avoided making decisions, instead deferring to
the president and playing different factions within his own government off one
another.

            To the West, Chernomyrdin
is the man who moved Russia closer to the West and forged a friendship with the
United States. It may be tempting to read in Chernomyrdin's appointment a
message from Yeltsin to the United States to the effect that Russia is finally
willing to behave as though loans were more important than a nationalist
foreign policy. But more likely the message was intended for a Yeltsin
appointee turned rival, Yevgeny Primakov, the confrontational, pro-Serbian
prime minister who hopes to capitalize on the Kosovo crisis. The night
Operation Allied Force began, Primakov, en route to the United States for loan
negotiations, turned his plane around in midair, losing the money but gaining
immense popularity at home. For weeks afterward, his former aide and current
foreign minister issued a pro-Serbian, anti-NATO line and decried claims of
anti-Albanian atrocities as defamatory. Yeltsin's own public statements on the
conflict were not all that different, but now that Chernomyrdin has arrived on
the scene, the rhetoric has become noticeably milder. In the new envoy's first
public statement on Yugoslavia, he ruled out the possibility of Russian
military involvement.

            Yeltsin's previous appointment of Chernomyrdin, in December
1992, was another of Yeltsin's inspired and unexpected moves. Before
Chernomyrdin joined Yegor Gaidar's reformist government half a year earlier, he
had had the political profile of an apparatchik, which is to say, he didn't
have one. Born to a truck driver's family in the provincial city of Orsk,
Chernomyrdin worked his way up through party ranks. He was a member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party and, briefly, the minister of the oil
and gas industries under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, he lost a race for
parliament. He was mainly known in the Gaidar government for holding no views
and taking no actions, which meant he could be sold as the least of all evils
to all factions in the bitter political crisis of late 1992.

            As a politician,
Chernomyrdin may seem awkward and indecisive, but as a businessman, he is said
to be ruthless. Chernomyrdin is a member of a unique species of post-Soviet
businessman--the all-powerful and extremely wealthy head of a state
corporation. As the first chairman of of Gazprom, the Russian gas utility, he
presided over the company's issuance of stock. His tax returns estimate the
worth of the stock he holds at $50,000, but other published reports place his
personal wealth at $5 billion. His position as the man in charge of the
pipeline made him an effective negotiator with post-Soviet republics, which
depend on Russia for natural gas and generally have huge unpaid gas debts.
Though Russia also exports gas to Yugoslavia, this fact seems unlikely to sway
Milosevic any more than threats to cut off Serbia's oil and electricity
have.

            Chernomyrdin's most notorious trait is his
inarticulateness, which may stem from an ill-suppressed tendency to swear. His
bizarre pronouncements have been a source of endless joy to Russian political
journalists. Here is what he had to say, for example, on the Russian financial
crisis last August: "There was a state. The state retained. The state began to
accumulate. Results began to be had." Speaking of his tenure as prime minister,
he claimed, "If one considers what could have been done, and then what we did
do over this long time, one can conclude that something was done." Finally, his
best-known statement, which in its eloquent ineloquence seemed to sum up
everything about Russian politics, was, "We hoped for the best, but it turned
out as usual."

            In appointing the bland, seemingly slow-paced
Chernomyrdin as his envoy, Boris Yeltsin is probably hoping that Chernomyrdin
will somehow pull off a settlement without really seeming to or without raising
too many hackles, and that his ultimate success will be Primakov's loss. But,
like many of Yeltsin's recent appointments, this one has the quality of being
surprising without being brilliant. Chernomyrdin is not all that qualified to
succeed in his new mission, and he may not even be motivated to do so. He has
already announced that he plans to run for president in the year 2000 (the law
bans Yeltsin from taking part in that election, but Primakov is another likely
candidate). If Chernomyrdin succeeds in convincing Milosevic to accept enough
of NATO's demands to guarantee some sort of deal, he will go down in domestic
political history as the man who sold out Serbia. If he's worried about the
folks at home, what he should probably do is take advantage of his own personal
weaknesses, and stubbornly and laboriously fail.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <STRONG><EM>Slate </EM></STRONG><EM>Mea Culpas</EM>

            
               The Shearered
Truth
            

            Readers who might enjoy parsing all the careless
errors in A.O. Scott's silly about Cody Shearer and Chris Matthews should stop
right here, and use your very thoughtful link to my current Salon
column. It's a longish list, I'm afraid, but most of Scott's mistakes should be
obvious to anyone who can read. Just to correct the record in

                  Slate
               , here they are:

            Scott writes: "On Jan. 8 last year, shortly after
she had testified in the Paula Jones trial, Willey reportedly had a frightening
encounter with a jogger near her house in Richmond, Va." Fact: As I mentioned,
the alleged incident on Jan. 8 was three days before Willey testified
in the Jones case. Otherwise, what was the point of "intimidating" her?

            Scott writes: "Matthews seemed to have a pretty
good idea who [the mysterious jogger] was--an idea that he got from the
Drudge Report ." Fact: As I noted, the Drudge Report picked up the
jogger's supposed identity from the Matthews broadcast in an item posted
the following day . That's why the column was primarily about
Matthews.

            Scott writes: "The next night, chatting with
Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff and NOW President Patricia Ireland, Matthews
was less coy. The Shearer in question, he declared, was Brooke's twin brother,
Cody." Fact: As I wrote, quoting the transcript of May 11, Matthews
identified Cody Shearer by name the night Willey appeared . There are
many words to describe the way Matthews behaved. "Coy" is not among them.

            Scott writes: "Shearer could not have been Willey's
stalker, Conason declared, because he was on a transcontinental flight last
Jan. 8--a flight on which Shearer happened to bump into his brother-in-law's
old boss former Secretary of State Warren Christopher." Fact: Actually, what I
"declared" was that Shearer has documents proving he was in San
Francisco Jan. 8--and that he sat next to Christopher on a flight back to
Washington Jan. 11. This mistake is a little worse than what Matthews did. He
had to make a phone call to get the facts. All Scott had to do was read
them.

            Scott writes: "According to a recent Drudge
posting, a man with a gun was arrested outside Shearer's house a few days after
Matthews' Willey segment aired." Fact: (This is exhausting) Many news sources,
including the AP, reported the appearance of a gun-waving man at Shearer's
home, not just Drudge. Those same sources also made it clear that the gun nut
wasn't arrested outside Shearer's house, but in fact arranged voluntary
surrender to the police a few days later.

            As for my failure to
"explain" why nutty people are nuts--and why they weave Shearer family
conspiracies around an event that may or may not really have occurred--that is
beyond my competence. Sort of like journalism (or even reading) is for A. O.
Scott.

            Best
regards,
Joe Conason

            

               
                  A.O. Scott replies:
                
               I thank Joe Conason for
pointing out my errors, and I apologize to the readers of
S
                  late for my carelessness. The article as now published
reflects the corrections.
            

            

               Ticketmaster
            

            I found Paul Krugman's "" somewhat puzzling. First,
why would allowing the interplay of free-market forces imply that stadiums,
movie houses, and other mass entertainment centers would become dominated by
wealthy people? More specifically, why would letting the price of tickets rise
to the market clearing-level necessarily "lock out" the average fan? This is an
assumption about demand. What Krugman appears to be saying is that demand for a
given commodity will become more inelastic as one's income or wealth increases.
This is odd because it collapses the distinction between willingness to pay and
ability to pay. Just because someone can afford to pay $120 for an advanced
showing of The Phantom Menace or $10,000 for a Knicks game doesn't mean
he will. Why, then, conclude domination by elites?

            Second, even if we allow for Krugman's assumptions
and his conclusions, it would still imply that those who pay more must also be
rabid fans. Is it true that wealthy people are bigger sports fans than the
nonwealthy? If not, stadium seating will always be accessible to the average
fan.

            Third, even if we accept the conclusions, they
don't apply to all mass entertainment venues. A particular sporting event can
be unique. Seeing Michael Jordan do a slam-dunk right in front of your eyes
because you have courtside seats can be a singular experience. A movie, on the
other hand, is the same everywhere. Why, then, would George Lucas be concerned
about alienating tens of millions of fans by allowing some advanced showings at
premium prices? The movie can air for as long as it keeps packing the theaters.
How is accessibility reduced?

            Fourth, money is a very flexible tool. It is
possible to shift our disposable income to any number of items. Why couldn't an
average fan spend $120 or so to see an advanced showing of The Phantom
Menace and simply forgo doing something else he obviously valued less?
Charging below market prices to make tickets "affordable" does not appear to
make any sense.

            Gary Becker's argument
is the only one that appears to make any sense. If the value of mass
entertainment is in the social experience, then guaranteeing that the venue be
packed by charging below market prices is a rational policy. Many bars and
clubs live and die by this principle, often giving the impression of being
"packed" by letting a long line of people in at a slower rate than they
otherwise could. The strongest example of this is probably Wrigley Field. It's
been argued that the stadium contributes enormously to the baseball experience,
which is why the place is packed even if the Cubs have a bad season.

            -- Mark Pokorni
            

            
Chicago

            
               Defense
Defense
            

            "How exactly is it that in the land of the
childproof cap it's legal and even customary to keep a loaded unlocked gun in a
house with children?" asks the May 14 "," citing an experiment suggesting that
many children (especially ones aged 4 to 7) will play with guns even when told
not to. Let me suggest a possible answer.

            1. It turns out that there are very few fatal
firearms accidents involving children. This may be surprising, given that 35
percent to 50 percent of all U.S. households own guns, but it's so. According
to the National Safety Council's Accident Facts , there were about 30
fatal gun deaths in 1995 among kids age 4 to 7. There were 30 such deaths among
kids 0 to 4, and 170 among kids 5 to 14. This tells us about the age of the
victim , not of the shooter, but it's the best rough proxy I've seen in
my professional readings (I teach a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law
School).

            To put that risk in some perspective, about 500
kids age 0 to 4 drown each year in residential swimming pools, which are legal
and even customary to keep around one's house; that's twice as many as the
fatal gun accidents for all kids age 0 to 14, even though pools are much less
common than guns. (I know some people fence their swimming pools, but some
don't--just like some keep their guns locked and others don't.) More generally,
the total number of fatal accidents involving kids 0 to 14 that year was 6,500,
so fatal firearms accidents accounted for about 3 percent of the total. There
were about 1,400 fatal firearms accidents involving people of all ages, out of
a total of 93,300 fatal accidents from all causes.

            2. But doesn't it make sense to require parents to
keep guns locked or unloaded even if it'll save just one child's life?
Unfortunately, the analysis can't be that simple, because such a restriction
will not only save lives, but also cost lives.

            Guns are used quite commonly in self-defense;
estimates range from 110,000 (National Crime Victimization Study) to 1.5
million to 2.5 million yearly defensive gun uses (studies by largely pro-gun
criminologist Gary Kleck and by largely anti-gun criminologist Philip Cook).
Nobody knows what the exact count is, and how many of these uses involve saved
lives, or saved lives of kids. Nor does anyone know how many of these uses
would have been frustrated by having to fumble with unlocking the gun, often in
the dark, when one has just been waked up by an intruder breaking into the
house. It is at least possible, though, that this number of lost lifesaving
self-defense uses would be greater than the number of fatal accidents
caused by having the guns loaded and unlocked. Not certain, but possible.
Certainly the answer isn't certain in the other direction.

            3. So, one answer to the
question "Why would a reasonable gun owner believe that it should be legal and
customary to keep a loaded unlocked gun in a house with children?" (not quite
the question Today's Papers asked, but the only one I'm remotely qualified to
try to answer) is: "Because loaded unlocked guns can save children's lives as
well as take children's lives, and reasonable gun owners--especially ones who
live in dangerous parts of town--may be acting very rationally in keeping their
guns maximally ready for self-defense, despite the modest risks this may
impose."

            -- Eugene Volokh
            

            Acting Professor, UCLA Law
School

            Los
Angeles

            
               The Future Is
Now
            

            Jacob Weisberg writes in "": "And when they
(e-books) truly arrive, I predict that the Rocket will be remembered as a
landmark: the first demonstration that reading a 'book' didn't require paper,
ink, or even an overhead light."

            For the sake of
historical accuracy I hope that the Rocket will not be so remembered. Some of
us have been reading 
                  Slate
                and other fine reading material on the
john (and wherever) for a few years now using our palmtop computers. I use my
Psion Siena or 3C. I won't bore you with the details, but it's really quite
easy to download books and other reading materials into a palmtop computer.

            -- Phillip
Rose
            

            
Wellington, New Zealand

            
               Flighty
Argument
            

            In , Scott Shuger asks, "Why shouldn't big people
(not just 'fat' people) pay more for plane tickets? After all, moving them
through the air takes more fuel. Why should this argument make sense for
postage but be abandoned for people?"

            Taken to the extreme, should small people pay less?
Should small people be charged more for heat since they generate less of their
own? Should smarter people pay more for school since they remember more? Should
children and older people be charged more in taxes since they require more
services? Should city people pay more in income taxes since they have more
services? How do you suggest this is administered?

            Ticket prices are based
on the bell-shaped curve that describes the population. This gives the average
height and weight. These "outliers" are already accounted for. Congratulations,
however: You are well on your way to being a true libertarian.

            -- Patrick
Donahue
            

            Salinas, Calif.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Fallwell's That
Ends Well
            

            Jacob Weisberg in "" is missing the point about the
reaction to Jerry Falwell's outing of the "gay Teletubby." While Tinky Winky
may be queer and proud, and while Tinky Winky might be your best fantasy and
your worst nightmare, that's not the why Americans are shaking their heads.

            Personally, I couldn't
care less if Tinky Winky or Bert or Batman is gay. What does offend me is that
bigots such as Falwell and other Christian right-wingers feel the need to
"save" our children from supposedly evil influences, such as gay Teletubbies.
If a gay Teletubby teaches tolerance and acceptance to children, that's a good
thing. What we should be afraid of are Falwellian bigots who preach hate and
division.

            
               --Tyler Green
            

            
Washington

            
               
                  Real
Numbers
            

            I am writing from Brazil where the statements by
Paul Krugman about Arminio Fraga in the to "Don't Blame It on Rio ... Or
Brasilia Either" have been front-page news for a week. While I am pleased that
you have published to Krugman's note, I am distressed to see that

                  Slate
                has not taken responsibility for its actions in the same
way that Krugman has. 
                  Slate
               's editors must take a large measure
of responsibility for this "bagunça "--Portuguese for mess. As Krugman
notes in his apologies, he is an economist, not a journalist. Given the
seriousness of the charges--trading inside information for the gain of Fraga's
former employer--shouldn't 
                  Slate
                offer Fraga an apology as well?
Leaving Krugman to take all the heat of a very angry Brazilian public is not

                  Slate
               's finest demonstration of journalistic ethics.

            The greatest tragedy of
this episode is that of the Brazilian situation is one of the most positive and
accurate I have seen during the past six months. He makes clear what few have
been able to--the vicious cycle of lack of confidence and interest rates. I
wish the public discussion of his article had focused on solutions to the
dilemma he posed rather than on an extraneous appendage.

            
               --James R.
Hunter
            

            Los
Angeles

            
               War, Blockades,
and Peace
            

            Broadly speaking, I agree with the points David
Plotz makes in "." Congress has the sole power to declare war, and a bipartisan
Congress and the president have cheerfully ignored that clear constitutional
fact. But I think Plotz may be mistaken in saying the recent Iraq bombing
needed authorization. As I understand it, the war between Iraq and the United
States, begun in 1991, has not yet ended. The shooting war of 1992 ended with a
cease-fire, not peace. Indeed, in the years following, we have enforced a
blockade on Iraq. Blockades have always been regarded as acts of war. And the
cease-fire is conditional: if Iraq permits inspections, doesn't fly
planes in certain areas, and doesn't threaten our troops, then we will
hold our fire. So, if the war was constitutional in 1991-92, the war is still
constitutional now--nothing in the resolution specified a time limit.

            Alas, the president has
not made this case. Whenever Iraq claimed (quite rightly) that arms inspections
were a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, we could and should have responded,
"Bugger your sovereignty--this is war." Somehow, I can't imagine Clinton saying
that.

            
               --Andrew
Solovay
            

            
Belmont, Calif.

            
               Diary of a Mad
Professor
            

            I must say that the "" by
the anonymous assistant professor portrays the day-to-day stresses and
anxieties of academic life through the eyes of a shockingly irresponsible
instructor. The way in which the author views both graduate and undergraduate
students reveals unhealthy personal insecurity. Teaching is a profoundly
ethical vocation: Students entrust their emotional and intellectual well-being
to their professors, and those who command such authority must recognize their
responsibilities to their students. The stresses of an academic are truly
heavy, but why should it be different from any other profession? Does the
author think that teaching in the university involves a lighter load than
working for a corporation? Why? Furthermore, the author is fortunate enough to
have a job when so many of the author's fellow humanities scholars are without
employment.

            
               --Jack W. Chen
            

            Somerville, Mass.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Unhappy Warrior

            Last
Thursday, in a speech at the National Defense University, President Clinton
passionately disavowed the theory that ethnic slaughter is an incurable Balkan
disease. "If people make decisions to do these kinds of things, other people
can make decisions to stop them," he asserted. "If the resources are properly
arrayed, it can be done." But five days later, when asked why the United States
was refusing to send Apache helicopters and ground troops into Kosovo, Clinton
cited prudence, objective difficulties, and the "risk" to American soldiers.
"The military leaders will make their decisions about when and under what
circumstances to use the Apaches," said Clinton. "It is not a political
decision in any way."

            These
two statements--one ambitious and imperative, the other cautious and
detached--underscore a paradox in the war over Kosovo. In foreign policy, there
are two rival schools of thought--realism and idealism--and Clinton, as usual,
is trying to have it both ways. Each school has its values, virtues, and spins.
Idealists emphasize free will; realists emphasize determinism. Idealists
believe in subjective resolve; realists believe in objective constraints.
Idealists preach responsibility and courage, which realists dismiss as hubris
and folly. Realists preach humility and prudence, which idealists dismiss as
complacency and selfishness. Idealists tell us what we can do; realists tell us
what we can't do. Idealists tend to be liberal; realists tend to be
conservative.

            On the
fundamental question of whether to intervene in the Balkans, Clinton is an
idealist. Thursday, in what many deemed a slap at--and arguably an
oversimplification of--the theories of Balkans scholar Robert D. Kaplan and
Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Clinton repudiated those who "justify
looking away from this kind of slaughter ... by saying that these people are
simply incapable of civilized behavior." The president asked, "Do you think the
Germans would have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own without Hitler? Was
there something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No.
... This is something political leaders do." Yugoslavia's Balkan
neighbors, Clinton argued, show that "there is another path ... that discord is
not inevitable, that there is not some Balkan disease. ... Serbs simply must
free themselves of the notion that their neighbors must be their enemies."

            
Realists regard Serbian resistance to NATO as a fact of life, an immovable
constraint on American ambitions in the Balkans. "The bombing has not made much
difference" and has "strengthened the resolve of the Serbian people," House
Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, alleged Sunday on Meet the Press .
Likewise, realists view American lack of resolve as an objective limit
on the war's prosecution. As long as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is
willing to withstand airstrikes, "there is no real end in sight," former
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger cautioned this weekend. Former Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell agreed: "It is up to Mr. Milosevic ... to
decide when he has had enough. And that makes it difficult for us." Sen.
Richard Shelby, R-Ala., concluded, "I'm not sure we have the will to win."

            
Idealists regard such helplessness as self-delusion. In their view, our "will
to win" is something to be mustered, not dispassionately assessed. While it may
be "difficult" to outlast Milosevic, they posit that we can and must do so.
"It's because he's determined that we have to be determined as
well," NATO spokesman Jamie Shea argued on Late Edition . On Face the
Nation , host Bob Schieffer skeptically asked Defense Secretary William
Cohen, "How long are you prepared to do this?" "As long as it takes," Cohen
replied. Crystallizing the idealists' credo, Clinton declared Friday, "We
cannot fundamentally alter human nature, but we can alter the rules by which
all of us let our nature play out, and we can call forth our better
selves."

            On
this view, just as we are free to persist in the war, the Serbs are free to
back down. Here idealists divide into two camps. Moderate idealists claim
merely that we don't have to accept the way things are--that we can
fight on, and the Serbs might not prevail. Radical idealists posit that
we can dictate the way things are--that we will fight on, and Milosevic
cannot prevail. Clinton and his allies are taking, or at least mouthing,
the radical position. Milosevic faces "an unwinnable conflict," Clinton
asserted Thursday. "NATO actions will not stop until the conditions I have
described for peace are met." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her
British counterpart, Robin Cook, took the same hard line in a Sunday
Washington Post op-ed: "We will carry on attacking Milosevic's military
machine until he yields. ... His people are ignoring his call to fight in a
conflict they do not want and know they cannot win."

            All
this sounds stirring until you hear Clinton's less-than-idealistic excuses for
the war's shortcomings. When asked this weekend why the United States was
withholding helicopters, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton and NATO
spokesman Shea answered with mumbo jumbo about "training," "operational
matters," "procedural matters," and the "moving parts" of a "complex
operation." Clinton, like Shelton, mentioned the "risk" to American pilots,
depicting this as a military "judgment" rather than a "political decision." But
from an idealist's perspective, the decision to let Kosovars die rather than
risk American lives is indeed political--and the purpose of Clinton's allusions
to "judgment," "strategy," and "circumstances" is, as with all such realist
language, to obscure our indifference and cowardice.

            
Pressed about their cautious conduct of the war, Clinton's putative idealists
invoke the classic realist alibi: impossibility. Why haven't we halted Serbian
atrocities? "You cannot, through air power, stop individual soldiers
oppressing, murdering, and burning the homes of individual Albanians,"
Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering pleaded Sunday. Then why haven't we
sent in ground troops? "When you start with a coalition, you have to hold that
coalition together," said Cohen. "There is no consensus within the alliance for
a ground force." A true idealist would lobby the coalition hard for ground
troops, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has done, or would jettison the
coalition and send in his own ground troops anyway. Instead, the Clinton team
accepts the coalition's reluctance and tells us this is just the way things
are.

            And
what about the hundreds of civilians killed by errant NATO bombs? "It is simply
not possible to avoid casualties of noncombatants in this sort of encounter,"
Clinton pleaded Thursday. Albright and Cook agreed. "Some people argue as if
Milosevic can be opposed militarily through a campaign of 'immaculate
coercion,' in which no mistakes are made and no innocent casualties occur. But
that is not the nature of conflict," they wrote in the Post , borrowing
every realist buzzword in the book. "Perfection is unattainable," they
counseled, and "it is impossible to eliminate such casualties."

            On
other questions as well, U.S. officials use fatalism and objective language to
minimize American responsibility and rule out options. Have we antagonized
Russia and China? Yes, conceded Pickering, but only "because nationalism is
endemic in both of those countries." Are we backing the Kosovo Liberation Army?
No, said Cohen, but "Milosevic is going to find that his military forces are
systematically being diminished at a time when the KLA will come back," since
it is "getting money and support and some arms from other countries, no doubt."
Could we curb Milosevic's aggression through diplomacy rather than bombing?
Impossible, argued Albright and Cook: "He will not stop until he is forced to
do so."

            Behind
these explanations lies a coldly realistic assessment of America's character:
If our soldiers are killed, the public will turn against the war; and if the
public turns against the war, Clinton will have to withdraw our forces. This
assessment rules out idealistic scenarios: that the public might accept the
sacrifice and continue to support the war, or that Clinton might persist and
try to win back public confidence rather than bail out. Based on this
assessment, NATO has kept ground forces out of Kosovo, allowing atrocities to
continue, and has kept its planes high above Serbian anti-aircraft batteries,
limiting our pilots' ability to distinguish refugees from Serb forces on the
ground.

            None
of this proves that realism is corrupt. Realism tempers the romanticism of
idealists with a sense of tragedy. It's not our job to police the whole
world , says the realist. Even if it were, we couldn't afford it. Even if
we could afford it, we don't have the will to do it. Even if we had the will to
do it, we couldn't stop killings everywhere. Even if we stopped killings
everywhere, we couldn't do so without killing people ourselves. Even if we
avoided killing people, we couldn't repair every war-torn region. Nor is
Clinton's blend of realism and idealism necessarily corrupt. Perhaps we
should be idealistic about intervention in general but realistic in how
we go about it.

            But
the realist/idealist distinction does clarify two puzzles about the war. One is
why almost nobody wholly supports it. Idealists don't like the way it's being
fought; realists think we shouldn't have started it in the first place. The
other puzzle is the incoherence of Clinton's critics, punctuated by DeLay's
bizarre complaint that Clinton has 1) "hollowed out our forces while he's
running around having these adventures all over the world"; and 2) fallen short
of "victory" in Kosovo by using "excessive rhetoric supported by underwhelming
force" in a conflict involving "no strategic interest of the United States."
You can fault Clinton's piety and recklessness from a realistic standpoint. You
can fault his cowardice and cynicism from an idealistic standpoint. But the
only way to combine piety, cowardice, cynicism, and recklessness is to hit him
from both sides.

            
               Photograph of Bill
Clinton on the Slate Table of Contents by Kevin
Lamarque/Reuters.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Out-of-Towners

            As Hillary Clinton toys
with a run for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Senate seat, the main charge leveled
against her has nothing to do with her conventional liberal views, her status
as a politician's wife, or her smarmy New Age morality. Rather, critics blast
her status as a carpetbagger--an Illinoisan, by way of Arkansas and Washington,
D.C., who would exploit New York's lax residency requirements for personal
glory. So how come no one cares that Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Okla.?

            Of course, Moynihan grew
up in New York. Still, the point is that in our highly mobile society,
carpetbagging is as common a political sin as taking soft money or committing
adultery. According to a 1993 tally by Roll Call , 36 senators and 145
House members--about a third of Congress--were born outside the states they
represented. Sen. Robert Byrd, known for bringing federal pork to his West
Virginia constituents, hails from North Carolina. And his junior colleague, Jay
Rockefeller, isn't a native either. Presidential candidate Bob Smith, hoping to
capture New Hampshire's critical primary as a native son, was born in Trenton,
N.J. Yet the charge of carpetbagging remains a favorite campaign-season
accusation.

            Where does the term come from? Southerners pinned the label
on both the opportunistic and idealistic Northerners who packed their worldly
possessions into "carpetbags" during Reconstruction and moved to Dixie to enter
politics. A term of opprobrium, the word came from the Southerners' perception
that the newcomers represented the dregs of society, seeking nothing but easy
political gain. In particular, carpetbaggers were scorned for capitalizing on
the freed slaves' newly granted right to vote. Testifying before a
congressional committee in 1872, Alabama Democrat William M. Lowe explained, "A
carpetbagger is generally understood to be a man who comes here for office
sake, of an ignorant or bad character, and who seeks to array the negroes
against the whites."

            While the North won the
Civil War, the South won Reconstruction. By the late 1870s, Southern
"redeemers" (as they were admiringly called) got the federal government to
withdraw the troops that were safeguarding the rights of blacks. Meanwhile,
white supremacists regained control of state governments through fraud and
violence. Confederate apologists, who wrote the first round of histories of the
South, portrayed slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution (for more on
this topic, see "") and painted the carpetbaggers as venal and corrupt
interlopers.

            Hardly a pack of jackals feeding off the crippled South,
the carpetbaggers came from various backgrounds and acted from a range of
motives, historians tell us. Most were well educated, and included former Union
soldiers, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, newspapermen, and agents of the
postwar Freedmen's Bureau.

            The opportunism of some
carpetbaggers was more economic than political: The war-ravaged and
economically stagnant South direly needed Northern investors to spur the kind
of dynamic industrial and commercial growth that was transforming the rest of
the country. Others, of a religious bent, followed what one called "a Mission
with a large M" to help former slaves. Still others simply warmed to the
region's climate, the way Americans would later flock to California. "Maybe I
will locate in the sunny South," one sergeant wrote to his sister in Ohio in
1866. "What think you of roses blooming in open air in November, and the
gardens glorious with flowers." As historian Richard Current noted, the phrase
"Go South, young man" supplanted Horace Greeley's famous exhortation to head
West.

            While the behavior of a few of the carpetbaggers is,
according to Current, "rather difficult to defend," most were not unusually
corrupt. Committed to rebuilding the South, they advocated strong public
schools, better roads and railroads, labor reform, and progressive taxation. As
for disturbing race relations, of course many carpetbaggers did so--that was
the whole idea. In a society drenched in white supremacism, race relations had
to be disturbed. Few today would question their virtue on that score.

            The carpetbaggers'
reputation has improved, but the word's negative connotations have spread to
cover all ambitious newcomers. The proliferation of railroads, then the
automobile, and later the airplane made this a country of mobile, ambitious
newcomers. By the mid-20 th century, carpetbaggers made up the
majority in the West. Yet, as observers dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville in
1835 have noted, Americans take pride in their local communities: Wherever
transience and provincialism collide, the charge of carpetbagging still
stings.

            In Oakland County, Mich., earlier this year, opponents of a
state Senate candidate went to court to try to force him off the ballot,
arguing he hadn't lived in the district long enough. (They lost.) In
Massachusetts last year, former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn--a lifelong South Boston
resident--leased an East Boston apartment to qualify for an open
congressional seat. (He lost, too.) Of course, Flynn was merely imitating John
F. Kennedy, who ran for Congress in 1946 by using a hotel as his
11 th District "residence." (He won.) A Kennedy rival placed a
mocking newspaper ad: "Congress Seat for Sale. No Experience Necessary.
Applicant Must Live in New York or Florida."

            New York's easy residency requirements--you only
need to be a resident at the time of the election--and its political prominence
make it a carpetbagger magnet. Detractors assailed Robert Kennedy for his 1964
New York Senate bid; even the liberal New York Times endorsed Republican
Kenneth Keating. Six years later, Connecticut resident James Buckley suffered
similar charges en route to winning the seat. Candidates have accused opponents
of carpetbagging in other high-profile Senate races: Frank Lautenberg vs. Pete
Dawkins in New Jersey in 1988; Dianne Feinstein vs. Michael Huffington in
California in 1994; Paul Sarbanes vs. Bill Brock in Maryland, also in '94. It
didn't help Brock's case that he had already served as a U.S. senator--from
Tennessee.

            For all its currency, the carpetbagger charge only
carries these days in parochial places and when it plays into other, more
potent, liabilities: the naked ambition of Dawkins or Huffington, the
Washington-insider image of Brock. Solid candidates, such as RFK (or HRC),
weather the charges. And for some politicians, such as Arizona's John McCain,
living in an adopted home state doesn't seem to matter at all. The Constitution
requires only that a senator "when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for
which he shall be chosen." Having rehabilitated the carpetbaggers, we might as
well give them back their good name.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <EM>Mummy</EM> Soup, With <EM>Onion</EM>

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  The Mummy
                (Universal Pictures). The enthusiasts
("What grand, ghoulish gore!" Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal )
are outnumbered by the detractors ("hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey,"
Richard Schickel, Time ), who say 1) it's not remotely scary; 2) the
sarcasm and self-conscious irony grow tiresome; 3) it's permeated with
anti-Arab racism; and 4) the mummy isn't a real mummy, he's "a mutating
Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect" (David Edelstein,

                  Slate
               ), or as Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker , "[I]f
you made a nourishing winter soup out of white beans and Terminator ,
this fellow is what you would find at the bottom of the pot." (Read Edelstein's
in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               
                  The Phantom Menace
                (20 th Century Fox).
"The movie is a disappointment. A big one" (David Ansen, Newsweek ).
Time and Newsweek run negative early reviews of The Phantom
Menace , complaining that the film is dialogue-heavy, not especially
exciting, and marred by weak acting. Both agree that the fight scenes, an
extended desert chase sequence, and the special effects and scenery are
top-notch. The reviews mention in passing that this disappointment is a natural
result of the advance hype but don't mention their own roles in generating that
hype. Richard Corliss opens his Time review with this questionable line:
"To get in, you needed a ticket, more precious than a passport out of Kosovo."
(Find out the latest news on the film on this fan site.)

            

               
                  The Castle
                (Miramax). Good reviews for this corny Capra-esque
Australian comedy about a working-class family's fight to keep its precious but
hilariously tacky home from being demolished for an airstrip. The film is "[a]
triumph of sustained silliness" (Andy Seiler, USA Today ), which pokes
fun at the family's bad taste while elevating their home-grown values and
simple familial love. On the down side, the film's pretty much a one-trick
pony: It "continually dares us to sneer at their garish tastes" (Stephen
Holden, the New York Times ). Somehow the critics come out smiling
anyhow. (Click here to watch the trailer.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Ricky Martin
               , by Ricky Martin (Columbia). The media are feasting
on the English-language debut of this Puerto Rican pop star and former Menudo
member. The album itself is deemed passable musically--Martin has a
"serviceable" voice (Ethan Brown, New York ) and a set of reasonably
catchy tunes. But what's really on sale is Martin himself. Going for him: 1)
infectious charisma as seen at his terrific performance at the Grammys and
which is constantly on display on MTV; 2) boyish good looks--he was named one
of People 's "50 Most Beautiful People"; and 3) he's friends with
Madonna. Also important is the press's hunger for a new trend to write about,
which has led to the recent designation of Latin music as the Next Big Thing,
and Martin's poppy crossover album is just what they're looking for. (This site has photos, sound
clips, and info on Martin.)

            

               Publication
            

            

               The Onion
               . The Madison, Wis.,-based satiric
newspaper/Web site rides a wave of recent publicity: Our Dumb Century
(written by the editors) is now No. 3 on the New York Times ' paperback
best-seller list, editor in chief Scott Dikkers appeared on Conan O'Brien's
show, and the publication has signed a deal to make a series of TV specials.
The New Yorker attributes the Onion 's wildly popular deadpan
humor to its location. "Instead of allowing itself to be sliced, diced,
sautéed, and served up at Spago or Balthazar, The Onion , by just sitting
out there in Madison, has grown into something large, beautiful and
strange-shaped, like a 4-H crop exhibit with a blue ribbon on it at the
Wisconsin State Fair." (Click here to read the latest online issue.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Home Town
               , by Tracy Kidder (Random House). Critics call Kidder's
exploration of Northampton, Mass., interesting but unfocused. He writes mainly
about a local cop, Tommy O'Connor, but his story is interspersed with tangents
on the town's history and various oddball local residents. As Ben Yagoda writes
in the New York Times Book Review , "somewhere along the way, Kidder must
have decided not to write a book about Tommy O'Connor." The critics praise
Kidder's reporting, but most find the discursive style slow going. (Listen to an interview with Kidder about how he decided to write
this book. [Requires free registration.])

            

               
                  The Drowning People
               , by Richard Mason (Warner). The 21-year-old
British author's youth and good looks are cited as major factors in the
blockbuster advance ($800,000) and ballyhooed publication of this ponderous
gothic novel. The critics are not amused. Newsweek 's Jeff Giles calls it
a "hokey tragic romance" and Entertainment Weekly 's Vanessa Friedman
says it "reads like a high school essay--'write the story as if you were
Charlotte Brontë.' " Publishers Weekly gives the book its only upbeat
review, praising the narrator's "compelling voice" and calling the author
"remarkably assured." (Read an excerpt from the book here.)

            

               Snap Judgments
            

            
               Movie
            

            

               
                  William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
                (Fox
Searchlight Pictures). Mediocre reviews for the 10 millionth recent film
adaptation of a Shakespeare play. The cast is posh (Calista Flockhart, Kevin
Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci), but the magic never
quite gels. Kline is singled out for his excellent Bottom. (See Edelstein's in

                  Slate
               .)

            
               Book
            

            
               
                  A Dangerous
Friend
               , by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin). Polite reviews for
Just's 15 th novel, which follows a group of Americans working for a
nongovernmental organization in Vietnam in 1965. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
raves ("extraordinary") in the New York Times .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Underpaid Soldiers?

            To justify a new increase in military pay, the
Pentagon and legislators are citing a 13 percent "pay gap" between the salaries
of servicemen and their civilian counterparts. Ignoring for a moment whether a
dramatic increase in military pay is needed, the 13 percent figure is bogus.
Even though the Congressional Budget Office debunked the statistic in March,
several military representatives continue to cite it in congressional
testimony.

            The 13 percent "pay gap" represents the difference
in the growth of military versus civilian wages since 1982--that is,
civilian wages have grown 13 percent faster. This does not mean that
soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not take into account the
pay differential from 1982. If my wages have increased by 100 percent during
the past five years while Bill Gates' have increased by nearly 50 percent, this
does not mean that I am earning 50 percent more than Bill Gates, since he was
making more to begin with.

            Moreover, even as a
measure of relative wage growth, the 13 percent figure fails. First, the 1982
starting point--as opposed to some other year--makes the gap look especially
big, since there was a substantial military pay increase in 1981. Even worse,
the comparison does not account for the fact that most members of the armed
forces are younger and less educated than civilian workers. This is important
because in recent years the wages of college-educated workers have grown much
faster than the wages of high-school-educated workers. The better comparison
would be between the wage growth of soldiers and civilians of comparable age
and education.

            So forget about 13 percent argument. Is there any pay gap?
A rough study by the CBO found that enlisted service members earned
higher wages than three-quarters of male civilian high-school graduates
of the same age, and officers earn higher wages than three-quarters of
college graduates of the same age. By that measure, soldiers earn more than
their civilian counterparts. A RAND study has found essentially similar
results.

            Military service offers many
advantages--self-improvement, adventure, travel, patriotism, the esteem of
one's countrymen--as the services tout. It also has severe disadvantages, such
as long hours, harsh discipline, isolation from loved ones, and the risk of
injury or death. It may be a good idea to attract better soldiers, sailors, and
airmen with huge salary increases, but military service is so different from
civilian work that most wage comparisons are extremely suspect.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               NATO 
               continued to bomb Yugoslavia. Scorecard:
Significant damage to the Serbs' air defenses and command centers, but not to
Serb ground forces, which are escalating their assaults on ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo. As of Friday morning, NATO had lost no pilots. Stress points: 1)
President Clinton told the Serbian people their leaders are to blame for
dragging them into a disastrous war, but so far the Serbs are rallying behind
their leaders and blaming NATO. 2) Congress and the American public are
cautiously supporting the bombing, but not the use of U.S. ground troops. 3)
Italy and Greece suggested resuming peace talks with the Serbs, but U.S.
officials say the allied coalition is holding firm. 4) Russia and China are
protesting loudly but aren't matching their harsh words with deeds. The naive
anti-bombing spin: NATO's bombs will never get the Serbs to accept NATO's peace
plan. The pro-bombing spin: NATO will soon attack the Serbs' tanks and troops
directly, crippling their ability to slaughter the Kosovars. The sophisticated
anti-bombing spin: That's when the Serbs will start shooting down the allies'
planes. (For the overseas' press reaction to the Kosovo airstrikes see "" and
".") (3/26/99)
            

            
Britain's
highest court issued a new ruling on the fate of Chilean Gen. Augusto
Pinochet . Spain is seeking his extradition from Britain on charges of
murder, torture, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Pinochet wants to return to Chile,
where he is immune from prosecution. The court ruled that 1) Pinochet can be
extradited but 2) only for crimes that are illegal in both Britain and Chile.
Since Britain didn't sign the global treaty on crimes against humanity until
1988, this means Pinochet's alleged pre-1988 crimes--nearly all the charges
against him--can't be used as a basis for extraditing him. Both sides are
happy: Pinochet's supporters now expect him to escape extradition, while human
rights activists hail the ruling as a sign that dictators who have committed
more recent crimes can be extradited. (3/26/99)
            

            
The forewoman
of the Lewinsky grand jury said she was willing to indict President
Clinton for perjury. The good news for Clinton: She voted for him, attended
a Democratic gala in his honor in 1997, says, "I absolutely love him" (in part
because he has blacks and other minorities on his staff), doubts he committed
obstruction of justice, and doesn't think he should have been removed from
office. The bad news: She says that he committed perjury (by denying that he
had sex with Monica Lewinsky) and that his sexual exploitation of Lewinsky was
"awful." She also says 1) Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was just doing his
job; 2) she felt maternal sympathy for Lewinsky; and 3) the grand jurors were
suspicious of Linda Tripp and annoyed by her "self-righteousness."
(3/26/99)
            

            
Russian Prime
Minister Yevgeny Primakov canceled his visit to the United States . En
route to meet with President Clinton and leaders of the International Monetary
Fund, Primakov turned his plane around and went back to Moscow because NATO
decided to bomb Yugoslavia, despite Russia's vigorous opposition. The
pessimistic spin: This marks a "significant souring in the American-Russian
relationship" and "could poison discussions" on arms control, which are more
important than Yugoslavia. The optimistic spin: As long as we're holding the
purse strings and Primakov is hard up for cash, he'll be back. The in-between
spin: Canceling the visit offered both sides a graceful way to avoid a
face-to-face fight over Kosovo. (3/24/99)
            

            
Dr. Jack
Kevorkian is botching his murder trial . The prosecution's case relies on
a 60 Minutes video that shows Kevorkian giving a lethal injection to a
terminally ill man after obtaining the man's consent. Kevorkian, acting as his
own attorney, is arguing that it was a mercy killing. The judge has tried in
vain to explain to Kevorkian that mercy killing is not a valid defense against
a murder charge under Michigan law. The spins on Kevorkian's courtroom
performance, in order of ascending irony: 1) He's nuts. 2) He doesn't
understand the difference between morality and the law. 3) He's committing
legal malpractice. 4) He's killing himself. 5) He's unfit to make the legal
decisions by which he's killing himself. 6) He'll escape conviction thanks to
jury nullification yet again. (3/24/99)
            

            

               Jesse
Jackson won't run for president in 2000. Jackson's spin: He can do
more good by pressuring Wall Street to invest in poor communities. Other spins:
1) He decided he can't win. 2) His absence helps Vice President Al Gore by
clearing the field. 3) His absence helps former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., by
freeing up blacks and liberals sympathetic to Bradley's left-wing platform. 4)
Gore talked Jackson out of running. 5) On Gore's behalf, Clinton talked Jackson
out of running. 6) It doesn't matter much, since Gore has already wrapped up
the nomination. (3/24/99)
            

            

               
                  Shakespeare
                
               
                  in Love
                shocked
movie pundits by winning the Academy Award 
               for Best Picture .
Saving Private Ryan , which had been expected to win, instead received
four lesser awards, including best director (Steven Spielberg).
Shakespeare won seven awards, including best actress (Gwyneth Paltrow).
The happy spin: Love beats war. The half-cynical spin: Comedy beats tragedy.
The completely cynical spin: Disney-Miramax's publicity campaign for
Shakespeare beat DreamWorks-Paramount's publicity campaign for
Private Ryan . The ceremony's political controversy was a lifetime
achievement award for Elia Kazan, a director revered for his films but
ostracized by much of Hollywood for outing fellow Communists during the
McCarthy era. (3/22/99)
            

            
A Swiss
psychiatrist and his British co-pilot completed the first round-the-world
balloon trip . Their 20-day odyssey achieved aviation's most elusive goal,
beating more famous balloonists such as Steve Fossett and Richard Branson.
Their prize is $1 million--half the cost of their balloon. While applauding
co-pilot Brian Jones for overachieving, the media concluded in retrospect that
the pilot, Bertrand Piccard, had been destined for greatness, since his
grandfather was the first man to reach the stratosphere (in a balloon in 1931)
and his father had attained the oceans' lowest depth (35,000 feet). The spins:
1) The trip was a triumph of human ingenuity, skill, and endurance. 2) It was a
triumph of meteorological, communications, and auto-piloting technology, which
babysat the crew. 3) It was a triumph of lucky weather. (For more on the
species, see David Plotz's 1998 piece "") (3/22/99)
            

            
Duke,
Connecticut, Michigan State, and Ohio State reached the NCAA basketball
tournament's final four . Duke is the clear favorite to win it all, having
won 31 straight games. The Cinderella teams--Gonzaga, Southwest Missouri State,
and Miami of Ohio--were wiped out in the last two rounds, leaving no true
underdogs. Many fans are cheering Connecticut because the school has earned its
first final four appearance, having choked in the tournament in recent years.
Similarly, Michigan State is making its first such appearance in two decades.
The best story belongs to Ohio State, which was 8-22 last year and is the first
team ever to reach the final four without having qualified for the tournament
in the previous year. (3/22/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 208: &quot;Favorite Things&quot;

            

               Urine-absorbing disposable diapers, mistake-eradicating liquid paper,
bullet-stopping Kevlar--what's the connection?
            

             

            by noon
ET Wednesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Monday's Question
(No. 207)--"Samaranch Hand":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              As it prepares to convene in
Switzerland this week, the International Olympic Committee has invited a
well-known American to join its reform panel. Who and why? (Question
courtesy of Andrew
Staples.)
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               "The
Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, because of his grace under pressure and his
unimpeachable sense of fair pl--What? He did? Oh, never mind. Can you get me
tickets to The Lion King for my 10-year-old?"-- David Rakoff
( Bill Franzen and Eliot Cohen had similar answers.)

               "John
Glenn. Anyone who can take a junket on the space shuttle is all right with the
IOC."-- Dwight Lemke
               

               "The
ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz. Because he's ubiquitous."-- Dr. Jonathan E.
Snow
               

               "Whoopi
Goldberg. It's a trap: They're going to push her into a pit and cover it with a
steel plate in order to prevent her from hosting the Oscars. It's far-fetched,
but a guy can dream."-- Daniel Radosh
               

               "Phil
Knight, but only if he agrees to bring 20 pairs of Air Jordans for each
committee member, plus some hookers. In return, Nike becomes the official shoe
of the IOC Reform Committee."-- Tim "Deathly Afraid of Freeways"
Carvell
               

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            Do dark and brooding News
Quiz participants regard any effort at reform as insincere or just the IOC's?
What about AFSCME DC37, the New York municipal employees union? What about the
New York Police Department's recent plan--what was it called? oh yeah--Pride,
Respect, or I'll Shoot. No, wait, it was CPR: Courtesy, Professionalism,
Respect. How's that working out, by the way? Here's how: According to a New
York Times survey, 51 percent of all New Yorkers (72 percent of
African-Americans) believe most of the police use excessive force; 70 percent
think the police often engage in brutality against blacks; 60 percent think
that the mayor's response to the Amadou Diallo shooting has made matters worse.
The mayor's press secretary said everyone in New York is just wrong: "The poll
numbers seem to be driven by false perceptions." That's a kind of reform plan.
And by "dark and brooding," I, of course, mean appealing and simpatico.

            
               News Quiz Time
Line
            

            

               First slam at Eleanor Clift--March 16, 1999

               First reference to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis--March 16, 1999

               First use of phrase "monkey ass" (not alluding
to Landis)--March 16, 1999

            

            
               Honest to God I'm
Not Making Up This Answer
            

            As Greg Diamond , seeking the moral high ground, IOC
President Juan Antonio Samaranch has invited Henry Kissinger to join the reform
panel, for reasons that utterly confound me. The secret war in Cambodia? The
overthrow of the Allende government? The harassment of Daniel Ellsberg?

            Also invited, Jacques
Delors, architect of the European Union, and Fiat tycoon Giovanni Agnelli.
Samaranch told the Milan-based Gazzetta dello Sport that the new IOC
would include 35 representatives each from international sports federations and
national Olympic committees, "plus a group of athletes of great prestige and
some global personalities of unquestioned fame." A lovely phrase, that:
unquestioned fame. Like Idi Amin or Cher.

            
               The Price Is Right
Extra
            

            Match each dollar amount with the item it buys.

            
               Cost
            

            1. $1,099

            2. $7 million

            3. $3.5 million

            4. $5.25 million

            

               Benefit
            

            A. "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap's back pay from Sunbeam.

            B. Bonus payment to Philip Morris CEO Geoffrey
Bible.

            C. Amount left on contract of fired New Jersey Nets
coach John Calipari.

            D. Panasonic's high-tech toilet seat.

            

               Answers
            

            1-D: The "personal hygiene system" advertised in
today's Times features "intimate washing, heated seat, air dryer."

            2-C: Off to a 3-17 start, Calipari will likely get
to keep the money. Of his former bosses he said, "I do believe that they care
about me." None of his players was heard to say the same about their
ex-coach.

            3-B: Bible's bonus, a reward for his part in the
settlement with 46 states, was approved by the head of the compensation
committee, John Reed. As co-chair of Citigroup, Reed got a bonus of $7.8
million. That's called "empathy."

            4-A: Dunlap, the
dismissed CEO says he's owed the money; the company says he's not. Sunbeam,
incidentally, does not make a personal hygiene system, but for enough money,
Dunlap will come to your house, give you a sponge bath, and fire your
mother.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Don King. (Oh, right--you
kill one guy and I suppose that makes you a murderer. People are so
judgmental.)

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will become the property of Slate and will be
published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may
publish your name on its site in connection with your submission.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
Kosovo update:
1) Yugoslavia declared "peace," said it had negotiated a political
accord with ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, urged ethnic Albanian
refugees to return to their homes, and called further NATO bombing an assault
on "peace, unity, and understanding." NATO and the United States ridiculed the
statements as lies, inadequate concessions, and a "charm offensive." 2) NATO
said the bombing has now cut off supplies to Serbian forces in Kosovo.
Skeptics said the news comes too late, since Kosovo has already been ethnically
cleansed. 3) Having closed the borders through which refugees had been fleeing,
the Serbs sent the refugees back into Kosovo. The official Serbian spin:
We're welcoming the refugees back. The half-cynical NATO spin: This is part of
the Serbs' pretense of reconciliation. The completely cynical NATO spin: The
Serbs need the refugees as human shields. (Check out "" for

                  Slate
               's latest coverage.) (4/9/99)
            

            

               Russia 
               is ratcheting up its threats 
               against
NATO over the bombing of Yugoslavia. President Boris Yeltsin said Russia
would "not permit" NATO to send in ground troops to make Yugoslavia its
"protectorate." Then the speaker of Russia's parliament said Yeltsin had
directed the targeting of Russian nuclear missiles at NATO countries .
This raised alarms throughout the world, until the speaker's office retracted
the claim and explained that Yeltsin had merely discussed the targeting option.
The spins: 1) Yeltsin is pretending to entertain this option to placate Russian
hard-liners. 2) He's nuts. 3) He's playing his usual cagey game. 4) He doesn't
understand that you don't play games with nukes. (4/9/99)
            

            

               President 
               Clinton and Chinese Prime Minister Zhu
Rongji failed to agree on terms for China's admission to the World Trade
Organization . Backstage reports say that the deal is nearly complete but
that the hostile atmosphere in Congress, particularly over reports of Chinese
espionage at U.S. nuclear labs, makes it futile for Clinton to push WTO
admission now. Zhu, who is visiting Washington, told reporters that 1) he has
"no knowledge" of the alleged nuclear espionage; 2) he is "impatient" to
improve China's human rights practices; and 3) if he had meant to influence the
1996 U.S. presidential election, he would have shelled out a lot more than the
$300,000 China is accused of funneling to the Clinton campaign. While holding
out against lucrative trade concessions demanded by Wall Street and Hollywood,
Zhu is offering to let American telecommunications firms own Chinese cell phone
and Internet companies, which presumably would undermine China's ability to
quash domestic dissent. The spins: 1) America will take this deal because we
care about freedom. 2) We'll reject it because we care about money.
(4/9/99)
            

            
The Y2K
"conceive-a-thon" is on. Medical experts have declared April 9 the
conception date most likely to lead to the first baby born on Jan. 1, 2000, and
many couples are reportedly competing for the honor/shame. The most
charming/egregious case is a contest among four couples, selected by a Boston
radio station from among hundreds of contestants, to conceive the "millennium
baby" in separate rooms of the same hotel today. If any of the couples
succeeds, the radio station will pay a $1 million prize. One contestant says
she asked her mother, "How does it feel to have a daughter that's going to be
in the public and everybody knows that she's going to have sex tomorrow?"
Meanwhile, CNN offered interested viewers advice about ovulation and timing,
concluding: "Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines." The spins on the race:
1) It's grand and fascinating. 2) It's sick and pitiable. 3) It's sick and
fascinating. (4/9/99)
            

            
Missouri
voters rejected a ballot measure 
               that would have allowed citizens to
carry concealed handguns . The National Rifle Association had spent $3.7
million to promote the measure. The sunny spins: 1) It's a victory over the gun
nuts. 2) It's a victory over big money. The cynical spins: 1) It's a victory
for the anti-militia Zeitgeist spawned by the Oklahoma City bombing. 2)
It's a victory for a well-funded scare campaign led by Hillary Clinton. The
political analyses: 1) It's a victory for suburban whites and urban blacks over
rural dwellers. 2) It's a victory for women over men. (4/7/99)
            

            
Scientists found
three 500-year-old Inca mummies on top of a volcano in Argentina. After
the Incas were ritually sacrificed, their corpses quickly froze in the cold
weather, leaving them so well preserved that their internal organs remain
intact and the hair on their arms is still visible. Religious artifacts that
were evidently part of the sacrifice were also recovered. The anthropological
spin: The mummies will teach us all about Inca religious practices. The medical
spin: They'll teach us all about Inca diet, health, and genetics. The cynical
spin: We owe it all to human sacrifice. (4/7/99)
            

            

               Libya 
               finally 
               handed over the 
               suspects
in the 
               1988 Lockerbie bombing case. The bomb blew up a Pan Am plane
over Scotland, killing 270 people, most of them Americans. The suspects, Abdel
Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were sent to the Netherlands,
where they will be tried under Scottish law. In exchange, the 
               United
Nations 
               has lifted sanctions it imposed several years ago to punish
Libya for sheltering the suspects. The spins, in order of descending optimism:
1) It's a landmark in the establishment of effective international law. 2) It's
a triumph of negotiating perseverance by South African President Nelson Mandela
and the United Nations. 3) Even if the suspects are convicted, the bombing's
true mastermind, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, will escape justice.
(4/5/99)
            

            

               Serial 
               HIV spreader Nushawn Williams 
               was
sentenced to four to 12 years in jail. He was accused of infecting at least
nine women with HIV by knowingly exposing them to the virus through unprotected
sex in exchange for providing illegal drugs to them. His sentence is part of a
deal in which he pleaded guilty to statutory rape and reckless endangerment.
Williams' excuse for continuing to have unprotected sex after a nurse told him
he had the virus is that he didn't believe the nurse. His attorney's spin:
"He's not an evil person. ... He feels badly that he's ill. He expressed to me
the concern he may not live out his sentence." The naive retributive spin: He
should have been sentenced to death. The sophisticated spin: He has been.
(4/5/99)
            

            

               The 
               alleged author of the Melissa virus was
busted. David L. Smith, a New Jersey computer programmer, was arrested on
charges of conspiracy, theft of computer service, and interruption of public
communications. The virus jammed up the Internet by replicating itself in
multiple e-mails it transmitted from infected computers. The dramatic spin:
Smith is an ingenious villain, and the computer security companies that pursued
him were ingenious sleuths using sophisticated technology and techniques. The
boring spin: Smith is a 30-year-old bankrupt nerd, and America Online turned
him in by letting law enforcement officials see the log that showed which phone
line had been used to post the virus. (4/5/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I Like Mike

            When
Richard J. Daley was alive and mayor of Chicago, no one gave him a harder time
than Mike Royko did. Maybe the funniest piece Rokyo ever wrote was an extended
parody of one of Daley's frequent solecisms. Daley, responding to his critics,
once uttered the phrase "Like a guy said a long time ago: 'He who hasn't
sinned, pick up the first stone.' " Royko riffed on this through an entire
column, as in:

            

               Moses,
leading the Israelites out of Egypt: "Let's get out of here."

               Ahab,
sighting the Great White Whale: "Let's all get that fish."

               
Douglas MacArthur. leaving the Philippines in 1942: "Let's all come back here
some time."

            

            In a less madcap vein, Rokyo wrote Boss , a
devastating portrait of the Daley machine and probably the best book ever
written about city politics.

            Yet when Daley dropped
dead of a heart attack in 1976, Royko sat down at his typewriter and banged out
a column that was both an interpretation and an appreciation. Daley's abuse of
the English language didn't offend people who weren't "that far removed from
parents and grandparents who knew only bits and pieces of the language," Royko
wrote. The mayor's abuse of power didn't bother those who had lived through far
worse: "The people who came here in Daley's lifetime were accustomed to someone
wielding power like a club, be it a czar, emperor, king, or rural sheriff,"
Royko noted. "The niceties of the democratic process weren't part of the
immigrant experiences. So if the Machine muscle offended some, it seemed like
old times to many more." It's hard to imagine a political scientist--or any
other journalist for that matter--framing it so simply, or so well.

            Reading these gems in the new posthumous selection, One
More Time: The Best of Mike Royko , I found myself wondering: Why doesn't
anyone write a newspaper column this good anymore? Royko wasn't quite a Twain,
or a Mencken, but his writing was distinctive and memorable and in its time the
closest thing to lasting literature in a daily paper. Royko could make you
laugh and make you think, stir outrage at a heartless bureaucrat, or bring a
tear to the eye when he flashed a glimpse of the heart hidden beneath his hard
shell.

            He performed this range
of feats with a regularity and prominence that no city columnist, or any
national one, can match today. Royko wrote his 900 words five times a week,
sometimes six. Today the columnist who writes something decent twice a week is
a marvel. For the better part of 34 years, everyone in Chicago read him, first
in the Daily News , then in the Sun-Times after the Daily
News closed, then in the Tribune after Rupert Murdoch bought the
Sun-Times. (Even after Royko said that no self-respecting fish would be
wrapped in a Murdoch paper, "the Alien" refused to accept his resignation and
kept reprinting his old columns. This led Royko to write: "In Alien's Tongue,
'I Quit' is 'Vacation.' ") Royko's fame spread nationally despite the fact that
he seldom left Chicago and refused to do television. By the time he died in
1997, he was syndicated in 600 papers around the country.

            Royko's hold came in part from his sense of place. He grew
up in the Polish neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago that Nelson
Algren captured in one of Royko's favorite books, The Neon Wilderness ,
and he never left it in spirit. Royko's father was a milkman, and the family
lived over a tavern. Before finding his way into journalism, Royko already had
experience "setting bowling pins, working on a landscape crew, in a greasy
machine shop, and in a lamp factory and pushing carts around a department
store," as he noted in 1990. When he said he became a writer because it was
easier on the feet, he half meant it. To his working class and
working-class-once-removed readers, Royko was, like Daley, "one of us."

            But where Daley often
drew on the worst side of ethnic Chicago--its tolerance of corruption, its
parochialism and racial prejudice--Royko spoke to its better instincts. A
neighborhood populist, he celebrated the corner tavern and the weekend softball
game. But Royko also challenged white Chicago's prejudices, skewering bigots
who tried to keep a white couple that had adopted a black baby out of their
neighborhood or a funeral parlor that didn't want to bury a black soldier
killed in Vietnam. In the column he wrote the day after Harold Washington
became the first black person elected mayor of Chicago, Royko began with one of
his inimitable openings, "So I told Uncle Chester: Don't worry, Harold
Washington doesn't want to marry your sister."

            Of course, Uncle Chester, along with Slats Grobnik and Aunt
Wanda, didn't really exist. I'm sure that Sam Sianis, the proprietor of Royko's
beloved Billy Goat Tavern, didn't say many of the things Royko attributed to
him. I'm not sure how many of Royko's readers understood that much of what he
wrote was facetious or fictionalized. These days, newspaper writers are no
longer allowed the kind of license he took. As journalism has become less of a
trade and more of a profession, once common vices like embellishment,
plagiarism, and binge drinking have ceased to be regarded as charming. Mike
Barnicle, a second-rate Roykoesque columnist, was fired from the Boston
Globe for blending fiction and fact in a way that Royko did routinely.

            Nor is it possible for a
newspaper writer now to be as blunt as Royko was. In 1990, the University of
Missouri School of Journalism released a list of words for journalists to
avoid, including such terms as gorgeous, lazy, sweetie, and fried chicken.
"Fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken. I said it and I'm glad. Sue me,"
Royko wrote. His refusal to be sensitive got him in trouble in 1996, the year
before he died. In a column lampooning Pat Buchanan, Royko wrote that Mexico
was a useless country that should be invaded and turned over to Club Med. By
then, Royko's tone had grown increasingly bitter and his irony was easy to
miss. The result was an enormous protest outside the Tribune by Hispanic
groups that took his comments literally and demanded that he be fired.

            If journalism has changed since Royko's heyday, so too have
cities like Chicago. White ethnics have ceased to be the dominant force in
urban life. In 1981, when Royko moved to a condominium in a lakefront
high-rise, he cast himself as a bungalow-bred Margaret Mead, studying yuppies
by living among them. But yuppies--or at least the suburbanized offspring of
Slats Grobnik--were increasingly his audience and his newsroom colleagues.
Royko saw himself as more and more of an anachronism. Before he died, he quit
drinking and unhappily moved to the suburbs.

            So why don't we have newspaper columnists as good as
him anymore? To summarize: We no longer have his kind of newspaper. We no
longer have his kind of city. But mainly, we don't have another Mike Royko--a
newspaper writer grounded in a place like Chicago, with a gift for explaining
it to the world, and the world to it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Shoot Hooligans, Not Hoops

            Littleton. Springfield.
Paducah. Pearl. Jonesboro. Our once-safe schools have become slaughterhouses,
our children sitting ducks for any pot-smoking, Marilyn Manson-listening,
trench-coated deviant with a grievance.

            President Clinton and
his Democrat allies will undoubtedly exploit the tragedy of Littleton to push
for still more restrictions on the constitutional right to bear arms. Any day
now, you should expect to hear Clinton and lackeys proposing to expand
"gun-free school zones," the supposedly "safe" areas around schools where guns
are banned. (Given recent history, perhaps they should be called "school-free
gun zones.")

            It's time to recognize the naiveté of such legislation, a
foolishness that has turned our schools into killing grounds. National Rifle
Association President Charlton Heston wisely declared this week that the
presence of an armed guard might have saved the lives of Columbine High School
students. And Gov. Jesse Ventura pointed out that the presence of "someone who
was armed" could have "stabilized" the situation. As usual, Moses and the Body
were on target, but they didn't go far enough. As it turns out, there was a
security guard at Columbine, but a single, lightly armed person is not
sufficient deterrence. American schools don't just need several armed security
guards or even armed teachers. They need armed students. Immediately, before
another student fires another shot, Congress should pass the Right To Carry
Concealed Weapons in the Classroom Act of 1999.

            There is no disputing:
When guns in the classroom are outlawed, only outlaws in the classroom have
guns. President Clinton calls our gun-free schools "safe zones," but this is a
perverted idea of safety: Law-abiding students are defenseless while predatory
juvenile delinquents, armed to the teeth, are free to roam. Why do you think
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold chose Columbine High for murder? Because they
knew their victims would be unarmed! But they would not have dared to invade
that school had they known they would be confronted by well-trained,
well-prepared, and well-armed classmates. Studies have proven that society is
safer when law-abiding citizens carry concealed weapons. Our schools will be,
too.

            Not every student has to carry a concealed weapon. It is,
of course, a matter of personal choice. But any child who is willing--whether
she's 18 or 15 or even 8--should be free to arm herself and walk the halls of
her school without fear. If our teens and pre-teens are old enough to kill--and
the schoolyard massacres have proved that--they're certainly old enough to
defend themselves. Let's put classroom safety in the hands--and the
holsters--of those who need it most.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Litigation Lover

            President Clinton has spent
$10 million on legal fees; has been forced to answer repellent, invasive
questions under oath; has had every private embarrassment announced to the
world in the guise of "court documents"; and has watched helplessly as his
closest friends and aides have been barbecued and bankrupted by hostile
lawyers. Anyone who had been stretched on this legal rack for so long would do
anything to prevent the next guy from being similarly tortured.

            So it's not surprising
that the Clinton administration just announced its opposition to the renewal of
the independent counsel statute. The administration believes that the president
and his top advisers should not be subjected to the kind of endless,
borderless, remorseless investigation that Kenneth Starr has inflicted on
Clinton. And indeed, they should not be.

            Yet Clinton and his aides have said not one word about the
endless, borderless, remorseless lawsuits that afflict everyone else .
Clinton has learned a selfish lesson from Flytrap: I, the president,
should not have to suffer through a barrage of litigation and investigation.
But he has missed the real lesson: No one should have to endure what he
endured. The president's defenders portray Flytrap as a parable of how the law,
misapplied, can undermine the president. In fact, it is a parable of how the
law, properly applied, can undermine anyone.

            "The case, with its
invasive, irrelevant discovery, with its incredible legal fees, with the way it
drew in innocent bystanders and ruined their lives, is exactly typical
of the American legal system," says Walter Olson, a Manhattan Institute scholar
and author of The Excuse Factory .

            Even so, the president is not advocating any legal reform
larger than protecting himself. He continues to act as though lawsuits are
government by other means. From the beginning of his first term, Clinton has
favored policies that made litigation more invasive and expanded the right to
sue. And he still seems to believe that litigation is a substitute for
regulation and legislation.

            There is, as has been
widely noted, one pungent irony about Clinton's policies. In 1994, he supported
the Violence Against Women Act at the behest of women's groups. The act permits
much more expansive discovery into the sexual history of defendants in sexual
harassment and sex crimes cases. Judges and legal scholars warned that the new
rules would be intrusive and prejudicial, but Clinton signed the bill into law
anyway. Four years later, he found himself a victim of the sort of voyeuristic,
nasty snooping that the law authorizes.

            In most other matters, too, Clinton has protected or
expanded the right to sue and the power of the plaintiff to make life miserable
for defendants. He has presided over the enlargement of the Americans with
Disabilities Act. Last summer, his Department of Justice successfully
petitioned the Supreme Court to designate asymptomatic HIV-infected people as a
protected class under the ADA. In 1995, he and congressional Democrats defeated
a House Republican bill to penalize plaintiffs for frivolous lawsuits and to
impose "loser pays" rules. Also that year, the president delighted plaintiffs'
lawyers by vetoing a bill to limit punitive damages in product liability
cases.

            Since the scandal, the
administration has been no less enthusiastic about lawsuits. The administration
continues to push a "patient's bill of rights" that would guarantee the right
to sue your HMO. Clinton is also trying to use lawsuits to make public policy.
In his State of the Union address, he announced that the Department of
Justice would sue cigarette companies to recover Medicare costs of smokers, a
backdoor way to have the courts increase federal tobacco revenues without going
through Congress. And the administration is lending tacit support to cities
suing gun manufacturers, a backdoor way to have the courts make gun policy
without going through Congress.

            The result of this reliance on lawsuits by Clinton, his
presidential predecessors, and Congress is what Brookings Institution scholar
Jonathan Rauch calls "microgovernment." Politicians are abdicating their duty
to write well-defined laws, leaving it to judges to make the rules
case-by-case. Judges end up deciding how bosses treat their employees, how
corporations treat their customers, etc. Microgovernment makes easy populist
politics. The president and Congress can take credit for giving people
"rights," then leave the actual work of making sense of those rights to the
courts. The patient's bill of rights, for example, would deliver a poll-tested
victory to Clinton and Congress. Then judges would absorb the responsibility of
handling the lawsuits spawned by the new rights.

            Clinton's support for
better living through litigation is also based on interest group politics.
Trial lawyers courted him and his party with tons of money. Women's groups,
civil rights groups, and Naderites--all avid believers in
litigation--constitute a huge chunk of Clinton's base. The president may also
be a true believer in government by lawsuit. He came of age when the civil
rights movement and the Naderites were using the courts to challenge unjust
state governments and arrogant corporations. His intentions are honorable:
Corporations shouldn't discriminate in hiring, HMOs shouldn't
deny care to patients who need it. But he never asks whether lawsuits and
rights are the only way to prevent these bad things.

            Microgovernment does not seem to cost anything--no new
budget lines, no new bureaucracies--but of course it does. Financially, it
shuffles expenses from government to someone else, usually the person being
sued. Politically, it's anti-democratic, replacing congressional and executive
branch decision-making. "It is a kind of three-card monte," says Olson. "You
shift the responsibility to the branch of government that citizens can't do
anything about." And it makes an already litigious society more so, afflicting
more and more people with onerous discovery, bottomless legal expenses, and
grotesque but legal invasions of privacy. (The United States, Olson notes, has
far laxer discovery rules than any other developed nation.)

            The GOP is reluctant to challenge the law's tyranny.
During Flytrap, many Republicans conveniently abandoned their objections to
wide-ranging sex harassment litigation, endorsing broad discovery in order to
nail Clinton. But even those who insist that the legal system is out of control
are afraid to challenge it: Every time they have done so, Clinton and the
Democrats have trounced them, depicting them (with some justice) as shills for
big corporations that don't want to be accountable to employees and
customers.

            Can anything change Clinton's mind? After all, he
has suffered through legal hell once and has emerged unaffected. Maybe, just
maybe, if he were sued again ...

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Ask Not What You
Can Constitutionally Do ...
            

            I'm not sure I quite see what's odd about accepting
a post that, as an abstract legal matter, you think is unconstitutional (see
""). Many people, for instance, believe that all independent agencies (such as
the FCC) are unconstitutional, and that the Supreme Court was mistaken in
upholding this "fourth branch of government." Does it really follow that a
person who believes this can't in good conscience go to work for the FCC?

            I don't think that such punctilio is really morally
or professionally obligatory. The battle over the constitutionality of
independent agencies was fought in the courts; it was won by those who've
argued that such agencies are constitutional. For our legal system's purposes,
that's that, at least until the court reverses its views. A fair-minded person
might say, "Given that the law as interpreted today authorizes such agencies, I
feel that I can do good/do my duty to my country by working for this
agency."

            Same for the independent
counsel. Now, if one thought that the office was not just unconstitutional but
immoral , that would be a different story; for instance, if one thinks
that it violates basic human rights to outlaw drugs, going to work for the DEA
would be a bit iffy. But I don't think people really think this (or should
think this) about the independent counsel statute.

            -- Eugene
Volokh
            

            UCLA Law School

            Los
Angeles

            
               Inflated
Inflation
            

            After referring to the USA Today report that
economists don't expect rising gasoline prices to trigger inflation, ""
concludes with the rhetorical flourish, "Huh--isn't inflation primarily
measured as a rate of increase in cost?"

            Both the economists cited and Scott Shuger seem
confused. Inflation is an overall rise in the price of goods and services. The
key word is overall . The increase or decrease in any particular item not
only does not, but cannot, produce inflation. When the amount of money in
circulation is fixed, if expenditures rise in one area, a fortiori, they fall
in another. Inflation, by definition, occurs when the government increases the
money supply faster than the real growth of the economy, because this increase
is the only way more money can become available to chase the same number of
goods.

            A logical corollary is that inflation cannot be
"triggered" by increasing wages, farm prices, or health care costs. If food and
medical care tripled in cost, people would of necessity spend less on other
things to pay for the increase or cut down on the food and medical care they
purchased.

            Falling demand for other
things would necessarily result in falling prices for those things. Wealth
would indeed be moved around, some people enriched, and others would be
financial losers. But there would not be, nor could there have been, an
overall increase in prices. An overall increase in prices is only
possible when there has been an overall increase in the amount of money in
circulation.

            -- Bennett
Weinberg
            

            
Philadelphia

            
               Groaning
            

            In his "" lamenting Matt Groening's absence from
the Comic Journal 's Top 100 list, A.O. Scott claims that "Groening's
willing, if somewhat ironic, embrace of the marketing bonanza his creation has
unleashed may have cost him his rightful spot in the the Comics
Journal 's highbrow/subculture pantheon."

            Oh, really? Then why is
Charles Schulz, surely the all-time top marketing whore, listed in the No. 2
spot? There must be a better explanation for Groening being left off the list,
and there is: Life in Hell sucks. It hasn't been funny or insightful for
over a decade. True, the same thing can be said for Peanuts , but
Peanuts had a solid 25 years of brilliance before burnout. Groening's
reputation is entirely dependent on two 12-episode series, Work Is Hell
and School Is Hell . The entire decade since then has just been
Akbar-and-Jeff minimalist filler. Scott confirms this, by the way, by only
talking about the quality of The Simpsons in his article--an undisputed
fact, but the Comics Journal wasn't ranking animators.

            -- Kim
Scarborough
            

            Chicago

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Phony War

            This is a season of refusal in American politics.
The Clinton scandals, exhausted, refuse to revive themselves. Texas Gov. George
W. Bush, anointed, refuses to campaign for president till summer arrives.
Congress, terrified of Social Security, refuses to do anything at all.

            Politics, too, abhors a
vacuum, so Washington has concocted a story to fill the void: Bill Bradley,
whose presidential campaign was written off just months ago, is surging, and
Vice President Al Gore, the nominee presumptive, is in deep trouble. No matter
that the New Hampshire primary is 10 months away. In recent weeks, the New
York Times , the Wall Street Journal , the Chicago Tribune ,
many smaller papers, and all three newsweeklies have touted the viability of
Bradley's campaign and the messiness of Gore's. Last Sunday, the great sage
David Broder declared that Gore was struggling and conferred the mantle of
electability on Bradley. Bradley's numbers seem to be rising in the polls: One
shows Bradley favored by 35 percent of Democratic voters, trailing Gore by only
17 points. (Other polls show Bradley in the 20s, trailing Gore by at least 25
points.)

            Bradley is an impressive candidate, blessed with celebrity,
thoughtfulness, and a good heart, and Gore can be an erratic campaigner. But
the Bradley Surge and Gore Stumble have little to do with the candidates. We
are witnessing one of the first fake battles of what the Progressive Policy
Institute's Will Marshall calls "the phony war" of the campaign. This is the
period when voters are indifferent, and when journalists, Democratic
candidates, and Republican troublemakers spin and position and jockey to write
the script for the coming real campaign--in this case, a script that makes
Bradley a white knight and Gore a looming disaster.

            The first reason for the
Bradley Surge is that Dollar Bill is proving himself a better fund-raiser than
anyone expected. He collected $4.3 million in the first three months of the
year, less than half what Gore raised, but more than enough to make him a
legitimate candidate. His first fund-raising reports two weeks ago gave
journalists an opening to laud him.

            The Bradley surge also owes something to his fame.
Bradley is the John McCain of the left, the politician who turns baby boomer
men weak in the knees. His "Princeton, basketball, sense-of-where-you-are,
Rhodes Scholar, New York Knick" mystique won him a free pass as the thinking
man's senator. This was only reinforced by his celebrated reluctance to run for
president in 1988 and 1992 and his "politics is broken" retirement speech in
1996. His reputation as the politician too good for politics has been a key
feature of the early adulatory campaign coverage.

            But the most important
reasons for Bradley's supposed surge are independent of the candidate. Bradley
has lucked into a one-on-one race. Besides serving as yet another useful
basketball metaphor for Bradley--"I'm going one-on-one with Al Gore"--the
two-man race gives Bradley instant viability. He's automatically one gaffe away
from the nomination. Political Washington is desperate for a Democratic horse
race, but a horse race can only happen if Bradley is perceived to be strong,
and he will only be perceived to be strong if everyone says he is.

            The one-on-one campaign also explains Bradley's apparent
rise in the polls. As the only challenger, Bradley collects all the anti-Gore
votes. Bradley's numbers have climbed as pollsters dropped Richard Gephardt,
Paul Wellstone, and Jesse Jackson from their surveys. "Fifty-two to 35 looks a
lot better for Bradley than 52 to 13 to 12 to 10," gripes a Gore staffer.

            Bradley's media boomlet
also depends on Democratic anxiety about Gore. Gore trails both George W. Bush
and Elizabeth Dole in nationwide polls. More than 50 percent of one poll sample
called Gore "boring." Gore has become a kind of voodoo doll for Clinton: When
the president is in trouble, his approval ratings remain high, but Gore's
numbers sag. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that the vast majority
of Americans are sick of the Clinton administration scandals, and they are
taking out their frustration on Gore. "Americans want someone who continues
Clinton's policies and programs but who is not Clinton. Gore ought to fit that
bill," says Pew Director Andrew Kohut. "But somehow there is a link between
Clinton and Gore that is hurting Gore." Democrats feeling panicky over the Gore
numbers are touting Bradley as the remedy: Every piece on Bradley emphasizes
that he shares Gore's moderate, thoughtful, New Democrat politics but isn't
handcuffed to Clinton.

            Republicans are doing their best to intensify this
Democratic anxiety about the vice president. They are trying to Quaylize Gore.
Republican house members, Republican senators, the Republican National
Committee, and Republican interest groups have been assaulting Gore for the
past few months, trying to turn him into a figure of fun. They have ridiculed
his "creating the Internet" comment, his claim that he and Tipper were the
model for Love Story , and his anecdotes about growing up as a farm
boy.

            The notion that Bradley
is rising and Gore is falling can become true if everyone keeps declaring it
so. But what's more likely is that time and the natural course of campaigns
will take their toll. Campaigns are self-correcting: If Bradley gets close
enough to be a real challenge to Gore, he will be subject to the same withering
fire that Gore faces. It will be pointed out again and again that Bradley is
just as awkward a campaigner as Gore. Bradley, who has belittled Gore's
microproposals (sprawl, traffic, etc.), will see his own self-proclaimed ""
questioned. As the plucky challenger, Bradley can campaign both to the left and
right of Gore, picking up support from anti-Gore, pro-labor activists on one
day and boosting his pro-business, pro-free-trade agenda to Wall Streeters a
few days later. But if his campaign really prospers and he has to explain what
he believes, he'll have a hard time holding that coalition together. At the
moment, Bradley can promote his support for campaign finance reform, but if he
does well, he'll be battered with questions about his own aggressive fund
raising.

            The progression of the campaign will also rescue Gore from
his Vice Presidential Malaise. The Democratic fretfulness about Gore's polls is
premature: Vice presidents always poll terribly in the year before their
presidential campaign. George Bush, you may remember, trailed Gary Hart in 1987
polls, and Newsweek even ran a cover story about Bush and "the wimp
factor." Gore has been Clinton's lackey for more than six years. He's loyal to
his president, and that loyalty makes him look ineffectual. (George W. Bush
kills Gore in poll questions about "leadership." Bush is the manly governor of
Texas, while Gore moderates Reinventing Government seminars.)

            The cure for the phony war will be the real one.
Come fall and winter, surges and stumbles will really mean something. By then
Gore will be campaigning seriously, distancing himself from Clinton, and
running macho ads; Bradley will have defined his big ideas and endured the
inevitable media backlash to his current rave notices; and the voters will
actually be paying attention.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  Pushing
Tin
                (20 th Century Fox). The first half of this film
offers an exhilarating peek into the high-pressure world of air traffic
controllers, but despite the best efforts of a choice ensemble cast (John
Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie), the movie tanks by
the end. "[F]or a while, at least, the sheer journalistic energy of what we're
seeing grips us in a casually exotic way" (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment
Weekly ). The trouble: The plot is horrendous and ends up with an
"obligatory traffic control emergency crisis" (Janet Maslin, the New York
Times ) that takes all the spice out of what had been an unusual study of
group dynamics. (Watch the trailer and clips from the film here [requires free registration].)

            

               
                  Election
                (Paramount Pictures). Critics rave: "The
best and brightest high-school adventure since the groundbreaking
Heathers ... a nearly flawless little film" (Kenneth Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ). Reese Witherspoon turns in a spectacular performance as a
ferociously ambitious goody-goody go-getter who's running for student council
president. Matthew Broderick is the genial teacher who becomes irritated with
Reese's smugness and tries to rig the election. The three-candidate runoff that
results is a loose parody of the '96 presidential election, which makes for "a
moral fable with rare comic bite" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone ).
(
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein the film "exuberantly caustic." Visit
this site dedicated to the expecting Witherspoon and her fiance Ryan
Phillippe.)

            
               
                  Lovers of the
Arctic Circle
                (Fine Line Features). Critics have a hard time
explaining just what it is they like so much about this Spanish film of fate
and love, but they like it. Maslin says one "needn't really articulate what
makes it so haunting. The evidence is on the screen" (the New York
Times ). Joe Morgenstern writes, "Lest I, too, go round in circles trying to
convey the dense texture of this exquisite film, I'll simply say that [it]
seizes your mind and stays in your heart" (the Wall Street Journal ). The
story follows two lovers who meet at the age of 8 and cycle in and out of each
other's lives through adulthood. Peppered with wordplay, startling visual
imagery, and near misses by the two lovers, the film has only one flaw,
according to critics, namely that all the fancy footwork verges on becoming too
self-conscious. (Visit the film's official site for a sample of the film's
peculiarities.)

            

               Music
            

            
               
                  Mule
Variations
               , by Tom Waits (Epitaph). Tom Waits' first album in six
years, which ditches the junkyard noise experimentation of his previous
releases for a blues approach, gets passable reviews from Rolling Sone
and Spin . "Waits seems to have peaked as a songwriter with 1985's
Rain Dogs ," writes Ben Ratliff, "and he's still writing outtakes from
that record" ( Rolling Stone ). Spin 's Sarah Vowell says, "Waits'
coolie raps often feel a little fake, like he's working at having a good time."
Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times dissents, calling Mule
Variations "personal and accessible"; as does Billboard , "Waits digs
deep and wide into his song psyche and pulls up material rooted in blues,
gospel, and cabaret music but delivered with the utmost originality." (Listen
to a track from the album here.)

            

               Event
            

            
               Nabokov's
100 th Birthday (April 23, 1999). The centennial of Vladimir
Nabokov's birth is marked by the appearance of a biography of his wife, Véra
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) ; a reissue of Speak, Memory ; and a
celebration staged by The New Yorker , Vintage books, and the PEN
American Center. Critics praise Véra for the details it reveals about
the Nabokovs' intense marriage--she was his "editor, typist, secretary,
chauffeur, nursemaid, go-between, buffer, researcher and butterfly-catching
companion" (Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times ). But when you get down
to it, "this is really a potted biography of Vladimir Nabokov, told from an
unusual angle" (Michael Dirda, the Washington Post ). The PEN celebration
featured readings by and about the Nabokovs by Joyce Carol Oates, Dimitri
Nabokov, David Remnick, and Véra author Stacy Schiff. The New York
Public Library is also getting in on the action with an exhibit of Nabokov's
manuscripts and personal effects, such as his glasses and butterfly net. (Click
to read a discussion on Speak, Memory and Véra in

                  Slate
               . This multimedia exhibit on Nabokov on the New York Times ' Web site
includes recordings of him reading his work and a series of photos [free
registration required].)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  Byron: Child
of Passion, Fool of Fame , by Benita Eisler (Knopf). The 800-page
biography puts forth no new theories on the poet or on his times as it retells
the juicy bits of his life. Sam Schulman complains in the Wall Street
Journal that despite the excellent material, Eisler "cannot capture" the
essence of Byron's power "because her earnestness misses his seductive
combination of modesty, irony, self-doubt and self-confidence." (For more on
Byron, visit this site which includes a portrait gallery and links to other poets'
sites.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  Lost &
Found
                (Warner Bros.). A "rancid little nothing of a movie"
(Stephen Holden, the New York Times ) that's a grim, gross wannabe
Farrelly brothers flick. Stars David Spade. Thumbs down from all critics. 

                  eXistenZ
                (Dimension Films). Good reviews for David Cronenberg's
virtual reality flick that covers the same ground as the more popular The
Matrix . Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as a video game designer who hides in a
game of her own devising. Features a device called a "gristle gun."

            

               Magazine
            

            

               
                  Nylon
               . Supermodel Helena Christensen starts her own
magazine; critics are mildly interested. It boasts interviews with Liv Tyler
and Mike D and a layout far funkier than any other women's mag, but critics
agree creative director Christensen is "without a doubt the magazine's biggest
selling point" ( Design Week ).

            Find a
movie playing near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Hideous Kinky ;

               
                  Movie -- Life ;

               
                  Movie -- Goodbye, Lover ;

               
                  Movie -- SLC Punk ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon , by Stephen
King;

               
                  Book -- A Prayer for the Dying , by Stewart
O'Nan.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Go ;

               
                  Movie -- The Dreamlife of Angels ;

               
                  Movie -- Never Been Kissed;
               

               
                  
                     Movie --Metroland ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Ground Beneath Her Feet , by Salman
Rushdie;

               
                  Theater--
                  The Iceman Cometh , by Eugene
O'Neill.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  The Matrix
                  ;
               

               
                  Movie--
                  10 Things I Hate About You ;

               
                  Movie--
                  Cookie's Fortune ;

               
                  Movie -- A Walk on the Moon ;

               
                  Movie- - The Out-of-Towners ;

               
                  Book--
                  Morgan: American Financier , by Jean
Strouse;

               
                  Book--
                  The Times of My Life and My Life With the

                  Times , by Max Frankel.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Mod Squad ;

               
                  Movie -- EdTV ;

               
                  Movie -- 20 Dates ;

               
                  Television -- Futurama ;

               
                  Book -- All Too Human: A Political Education , by
George Stephanopoulos;

               
                  Book -- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges , by Nathan
Englander.

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 195: &quot;Suggestive Gestures&quot;

            

               Last week, the British government received a letter offering advice on
an ongoing investigation. From whom; suggesting what?
            

             

            by noon
ET Tuesday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Thursday's Question
(No. 194)--"Unaffordable":
               

               

                  
                     After a call from Ford Motors, Greg Bradsher of the National
Archives said, "You have to think in terms of corporate memories. There is
probably no one around who knows anything about this stuff." What stuff does
Ford need help remembering?
                  
               

               
"Henry's first minivan, the 'Ford YellowStar.' "-- Beth Sherman
               

               "The
schematic of the rather messy, and sadly unsuccessful, 'pudding-filled
airbags.' "-- Danny Spiegel
               

               "Robert
McNamara's gentle, charming wit. It's for a miniseries."-- Greg
Diamond
               

               "The
brief yet tumultuous reign of Generalísimo Franco as Ford CEO."-- Tim
Carvell
               

               "I can
see where this is going, Randy. Yes, Ford cooperated with Hitler, but it was
Chevy that made 19 zillion truck ads with Bob Seger's 'Like a Rock.'
"-- Chris Kelly
               

               Click
for more answers.

            

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            A year ago, when News
Quiz debuted, 
                  Slate
                was free. Now, to commemorate our first
anniversary, in an act of incredible corporate generosity that is every bit as
good as providing health insurance (I'm sure that Mr. Gates will make this sort
of thing more available should Microsoft prove profitable), 
                  Slate
               
is once again free. I like to think of it as my personal gift to News Quiz
participants. (And the high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere that
sustains life on this planet--hey, it's on me!) Enjoy. Because, at the risk of
sentimentality, it's the News Quiz participants that make it fun for me. We've
come a long way together from Strom Thurmond's ass (which, while not free, is
surprisingly affordable), and if online technology were not in its infancy,
right about now I'd be buying you all a round of free-range rug shampoo. Maybe
next year. Thanks for playing.

            
               Professionally
Researched Answer
            

            Ford can't remember if it profited from its German
operations under the Nazis, so it has hired historians to help it recall. A key
detail--did it lose control of German subsidiary Ford Werke before or after the
United States entered the war?

            It is Holocaust litigation, not the love of
learning, that has sent several corporations into the archives, notes Barry
Meier in the New York Times , including General Motors and Deutsche Bank,
both of whom hired prominent historians. However, the natural bias of their
corporate employers can make academics uneasy.

            "Among certain corporate historians, there is an
ideology that corporations are unfairly maligned and that they are less
powerful than they are made out to be," says Professor Michael Pinto-Duchinsky
of England's Brunel University.

            On the other hand, the
pay is terrific, notes researcher Miriam Kleinman, who works the other side of
the street for a class-action law firm: "Some of those people have limousines
picking them up."

            
               Tim Carvell's
Anniversary Extra
            

            A guest extra marking the first year of News
Quiz.

            Granted this corner of the quiz to fill how I
choose, I'm going to live the dream of every participant who's ever had an
especially good answer rejected: I'm going to run my dozen favorites that
Randy, in his "wisdom," callously spurned.

            

               "Covered with festering sores, of course."

               "A saucy Margaret Thatcher, fresh from the hairstylist."

               "Tom DeLay, polling the constituents, if you catch my drift."

               "They don't."

               "Michael Kinsley's pale, puffy ass."

               "CLINTON GETS OFF," the New York Post .

               "A pissed-off Barbara Lippert."

               "That new Irish film, Wanking Ned Devine .

               "The Korean War."

               "Casey Silver, explaining his decision to green-light Babe: Pig in an
Abattoir.
               

               "John Ehrlichmann, describing what he liked best about Pat Nixon."

               "Miss Tori Spelling."

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Ford's miserable anti-Semitic founder.

            Strong second: Ford's
unexpectedly flammable Pinto.

            
               Disclaimer: All
submissions will 
               become the property of

               
                  Slate
                
               and will be published at

               
                  Slate
               
               's discretion.

               
                  Slate
                
               may publish your name on its site in
connection with your submission .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Cartoon Closet

            The reaction to the Rev.
Jerry Falwell's outing of Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby, was widespread
scorn and hilarity. Comedians and column writers mercilessly ridiculed Falwell
for his paranoia in seeing gays under the crib.

            Three comments in
defense of Falwell: First, he didn't write the article in question, which
appeared unsigned in National Liberty Journal , a magazine he publishes.
When asked about the charge, Falwell said he had never seen Teletubbies
and didn't know whether Tinky Winky was homosexual or not. The notion of
Falwell attacking a cartoon character is too appealing to liberal prejudices to
be easily abandoned.

            Second, if you've ever watched Teletubbies , you
might well suspect some kind of subliminal messaging. The four tubbies have
aerials coming out of their spacesuit hoods, which receive programming that's
broadcast on TV screens in their tummies. As they prance out of their bunker
and around the strange, apocalyptic landscape where they live, periscope
speakers pop out of the ground and feed them orders. It's both cute and
creepy.

            Third, the folks at
Liberty College apparently got their idea about Tinky Winky not from watching
the program but from reading such publications as the Washington Post
and People . On Jan. 1, the Post included "TINKY WINKY, THE GAY
TELETUBBY" in its annual list of what's "in" for the New Year. No one got
excited. The press, including the Post , then mocked Falwell as a
reactionary hick obsessed with the sexuality of puppets. Seems like a bit of a
trap.

            Is Tinky Winky gay? He is not the first cartoon character
to be outed. More often than not it is homosexuals who claim a character as one
of their own--which also puts the Falwell fuss in perspective. At the level of
the creators' stated intentions, the Teletubbies have no sexual
orientation. The program tries to recreate the world of toddlers, which does
not involve any level of sexual understanding. But TV programs are group
products, and it's not impossible that references--Tinky Winky's handbag, his
purple triangle antenna, and the tutu he sometimes wears--are bits of code
included for the benefit of adults. If Tinky Winky has a bit more spring in his
step than Dipsy, the other male tubby, it may be because the actor who
originally inhabited his costume added that dimension. Gays in Britain love
Tinky Winky, and some protested outside the BBC when the actor who played him
was fired.

            Sexual signals can be
received without being consciously sent. The first cartoon characters to be
accused of aberrant sexual practices were Batman and Robin. In a 1954 book
titled Seduction of the Innocent , a psychologist named Fred Wertham
attacked the sadistic violence and sexual deviance portrayed in comic books.
Batman and Robin, he noted, were two men living together who liked to wear
capes and tights. Back home at stately Wayne Manor, they lounged about in
dressing gowns. Wertham was a student of Freud who discovered a message that
Bob Kane, Batman's creator, probably never consciously intended. But that
doesn't mean it wasn't there.

            Wertham's book led to the adoption of a code of standards
by the comic book industry, which included, among other things, an admonition
that "sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden." After
this history, the Batman TV series, which was made in the mid-to-late
1960s, couldn't plead the same innocence. Post-Wertham, the producers were well
aware of the gay take on Batman and Robin. Rather than resist it, they gave a
camp tenor to the whole series. In the 1960s, even most adult viewers
interpreted the program as broad parody. But once the idea of a gay subtext has
been planted, Louie the Lilac (as played by Milton Berle) isn't just a villain
who likes to wear purple.

            In a curious way, gays,
their friends, and their enemies have all collaborated in destroying the sexual
innocence of cartoon characters by making an issue out of it. When trying to
elude Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny is liable to dress up as a woman,
vamp around, or imitate Katharine Hepburn. Is this meant to indicate that he
likes other boy bunnies? Many of these antics were borrowed from vaudeville
comedy, where a man dressing up as a woman didn't necessarily imply
homosexuality (although the same questions arise in retrospect). The Warner
Bros. studio, where these cartoons were created in the 1940s and '50s, was an
aggressively heterosexual milieu. Chuck Jones and other illustrators were
mocking stereotyped homosexual behavior, not winking at homosexuals in a
friendly way. But while a man dressing up as a woman may not have "meant"
anything in the 1940s, it does mean something in the late 1990s. What has
sexualized these cartoon characters is the change in the culture, which in the
last few decades has become not just aware of homosexuality but increasingly
open about and tolerant of it.

            Ernie and Bert are another good example of this process.
When Sesame Street was created in the early 1970s, no one meant for them
to be taken as lovers. But consider two men living together, sleeping in the
same room, and taking great interest in each other's baths. Predictably, the
"urban legend" that Ernie and Bert were gay began to spread. In 1994, a
Southern preacher named Joseph Chambers tried to get them banned under an old
North Carolina anti-sodomy law. (He said they had "blatantly effeminate
characteristics.") The Children's Television Workshop eventually had to deny
the rumors, which have included an impending same-sex union. But the gay read
on Ernie and Bert isn't wrong because the creators don't endorse it. The same
goes for the Peanuts characters Peppermint Patty and her tomboy friend
Marcie, who always refers to her as "Sir." When Charles M. Schulz created the
strip, he never imagined that Patty and Marcie would be claimed as
protolesbians.

            In recent years,
children's entertainment has contained an increasing number of apparently
intentional or even obviously intentional gay references. In The Lion
King, Simba leaves home and is more or less adopted by Timon and Pumbaa, a
male meerkat and a male warthog who live together as a couple in the jungle. In
the 1994 Disney film, the actor Nathan Lane supplied the voice of Timon in much
the same style as his flamboyantly gay character in The Birdcage . When I
saw the Broadway version of the musical, the audience roared at Timon's even
more exaggerated gay mannerisms.

            Or consider Pee-wee's Playhouse . Pee-wee Herman
minces about and becomes obviously infatuated with other male characters who
conform to gay archetypes. While parents may pick up this gay semaphore, kids
aren't likely to. To them, Timon, Pumbaa, and Pee-wee are just goofy
characters.

            Elsewhere, the implicit
has become explicit. On The Simpsons , Smithers, the bow tie wearing
toady who trails around after Mr. Burns, has become increasingly gay. According
to Larry Doyle, who writes for the show, Smithers was originally just a
sycophant in love with the boss. But lately he has taken to cruising college
campuses in his Miata, looking for "recruits." In last week's episode, Apu, the
Indian convenience store owner, goes down to the docks to donate porno
magazines to sailors. The sea captain calls out to thank him: "Thank you for
the Jugs magazines. They'll keep my men from resorting to homosexuality
... for about 10 minutes!" The sailors all laugh, and one calls out, "Look
who's talking!"

            It isn't absurd for anyone, including Falwell, to notice
these hints, inferences, and references. But it is ridiculous to object to
them. There's no scientific or psychological basis for believing that children
are affected in their sexual development or eventual sexual orientation by
exposure to homosexuality--on television or in real life. If the creators of
cartoons are intentionally or unintentionally giving children the idea that gay
people are part of the big, happy human family, that's a good thing, not a bad
one. (If it weren't for gay people, there would be no Lion King --or much
else on the all-American cultural front.) The conservative paranoia about
recruiting, which leads them to think that gay school teachers and Boy Scout
leaders present a hazard to the young is pure prejudice.

            Anyway, for the religious right, this battle is
pointless because the war is already lost. Gay themes are everywhere.
Pee-wee's Playhouse runs every day on the Fox Family Channel, the cable
network Pat Robertson recently sold to Rupert Murdoch. It's just a couple of
hours ahead of The 700 Club .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Whistling in the Dark

            Italy emerged as the first
NATO country to threaten the solidarity of the military alliance against Serbia
when Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema called for the air attacks to stop and for
a return to negotiation. "Italy Slows Down, Tension in NATO" was the main
headline Friday of Turin's La Stampa , which in a front-page editorial condemned the
prime minister for backtracking so quickly. Italy's "dignity" and its
"international role" demanded "more serious behavior," it said. "Even the most
frenetic waltz turns to which, unfortunately, Italian diplomacy has accustomed
our allies and our adversaries in the past usually take more than one day,"
La Stampa said. "In an effort to save the unity of his coalition and to
prevent a government crisis, Massimo D'Alema has split with his international
allies," La
Repubblica of Rome reported from Berlin, where European leaders were
gathered, saying that this created "a major incident" at the summit.

            D'Alema's claim Thursday
that "the first NATO operation has induced the Serbs to suspend their military
offensive against the civilian population of Kosovo" was thoroughly discredited
by reports from journalists on the scene of increased Serb brutality against
the Albanian Kosovars. A report from Pristina in the Daily Telegraph of London gave
an account of the brutal removal from their home of Kosovo's leading human
rights lawyer Bayram Kelmendi and his son Kastriot, who was told before being
taken away to kiss his children for the last time because he would never see
them again. On President Slobodan Milosevic's decision to expel Western
journalists and TV crews from the region, La Repubblica noted that
neither Adolf Hitler nor Saddam Hussein had done that.

            As Milosevic's resistance continued, alarm grew in the
Western press over the apparent lack of clear war aims and the growing fear
that NATO will not succeed in restoring peace to Yugoslavia without committing
ground troops. In Canada, the Toronto Globe and Mail said
in a nervous editorial Thursday that, by ruling out in advance the commitment
of ground troops before a negotiated peace agreement, NATO told Milosevic that
its undertaking to protect Kosovo went only so far--"not exactly the kind of
message to send to an adversary as you go to war." Milosevic, by "his bestial
behavior," had courted the disaster now befalling his country, the paper said,
but it added: "The world is full of beasts. It is also full of oppressed
minorities struggling to be free. Which beasts do we bomb? Which minorities do
we champion? When do we charge to the rescue and when do we shrug and look
away? What are the rules of the game? After yesterday, nobody knows."

            In France, Libération said in an editorial Friday that the
missile attacks, far from frightening "the great ethnic purifier of the
Balkans," had made him look almost in the right. The Kosovars would not be
saved, the editorial added--"Milosevic will sooner or later return to the
negotiating table, but that will without doubt be only to effect the partition
of Kosovo." Le
Figaro also envisaged the partition of Kosovo as the undesired outcome
of the war, with Albania getting the inhospitable mountains and Serbia the
fertile plain, and it blamed Europe for letting Washington call the shots by
failing to take responsibility for its own security. History has shown that
military campaigns are only successful if their aims are defined beforehand,
Le Figaro said, comparing Bill Clinton to "a little boy who whistles in
the dark to reassure himself."

            In Spain, El Mundo called for a
political solution, saying that if the bombing goes on for long, the alliance
will become increasingly divided. In Britain, the Daily Telegraph
proposed that Kosovar independence be made "a declared goal of policy--after
three years, if Mr. Milosevic complies with Rambouillet, sooner if he does
not"; the Independent said that the United Nations had already agreed
to the objective of the war--to protect the human rights of the Albanian
Kosovars--and that NATO should not balk at the prospect of a long campaign to
achieve it; and the Times urged the expedition of an International Monetary Fund
loan to Russia to keep the country sweet.

            Despite feelings of solidarity with Kosovo's Muslim
Albanian majority, Arab newspapers were generally gloomy and apprehensive
Thursday about the NATO offensive. They feared it could fatally damage the
authority of the United Nations and lead to a resumption of the Cold War, while
benefiting Saddam Hussein and weakening NATO by setting Greece and Turkey
against each other. In the Pan-Arab daily al-Hayat , Abdelwahhab
Badrakkhan wrote that the United States, by abrogating to itself the right to
decide on the use of military force, had effectively "delegitimized" the United
Nations. He called for a new international agreement of the kind that replaced
the League of Nations with the United Nations, for it was unacceptable that the
United Nations should become "merely a building where people go to complain or
engage in Byzantine debates over texts that everyone knows the big powers will
be the first to treat with contempt."

            In the leading Saudi
daily Asharq al-Awsat , Huda al-Husseini said the bombing reflected the
Clinton administration's growing penchant for "military solutions as a
substitute for considered plans to impose peace and protect people from
massacres." The writer expressed concern over the precedent it set for NATO
military intervention in the internal conflicts of any state. "If tensions
between Washington and Beijing grow in the future, what is there to prevent the
former raising the Tibet issue and threatening intervention there?" she wrote.
"And if the aim of the intervention is to protect oppressed minorities, why,
people ask, doesn't NATO intervene in Turkey, whose human rights record
vis-a-vis the Kurds is as bad as it can be?"

            Selectivity in approaching issues of human rights and
self-determination is a long-standing American trait, al-Husseini said, adding
that "its resolve in Kosovo perhaps has more to do with upholding the
credibility of NATO as its 50 th anniversary approaches, and to
ensure that Washington's leadership of the alliance does not appear weak." But,
she went on, "the airstrikes could not only provoke Serbian retaliation against
NATO forces in Bosnia, but trigger ethnic conflict in Macedonia, which has a
large ethnic Albanian majority," and a Balkan explosion would severely weaken
NATO.

            The Pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi said that if the Americans get bogged
down in the Balkan conflict, as is likely to happen, this will benefit Iraq,
the other country on the receiving end of U.S. military action. It also
described the bombing as a step toward initiating a new, modified Cold War and
said that Kosovo could turn into a latter-day version of Afghanistan, or even
Vietnam, for the United States and its allies.

            The most cheerful
assessment of the situation came in the main headline Thursday of the Albanian
daily eRilindja Demokratikei . "NATO Brings Peace to the Balkans," it
said.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Double Take

            Since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia a month ago,
American hawks and doves have agreed on one thing: NATO and the Clinton
administration have "miscalculated." "The administration completely
miscalculated when it launched the air campaign," declared Sen. Frank
Murkowski, R-Alaska, April 19. "They assumed that the Serbs would immediately
retreat when the bombs began to descend."

            This critique is well founded, but it's only half
of one dimension of the story. In war, there are two players, and each can
miscalculate. Furthermore, war has a psychological dimension, in which each
side's morale is undermined by its mere belief that it has
miscalculated. To win the practical war, you don't have to calculate perfectly.
All you have to do is outcalculate your enemy. Likewise, to win the
psychological war, all you have to do is make your enemy second-guess his
belligerence more than he thinks you're second-guessing yours. The surest way
to lose the psychological war is to fret that you have misjudged your enemy's
resolve, while failing to entertain the possibility that he will decide he has
misjudged yours.

            The "miscalculation" critique permeated Wednesday's
war debate on the House floor. "It appears that President Clinton and other
NATO leaders mistakenly thought that bombing specified military targets in
Serbia and Kosovo would send a message to Yugoslav President Milosevic that
would cause him to quickly embrace the NATO peace plan. It is obvious this was
a gross miscalculation," charged Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla. Rep. Chris Smith,
R-N.J., denounced "the tragic miscalculation by President Clinton that
Milosevic would back down if we bombed Serbia for a week or maybe two."

            Since this way of framing the conflict treats NATO
but not Yugoslavia as a rational player susceptible to threats, punishment,
failure, and re-evaluation, Yugoslavia is happy to encourage it. Last Friday,
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic warned that a NATO ground invasion
of Kosovo "would be yet another miscalculation by those who have already been
proved wrong so far," posing "dangers to the whole continent" and drawing the
United States into a quagmire that would make Vietnam look like "nothing."

            Tuesday morning, NATO's military commander, Gen.
Wesley Clark, decided he had heard enough of this critique. Wrapping up his
opening remarks to reporters in Brussels, Clark turned the miscalculation
argument on its head. Milosevic, said Clark, "may have thought that NATO really
wouldn't launch the airstrikes. But he was wrong. He may have believed they
wouldn't last after they were started. Wrong. He may have thought that some
countries would be afraid of his bluster and intimidation, they would withdraw
the use of their bases or buckle under his intimidation. He was wrong. He
thought that other countries might rush to his aid. Wrong again."

            Clark went on: "He thought that taking prisoners
and mistreating them and humiliating them publicly would weaken our resolve.
Wrong again. He thought his air defense would be effective against our
aircraft. Wrong. He thought his troops would stay loyal. Increasingly he's
wrong about that. There are more desertions. Former generals are under arrest.
Dissent is growing louder and louder. Military press censorship has been
imposed. He thought he could hide the truth from his own people, I suppose, and
increasingly he's wrong in that. We're winning, Milosevic is losing, and he
knows it. He should face up to this and he should face up to it now."

            In recent days, other NATO and U.S. officials have
reinforced Clark's campaign to counterframe the miscalculation thesis. NATO
spokesman Jamie Shea suggested that the assignment of fresh Yugoslav troops to
Kosovo "demonstrates yet again Milosevic's miscalculations. He thought he could
defeat the KLA in a short, five-to-seven days' operation. ... [This] was
completely wrong and is further testimony to the success of the air campaign."
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., contended that Milosevic "counted, at the outset
of this, when he moved his forces into Kosovo, on NATO breaking up quickly--and
quite the opposite has happened." White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart
predicted that Milosevic "will change his calculation" as his apparatus of
power is progressively destroyed.

            Did NATO misjudge Milosevic's efficacy and resolve?
Absolutely. But to debate that question by itself is already a loaded
proposition, because it overlooks the corresponding question of whether
Milosevic has misjudged NATO's efficacy and resolve--and whether he,
accordingly, can be humbled into reconsidering his belligerence before we
reconsider ours. Gen. Clark understands that in war, morale is both vital and
relative. He has heard enough pessimism from pundits and politicians on the
subject of whether NATO has miscalculated. He is not interested in changing the
answer. He is interested in changing the question.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Over the past several years it has evidently
become fashionable for restaurants to have all their servers march out singing
birthday greetings to customers. Am I the only person who finds this
intolerable? I've stopped going to restaurants that follow this custom if I can
avoid them. (My wife likes the food at some of these places, so compromises
must be made.) The noise makes conversation impossible, and I can't help but
wonder if that's my meal being ignored in the kitchen during the song.
            

            
               Am I being petty?
Shouldn't servers be respectful of all customers? What can be done?
            

            

               --BH
            

            Honey, get a grip.
Prudie just sang "Happy Birthday" to herself: It takes 11 seconds. If it
is your meal being ignored for roughly one fifth of a minute, Prudie
does not think the delay will harm the flavor. Let Prudie hasten to add that
she, too, finds the wait staff singing the birthday song rather hokey and
believes that the only people who dislike it more than you and I are the
"honorees." It is always embarrassing, but certainly not worth the boycott of a
good restaurant. Prudie thinks you need to hook up your sense of humor to your
tolerance mechanism and find something really objectionable to dislike ... such
as the "suggested" tip printed on the bill.

            
--Prudie, proportionately

            

               
                  A Note From Prudie : What kids call grown-ups is still riling
some readers, so here is a knock for Prudie that was at least
civil.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               You stated, "It
sounds to Prudie as though you and your spouse are a little more formal than
the times," when that he felt children should address adults in a more formal
manner than using their first names. You may be correct that they may be out of
touch with current (rude) customs of our society. In my day, children were
taught respect for their elders, and one of the methods used was form of
address. Today, the television and the mall do the job that once was the
purview of parents. Back then we had no guns in high schools, no drive-by
shootings, no graffiti on the walls, etc. I, for one, am glad that I was raised
by parents who had a value system. I still get up when a woman enters the room,
open a door for her, and offer my seat on a bus. Somehow I am happy to be too
formal for "your" society.
            

            

               --Norm
            

            Dear Norm,

            Prudie applauds your
standing for women and holding doors, but must point out that calling adults by
a first name, if they wish it, is a different issue. Please be assured that
knives in the schools are not caused by calling Mrs. Allen "Jodie."

            
--Prudie, realistically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               While watching the impeachment trial, my
husband of 15 years revealed to me that he had an affair with a friend of ours
some 12 years ago. It went on for the eight months that we were in a commuting
marriage, living in different states. Ten years ago she came out on a vacation
to visit us for two weeks, and has continued to correspond during the holidays.
My husband says he was ashamed of his lie and that they had promised never to
tell me. Over the past years, I have asked him if there was anyone else, and he
always lied. He said the reason for the continued correspondence was that if he
stopped writing I might get suspicious. So, I wrote her and her husband and
told her to stop writing--plus what I thought of her morals.
            

            
               After four months, I
cannot get this out of my mind. I think I love him and want the marriage to go
on, but other days I feel so used that I can't believe I am still with him.
I've spoken to a counselor twice and that helped for a day or so. My husband is
61, and I am 46. What should I do? Am I dumb to try to make this work? I also
suspect him of other lies, but my views of reality are definitely
skewed.
            

            

               --ep
            

            Dear e.,

            Where to begin? Prudie wants to tell you so many
things. First is that you must find the way that is right for you to feel good
again. That old canard that "confession is good for the soul" usually only
seems to work for the person confessing. Lover Boy's disclosure has clearly put
your life at sixes and sevens.

            Of course your husband's behavior was lower than a
snake's tail in a wagon rut. He has not only lied to you but also to the woman
he cheated with. You, however, evened the score somewhat by writing to the
woman and her husband. God only knows what's going on in their
household.

            Therapy that improves
things for only "a day or so" is not Prudie's idea of effective help. You might
want to try someone else. Since you suspect other lies, you might want to have
a trial separation. On the plus side, you say you love this man, and the affair
you know about ended more than a decade ago. On the minus side, feeling you're
never getting a straight story is a major impediment to the comfort one feels
when there is trust. Prudie hopes you find your way to peace and resolution,
and your guide will most likely be a competent therapist, perhaps of the
marriage counselor variety.

            
--Prudie, empathetically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               You recently ran a letter from about unwanted
sympathy for what was a great example of how to live a life. I also have some
areas where I get very uncomfortable with sympathy. I am the father of three
sons. Two of them died while they were teen-agers, one from an auto accident
and the other from cancer. Yes, I loved them deeply and still have a hole in my
heart for them. The problem is when, in conversation, someone asks general
questions, such as, "How many children do you have?" People are devastated if I
tell them three, but I lost two. If I say one, I am bypassing an important part
of my life. If I just say three, I am not giving a very truthful
answer.
            

            
               I have adjusted well
to these tragedies. It has been hard. I don't want to put people in an
uncomfortable position. There is also a part of me that hurts, but I don't
really want to expose that to a stranger.
            

            

               --Albany Father
            

            Dear Alb,

            Prudie bows low to a man
such as yourself who, having lived through what is said to be life's cruelest
event, is trying to do the honest, philosophically correct, and thoughtful
thing. Prudie suggests that you tailor your answer to the situation. If it is a
passing social encounter, with what you would call "a stranger," say one child.
If you encounter someone with whom you feel rapport, you might say three, with
a brief explanation, and allow that person to express sympathy. Let your
instinct guide you. Prudie wishes to suggest that you are not playing your
history false by not informing people of the two children you lost. Let the
decision about what to say, and to whom, come from your heart, the place where
two of your sons now live.

            --Prudie, respectfully

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dark Side Lite

            Those poor souls who've been camping out in front
of theaters for six weeks: Who can blame them for saying, "To hell with the
critics, we know it will be great!"? The doors will open, and they'll race to
grab the best seats and feel a surge of triumph as their butts sink down. We've
made it: Yeeehaww!! They'll cheer when the familiar John Williams
fanfare erupts and the title-- Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom
Menace --rises out of the screen and the backward-slanted opening "crawl"
begins: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ..." Yaaahhhhhhh!!!
Then, their hearts pounding, they'll settle back to read the rest of the
titles: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade
routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Taxation of trade routes:
Waaahoooo!!!!
            

            How long will they go with it? At what point will
they realize that what they've heard is, alas, true, that the picture really is
a stiff? Maybe they never will. Maybe they'll want to love The

               Phantom Menace so much--because they have so much emotional energy
invested in loving it, and in buying the books, magazines, dolls, cards,
clothes, soap, fast food, etc.--that the realization will never sink in. In
successful hypnosis, the subject works to enter a state of heightened
susceptibility, to surrender to a higher power. Maybe they'll conclude that
common sense is the enemy of the Force and fight it to the death.

            Look, I wanted to love
The Phantom Menace , too. I was an adolescent boy and would enjoy being
one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but
the most delusional of hopes. If someone had given Ed Wood $115 million to
remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this,
although Wood's dialogue would surely have been more memorable.

            The first thing that will strike you is that George Lucas,
who wrote and directed the movie, has forgotten how to write and direct a
movie. Having spent the two decades since the original Star Wars (1977)
concocting skeletons of screenplays that other people flesh out, and overseeing
productions that other people storyboard and stage, he has come to lack what
one might Michelangelistically term "the spark of life." If the first Star
Wars was a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes, The Phantom
Menace is a box of Cracker Jacks that's all diagrams of prizes. It's there
on paper, but it's waiting to be filled in and jazzed up.

            Advance word has been
cruel to the actors, but advance word has it only half right. Yes, they're
terrible, but Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman are not terrible
actors, they've just been given scenes that no human could be expected to play.
As a sage Jedi Master called Qui-Gon Jinn, Neeson must maintain a Zen-like
detachment from the universe around him--probably not a challenge when that
universe will be added in later by computers. "I don't sense anything," he
tells his uneasy young apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor), as the two sit
waiting to conduct trade negotiations with a bunch of gray, fish-faced
Federation officers who talk like extras in a samurai movie. McGregor furrows
his brow. "There's something ... elusive," he says, working to enunciate like a
young Alec Guinness but succeeding only in nullifying his natural Scots charm.
"Master," he adds, "you said I should be mindful of the future." Neeson thinks
a bit. "I do sense an unusual amount of fear for something as trivial as this
trade dispute."

            A hologram of Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the "Sith,"
commands the Federation to sic its battle droids on the Jedi ambassadors before
they can apprise Queen Amidala (Portman) of the imminent invasion of the
peaceful planet of Naboo. In come the battle droids and out come the light
sabers, which still hum like faulty fluorescents. Clack, clack, clack. Lucas
can't edit fight scenes so that they're fluid--he cuts on the clack. You get
the gist, though. The Jedi make their getaway, but with gas and tolls and droid
destroyers, it takes them over an hour to land on Naboo, by which time the
queen and the Galactic Senate have already got the grim message. For one thing,
communications have been disrupted: "A communications disruption can mean only
one thing," says someone. "Invasion."

            Queen Amidala, done up
like a white-faced Chinese empress in hanging beads and glass balls and a hat
with curly horns, speaks in tones from which emotion has been expunged, perhaps
on the theory that subjects won't argue with a ruler who puts them to sleep: "I
... will ... not ... condone ... a ... course ... of ... action ... that ...
will ... lead ... us ... to ... war," she drones. Meanwhile, the Jedi whiz
through the underwater core of a planet in a man-of-warlike submersible pursued
by 3-D dragony beasties and a giant catfish with extra movable parts.
Potentially thrilling stuff, but Neeson and McGregor remain peculiarly
unruffled. "The Force will guide us," says Neeson blandly, and the director
seems to share his lack of urgency. There's Zen detachment and there's Quaalude
detachment, and The Phantom 
               Menace falls into the second camp: It
really does take place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When R2-D2
showed up, I thought: At last, a character with the potential for
intimacy!
            

            Say this for Lucas, he doesn't whip up a lot of bogus
energy, the way the makers of such blockbusters as The Mummy (1999) and
Armageddon (1998) do. It's as if he conceived The Phantom Menace
as a Japanese No pageant and has purposely deadened his actors, directing them
to stand stiffly in the dead center of the screen against matte paintings of
space or some futuristic metropolis and deliver lines alternately formal or
bemusing. ("This is an odd move for the Trade Federation.") Lucas considers
himself an "independent" filmmaker and an artist of integrity. Had he not been
such a pretentious overlord, a platoon of screenwriters would doubtless have
been engaged to rewrite him and make the movie halfway human. A buddy
specialist would have punched up the Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi badinage, and
a black dialogue specialist would have given the comic-relief character, Jar
Jar Binks, a man-size dinosaur with pop eyes and a vaguely West Indian patois,
something fresher than "Ex-squeeze me!" and a lot of Butterfly McQueen-style
simpering and running away from battles. Those of us who complain about the
assembly-line production of "blockbuster" scripts need an occasional reminder
that assembly lines can do much to make empty thrill machines more lively.

            
               The Phantom
Menace didn't need to be barren of feeling, but it took a real writer,
Lawrence Kasdan ( The Big Chill , 1983), to draft the best and most
inspiring of the Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back
(1980), and a real director, Irvin Kershner, to breathe Wagnerian grandeur into
Lucas' cartoonish fantasies. Having lived with the saga for so many years, the
audience was prepared to set aside some of its narrative expectations here to
plumb the origins of Lucas' universe. In The Phantom Menace , however,
the Jedi already exist and the Force is taken for granted--we're still
in the middle of the damn story. The only dramatic interest comes from a young
Tatooine slave named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), whom we know will grow up
to father Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and
then surrender to the dark side of the Force and become Darth Vader. But that
transformation won't happen until the third episode; meanwhile, Anakin is a
conventionally industrious juvenile with a penchant for building droids from
scratch and "pod racing"--an activity that he demonstrates in one of the
movie's most impressive but irrelevant special effects set pieces, a whiplash
hyperdrive permutation of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959).

            Later in the film, when Anakin goes before something called
the Jedi Council and meets Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson (together again!), Lucas
dramatizes the interrogation so ineptly that you either have to take Yoda's
word that there's something wrong with the boy ("Clouded this boy's future is")
or to conclude that Yoda, like us, is moving backward through time and has
already seen Episodes 4 through 6. Anakin, he says smugly, has fear in him, and
fear leads to anger and anger to the dark side--which would mean, as I
interpret it, that only people without fear (i.e., people who don't exist) are
suitable candidates for Jedi knighthood (perhaps Yoda will enlarge his
definition of fear in subsequent episodes). There's also some quasireligious,
quasiscientific blather to the effect that the boy was conceived without a
father by "metachorians"--symbiont, microscopic life forms that will speak to
you if you "quiet your mind." In other words, the Force. So, it's not nebulous,
after all! It can be measured. It can be quantified. It can even, perhaps, be
merchandised.

            Yes, the effects are
first-rate, occasionally breathtaking. But the floating platforms in the
Galactic Senate do little to distract you from parliamentary machinations that
play like an especially dull day on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The
final military engagement, in which long-headed attack droids are rolled onto
the field as the spokes of a giant wheel, would be awesome if Lucas didn't
routinely cut away from the battle just when he seems on the verge of actually
thrilling you. The chief villain, bombastically named Darth Maul, is a horned,
red, Kabuki-style snake demon with orange pingpong-ball eyes who challenges the
Jedi to a couple of clackety light-saber battles. His appearances are
underscored by demonic chants; he might as well wear a neon beanie that flashes
"Bad Guy." Like all revisionist historians, Lucas cheats like mad. If Darth
Vader had built C-3PO as a young man, how come he never paid much attention to
him in the other movies--and vice versa? As Yoda himself puts it, in another
context, "See through you we can."

            
Still, it's worth reprinting a blistering
e-mail sent to my wife by a relative, after she'd let him know that I hated
The Phantom Menace :

            
               Surprise, Surprise. Star Wars was
never reviewed well by critics. Sometimes a basic story that rests on great
special effects and stupid dialogue can be very entertaining--it's called a
cult movie, and no critic can have an effect on the obvious outcome that this
is going to be the highest grossing movie ever. I myself stood in line for five
hours and already have tickets to see it three times, and I know I'll enjoy it.
Why? Because it plays on my childhood imagination. And I'm sure it's not as bad
as Return of the Jedi , which was the weakest one--but I still liked it
and saw it a dozen times. I get tired of being told I'm not going to like it
because it doesn't adhere to certain basic critic criteria. I say bpthhhh
(sticking my tongue out to review)--don't be sending me anything dissing my
movie:):):)
            

            I'll be curious to know whether he sees The
Phantom Menace a dozen times, or even the three for which he has paid. (I
could imagine seeing it three times only if they sold adrenaline shots at the
concession stand.) Or maybe he'll come out of the movie and say: "No, you
didn't get it, Mr. Snot-Nosed-Criteria Critic Person. It's not supposed to be
exciting. It's laying the foundation for the next chapter, when Anakin and
Obi-Wan defeat the Mandalorian warriors in the Clone Wars and Anakin marries
Queen Amidala. And listen, I'm getting in line even earlier for tickets to
Episode 2 . The Force is with me, butt-head."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               The Vast
Conspiracy That Cried Wolf
            

            As usual, Dan Quayle put it best. "Do we really
want to ask or answer all these irrelevant questions about what someone may or
may not have done 20 or 30 years ago? Quite frankly, the American people don't
care," he told the New York Times recently. "And quite frankly, it's not
that important. What's important is who you are today, what you're going to
do."

            Quite right. What does
it matter if, for example, Bill Clinton forced himself on Juanita Broaddrick
way back in 1978? Whom a man may have raped in the privacy of her hotel room
when he was attorney general of Arkansas has nothing to do with his ability to
lead the nation into the 21 st century. If an elected official is
doing a good job, how he relaxes during his free time is not a legitimate
public concern.

            Clinton denies the accusation, and there are good reasons
not to believe it (see ""). But it would have been better if he had said, with
simple dignity, "none of your business." Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., are winning press plaudits for refusing to answer press
questions about past private peccadilloes. Exhausted by the Year of Flytrap, we
have all decided that politicians' private lives should stay private.

            Some might demur that
rape is not a peccadillo. It is, among other things, illegal. But so are pot
smoking and cocaine snorting, which are high on the list of private behavior
politicians are getting little gold stars for refusing to discuss. Is rape a
worse crime than using drugs? Well, many might think so, but you wouldn't know
it from the way most politicians talk about drugs. In declining to talk about
his own drug experience, George W. made the interesting point that he didn't
want to give young people today the unfortunate (though accurate) impression
that you could do whatever he did when young and still end up governor of
Texas. Certainly this argument applies in the case of alleged rape by a
president even more currently popular than the governor of Texas.

            It is obvious why the liberal perverts and druggies of the
Democratic Party favor a curtain being drawn on politicians' private lives. But
how did Republican politicians--pure of body and spirit--get into this
position? One way is by repeating the mantra "it's not about sex" just once or
twice too often. They thought they had him by the legalities on perjury and
obstruction of justice, and in attempting to win converts to their cause they
may have been more dismissive than they intended about the sex thing. Too late,
too late.

            Then there's Larry
Flynt. A few conservative voices, such as the Weekly Standard and the
Wall Street Journal editorial page, remained steadfast in their
hysterical disapproval of the president's private sexual behavior, and remained
adamant that it is a legitimate public issue. But even they--like all
politicians of both parties, almost all the media, and most of the
citizenry--were hysterical and adamant that Larry Flynt should not be allowed
to draw public attention to the private sexual behavior of anyone else. (The
Journal even insisted that Flynt should be prosecuted for
blackmail.)

            Why? If a category of information is legitimately useful in
judging an elected public official, how can it be illegitimate and outrageous
to gather and publish such information? Maybe they decided that Clinton was a
good place to stop. When your side has launched an offensive, been driven back,
and nervously awaits a counteroffensive, it's not a bad time for an armistice.
That would be hypocritical of course. But newspapers have the right to practice
hypocrisy in the privacy of their own editorial pages.

            But did the Vast
Right-Wing Conspiracy tragically call for a cease-fire just as the ultimate
weapon was about to be delivered into their hands? Did they dig a tunnel to
within an inch of freedom from their Clinton imprisonment when they gave up?
Did they finally have an accusation that would shock a seemingly unshockable
public? Rape! Those few elements of the VRWC that haven't been drained of
fight--Fox News, for example--are flogging the Juanita Broaddrick story with at
least a bit of the old spirit and are puzzled that even this hasn't worked.

            It is puzzling. The evidence is flaky--a woman who has both
confirmed and denied the story, corroborators with their own reasons to
lie--but major scandals have been built on less. Yes, we're all suffering from
scandal fatigue, but rape?

            The explanation is
partly the frog-in-hot-water phenomenon (he'll jump out if you drop him in
boiling water, but not if you put him in cold water and slowly heat it to
boiling). Clinton has faced an escalating series of serious
accusations--serious in the sense that they were all plausible and some were
true. One or another of them might have stuck, but each one inured the public
to the next. (Clinton skillfully augmented this process by pacing any
admissions he has been forced to make, so that each new one was just a small
accretion on a large pile of old news.)

            Clinton, though, has also faced a continuing barrage of
unserious allegations--implausible and untrue. He's been accused of , among
other things. The effect of these stories from the nether regions of the Vast
Right-Wing Conspiracy has been like crying wolf. When you've heard the
president preposterously accused of murder so often, you just yawn when he's
accused of rape.

            So now we are living in the world everyone has long
claimed to want: where we judge politicians based only on the issues and their
public records of governance. Some might feel that healthy indifference to what
politicians do in their private lives has gone too far when it covers
allegations of rape. But they'll get used to it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Poisoned Dogs of Tuscany

            Two months after Muriel
Spark's poem "Mungo Bays at the Moon" was published in The New Yorker ,
her brown dog Mungo was found poisoned at her garden gate. As the British press
has copiously reported this week, Mungo was the fifth dog lost by the British
novelist, who lives in Tuscany, over the past 12 years.

            Although this sounds
like something straight out of Spark's wonderfully creepy novels, she and her
pets are not special victims. This is a story of everyday life in Tuscany.
Hundreds--and quite possibly thousands--of dogs, cats, and other domestic pets
are killed by poisoning each year in this cradle of European civilization, this
sun-soaked land of vines and olives and cypresses.

            My wife and I are lucky enough to own a farmhouse in
Tuscany. Five years ago, Susanna came into the house one day to find a very
thin and pregnant spotted white, bitch lying on the sofa in the sitting room.
She was a mongrel, as virtually all the stray dogs in Tuscany are, but
obviously with a powerful strain of Dalmatian in her and with that alarming
Dalmatian's "smile" that looks like a snarl. Soon she had a name, Allegra, and
two pups, Brutta (ugly) and Bella (beautiful). Susanna found a good home for
Brutta, but Bella we kept. After a while, Allegra and Bella were joined by
another stray dog of a very different kind, a huge white fluffy sheepdog who
was given the name of Eddy. Eddy adopted a posture of world-weary dignity and
behaved like the indulgent father of unruly daughters. They accepted him,
though, and liked to tease him mercilessly until he would give in and join in
their games.

            If these dogs had a
fault, it was their habit of barking all night, having made it their mission,
most unsuccessfully pursued, to keep the wild boar away from the house. For
most of the time they enjoyed a happy and carefree existence. Then one morning
a couple of years ago, there was a blast from a shotgun very near the house,
and Eddy came running home with blood pouring from his face and side. He
recovered. But then, in January, Bella and Allegra did not come in, as they
always did, for their evening meal. The next day Susanna discovered Allegra's
stiff body lying in grass behind the house, and a couple of days later the body
of Bella was discovered in one of her favorite patches of undergrowth.

            Who could possibly have done this awful thing? I asked the
vet who performed the autopsy on Allegra. He is an Englishman, Dr. Malcolm
Holliday, who has been in Tuscany for 25 years and is one of two
representatives in Italy of a British charity, the Anglo-Italian Society for
the Protection of Animals. Holliday is heir to a long line of British people
who have fallen in love with Italy but have been appalled by the Italian
treatment of animals. With a city practice, he treats several cases each year
of dogs poisoned maliciously by next-door neighbors, perhaps objecting to the
noise.

            But Holliday endorsed
the general assumption that almost all dog poisonings in the countryside are
committed by hunters. Many dogs die in bitter territorial wars between rival
squads of wild boar hunters and in the fierce competition between truffle
hunters seeking a bigger share of the lucrative truffle market by eliminating
rivals' hounds.

            Americans may find this hard to believe, but gun owners are
an even more privileged tribe in Italy than in the United States. They have a
constitutional right to walk over other people's land without permission. An
ordinary person just going for a walk in the country is trespassing--unless
he's holding a gun, in which case it's OK. Hunters are allowed to take their
dogs on buses; other people are not. The law requires dogs to be tied up during
the game breeding and shooting seasons (a law we were guilty of breaking in the
cases of Allegra and Bella).

            But for all that, the
hunters are not happy. They have practically no pheasants or partridges to
shoot at anymore, and they are fiercely protective of the birds put down in the
countryside in February by the shooting associations to which they pay their
dues. Consider, further, that nearly all predators apart from foxes are now
protected species, and that owning a gun license is very expensive, and you
will understand why the hunter's lot is not a happy one.

            Nevertheless, hunting continues to have an atavistic hold
on many Tuscan men over the age of 50, and it is among this group that the
poisoners--probably only a handful of them--are assumed to lurk. Their main
targets may not be dogs but foxes, for which they also lay illegal traps. But
they do not hesitate to place their poisoned baits close to people's houses
where dogs, cats, and even children may find them. Together with their
addiction to killing birds, they have inherited from their ancestors a cruel
indifference to the fate of any animal, even that of a much-loved pet. All
attempts to identify the poisoners are frustrated by a tradition of reluctance,
even among their victims, to tangle with authority. I called on a neighbor
whose dog was poisoned along with ours, and he said that if he found the
perpetrator, he would give him the thrashing of his life. But he wouldn't dream
of going to the police. At that level of society, Tuscany is not so different
from Sicily.

            We think we know who may have done it. There's an
old man who lives nearby, a fanatical member of the local hunting fraternity.
There is no evidence against him, but he once explained to another neighbor how
to make poisoned meatballs with a mixture of legal substances--organophosphates
and others--that cause internal hemorrhaging, which was what killed Allegra.
His car was seen near our house around the time of the poisoning. But there's
little point in pursuing the perpetrator, whoever he or she may be. While
poisoning dogs is strictly illegal, there have to be two witnesses who saw the
laying down of the poison, and even then the punishment is only a modest
fine.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Would <EM>Y</EM><I>ou</I> Give Money to This Man? 

            Lamar Alexander intends to
raise at least $15 million in 1999 for his presidential campaign. This raises a
critical question: How? How on earth does Lamar ("Lamar!") Alexander, who has
been running for president nonstop since 1995, convince tens of thousands of
Americans that his campaign is a reasonable investment?

            Let us stipulate:
Alexander is a serious politician who should be taken seriously as a serious
presidential candidate by serious voters everywhere. He served two successful
terms as Tennessee governor and a few years as secretary of education. He's
smart, thoughtful, and persistent. In recent years, he has spent 120 days in
Iowa and 40 in New Hampshire, more time than any other Republican prospect. For
2000 he has dropped the absurd trappings of his 1996 campaign: A gray suit has
replaced the embarrassing plaid shirt, "Lamar!" has become "Gov. Alexander,"
and he has stopped playing the piano at campaign stops.

            Yet Alexander remains, as one GOP strategist politely puts
it, an "extreme underdog." Recent polls of Republican caucus voters in Iowa,
where Alexander claims to have the best organization, show him in fifth place
with 7.7 percent, behind Dan Quayle. In California, a recent poll found him
10 th in the GOP field with 1 percent. An NBC/ Wall Street
Journal poll taken even before George W. Bush became a serious
candidate gave Alexander only 2 percent support among Republicans. Bush,
Elizabeth Dole, and (to a lesser extent) John McCain are eating his lunch,
capturing the mainstream conservatives on whom Alexander depends.

            Why, then, would anyone
bother to fund Alexander's campaign? (You could ask the same question about
Quayle.) To answer this riddle, I went to the folks who know: the people who
are funding his campaign. Alexander's presidential campaign doesn't have
to file contributor lists with the Federal Election Commission till April, but
the FEC does keep records for Campaign for a New American Century, Alexander's
main PAC. CNAC raised and spent nearly $5 million from 1996 to 1998--including
$2.7 million in 1998 alone--to fund Alexander's unofficial presidential
campaign. I downloaded the list of 1998 CNAC contributors and interviewed 17 of
them at random.

            CNAC donors are not exactly campaign contributors, but they
are close. All gave to CNAC in order to help Alexander's presidential run, and
all but one say they have already donated or will donate to Alexander's
presidential campaign. Most of them are prosperous businesspeople in Tennessee
and bordering states, folks who can afford to give a few thousand to CNAC and
another grand to the presidential campaign.

            Of the 17 Alexandrians I
contacted, five consider themselves acquaintances of Lamar, 10 call themselves
friends (including an old roommate, a godmother to his kids, and someone who
ate dinner with him the night before), and one is his brother-in-law. In other
words, only one of them doesn't know him, and most know him extremely
well. "He's a friend and I like him, and when a friend asks for help, you give
him help," says Peter Flanigan, who worked with Alexander in the Nixon White
House and gave CNAC $5,000. Now I doubt even the congenial Lamar has 15,000
friends and acquaintances, but he probably has enough to make a dent in that
$15 million.

            Obviously, the friends and acquaintances are not
contributing simply out of affection. Alexander's supporters universally admire
his brains, decency, commitment to public service, and honor. They applaud his
stewardship of Tennessee and his devotion to education. "He has a lot of
experience governing. He has the skills to carry out what he believes in. He
would be a very effective president," says Marvin Pomerantz, an Iowa
businessman and Alexander friend who contributed $5,000.

            Which brings us to the
$15 million question: Do they actually believe he can be elected president?
They are optimistic but also more realistic than you might expect. Ron Sheffer,
a Kentucky contributor, admits that the odds of Lamar winning the GOP
nomination are 15-to-1 against. The contributors all recognize that he would be
trounced by Bush and Dole if the primaries were held today. Instead they cling
to second-placism: Their man is the "strongest backup candidate," as one puts
it.

            They all paint me the same scene: "He has the best
organization in Iowa. Iowa and New Hampshire will narrow it down to two or
three candidates, and I think he will be one of them," says Marty Connors, an
Alabama Republican activist who gave CNAC $250. Lamar may not be known
nationwide, but "Iowa and New Hampshire know what he stands for. And Iowa and
New Hampshire are going to tell the rest of the country who to vote for," says
Connors. Once Lamar graduates from Iowa and New Hampshire, they say, he will
rise to the top because he's so "electable."

            And how exactly
will Alexander manage to finish second or third in Iowa and New Hampshire? A
Bush calamity as well as a Dole collapse (and perhaps a McCain implosion for
good measure). Being loyal Republicans, Lamar's contributors talk about such
happenings only obliquely. A few mention a "Bush stumble," but most are even
more circumspect. "Other candidates could have something unfavorable in
their past. Other candidates could get sick," says George Van, who runs
a financial management business in Nashville.

            "Other candidates may be sexier at this hour, but once we
go through the battering of New Hampshire and Iowa it might be a different
story," says Connors. "I think the subtext of this election will be, 'I will
not embarrass you.' I know with absolute certainty that Lamar Alexander is
without reproach."

            "The press will reveal
things about candidates that otherwise would not be revealed," says Carole
Sergent, a college classmate of Alexander's and godmother to one of his
children. "There are no secrets with Lamar. But when people scrutinize and see
what those front-runners are really about ..."

            Because they are relying on a Bush fade, the contributors
easily discount Lamar's dismal poll numbers. It's too early for the polls to
mean anything, they say. Voters are probably still reacting to "that plaid
shirt," says Tom Black, a Nashville software entrepreneur. The Alexandrians
reject the polls in favor of a 1996 number: 3,500. The contributors repeat this
figure as though it had talismanic power. If only Lamar had won 3,500 more
votes in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, he would have edged Bob Dole for
second, driven Dole out of the race, and cruised to the nomination. The 1996
near miss allows them to ignore the uglier facts of 2000: that Lamar faces a
stronger field and has lower poll numbers.

            The 17 contributors
admire the doggedness that has made Alexander a figure of fun to the press.
They call his nonstop campaigning since 1995 evidence of his persistence. "I
don't think you should make fun of anyone who has a strong desire for public
service. It takes hard work, and he will outwork all the others," says Brent
Rice, a Kentucky real estate developer.

            The endless campaign has "tested" him in ways that novice
candidates such as Bush and Dole can't even imagine. Republicans believe in
dues paying, say Lamar's supporters. Over and over, they remind me that the
last Republican who won the presidency in his first campaign was Dwight
Eisenhower. Reagan lost before he was nominated, as did George Bush and Richard
Nixon.

            The way the contributors figure it, Alexander is
running against the other veteran candidates: Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Alan
Keyes, and Quayle. By that calculus, I suppose, a contribution to Lamar is a
great bet.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            
               Intellectuals Go
to War
            

            NATO's intervention in
Kosovo has made strange bedfellows among European and American intellectuals.
In England, left-wing British playwright Harold Pinter has pronounced the
bombing "misjudged, miscalculated, disastrous," and conservative historian
Niall Ferguson scoffs at the campaign's inadequacy in a Financial Times
op-ed ("Bleeding Hearts and Bloody Messes"). Elsewhere, opponents of the
bombing include Germaine Greer, Pierre Bourdieu, Christa Wolf, Regis Debray,
and Noam Chomsky. Germany's Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who advocates arming the
Kosovo Liberation Army, begs to differ: "Europeans themselves are not merely
capable of intervening [in this conflict], we are morally obligated to do so."
Novelist Günter Grass supports the NATO campaign and regrets only that it did
not come sooner, and he is seconded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who
denounces the hypocrisy he sees in the Belgrade demonstrations against NATO
bombs. "In Belgrade," he writes, "people are defiantly dancing on the streets
while 300 kilometers to the south, a genocide of African proportions is taking
place." Serb historian and former Harvard research fellow Aleksa Djilas told
the Financial Times that although he would never have fought with the
Serbs in Bosnia, if drafted now, "I would probably not resist."

            
               Service
Economy
            

            California Gov. Gray
Davis has proposed community service as a requirement for graduating from the
state's public universities and colleges. California State University at
Monterey Bay already gives students course credit for performing two semesters
of mandatory public service. Maryland was the first state to require community
service from its high-school students, following the Clinton administration's
emphasis on public service in the early '90s. Who could object to such
civic-mindedness? In response to students' objections, the Ayn Rand Institute
offers an internship of its own: Participating students earn their community
service credit by working against volunteerism.

            
               This Class Is
Rated "R"
            

            A University of Arizona
student who enrolled in a class called "Women in Literature" was dismayed to
discover that the class addressed gay and lesbian issues. As a result, the
Arizona legislature is now considering warning labels for courses with
potentially "objectionable" content. Says Arizona Regents President Judy
Gignac, "The students are our customers and they are paying to be taught. They
need to know in advance what it is they're paying for." Some proponents of such
course labels have suggested classes be rated like TV programs--but, Gignac
points out, "that might increase enrollment in some classes" with particularly
racy ratings.

            
               The Kitschy
Holocaust
            

            Is there a difference
between denying the value of Holocaust scholarship and denying the Holocaust
itself? One might think so. But when Commentary Senior
Editor Gabriel Schoenfeld published scathing attacks on the kitschiness and
obscurity of contemporary Holocaust scholarship in Commentary and in the
New York Times , he found out otherwise. Steven Feinstein, acting
director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the
University of Minnesota, wrote on an e-mail discussion list that Schoenfeld
"has done as much damage as deniers." The Rev. Franklin Littell, an organizer
of a Holocaust studies conference, accused Schoenfeld of "subtle denial." In
response, Schoenfeld says, "Littell is not merely using vicious rhetoric
against a detractor, but engaging in behavior that itself undermines the cause
of Holocaust remembrance."

            
               The Polish
Revolution
            

            On the 10 th
anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe, we often refer to that event
in shorthand as the "fall of the Berlin Wall." But should we refer instead to
"the beginning of the Polish round-table negotiations"? The University of
Michigan thinks so, and on the weekend of April 9, it gathered an array of
dissidents, Communists, and priests to make the case. Most of the conference
attendees, including Solidarity leader Adam Michnik and Poland's President Alexander Kwasniewski,
participated in the 1989 talks that led to a Solidarity government. At the
conference, they defended their activities against numerous
critics: Solidarity leaders denied they made too many compromises; priests
denied they had been co-opted by the party; and Communists denied they had
committed treason. "We were not servile to the Soviet Union," said Poland's
last Communist Party prime minister, "we were helpless before that huge force."
Several Polish-American groups had planned to protest the conference, upset
that the university was paying to put former Communist leaders up in fine
hotels. In fact, the protests did not occur.

            
               "I'd Like To Thank
Members of the Academy"
            

            Academia's most popular
one-year fellowship, the Guggenheim, has been awarded to dozens of academics, including
the University of Chicago's Neil Harris, who will research the history of the
American urban newspaper building, and Williams College's Richard Stamelman,
who will study the literature and culture of perfume. Meanwhile, the New York
Public Library's brand new Center for Scholars and Writers unveiled its first class of
fellows, each of whom will receive a $50,000 stipend and an office in the
venerable library. Chosen under the auspices of the center's director,
historian Peter Gay, the fellows include cultural critic Paul Berman, at work
on a literary and political history of the Nicaraguan revolution; technology
historian Gregory Dreicer, who will study the architecture of racial
segregation; and historian Marion Kaplan, who studies the daily life of Jews in
Nazi Germany.

            
               For Whom the Calls
Toll
            

            George Mason University
has dropped three star runners from the track team for the wrongful use of
campus phones--and fired their women's track coach, Norm Gordon. According to
the Washington Post , assistant coach Joe Showers allowed three members
of GMU's women's track team--all of whom hail from Jamaica--to make
long-distance personal calls from his office. After a routine audit of the
departmental phone bill, GMU discovered the calls and found them to be in
violation of NCAA rules intended to curb recruitment abuses. Even if the NCAA
allows the athletes to regain their eligibility by reimbursing the school,
GMU's athletic director has decided they will not run with the team this
semester.

            

               www.nazistudent.com
            

            Students at Wofford
College in Spartanburg, S.C., staged a protest March 3 against one of their
fellow students, white supremacist Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a Web-savvy junior who
runs a neo-Nazi organization from his dorm room. Hawke is also double-majoring
in history and--sensibly enough--German. While his fellow students aren't
banding to his racist wagon, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Hawke
has garnered about 100 faithful adherents, most of whom are linked to him
through his Knights of Freedom Web site. The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution reports that Wofford officials don't feel they can do
much about the situation because of Hawke's First Amendment rights, but the school's dean says, "There is no
feeling here that we just say it's free speech and go the other way. The
institution has the obligation to speak out forcefully against speech that is
offensive."

            
               Honk if You Love
Honkies
            

            Meanwhile, Florida State
University psychology Professor Glayde Whitney has given David Duke his
scientific blessing. In a foreword to Duke's latest book, a 700-page autobiography judged by hate group watchers to
be the most naked statement yet of the former KKK grand wizard's racist views,
Whitney calls Duke a "seeker of truth," comparing him to Enlightenment
philosopher Voltaire and declaring his vision of racially segregated societies
to be based on "good science." The endorsement--along with the revelation that
Whitney has quietly pursued race-based research for 30 years--has provoked a
furor at FSU, which has the second-highest number of black students among the
state's public institutions. At a town meeting, FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte
declared Whitney's beliefs "obnoxious" but defended the tenured professor's
right to publish them.

            
               Look for the Union
Label
            

            Abetted by AFL-CIO outreach
campaigns, students are mobilizing in the name of labor on college campuses. On
April 16, demonstrators at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Kent State spoke out on
labor issues ranging from graduate student unionization, academic stipends, and
teaching loads to sweatshop abuses. At Yale, the protest was organized by the
Graduate
Employees and Students Organization, which is fighting for recognition from
university administrators. Turning out to support GESO and its recent study
claiming that 70 percent of undergraduate instruction at the college is
performed by poorly compensated graduate students and adjuncts were 500 student
activists and labor leaders, including an AFL-CIO vice president and
Nation
columnist Katha Pollitt. Meanwhile, in California, the state's Public
Employment Relations Board has ruled in favor of allowing union elections at
the seven University of California campuses by the end of the semester.

            
               Friday the Rabbi
Went to a Gay Bar
            

            Confronted by an increasingly vocal faction of
rabbinical students and liberal rabbis, New York's Jewish Theological Seminary may be
forced to reconsider its ban on admitting homosexual students. According to a
recent article in the Forward , the matter is expected to spark heated debate at the
late April meeting of the Conservative movement's religious leaders, the
Rabbinical Assembly. In 1992, citing Torah
prohibitions on homosexual acts by men, the Conservative Committee on Law
and Standards declared a ban on gays within the rabbinate. A backlash against
the ruling has been growing ever since. At the very least, Rabbi Gordon Tucker,
a former dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary told the Forward that
the Rabbinical Assembly should provide "assurances to members ... that their
sexual orientation will not be a factor in limiting their options in furthering
their careers."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , March 27
            

            
               (posted Saturday,
March 27)
            

            The cover editorial calls NATO's bombing of Serbia one of
the West's "riskiest ventures." The action sets a dangerous precedent by
attacking a sovereign state for suppressing an ethnic minority with
secessionist aspirations. Its strategy is faulty: Member countries are
reluctant, Serbia is strong militarily, and NATO has forsworn the use of ground
troops. And it's unrealistic to think that NATO can halt ethnic cleansing
without destabilizing the region. ... An article says President Clinton waited too long to
prepare the American public for military action in Kosovo. He procrastinated
because there were reservations within his own party and administration about
the wisdom of humanitarian intervention. ... A survey of Brazil reports that President Fernando Cardoso's
order to let the real float, which was issued from a bathroom at Rio's
international airport, deepened the recession and worsened inflation. Now that
fiscal austerity and higher interest rates have been imposed a more prosperous
country could emerge so long as Brazilians stay committed to reform.

            

               
                  Ms.
               
               , April/May 1999
            

            
               (posted Saturday, May
27, 1999)
            

            The feminist magazine
relaunches with articles on subjects predictable (female candidates for
president, abortion clinic violence) and less so (adultery, the benefits of
eating soy). ... A patient narrates her face lift. At first, she feels
like "female goods in a dick-driven market," but a few weeks later finds her
smoother, younger face a source of pleasure and confidence. ... A photo
essay, "In Praise of Women," features shots of impoverished or oppressed women
in Afghanistan, Africa, and Haiti, with lushly worded captions. ("Though worlds
apart geographically, we are all sisters in our souls.")

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               
                  , April 12
            

            
               (posted Friday, March
26, 1999)
            

            A cover book review
warns that America is not prepared for the surge in its elderly population.
Policies and social custom encourage early retirement, subsidized by government
programs. As the percentage of seniors increases, these programs will dominate
the federal budget. Increasing savings and reinventing retirement as a mix of
leisure and work could alleviate the looming crisis. ... An article
argues that feminists and conservatives share the same misguided view of gender
relations: that women are pervasively victimized by society and need special
protection. In fact, American society is more flexible than feminists and
traditionalists recognize: Most women manage to have a "workable balance of job
and home responsibilities."

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , March 28
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
March 25, 1999)
            

            The cover story by
Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues that the United States must
designate itself as enforcer-at-large of global stability. This role is
mandated by history (it's a natural extension of the melting-pot tradition),
economics (America stands to gain most from globalization), and necessity (no
one else can). ... A lawyer asserts that "spermination"--the
increasingly common practice of impregnating women with sperm retrieved from
comatose or dead partners--should be banned. (One bioethicist "has coined a
term for this new kind of father: the sperminator.") Like rape and forced
abortion for women, spermination invades bodily privacy and denies reproductive
choice.

            
               
                  The
Nation
               
               , April 5
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
March 25, 1999)
            

            The special showbiz
issue on "the relation between Hollywood and Washington" features stars
ruminating on politics and politically minded writers commenting on film.
Oliver Stone says that both making movies and running for office are too
expensive. Alec Baldwin blames Clinton's impeachment on "the deep, deep shame
that Republicans since [Watergate] have pretty much been synonymous with."
Writers name their mostly predictable favorite flicks: John Edgar Wideman goes
with Hoop Dreams and Larry Flynt picks The People vs. Larry Flynt
("I was very moved by it"). But Edward Said chooses Five Easy Pieces .
... An editorial warns feminists excited about Elizabeth Dole's
presidential run to remember "the Margaret Thatcher rule: A tough broad can
lead a developed nation and do nothing to improve the status of women or
children."

            
               
                  New
York
               
               , March 29
            

            
               (posted Thursday,
March 25, 1999)
            

            The cover
story exposes homophobia on Wall Street. Though some of Wall Street's
leading lights are gay, the industry is still "a testosterone-drenched frat
house complete with ritual hazing." Closeted bankers and brokers lie about
their extracurricular lives; out (and outed) peers suffer insults, wage
discrimination, and demotions. Few gay Wall Streeters are willing to risk their
positions to challenge the status quo. An exception: A top securities executive
who was fired when he requested health benefits for his partner is now suing
his old firm for $75 million.

            

               
                  Time
               
               and

               
                  Newsweek
               
               
                  , March 29
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
23, 1999)
            

            The newsweeklies offer history lessons. Time
profiles "the greatest scientists and thinkers" of the past 100 years, the
latest installment in its yearlong celebration of 20 th century
heroes. Among the chosen are Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Jonas Salk. In
his assessment of Orville and Wilbur Wright
               
                  ,
                Bill Gates says they
made the airplane "the World Wide Web" of their era. Robert Reich opines that
John Maynard Keynes ' theory of government spending "saved
capitalism." The inventors of the television, the computer, and plastics make
the list, as do more provocative choices: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean Piaget . Newsweek 's cover chronicles "2000 Years of Jesus." Belief in Jesus, "the
dominant figure of Western culture," has redefined the relationships between
living and dead, individual and society, and men and women. In a sidebar , a conservative pundit urges the religious right to
withdraw from partisan politics, comparing today's Christian politicians to the
religious teetotalers who passed Prohibition in a misguided attempt to regulate
morality. "The vision of worldly power is a distraction," he warns.

            
               Time reports
that George W. Bush is renovating his father's kitchen Cabinet for himself,
enlisting the youngest, most libertarian, and most idealistic of President
Bush's former White House advisers. "The revenge of the deputies," an older
aide calls it. ... 
               Newsweek 
               berates Madeleine Albright as "a cold warrior caught in the
wrong decade." Her absolutist policy style, formerly lauded, is now deemed
reactive, inconsistent, and ill-timed. See The New Yorker below for more
Albright bashing.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               
                  , March 29
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
23, 1999)
            

            The cover story,
"America's Best Graduate Schools ," suggests which graduate
schools readers should attend, but then asks if they should enroll at all. The
expansive job market makes young people increasingly hesitant to trade their
robust starting salaries for tuition debt and library toil. There are few
surprises on the lists: Harvard is top medical school, Yale is top law school,
Stanford is top business school. ... Vice President Gore's aides
blame their boss' sorry poll numbers on the same strain of
"vice-presidentitis" that afflicted the early days of George Bush's 1988 run.
The good news: Gore's fidelity to Tipper has never been questioned. Gore wants
his campaign team to resemble a Web site, where "each person links to many
different areas." ... The magazine reports on the bawdy race to conceive the first baby of the
year 2000. Events for the all-important first week of April: A radio station in
New Zealand erected tents for a 20-couple "togetherness" session, an Auckland
station is shelling out for hotel rooms for fecund contenders, and European
cable is broadcasting programs on the mating rituals of lions and chimps.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               
                  , March 29
            

            
               (posted Tuesday, March
23, 1999)
            

            An unflattering profile
of Madeleine Albright asserts that the State Department's influence has waned
under her watch and also suggests that she intentionally withheld information
about her Jewish heritage. Twice prior to her 1997 public revelations, Albright
had contact with people and documents telling of family members' religion and
deaths at Auschwitz. ... A piece calls academia's recent embrace of
pornography a cheap thrill. From college courses to journal articles, the newly
respectable field of porn studies evinces the ivory tower's desperate need to
seem cutting edge. ... An article describes the bitter war between the
superposh Inn at Little Washington and the residents of the bucolic Virginia
town where it is located. The townspeople find the proprietors invasive and
insufferably haughty; the owners, in turn, call the locals homophobes and
rubes.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Movies
            

            
               
                  The Deep End
of the Ocean
                (Columbia Pictures). Good reviews for this story of
the disappearance and eventual return of a young child, based on Jacquelyn
Mitchard's best seller. Michelle Pfeiffer's turn as the distraught mother is
singled out for praise; many reviewers call it "an exceptional performance ...
one of her best ever" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). Some say
the subject matter has a made-for-TV feel, but most conclude that the acting
elevates the film into real drama. 
                  Slate
               's David
Edelstein is of two minds about the film: "I want to say it's subtle, but I
also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too
many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook." (Read
the rest of his review .)

            
               
                  The
Corruptor
                (New Line Cinema). Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat's
second English-language film (after the unenthusiastically received
Replacement Killers ) gets mixed reviews. Mark Wahlberg co-stars as
Chow's rookie partner in a task force charged with controlling gangs in
Chinatown. Critics like this movie better than Chow's last film and say it has
"a stylish patina that puts it a cut above much of the competition" (Stephen
Holden, the New York Times ). But the story, an exploration of the line
between everyday palm-greasing and real treachery, does not capture everyone's
imagination. Gary Arnold of the Washington Times calls it "a groggy
hotbed of sensationalism." (Find out more about Chow on this
fan site.)

            
               
                  The Rage:
Carrie 2
                (MGM/UA). Critics agree that this film is a sorry
imitation of the original: "as generic in every aspect as Brian De Palma's
original was inventive" (Dennis Harvey, Daily Variety ). The plot is the
same (tortured telekinetic teen starts bloodbath when humiliated), but this
time it's just "campy inanity" (Jay Carr, the Boston Globe ) with none of
the original's terrifying flair. The Los Angeles Times ' Kevin Thomas is
the film's only ally; he calls the direction "astute" and the script
"intelligent." (Find out more about the 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek
here.)

            
               
                  Wing
Commander
                (20 th Century Fox). This film adaptation of
the popular computer game is deemed "so cheesy it could be served on crackers"
(Renee Graham, the Boston Globe ). Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard
(who is "upstaged by his hair ," according to Entertainment
Weekly 's Owen Gleiberman) star as two young fighter pilots in the year
2564. Many critics note that the enemies (an evil race of aliens) look like
"characters from Cats reupholstered in slimy green Naugahyde" (Godfrey
Cheshire, Daily Variety ). The most notable thing about the film is that
the second trailer for the new Star Wars movie runs before it. (Find out
more about the computer game on this site.)

            

               Death
            

            
               Stanley
Kubrick (1928-1999). In a pre-release publicity coup for his
forthcoming Eyes Wide Shut , Stanley Kubrick dies. The director of A
Clockwork Orange , 2001: A Space Odyssey , and Dr. Strangelove Or:
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was universally hailed for
a famously uncompromising vision. It was an "amazingly varied body of work"
that was "unified not only by bizarre brilliance but also by its rare ability
to disturb" (Janet Maslin, the New York Times ). His most commonly cited
shortcoming is what many critics describe as "coldness," even in his most
accomplished films. Many of the recent life and work recaps emphasize Kubrick's
famous idiosyncrasies: 1) his reclusiveness (though Time 's Richard
Schickel was apparently an intimate); 2) his obsessiveness (he was known, wrote
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times , to call projectionists personally
and complain about how his film was being shown in a particular theater); and
3) maniacal attention to detail (scores of takes were the norm). Jack
Nicholson, who starred in Kubrick's The Shining , was the only star big
enough to talk about the maestro with anything less than total respect:
"Stanley's good on sound," Nicholson said to Time . "Stanley's good on
the color of the mike. Stanley's good about the merchant he bought the mike
from. Stanley's good about the merchant's daughter who needs some dental work.
Stanley's good." ( Edelstein's and Alex Ross' take on Kubrick in

                  Slate
               .)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  Black Hawk
Down: A Story of Modern War
               , by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly
Press). Reviewers are fascinated by this account of the U.S. intervention in
Somalia. The writing may not be polished, but "[w]hat this demotic,
you-are-there prose lacks in literary finesse ... it makes up in pure narrative
drive." (William Finnegan, the New York Times Book Review ). Some
reviewers wish the account gave more of a sense of the historical context. But
Bowden's excellent reporting--he interviewed scores of U.S. and Somali
soldiers--makes for a "vivid, immediate and unsparing narrative that is filled
with blood and noise and terror" (Jonathan Yardley, the Washington
Post ). (Read the first chapter courtesy of the New York
Times [requires free registration].)

            Find a movie playing
near you on Sidewalk.com.

            

               Recent "Summary Judgment" columns
            

             

            

               
                  Movie -- Analyze This ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Cruel Intentions ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Lock, Stock & Two Smoking
Barrels ;

               
                  Book -- Monica's Story , by Andrew Morton;

               
                  Theater -- Annie Get Your Gun ;

               
                  Theater -- Bright Lights, Big
City .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  8MM ;

               
                  Movie -- 200 Cigarettes ;

               
                  Movie -- The 
                  Other Sister ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Houdini Girl , by Martyn Bedford;

               
                  Book -- Perfect Murder, Perfect Town , by Lawrence
Schiller;

               
                  Theater--
                  Not About Nightingales .

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  October Sky ;

               
                  
                     Movie --Jawbreaker ;

               
                  Movie -- Office Space ;

               
                  Music--
                  The Hot Rock , by Sleater-Kinney;

               
                  Book--
                  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith ,
by Anne Lamott;

               
                  Book -- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and
the Quest for the Ultimate Theory , by Brian R. Greene.

            

             

            

               
                  Movie--
                  Blast From the Past ;

               
                  Movie
                  --Message in a Bottle ;

               
                  Movie
                  --My Favorite Martian ;

               
                  Book--
                  The Testament , by John Grisham;

               
                  Book
                  --South of the Border, West of the Sun ,by Haruki
Murakami;

               
                  Theater--
                  Death of a Salesman (Eugene O'Neill
Theatre, New York City).

            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Let's Mask a Deal

            Three weeks ago, when NATO
launched its airstrikes against Yugoslavia, President Clinton swore off further
talks with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and ruled out a ground
invasion. Since then, events have obliged Clinton to rethink his options. he
floated weasel words that would let him wage a ground war while calling it
something else. This week Clinton's aides are floating weasel words for the
opposite scenario: negotiations.

            Now that everyone has
declared Milosevic a war criminal and has agreed that the United States'
manhood is at stake, the "N word" is verboten in Washington. On Sunday's
talk shows, pundits asked various U.S. officials how they could even
"contemplate negotiating with Mr. Milosevic after what he's done." The
officials dutifully ruled out the idea, all the while sketching concessions by
which Milosevic could persuade them to halt the bombing. The operative question
is no longer how American representatives could dare negotiate with Milosevic.
It's how they're doing it already while pretending not to by masking it in less
polite terms. Here are the various characterizations, in ascending order of
preference.

            
1. Cutting a deal. This is the most
noxious formulation, slung as an insult by hawks such as the Weekly
Standard and the Wall Street Journal . "This man who is engaged in
this massive ethnic cleansing," Standard publisher Bill Kristol spat on
This Week --"We're going [to]cut another deal with him? ... They cannot
cut another deal with Milosevic." Warnings against "cutting a deal" are
invariably accompanied by descriptions of Milosevic as a "war criminal." The
implication is that cutting a deal with a criminal is unethical, if not
illegal.

            2. Negotiation. U.S. officials hate this word because
it connotes capitulation. They've learned to deflect it by juxtaposing it with
"bombing." When asked on Face the Nation whether the United States would
"negotiate" with a "war criminal," Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott
sternly replied: "We're not negotiating with Milosevic. We're bombing him."
U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill likewise told CNN: "We're not
negotiating right now. We're conducting an air campaign." The false,
glossed-over premise that bombing and negotiation are incompatible goes
unchallenged.

            Indeed, in this case,
the bombing is part of the negotiation. While hitting Milosevic over the
head, NATO is offering terms under which it is willing to stop. Conversely,
Milosevic is offering lesser concessions. Though NATO rejected his initial
offer, the latest proposals by Germany and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan--which would suspend the bombing in exchange for partial compliance with
NATO's demands and would put the United Nations, rather than NATO, in charge of
settling the conflict--suggest there will ultimately be a compromise. A few
days ago, when a reporter asked about the N word, White House spokesman Joe
Lockhart answered, "We have a military objective now, which is to bring
President Milosevic to meet these conditions that we have laid out." By calling
this objective "military," Clinton's aides obscure its negotiatory aspect.

            
3. Diplomacy. Like negotiation, this word
smells of weakness. Again, administration officials deflect it by contrasting
it with a tougher word: "force." "Fourteen months ago, when Milosevic started
this crisis, our policy was one of diplomacy backed by force," Talbott argued
last weekend. "Now we have force backed by diplomacy." Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, are fond of the same
formulation. But the contrast between "diplomacy" and "force" is just as
deceptive as the contrast between "negotiation" and "bombing." NATO hopes to
bomb Milosevic to the table. Therefore, force is still serving diplomacy.

            
4. Political solution. This is the
administration's code word for "deal." Clinton says he wants a "political
solution." Albright and Rubin want "a political settlement" and a "political
framework based on Rambouillet." Toward that end, Albright welcomes Russia's
"support for dealing with the problem in a political way." Last week, when a
reporter asked whether the United States wanted Russia to undertake "diplomatic
mediation with Belgrade," Rubin replied, "I would put it a little differently.
... The Russians have been part and parcel of our effort to try to find a
peaceful solution." Rubin expressed hope that the Russians might succeed in
"convincing the Serbs to turn around" and "accept our conditions." But
diplomacy? Never.

            5. Harder and harder. Part of the indignity
of negotiation is the implication that during the bargaining NATO will offer
more and more concessions. So, American spokesmen tailor their words to create
the opposite impression: that NATO will offer fewer and fewer concessions as
the conflict wears on. As Defense Secretary William Cohen put it Sunday, "every
day that goes by" with further evidence of Milosevic's "brutality" would "make
it far more difficult to deal with him."

            Last week, a reporter
asked Lockhart whether it was "right for an American negotiator now to sit down
with Milosevic to try to cut some deal." Lockhart replied that such a scenario
"gets harder every day. But I am not going to ... rule anything out." The
reporter pressed: "But it's not off the table yet?" Lockhart answered: "Dealing
with him gets harder." When asked whether "at some point" dealing with
Milosevic would "become impossible," Lockhart scoffed, "I am not going to spell
out a timetable or what he has to do." Refusing to "spell out" demands or to
"rule anything out" is a classic negotiating posture--which Lockhart
effectively obscured by repeating the word "harder" five times during the
exchange.

            6. Demands. This is the administration's favorite
description. Confronted recently with a coarse question as to whether the
United States was "willing to talk to Milosevic," Lockhart stonily replied,
"The NATO alliance has made demands, and he needs to meet them." Lest anyone
confuse these demands with negotiation, Albright insisted, "We're not trying to
please President Milosevic. ... The goal of this is to be able to get him to
understand these five demands that the international community is making."
American officials also speak of NATO's "terms," "conditions," and
"requirements." There was only one slip-up last week, when Rubin referred to
them as "our position."

            The administration's spin is that "demands" and
"conditions" are the opposite of "negotiation." Milosevic "knows precisely what
the conditions are, so we're not negotiating," Ambassador Hill declared on
Late Edition last weekend. On Meet the Press , White House Chief
of Staff John Podesta vowed: "We're not negotiating, Tim. He knows what he
needs to do to stop the war. ... That's not a negotiation." But minutes later,
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., betrayed the spin: "No, I don't think we can negotiate
with him--if you mean can we, in fact, work out something other than those
minimal demands that were stated" by NATO. It depends, in short, upon what the
meaning of the word "negotiation" is.

            If the German and U.N.
proposals lead to a settlement with Milosevic, Clinton and his diplomats will
have to finesse the discrepancy between the "demands" they touted and the deal
they signed. Somehow I'm confident they can work it out.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

             

            

               Joe DiMaggio
died of complications from lung cancer surgery. News accounts recited
his résumé--the Hall of Fame, nine World Series championships, 11 All-Star
games, and three American League Most Valuable Player awards--but focused on
his record 56 game hitting steak in 1941, which still stands today. While
sports analysts compared his greatness on the field to that of Babe Ruth and
Lou Gehrig, commentators traced his celebrity to his courteous, humble,
all-American, son-of-immigrants personality. The spins: 1) DiMaggio represented
the grace and dignity of the good old days. 2) Ruth and Ty Cobb represented the
pugnacity and decadence of the good old days, and DiMaggio was the exception.
(3/8/99)
            

            
Gov. George
W. Bush , R-Texas, announced he is forming a presidential campaign
exploratory committee. Though he won't officially declare his candidacy until
June, he paraded notable supporters such as former GOP Chairman Haley Barbour
and House GOP Chairman J.C. Watts Jr., before the press. His aides also listed
scores of governors and members of Congress who are backing him. Everyone
agrees his strategy is to create an air of inevitability and suffocate his
competitors. The spins against him: 1) He's inexperienced in public office. 2)
He's inexperienced in national politics. 3) He has no base. 4) He lacks
organization in early states. 5) He's had it too easy and is due for a fall. 6)
His expectations are too high. 7) Elizabeth Dole's entry into the race will
kill his momentum. 8) His supporters don't know what he stands for. 9) He
doesn't know what he stands for. (3/8/99)
            

            
Film director
Stanley Kubrick died . Obituaries recalled his movies' eight Academy
Awards, focusing on Dr. Strangelove , A Clockwork Orange , and
2001: A Space Odyssey , also mentioning Lolita and The
Shining . Commentators debated the significance of the bleak fantasies in
which he portrayed human recklessness, madness, brutality, murder, and nuclear
holocaust. The half-cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as
savages. The completely cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as
savages because they deserved it. (3/8/99)
            

            
ABC aired
Monica Lewinsky's interview with Barbara Walters . The biggest news that
wasn't leaked prior to the broadcast: Between trysts with Clinton, Lewinsky had
another affair leading to an abortion. Seventy million people watched the
interview. Since Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had forbidden Lewinsky to
talk about him in the interview, she bashed him separately in her book, which
is outside his jurisdiction. Pro-Monica spins: 1) She's a victim. 2) She's a
fool for love. 3) She's smarter than we thought. 4) She's still loyal to
Clinton. Anti-Monica spins: 1) She's vain. 2) She's amoral. 3) She's a savvy,
pernicious temptress. 4) She's shameless. 5) She makes Clinton look moral by
comparison. 6) She reflects our decadence. 7) She reflects our empty
sentimentality. 8) She reflects our tasteless commercialism. (Click to read the
"Frame Game" analysis of the interview, and for the "Culturebox" take.)
(3/5/99)
            

            
A court-martial
jury acquitted U.S. Marine Capt. Richard Ashby of involuntary homicide
and manslaughter in the Italian ski lift accident. Ashby's jet severed the
lift's cables, killing 20 European skiers . He still faces trial on a
charge that he obstructed justice by ditching the plane's videotape of the
accident. Evidence in the first trial indicated that the plane was flying too
fast and too low but that incomplete U.S. military maps, poor training,
inadequate communications, and a possibly faulty altimeter may also have
contributed to the accident. Italians are outraged. The naive Italian spin:
There is no justice in America. The sophisticated Italian spin: To get justice
in America we'll have to file a lawsuit. (3/5/99)
            

            
Former Supreme
Court Justice Harry Blackmun died . Obituaries fulfilled his prediction
that he would always be associated with his majority opinion in Roe vs.
Wade . The conservative spin on his career: He snookered President Nixon and
undermined justice by evolving from a law-and-order moderate into a flaming
liberal . Blackmun's spin: He remained a moderate but seemed increasingly
liberal by comparison as right-wingers took over the court. The liberal spin:
He served justice by evolving from a law-and-order moderate into a flaming
liberal. (3/5/99)
            

            
Rwandan Hutu
rebels abducted and murdered eight tourists , including two Americans, in
Uganda. The other six victims were Britons and New Zealanders. The selection of
American and British targets was evidently deliberate. Ugandan troops, with
help from U.S. and British agents, are tracking down the culprits and vow to
bring them in dead or alive. The spins: 1) Did the U.S. and British governments
adequately warn the tourists of danger? 2) Did the Ugandan government
adequately warn the U.S. and British governments? 3) If the lives of two
Americans are so important, why haven't we paid more attention to the 500,000
Africans similarly massacred in the Rwandan civil war? (3/3/99)
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 245: &quot;Dis Sent&quot;

            
               Gerald
Vollmer-Heurer has a plan, and Dirk Adol hates it. "It is cheap, it is
degrading, it is smelly," says Mr. Adol, who has a plan of his own. "What I
propose is something clean, useful and solid." What is the subject of Dirk and
Gerald's disagreement?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 244)--"When IRS Eyes Are Smiling":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        Fill in the blank on this tax tip from a
Washington state IRS collection officer. "If you don't want to pay your taxes
today all you have to do is say two magic words: _________
_________."
                     
                  
               
            

            "Whale
meat?"-- Michael Fein
            

            
"Willie Nelson."-- Erin H. Murphy , Kate Wing , and Justin
Warner
            

            
"Mommy, please."-- Bill Scheft
            

            "I
commute! (New York Metropolitan-area answer.)"-- Andrew
Silow-Carroll
            

            "I'm
sorry. (No, wait, that's how you get out of accidentally bombing somebody's
embassy.)"-- Zach Hooker
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Tax Reform
Wrap-Up
            

            One criticism of our tax system is its use not
merely to raise revenue but to encourage social policy, as in the deduction for
mortgage interest or charitable contributions. I'd like to suggest that the tax
system should go much, much farther down this road, particularly the sales tax.
Under my plan, sales taxes would only be not eliminated on certain socially
desirable purchases, but also good shoppers would receive an anti-tax, a bonus
for their beneficent purchases.

            For example, in New York City you're charged an 8
1/4 percent tax when you buy a book. I propose that when you buy a really good
book--say, a Patrick O'Brian, he's marvelous!--you'd be paid a 10 percent
bonus: Buy a $20 book; receive $2 from the city.

            Buy a TV set and you should pay a tax: Your
purchase will make you fat and stupid. Buy a TV set that operates only when you
pedal a bicycle-powered generator, and you receive a bonus: Your purchase will
make you thin and stupid.

            Rent a copy of Seven Samurai , a fine movie,
and you get the bonus. Rent Three Ninjas and you pay a tax, but you can
check a box that allocates your money to hire a guy to beat the hell out of
Jack Valenti.

            The question, of course,
is who decides which items are taxed and which earn the buyer a bonus. I do. By
making these decisions a matter of narrow self-interest, my reform remains
within the historical context of the present system, where tax rates are set to
benefit the rich and powerful. My system would differ only in benefiting a
different self. And what's good for me would no doubt be good for the
country.

            
               Bracket Creep
Answer
            

            "If you don't want to pay your taxes today all you
have to do is say two magic words: installment agreement ."

            "You just say you want one and even if the terms
you propose are ridiculous--like $10 a week when you owe tens of
thousands--collection stops while your proposal goes up and down the chain of
managers, until 90 days later you are told no. Then you need to say another
magic word--harassment--and because of this new law, the collection process
stops while your complaint gets reviewed."

            This new law is
Congress' way to bully the IRS into acting nicer. As a result, seizures of
property in lieu of back taxes are down 98 percent this year. Other attempts to
get people to pay what they owe are also way down. Many IRS officials say the
drop stems from their fear of running afoul of the new niceness laws and
getting fired.

            
               Ananda Gupta's
Cool American Bible Follow-Up
            

            There is a board game based on the Battle of
Armageddon.

            Some details:

            

               2 to 3 players.

               Units represent Magog (Russia), the Kings of the East (China), the Western
empires (USA and Europe), Israel, and the Arabs.

               The West gets a piece representing the antichrist.

               When you throw the die to resolve a battle and a 6 comes up, an
"apocalyptic event"--Euphrates dries up, sky turns blood red interfering with
air units, etc.--occurs.

            

            The game is published by
the Microgame
Co-op, a small operation run by a Canadian named Kerry Anderson. Its raison
d'être is to publish board games by unknown designers or on "niche" subjects
(they have a board game depicting the struggle between Peru's government and
the Sendero Luminoso). Check it out.

            
               Headline Haiku
Extra
            

            Sestinas are for sissies. News Quiz participants
are still encouraged to attempt this far more demanding verse form:

            

               Four lines, each with the same number of words; two, three, or four
suggested, but it's poet's choice.

               The words in each line must originally appear adjacent to each other in a
newspaper headline.

               The headlines must all come from a single
edition of a single paper.

            

            Two
lyrical examples:

            Through a Hot
Metaphor
A Series of Missteps
The Boss's Pay Gets
Terms Hard To Swallow

            
               Wall Street Journal , May 18, 1999

            -- Heather
Harmon
            

            Quiet Jubilation
Whitman Mounts
Bloody Gloves
To Sell Drugs

            
               --Winter
Miller
            

             

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The rich and the dead.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 210: &quot;Let Us Now Praise Famous Me&quot;

            

               "You like me! You really like me!"-- Sally Field
               
            

            

               "I'm the king of the world and the lord of Monkey Island!"-- James
Cameron
               
            

            
               Every Academy
Awards broadcast yields one perfect remark. Participants are invited to predict
the comment from Sunday's Oscars that will be most quoted in Monday's
papers.
            

            

               ( Topic courtesy of Greg Diamond. )
            

             

            by 5
p.m. ET Sunday to e-mail your answer to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 209)--"Noise Is Off":
               

               

                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    The whistle, the
clanging, it's a good noise," said Dennis Brady, "a noise that's supposed to be
there."
Where?
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               

               "The
NBA, trying to spin the hacking fouls and awful shooting that have dominated
play."-- Matt Sullivan
               

               
"Emanating from Bob Dole's new, souped-up prostate."-- David Rakoff
               

               "The
Mir space station, according to Boris Yeltsin."-- Michael Wilde
               

               "HAL's
shiva house."-- Beth Sherman
               

               "Gosh,
I hope nobody made any Amtrak jokes. Remember, comedy is tragedy PLUS time.
Such jokes wouldn't be appropriate until, oh, let's say, next Monday around
noon."-- Nell Scovell
               

                

                

                

                

               Click
for more answers.

               
                  Randy's
Wrap-Up
               

            

            Remember the grotesque
defense-spending boondoggles of the '50s and '60s meant to bridge the "missile
gap" with the Soviets and the "swimming pool and redwood deck gap" at the
summer houses of General Dynamics executives? Well, it's back, and it's called
the anti-missile system, an unworkable solution to an imaginary problem. It's
the perfect program for a time when the best delivery system for a small
nuclear warhead is UPS. Not only will the ABM program absorb money from
programs that might actually benefit the country, but by taking scientists and
engineers away from real work, it will skew technological progress for decades.
(Wait, wait, I'm about to tie this into the actual topic.) The one tiny moment
of happiness to come from this occurred yesterday; at the exact moment of
President Clinton's utter moral collapse, I distinctly heard a whistle and
clang. Thank you. And now let's bring out Bobby Orsini and his amazing
orangutans!

            
               Romance of the
Rails Answer
            

            The sound belongs at a railroad crossing in
Kankakee, near the fatal Amtrak crash in Bourbonnais, Ill., said a local
resident.

            Since 1991, the
Transportation Department has reduced the number of these crossings from
290,000 to 257,000 and intends to close another 30,000. Last year there were
422 deaths at crossings, down one-third from five years earlier. The remaining
crossings will get upgraded warning systems including, in some cases, gates
that block all four lanes of the road. The truck involved in the Bourbonnais
crash is suspected of veering around the gates in an attempt to beat the train
through the crossing.

            
               Daniel Radosh's
Spring Cleaning Extra
            

            If amusing but ultimately unusable newspaper
clippings are the dust bunnies of a free-lance humorist's living room, then the
News Quiz Spring Cleaning Extra is the rug under which to sweep them.

            

               "There's a certain value in being overly courteous, even when it's to the
point of being somewhat sarcastic."-- Rudy Giuliani, admitting that police
officers should call men "sir," as long as it's clear they don't mean any
actual respect by it.
               

               "Only one thing would be worse than the status quo. And that would be for
the status quo to become the norm."-- Elizabeth Dole, craftily stealing
rhetoric from rival candidate Dan Quayle.
               

               "Young children who are enchanted with the Teletubbies and Barney
characters want to participate in a nurturing experience. Unfortunately, the
children are toppling the TVs down on themselves causing head traumas and other
crushing injuries."-- Dr. Ellen Crain of the Jacobi Medical Center, warning
parents not to let their little ones hug the television. Especially the
Teletubbies. Especially the one with the purse.
               

               "PBS shows are not killers."-- PBS spokeswoman Donna Williams, responding
to Dr. Crain, and generating the most ambivalent network slogan since NBC's "If
you haven't seen it, it's new to you."
               

               "Loads of pot!"-- From an ad for a two-family house in the New York
Times "Real Estate" section. I'm holding out for "tons of crack" down the
street.
               

               "A picture caption in 'Weekend' last Friday ... misidentified a man in a
Lone Ranger mask standing with J. Edgar Hoover. ... The FBI said yesterday that
while the man was not Clayton Moore, one of several actors who have portrayed
the Lone Ranger, it had not yet determined his identity."-- A New York
Times correction, barely concealing the urge to shout, "Who was that masked
man?"
               

               "But last year in October, I finally did come out. I joined a teen support
group for gay, lesbian, transgendered, questioning, bisexual and non-labeling
youth."-- A contributor to New Youth Connections , a high-school
newspaper. Is it just me, or do the non-labeling youth lack the courage of
their convictions?
               

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Intercranial noises.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A 36,000 Dow?

            One year ago, with the Dow
Jones industrial average at 8,700, financial writer James Glassman and
economist Kevin Hassett wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the price
of stocks was still way too low. By their logic, they said, the Dow should be
at 35,000--and would be, when investors caught on.

            This week, as the Dow
hit 10,000, Glassman and Hassett repeat their argument in the Journal .
They admit that the "financial establishment" has reacted with guffaws. They do
not mention that Jeremy Siegel, the Wharton finance professor whose research is
central to their case, wrote to the Journal that "their analysis
contains a serious flaw [and] vastly overstates the value of stocks."

                  Slate
                also published a "" between Glassman and the
Economist 's Clive Crook, in which Crook explained that Glassman was
"wrong, plain wrong ... in the same way that it's wrong to say two plus two
equals five." But Glassman and Hassett (henceforth, "Glassman") remain unbowed.
In fact, they've upped the ante. This fall they're bringing out a book titled
Dow 36,000 .

            It would make a wonderful tale if these two (both
associated with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington
think tank) had discovered what the entire finance establishment had missed,
and written the next Wealth of Nations . The true tale, sadly, is
somewhat less inspiring. Glassman's analysis suffers from a plain conceptual
mistake, described below, which he simply refuses to admit, no matter how many
times it is pointed out to him. Here is his argument, and why it is wrong.

            Glassman begins by asking
whether you'd rather have $100 in a savings account that pays 6 percent
interest or a $100 share of a company that earned $1 per share last year. The
answer is simple, right? The savings account pays you $6 per year, while the
stock pays only $1--and even that only if the company's entire earnings are
paid out in dividends.

            But why would a stock that pays out only $1 be trading at
$100, when investors can get $6 in a savings account? Because firms tend to
grow over time and so do their earnings. Firms can grow for any number of
reasons, but only one is mathematically certain, and that is the one Glassman's
argument depends on: A firm that earns $1 can use it to expand, and thus
increase its earnings, expand even more, and so on. For instance, a typical
firm with $1 of earnings per share might earn $1.05 next year, $1.11 the
following year, and so on. In 35 years, earnings per share will pass $6 and
continue to increase. You can show mathematically that $6 a year forever and $1
this year plus $1.05 next year and so on are equal amounts. So it's not
illogical that investors would be willing to pay the same $100 for either
income stream.

            Glassman points out that investors are not
paying the same amount for these two income streams. To get $6 a year from a
savings account costs you about $100 today, but you can buy $1 of corporate
earnings on the stock market for an average of only $25! One reason is that
stocks are considered riskier. Even if the average return on the stocks is the
same as the certain return on the savings account, people will pay extra for
the certainty itself. Glassman thinks this is the only reason for the
difference--although it's not.

            But Glassman
argues--citing historical studies by Siegel--that stocks held for many years
are not actually riskier. And when people realize this, they'll be willing to
pay $100 instead of $25 for $1 of corporate earnings, and stock prices will
quadruple. That's where he gets his 36,000 Dow: four times the current level.
(Maybe it's not too late to call the book Dow 40,000 .)

            So where's the flaw? Assume that Glassman is right about
the long-term risk of stocks, and assume he's right that average corporate
earnings will grow at 5 percent a year. The problem is that he is
double-counting. The $6 a year you get from a savings account is yours to spend
on anything you please. The corporate earnings are yours to spend only if they
are paid out in dividends. But if they are paid out in dividends, they aren't
available to expand the firm, and so the delightful progression from $1 to
$1.05 to $1.11 and so on won't occur.

            Another way to see the flaw is to apply Glassman's
logic to the savings account. Sure, a $100 investment today will only get you
$6 this year. But those earnings will allow the savings account to grow, and
next year's earnings will be $6.36, and then $6.74, and so on. So according to
Glassman's theory, you should be willing to pay $400 for a $100 savings
account.

            The key point is that earnings cannot be
simultaneously paid out in dividends and invested in future profits.
Glassman would be right, however, if you could buy $1 of dividends for
$25. But it turns out that to buy $1 of dividends costs you $72 (among Dow
Jones industrial average stocks). Which suggests that if you really believe
that stocks are actually no riskier than a savings account--or, rather, if you
believe that everyone else will come to believe this--the Dow may still have
3,888 or so points to go. Dow 14,000 anyone?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Ethnicity Slickers

            
               But They're
Harmless Stereotypes
            

            In "The Merchant of Menace ," Bruce
Gottlieb for using racial stereotyping in the new Star Wars movie. While
it's undeniably true that Jar Jar Binks is reminiscent of Stepin Fetchit, and
those two noseless Federation guys are sinister Asians of the type not seen
since World War II movies, I take issue with the implication that this is
harmful.

            Let's face it--these stereotypes have been out of
circulation for 30 or 40 years, kept alive almost exclusively by crackpot
racists and horrified anti-stereotype brigades, mostly the latter. Your typical
5-year-old does not associate those traits with those ethnic groups. Lucas
stigmatizes no one but computer-generated alien creatures with these
portrayals--in fact, a black man is prominent on the Jedi counsel. There is a
distinct Asian influence in the court of the queen of Naboo. As Gottlieb points
out, the ultimate villain of the story is an influential, rich, white guy.

            Lucas has been
appropriating elements from other movies his entire career. It only makes sense
that he would revive these long-unused stereotypes and squeeze them for their
entertainment value. I salute him for finding ways to do it without hurting
real people.

            

               --Daniel Krause Canoga Park, Calif.

            
               
                  Bruce Gottlieb
replies:
                
               The response to my recent article "The Merchant
of Menace " has been overwhelming--3,000 e-mails and counting. In that
article I argued that The Phantom Menace revives long-standing racial
stereotypes about Asians, Jews, and blacks. Many of the 3,000 e-mails told me
that I was wrong to make this claim. A smaller number told me that I was right.
Other than what I wrote in the initial article, I have nothing to add to this
debate.
            

            
               But a number of respondents, such as Daniel
Krause, concede that Lucas did indeed revive racial stereotypes but think this
revival is no big deal. Krause says that in this modern age stereotypes no
longer have the power to do harm. A surprisingly large number of respondents
add that only intentional racial stereotypes are harmful (and, as I say in the
original article, I don't think Lucas intended to offend anyone).
            

            
               Frankly, I had not anticipated this type of
argument. I'd always assumed that the revival of certain racial stereotypes in
a children's movie would be universally deplored. But apparently not everyone
feels this way.
            

            
               So, why is it wrong to milk ancient stereotypes
for modern-day laughs? Mostly, it is tasteless, since the racial stereotypes at
issue have been used to justify all sorts of historical barbarities.
Admittedly, there is no bright line dividing an ethnic joke that seems funny
from one that is vicious. The ingredients of humor are hard to pin down. But
reviving Shylock--without a trace of historical awareness--to amuse
uncomprehending children seems obviously vicious rather than funny. At least to
me. One thing is sure--it certainly is not imaginative.
            

            
               And there is yet
another valid concern: that the widespread transmission of racial stereotypes
might indeed be helpful to hate groups. The influence is sure to be diffuse.
Many claims about the influence of popular culture are exaggerated. But it's
hard to believe that people are not affected by the images and stereotypes they
encounter as children. I am not completely confident that racial stereotyping
in movies has a significant effect on racial politics. But neither am I
confident that it doesn't.
            

            
               Naboo Tea
Party
            

            I liked James Surowiecki's in the imaginary
universe of The Phantom Menace ("Moneybox"). But his attempt to
characterize the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal as
ridiculously hostile to taxation forgets that the Journal people are in
good company. Have you forgotten U.S. history? By making a tax dispute the
putative reason for invading a planet, Lucas merely transposed historical
events that Americans ought to be familiar with. Beyond substituting spacecraft
for sailing ships, it wasn't much of a reach. Does "Boston Tea Party" ring any
bells? How about "Lexington and Concord" or "no taxation without
representation"?

            Moviegoers are told very
little about why Naboo was invaded, but the few facts we get are credible,
albeit too sparse to test with the criteria for just wars.

            

               --Patrick O'Hannigan San Luis Obispo, Calif.

            
               Let's Go to the
Tape
            

            David Plotz needs to hit the replay button on the
Prepare To Win tapes (""). As obvious and as simplistic as he deemed the
content, he still managed to miss the point.

            We want to encourage more women and minorities to
run for office. Frequently, candidates announce before they have given real
consideration to the basics: Why am I running? Where will I get the money? How
do I get started? "Thunderingly obvious" to Plotz on his perch it may be, but
to candidates who rush to announce before thoughtful consideration, the result
is a no win .
            

            He takes on Sen. Kit Bond for advising listeners
and potential candidates to "be true to yourself." This advice is easier said
than done, and Bond cautions the candidate that once you sell your vote, you
sell your integrity. Plotz finds this advice cynical and shabby. In this case,
the eye of the beholder is less than 20-20.

            Cynical and shabby is
alive and well in the White House, and that is just one of the reasons it is
necessary to caution potential candidates--on the obvious--that selling your
vote or the Lincoln bedroom is a formula for "prepare to lose."

            

               --Patricia Harrison Co-chair, Republican National Committee
Washington

            
               TV's Golden
'90s
            

            I suppose it figures that you would pick two sitcom
writers to debate the value of writing for television and movies (""). What
either of them has to say is irrelevant: Half-hour comedy writers write jokes,
not shows. One exception, which they both ridiculed, is, in my opinion,
Sports Night .

            As far as screenwriters go, it is hard to remember
a movie in the last few years that is as well written as the prime-time dramas
we have seen in the past 15 years. I am referring to Hill Street Blues ,
L.A. Law , Murder One , Picket Fences , Chicago Hope
(the Kelly years), Law & Order , Homicide: Life on the Street ,
Brooklyn South , The Practice , and yes, even Ally McBeal .
Show me any half-hour show that approaches the wit, intelligence, character,
relevance, and drama of the shows I mentioned.

            We are experiencing right now a golden age of drama
on television, not in the theater, not in movies, but (mainly) in the 10
o'clock-to-11 o'clock hour almost every night. Look at these scripts then go
back and look at what was called "the golden age of television" in the '50s.
Sadly, most of it doesn't hold up compared to what we see now.

            There are some fine
writers out here, and they are writing drama, not jokes.

            
               --Robert
Duncan Sherman Oaks, Calif.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hard Core Goes Soft

            A few years ago, when
debates over the fate of "Western Civ" requirements raged at Stanford and
elsewhere, traditionalists often pointed to the University of Chicago as the
school where the old ideals of liberal education remained the most intact. Now
that bastion of tradition is itself under attack, not by deconstructionists and
postmodernists but by economists and accountants.

            The turmoil is over a
proposal to transform the old "Common Core" curriculum, some version of which
has been in place since the 1930s, into the so-called "Chicago Plan." The
university administration wants to reduce the number of required courses in the
humanities, sciences, and social sciences from 21 to 15 and to remove a
longstanding foreign language requirement. Students, faculty, and alumni who
object to this change are also up in arms about a plan to expand the size of
the undergraduate student body by about 20 percent, to 4,500.They further
object to efforts to change the school's image from superintellectual to smart
but fun. One way this makeover is to be accomplished is by changing the
school's handle from the University of Chicago to just "Chicago" (to identify
the school with the hit Broadway musical, perhaps).

            I should probably start by declaring my own hypocritical
feelings in the matter. I grew up in Chicago (the city) and thought seriously
about attending "The University" as it was known in my family, before deciding
that it was a bit too cloistered and socially claustrophobic for my taste.
Instead, I went to a big-name Ivy League university. I suspect that I would
have got a superior education at Chicago, but I'm still glad I didn't go there,
both because college is partly about leaving home and because I think it would
have been too hard and not enjoyable enough. Having rejected Chicago in part
for the reasons that its officials are worried about, I can't easily argue that
they're being absurd.

            On the other hand, my
instinctive sympathies are entirely with the alumni who are withholding
contributions until their alma mater quits threatening to loosen up. What was
best about the undergraduate education I subsequently got at Yale was what was
done in imitation of Chicago--a freshman year Great Books program, structured
around discussion in small seminars. I think it's important that the beacon of
that kind of liberal education continue to exist, even though I didn't--and
still probably wouldn't--choose that education for myself. My old boss at the
New Republic , Marty Peretz, used to say he wanted to found an
organization called Jews for Hard-Line Christianity. Mine would be Nonalumni
Against Changing the University of Chicago.

            As reports about the campus culture wars go, the Chicago
story is refreshingly man-bites-dog. Instead of being driven by a bunch of
tenured radicals, the dumbing down of Chicago's curriculum is being pushed by
the university's Board of Trustees and its president, Hugo Sonnenschein, an
economist who casts the need to change as a simple issue of competition.
Chicago wants to attract the best students, and those students are offered more
"choice" about what to study by other colleges and universities. Opponents of
his plans think Sonnenschein, who came from Princeton, misunderstands the
culture of the school he runs. One sign was his hiring as one of his vice
presidents a marketing specialist from Ford who said cringe-making things about
making the university more "fun" until he was driven out a few weeks ago. The
leading opponents of reducing the amount of Aristotle, physics, and English
composition in the curriculum are liberal professors, students, and alumni, who
reject the consumer-market model of education.

            The best argument for
change is that it's the only cure for a looming financial problem. Chicago's $2
billion endowment is puny compared to the big Ivy League universities', and it
has run a small deficit in some years. The main reason its financial situation
is weaker than that of other schools (though hardly desperate) is that Chicago
has a much higher proportion of unprofitable graduate students. Undergraduates
are the cash cows of higher education, both because they pay tuition and
because they later contribute money when they become alumni. The unstated logic
of the changes is roughly as follows: To produce more revenue you need more
undergraduates. To get more high-quality undergraduates--meaning those with
high SAT scores--you need easier course requirements and a more appealing
atmosphere.

            Chicago's revenues also suffer from the way undergraduates
are taught at Chicago--in small, participatory seminars led by full faculty
members. It's retail rather than wholesale education and requires more faculty
than a lecture-based system. In recent years, the university has been holding
larger seminars and using more graduate teaching assistants. Those protesting
the Chicago Plan are really objecting as much to what has already happened in
this regard as to what's promised.

            Chicago hopes to attract
more smart kids by becoming an easier school that offers its students less
individual attention? This isn't necessarily as nutty at is sounds. Consider
Brown, whose undergraduates have a higher average SAT score than those at
Chicago, and which gets three times as many applications precisely because it
has a reputation for being a blast and lacks any real requirements. The problem
with this logic in this situation is that Chicago's whole history, tradition,
and reputation are on the other side of this divide. Intellectual intensity is
its great--and perhaps sole--selling point. Rebranding the University of
Chicago as a "fun" school deserves a place in the annals of marketing lunacy,
alongside "Weyerhaeuser: the tree growing company" and the New Coke. It's like
trying to sell spinach as a delicious dessert. Chicago will never be fun,
except insofar as intellectual stimulation is a species of pleasure.

            That does not, however, condemn it to an inexorable
decline. It's not clear that Chicago's financial problem is all that serious.
But if it does need to woo more undergraduates, it would probably have better
luck emulating Columbia University. Columbia, the university that has the
toughest core requirements after Chicago's, is as trendy as Brown--it admits
only 17 percent of its applicants, versus 62 percent for Chicago. Of course,
Columbia has the advantage of being in New York City instead of in an isolated
enclave on the South Side of Chicago. But it also markets the strength of its
curriculum. It boasts about its set menu instead of apologizing for not being a
cafeteria.

            Chicago ought to do the same. What's valuable about
Chicago isn't just that it's a high-caliber, difficult school. It's that, in a
time of confusion about the ends and means of higher education, it has the
clearest and best notion of what constitutes one. This is isn't simply reading
the Great Books chosen by Chicago's legendary President Robert Maynard Hutchins
and his sidekick Mortimer Adler. It's a commitment to general education--a
sequence of courses intended to develop critical thinking in a wide variety of
disciplines--in opposition to early specialization. And it's the pedagogic
method that Chicago largely invented: small seminars based on original texts
and the examination of original works.

            As for Chicago not being as selective as its Ivy
League rivals are, the administration should quit worrying about it. Part of
what's appealing about Chicago is that it's more open and democratic than other
comparable elite institutions. Unconventionally gifted kids, who didn't get top
grades in high school or who don't have perfect SAT scores, stand a better
chance than they do elsewhere of getting in--and of being presented with the
highest level of intellectual challenge. People at Chicago like to say that
it's harder to get into Harvard but harder to get out of Chicago. This makes it
one of the few possible end runs around the meritocratic-credentialing complex,
whereby standardized test scores determine future opportunities. Chicago has
resisted institutional peer pressure for 50 years. It would be a shame to see
it finally give in and become more like everywhere else.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Madeleine Albright

            The last few publishing
seasons have produced a stream of books about the major figures of postwar
American foreign policy: James Chace on Dean Acheson; Kai Bird on McGeorge and
William Bundy; William Bundy on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; Henry
Kissinger on himself, to name a few. These books are all works of diplomatic
history, thick with policy analysis, institutional boilerplate, and unabashed
second-guessing. They focus, as one might expect, on the big
issues--containment, détente, China, Vietnam--and on the day-to-day
contingencies of democratic politics and imperial diplomacy. Personality is for
the most part an analytic construct, of interest only to the extent that it can
help in the understanding of historical events.

            The two new biographies
of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright do the opposite, using historical
events to explain the personality of their subject. Ann Blackman and Michael
Dobbs, the authors, respectively, of Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of
Madeleine Korbel Albright and Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century
Odyssey , are both accomplished Washington journalists and experienced
foreign correspondents. But, for all the light they shed on the substance and
conduct of U.S. foreign policy, they might as well be writing for the style
pages. "Madeleine's story can be read as a personalized version of the
twentieth century," announces Dobbs, the Washington Post reporter who
first broke the story of Albright's Jewish background.

            Blackman, a writer for Time who has served as both
Washington bureau chief and Moscow correspondent, sketches a virtually
identical biography, but her view of Albright is more personalized. "Albright's
greatest appeal," she declares, "is that she is just like us, only wealthier.
She has had bad hair days and skirts with spots, runs in her stockings, a dog
that was skunked. ... Americans see her as vulnerable, a wife rejected, a
single mother who went back to work, prevailed, and raised good kids."

            Continuing in this vein,
Blackman titles her last chapter--about the first year or so of Albright's
tenure as the most visible diplomat in the world--"Celebrity." Undoubtedly,
Madeleine Albright is a "celebrity," a word one would hesitate to apply to
Warren Christopher, Cyrus Vance, or Dean Rusk. Of her predecessors, only
Kissinger exercised a comparable hold over the public imagination, but he
achieved it by exploiting the drama and mystique of his diplomatic
undertakings. Albright's celebrity is less a matter of what she has done than
of who she is: a candid, funny, and appealing woman with a life story rich in
human interest and historical resonance. She has also received the star
treatment usually accorded pioneers of diversity. As the first woman in charge
of a department that traditionally combines gentleman's-club exclusivity with
macho bluster, she has figured out how to present herself to the public, to the
media, and to other world leaders without the benefit of role models.

            She has, for the most part, succeeded brilliantly, becoming
the most popular and visible member of Clinton's second-term Cabinet. According
to an anonymous State Department official quoted in the Washington Post ,
"Madeleine Albright, more than anyone else in this administration, is driven by
her own biography." And she has used her life story--even those aspects of it
that apparently took her by surprise--in the service both of her public image
and of the policies she advocates. Her status as an American who fled both
Hitler and Stalin gives Albright a certain moral authority, just as her
success, against long odds, as a woman in a man's world makes her an appealing
figure. But the foreign policy of the world's superpower cannot be explained
by--and should not be based upon--the life experience of a single person, no
matter how tough, charming, or admirable they might be. Albright's biographers
offer an inspiring narrative of how she succeeded in becoming secretary of
state, but they offer scant grounds for evaluating what has happened since. And
neither, so far, has she.

            Albright was born Marie
Jana Korbelova (Madeleine is the anglicized form of Madlenka, her childhood
nickname) in Prague in 1937, the eldest child of Josef Korbel, a diplomat, and
Mandula Spiegel. Though Josef's birth certificate declared him "Jewish and
legitimate," he habitually wrote "no confession" on official forms that asked
him his religion. His assimilation, like that of many Czechoslovakian Jews
between the wars, seems to have been motivated by a combination of fear,
ambition, and patriotism. Before the Nazis erased his country from the map,
Korbel served as an attaché to its Belgrade embassy. During the war, the
Korbels fled to England. Many of their relatives, including Madeleine's
grandparents on both sides, died in the concentration camps. Korbel returned to
Prague, and then to Belgrade, to serve his government in the brief period
between liberation from the Germans and the Communist coup of 1948. The family
ended up in Denver, where Josef was a revered professor of international
relations until his retirement in 1969. Madeleine and her sister and brother
were raised as Roman Catholics; no mention was ever made of the Korbels' Jewish
origins. Until Dobbs confronted her with evidence of her ancestry and of the
deaths of her relatives in the Holocaust, Albright seems to have lived in a
state of willed ignorance, declining to challenge her parents' account of the
past.

            If Albright's childhood is marked by the catastrophes of
20 th -century European history, her early adulthood unfolded amid the
complacencies of the American '50s. She attended Wellesley on a partial
scholarship, and soon after graduation she married Joseph Medill Patterson
Albright, scion of two prominent newspaper families. As she raised their three
daughters and moved from Washington to Long Island and back in the service of
her husband's rather lackluster career in journalism, Albright inched her way
toward a Ph.D. under Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the
meantime, she worked on the staff of Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, and then,
when Brzezinski became President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, as
his liaison to Congress.

            After her husband left
her for a younger woman, Albright's professional ambition accelerated. In 1984
she was foreign policy adviser to vice presidential candidate Geraldine
Ferraro. By 1988 she was advising presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. In
the course of that doomed crusade she met Bill Clinton and wrote him a letter
of recommendation to the Council on Foreign Relations. A few years later, he
named her ambassador to the United Nations.

            Albright's U.N. tenure is best remembered for two things:
her sandbagging of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and her proclamation
that Cuba's shooting down of planes flown by anti-Castro exiles took "not
cojones " but "cowardice." Both of these statements were calculated to
play well at home and to outrage the rest of the world. Since becoming
secretary of state in early 1997, Albright has similarly done better on the
domestic front than in the international sphere, enjoying a long media
honeymoon, holding hands with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., persuading a
recalcitrant Congress to ratify the chemical weapons conventions, and pushing
for NATO expansion. But halfway through her term in office, the Middle East
peace process is moribund, U.S. China policy is mired in incoherence, and the
Indian subcontinent is locked in a nuclear arms race. And this is not to
mention East Timor, Southern Sudan, or Saddam Hussein. It can be argued in
Albright's defense that international affairs is no longer the grand chess
match of the Cold War years--it's more like a floating crap game. But the
complexity and instability of the world are hardly excuses for the muddle and
indirection of the world's only great power.

            It was Albright, after
all, who titled a 1993 memo to Clinton "Why America Must Take the Lead." The
subject of that memo was Bosnia, and while Ambassador Albright emerged as the
administration's leading hawk on a number of fronts, arguing for intervention
in Haiti and in Rwanda, she made the case for how the United States should take
the lead--by threatening and, if necessary, using force--with special passion
about the American role in the Balkans.

            The Bush administration's approach to the unfolding
disaster in Yugoslavia might be characterized as inaction backed up by
indifference. Until last month, the Clinton administration preferred calls for
action backed up by indecision. Writing in the New York Review of Books ,
Mark Danner has argued that the administration's predilection for tough talk,
coupled with its political timidity, did much to make matters worse in Bosnia.
In 1993, Clinton, urged on by Albright, rejected out of hand the Vance-Owen
plan for partition of the country, saying that it rewarded Serb aggression. Two
years later, after the massacres at Srebrenica and Vukovar, the slaughter and
displacement of tens of thousands more Croats and Muslims, the decimation of
Sarajevo, and the Serb conquest of more territory, the administration pushed
through the Dayton Accords. This agreement, which gave the Serbs a great deal
more than Vance-Owen would have, was puffed as a Nobel-worthy diplomatic
accomplishment. In the meantime, Albright had promoted the United Nations'
disastrous "Safe Havens" policy, which placed masses of unarmed Bosnian
civilians under the "protection" of minuscule numbers of U.N. (but no U.S.)
troops--that is, left them at the mercy of Serb paramilitaries, who
systematically set about driving them from their homes and killing them.

            The administration's failure to act effectively in
Bosnia (or in Rwanda) can't be blamed entirely, or even primarily, on Albright,
whose job at the time was peripheral to the making and implementing of policy.
Nor can the Kosovo campaign be called "Albright's war," even though it was the
utter failure of her attempted diplomacy at Rambouillet (along with the failure
of her one-time rival Richard Holbrooke in Belgrade) that helped to precipitate
the current conflict. But the NATO campaign against Milosevic is often, and
rightly, viewed as the victory of Albright's interventionist position over the
more cautious views of colleagues such as National Security Adviser Samuel
Berger and his predecessor Anthony Lake. The genesis of that position, Albright
has insisted, lies in her own life story: Her view of the world, she repeats as
though it were a mantra, was formed not by Vietnam, but by Munich, by the
failure of the great powers to check totalitarian aggression in Central Europe.
But as the war over Kosovo escalates, such analogies prove to be of limited and
rapidly diminishing use. It is likely that future secretaries of state will say
that the formative experience of their lives was Kosovo. What they mean when
they say that, rather than how she got to be where she is, will determine
Albright's place in history.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 236: &quot;Tragedy Plus Time Minus Taste&quot;

            

               Columbine students resumed classes Monday at nearby Chatfield High
School. Many wore white T-shirts imprinted on the front with "We Are ..." and
on the back ... what?
Send your answer by noon ET Wednesday to 
                  newsquiz@slate.com .
            

            

               Monday's Question (No. 235) "Pork Quoi?": A big half-page ad running in
many papers today features a photo of four piglets vigorously suckling a sow's
teats. An ad for what?
            

            "A law
firm specializing in medical malpractice suits (photo is of Pamela
Anderson)."-- Ellen Macleay
            

            "The
Montreal Expos' all-new, low-budget 'farm' system."-- Neal Pollack
            

            "I
don't know, but Michael Medved's CONVINCED that this ad directly leads to
school shootings."-- Andrew Milner
            

            "Bob
Barr's 'Open Letter' tribute to the NRA."-- Richard Nikonovich-Kahn
( Barry Johnson had a similar answer.)

            "Got
Pig? The other white milk."-- Steve Joynt (similarly, Bruce Oberg ,
James Poniewozik , Bjorn , and Steven Davis )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            To most participants, the pig symbolizes greed.
None associated the pig with its traditional attributes, dirty or foul
smelling. None exploited "pig" as an epithet for policeman. There were no pigs
in pokes, no when pigs fly, no in a pig's ear, no Pigmeat Markham, no pork
salad Annie, no Gadarene swine, no Piggly Wiggly, no E. B. White's Wilbur, no
there in the wood the piggy-wig stood. No three littles. No pearls before. No
turning men into. How did we lose our rich tradition of porcine references? Did
it all go wrong when we left the farm? Many's the happy hour we spent by the
sty, a volume of Greek mythology in our trotters, contemplating the
particularly rank aroma of our enemies. Well, we're city folk now, and our foes
wear deodorant. And carry Prada bags. Made of ... oh, my lord! No!

            Perhaps the pig has
always been a comical animal because it's so much like us--a college graduate
with 2.3 children, yacking away on a cell phone while it's stuck in traffic in
its rotten SUV. OK, bad example. But pigs can pretty much eat everything we do.
An ecological theory of the kosher laws suggests that they're meant to
proscribe animals who'd compete with us for the foods we need. This theory is a
little hazy about lobsters. Who, by the way, can also be made into a durable
and attractive handbag. If you eat a whole lot of lobster, people will call you
a pig. But not the other way around. Lobsters: not funny. Pigs: funny. A pig
dancing with a monkey: hysterical.

            
               Porcine on the
Dotted Line Answer
            

            The copy reads: "After
all she's done for you, doesn't mom deserve flowers for Mother's Day, and to be
compared to a barnyard animal?" except for the final phrase, which is merely
implicit. It's an ad for an online flower service. In a curious bit of marketing, the offer
of $10 off on Mother's Day flowers doesn't expire until July 31. So, buy your
mom something nice, eventually, when you get around to it.

            
               Tim Carvell's
American Highways Extra
            

            Since moving to Los Angeles, I've noticed that
about every tenth car has a vanity plate. People want the world to know their
names (HERMAN), their tastes (BLU MNMS), their dreams (KRE8 IT). And sometimes
it seems they just want to confuse you. (I've puzzled over SHAKYPL for long
stretches of freeway. Why pay $40 so your car can say SHAKYPL?)

            At the California
Department of Motor Vehicles' vanity-plate-availability site, you can input a plate, and see if
it's already taken. Hence the following quiz: Which of the following plates
have been spoken for, and which are still up for grabs?

            1. UNIQUE

            2. UNIQUE 2

            3. MANLY

            4. BIGOT

            5. RACIST

            6. 4SKIN

            7. HERPES

            8. MARILU H

            9. SATAN

            10. BOBDOLE

            11. MANSON

            12. KINSLEY

            13. YUGO

            14. NEWSQIZ

            15. UGLY

            16. GOYZ

            17. BEDWETR

            18. DIANETX

            19. LIAR

            20. ANORXIC

            

               Answers
            

            Both UNIQUE and UNIQUE2
have been claimed, which is just sad ("I'd like my plate to read UNIQUE. Oh,
it's taken. Well, then how about UNIQUE2?"). MANLY is available for at least as
long as it takes me to get to the DMV. BIGOT is taken, RACIST is not. Go
figure. 4SKIN is taken; HERPES, oddly, remains available. MARILU H, SATAN, and
BOBDOLE have all been claimed, although the site doesn't specify by whom.
MANSON and KINSLEY are both still available. YUGO is taken, NEWSQIZ is still up
for grabs, as is UGLY. GOYZ and BEDWETR are both taken, which means that
somewhere out there there's a car being driven by an unashamed incontinent
person. And, finally, depsite what you might expect for a state that's home to
the entertainment industry, DIANETX, LIAR, and ANORXIC remain unclaimed.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Kosher and its discontents, Babe, "Got Milk?"

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Students Have Always Been Violent

            Judging by the histrionic Columbine massacre
coverage you'd think that children are by nature innocent, free of violent or
sexual thoughts until corrupted by our culture. That schools have traditionally
been safe. That the recent spate of killings is unprecedented.

            History says otherwise. In every era, American
schoolchildren--especially teen-agers--have been unruly and destructive. As
late as the 17 th century, those "children" we now call teen-agers
were considered adults. And preteens swore, drank, had sex, even dueled with
guns. If school violence wasn't a problem back then, it's only because few
children went to school.

            In colonial America, most young children were
taught at home. Those who attended school were just as prone to be disorderly
as today's youths. Teachers kept problem children in line with corporal
punishments that seem positively barbaric today: They tied children to whipping
posts and beat them or branded students for their crimes--a "T" for thievery, a
"B" for blasphemy. Occasionally children were put to death.

            Branding fell from favor
in the18 th century, but students were still flogged or tied to
chairs (for more on corporal punishment, click ). In the early 19 th
century, school reformer Horace Mann reported that he saw 328 floggings in one
school during the course of a week. As the principles of humanitarianism spread
and the era of mass schooling arrived, Mann and others replaced or supplemented
the elite academies with taxpayer-supported "common schools," which admitted
young students from all walks of life. (Later, attendance become compulsory.)
In the Gilded Age, as immigrants and migrants flooded the cities, public
elementary schools proliferated. Finally, the Progressives championed the view
of adolescence as a stage of childhood, and high schools (the first of which
opened in the 1820s) multiplied as well.

            It appears that more students meant more violence. In 1837,
Mann noted that almost 400 schools across Massachusetts had to be shut down
because of disciplinary problems. In most institutions, keeping order took
precedence over teaching. One observer in 1851 likened the typical American
school to "the despotic government of a military camp." In the colleges, where
the teen-age students were bigger and less docile, violence was even worse.
Princeton University, to take just one example, witnessed six major riots
between 1800 and 1830, including the burning of the library in 1802 and a rash
of campus explosions in 1823 that caused half of one class to be expelled.

            School violence persisted
into the 20 th century, taking different forms according to the
climate of the day. In politically charged times, students became violent in
the name of political causes. In 1917, for example, when New York City
introduced a "platoon" system to deal with an influx of pupils, students
rebelled--literally. Between 1,000 and 3,000 schoolchildren picketed and stoned
P.S. 171 on Madison Avenue and attacked nonstriking classmates. Similar riots
erupted across the city, resulting in furious battles between student mobs and
the police. Likewise, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests
brought different forms of "political" violence to places ranging from Little
Rock Central High in Arkansas to Kent State University in Ohio.

            More politically sedate times didn't translate into student
acquiescence, however. In the post-World War II years, urban strife and
suburban anomie gave rise to school violence of the sorts broadly rendered by
Hollywood in the 1955 films Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard
Jungle . The nation waxed hysterical over "juvenile delinquency," as the
vogue phrase had it--alienated adolescents unaccountably sullen in the
bountiful Eisenhower years. Though history had recorded public concern over
bands of violent teen-agers ever since the beginning of the republic, the fear
of "gangs" (a term coined in the 1930s) caught the nation's fancy. Time
magazine headlined a story, "Teen-agers on the Rampage," which detailed a
weeklong outbreak of violence in high schools from Maine to California.
Congress held hearings on the delinquency epidemic, calling comic-book artists
to testify about whether their drawings inspired children to violence.

            Youth rebelliousness
surged in the 1960s. While crime grew overall, juvenile crime grew faster.
Sociologists, social workers, and policy wonks turned their attention en masse
to offenses ranging from vandalism to gang-related crime, from drug use to
student-upon-student assaults. Schools implemented safety plans, bringing in
adult hall monitors and setting up bodies for hearing student grievances. Urban
schools hired professional security agents--and later adopted the surveillance
cameras, metal detectors, locker searches, and other measures more commonly
seen in prisons. But a major study conducted in 1978 confirmed what experience
had been teaching. Teen-agers were more likely to be victims of crime at school
than anywhere else.

            If student violence has now been a major concern for
decades now, what seems to distinguish '90s violence is the suburban- or
rural-school massacre. West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; Pearl, Miss.; Moses
Lake, Wash.; Springfield, Ore.; and now Littleton, Colo.--in each case, young
students, armed with guns, committed multiple murders in or near the school
itself. To be sure, similar atrocities have occurred in the past. In 1927, a
55-year-old school-board official detonated three bombs in the Bath, Mich.,
schoolhouse, killing 45 people. And to be sure, the string of recent killings
in fact reveals nothing, statistically speaking, about our society. Yet they
remind us that the number of children killed by guns skyrocketed in the '80s
and while tailing off in the '90s remains far higher than in decades past.
According to , the growing trend of violent altercations ending in death is
attributable "almost entirely" to the proliferation of guns among children.

            History makes it clear that children and teen-agers
are no strangers to violent impulses. There have always been, and always will
be, maladjusted or deranged students who unleash those impulses. That they do
so is inevitable. How they do so may be within our control.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Glass Wear

            About 30 years ago I attended an exhibition of
corsets at a great costume collection in Manchester, England. In a dim room
were gathered a dozen elegant undergarments, each in its own glass case, and
each accompanied by at least three paragraphs of scholarly labeling about
materials, structure, and shape.

            Chosen from a collection of hundreds of corsets,
these garments dated only from the second quarter of the 18 th
century. They were masterpieces of delicate craftsmanship; no two were exactly
the same. Looking at them was like looking at ancient Etruscan bronzes or
Renaissance enameled boxes. But it was also like a private showing: Nobody else
was there. In those days, "costume" was dear only to a few obsessed
antiquarians, with no connection to the mad scuffle of fashion in real life. A
show back then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute might have
displayed a tired ecclesiastical vestment from 17 th -century Spain or
a stiffly embroidered linen nightcap looking inert and inscrutable.

            No longer. The current Costume Institute show, "Our
New Clothes: Acquisitions of the 1990s," vibrates with modern energy. Under
curator Richard Martin's direction, fashions of the moment resonate backward
into the past, and the modes of olden days awaken to new life next to their
modern revisions. Martin also succeeded in intermingling history and the
present day in an earlier show called "The Ceaseless Century," by which he
meant the 18 th .

            There were reasons for
picking that century. Chic outfits in good condition date back only as far as
about 1700, or maybe a little before that. Except for bits and pieces, no
gorgeous suits from Shakespeare's day survive, no gold-bordered gowns from Mona
Lisa's wardrobe, none of King Richard III's rich doublets fitted to his
humpback. The dazzling styles of the distant past live only in pictures.

            A fashion designer can put old imagery to use. But a museum
collector needs history in material form, the better to display its links with
the productions of more recent ateliers. The earliest and most magnificent item
in the current show is a bright salmon-pink English lady's ensemble from 1708,
made of silk damask brocaded in bold patterns with multicolored silk floss and
metallic thread. The strong color and buoyant presence of this ornate dress
command our attention; the dress has no mustiness at all. Another, French,
ensemble from around 1760, all in canary-yellow silk taffeta, self-trimmed in
miles of applied pleated ruffles, creates a similar effect. These dramatic
dresses easily compete in intensity or sensationalism with the vivid works by
Issey Miyake and Alix Grés nearby.

            Some
18 th -century men's outfits are equally bold, especially a French
coat dated between 1787-92--which is to say, just at the Revolutionary moment.
This lean, unadorned, high-collared garment in plain fire-engine-red wool
contrasts wonderfully with a peach velvet and green satin coat-and-waistcoat
men's ensemble from about 1765, its cuffs and vest covered with embroideries,
its buttons glittering with paste diamonds. The latter was made at a time when
the king's head was still on, and refined elegance could still relax and keep
refining. A bright blue checked linen tailcoat from America dated around 1815,
neat and tight fitting with self-covered buttons, is a nice contrast to both of
these. Its summery simplicity suggests fresh American artlessness and love of
convenience.

            The antique menswear in this show has a clarity of line and
color that claims an affinity with the surges of invention in men's clothes
right now. There's Tom Ford's red velvet suit from his 1996-97 winter
collection, displayed next to the red wool French Revolutionary coat: Its
old-fashioned 1970s redness sets up vibrations with older-fashioned 1790s
redness, and both look timely. A brotherhood of male expression communicates
across time, and we start to imagine the red coats of the future. Jean-Paul
Gaultier, of course, has already begun (after all, this is the only designer
who has repeatedly offered skirts for men). Gaultier's dark red and white man's
jacket in silk-and-rayon twill has a modern classical shape, but it's printed
with variably modulated stripes that form the vision of a nude Greek classical
torso, complete with arms and thighs. At the groin, the two sides of the jacket
discreetly curve apart to unveil the wearer's own black-trouser-clad
crotch.

            Numerous white dresses are gathered in a group. The
earliest is another French 18 th -century damask ensemble. It's in
ivory and dates from 1770, and its flavor and trimmings are consciously echoed
by an American wedding dress from about 1880. The intervening snowy marvels are
in cotton--crisp and vigorous, or frothy and delicate--followed by the modern
silky columns that cling, fall, or drape in unexpected ways. The possibilities
of feminine white turn out to be infinite, to mirror any emotional and erotic
nuance in the souls of women for three centuries.

            The exhibit made me hope that the fashion of the
future will be all the more liberated for seeking its sources in the liberties
of the past. But the show made me realize something else as well: that our
present clothes are already museum pieces. The largest change in fashion since
1968 has been an immense new consciousness of what clothes mean, so that people
have got used to thinking about what their own outfits "say." By bringing
together old and new, this exhibition encourages that habit of looking for
significance in our own garments. While we stare with detached sociological
attention at the garb of generations who lived in complex past times, we're
invited to stare the same way at contemporary modes, to see them as the
historical artifacts of our own fraught epoch. And the gulf between Those Days
and These, once unbridgeable, starts to disappear.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Balloon Smugglers

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               This is an odd
question to ask a stranger--but at least you are objective, seeing as how we
don't know each other. I am undecided about whether or not to get breast
implants. I have convinced myself that they are not dangerous. The issue, now,
is the correctness of having such a procedure. I do not mean political
correctness; I mean how important should it be for 1) oneself, 2) one's
"onlookers," and whatever ethical-philosophical considerations come into play.
My boyfriend, by the way, says the decision is mine. (P.S.: I am not
particularly flat-chested.)
            

            

               --To D or Not To D
            

            Dear To,

            This is a first for Prudie, who has never been
asked before to decide about someone's chest enhancement.

            Only you know the
reasons for considering implants. Are you built like a boy? Do you think a pair
of remarkable hooters will change your life for the better? Do you think
drawing attention to your chest is a good thing? In general, there do not seem
to be "ethical-philosophical considerations" attached to breasts. Prudie's
personal view is that implants fool very few people (they often do not feel
genuine to a companion) and really, what is the point? Prudie wishes she could
attribute the phrase to the proper person, but some clever soul named the
bearers of implants "the balloon smugglers." That pretty much expresses
Prudie's thoughts on the matter.

            
--Prudie, naturally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Could it be that ,who so disliked the use of
the expression "there you go," has confused that phrase with "off you go?" I'm
not sure whether the latter has any currency in America, but here in Australia
it is often uttered in a pleasant--and perhaps patronizing tone of voice in
instances such as, say, insisting to a reluctant teen-ager that he march off
and do his homework. By actually describing the addressee's future act of
leaving the presence of the speaker, the "off you go" indicates a request for
departure.
            

            
               I think the reason
"there you go" has no such unpleasant connotations is that it describes, in the
retail context, the state in which the customer finds him- or herself after
successful completion of the purchase. (See also the rather Henry Jamesian
"there you are.") In other words, it functions as a polite observation
naturally terminating the transaction.
            

            
               --Yours
pedantically,
            

            

               Amitavo from Sydney
            

            Dear Am,

            Prudie thanks you for
your internationalist input on the issue of "there you go." She found it
enlightening and thoughtful. Whoever named your part of the world "down under"
surely was not referring to the educational level of Prudie's Australian
readers.

            
--Prudie, internationally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Having just marked
Mother's Day, here is my problem. I am married to a lovely man with a charming
family. He has no sisters, and I am the only daughter-in-law. For as long as
anyone can remember, the men in this family always forgot my mother-in-law's
birthday, Mother's Day, etc. Although she clearly loves a fuss, her sons and
husband produce not a cake, a card, a flower, or a gift. A year ago, I realized
everyone expected me to attend to these details, which I had previously
neglected to do. I am happy to celebrate her occasions in a way she would
enjoy, but I resent being expected to handle this task for everyone just
because I am a woman. Should I put feminist principles aside and do my familial
duty because it's the nicer thing to do, or should I leave it to the men to
wise up?
            

            

               --Dutiful Daughter-in-law, Toronto
            

            Dear Duti,

            Let's make a list. On
the plus side is "a lovely man with a charming family." On the minus side,
these male people can't seem to get it together to do anything about occasions.
Prudie feels certain feminism wasn't addressing itself to this issue and hopes
you will lose the resentment factor. Do the thoughtful thing for your lovely
husband and the charming others, because on the Richter Scale of Family Chores,
this ranks about .05. You can only reap the appreciation of your male clan
members, and who knows? In time you might have trained them by example, without
their even knowing it.

            
--Prudie, generously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               What is the most
polite--but effective--way to handle guests who do not know when to leave a
party? My brother brought friends of his to a brunch I gave recently. Not only
did these friends have too much to drink, but they actually stayed later than
my brother. I resorted to time-honored tricks such as washing the dishes, then
announcing I had a headache--and yet the guests stayed for another hour! Of
course I will never invite these people to my home again, but was there a more
direct, yet still polite, way I could have induced them to leave?
            

            

               --Tired Host
            

            Dear Ti,

            You say you will never
invite these people again. My dear, you didn't invite them the first
time. Prudie recommends, however, for those invited or not, a direct approach
once a hint is ignored. (Granted, people who aren't sober can be rather slow on
the uptake.) Simply say the festivities are over and you hope they had a good
time. If they wore wraps, hand them to them. If the weather is too warm, thank
them for coming and walk with them to the door. Do not take no for an answer.
The socially inept are not kid-glove candidates.

            --Prudie, directly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Phantom Menace

            The B-2 stealth bomber had
barely touched down after its first ever combat mission last week when two of
its most loyal allies staged a press conference to claim vindication. Standing
before one of the sleek black aircraft on the tarmac at Missouri's Whitman Air
Force Base, Democratic Reps. Ike Skelton of Missouri and Norm Dicks of
Washington scorned skeptics who had doubted the $2 billion (each!) airplane.
"We have seen this type of criticism on every major weapons system," said
Dicks, "and when they go to war, they work."

            Inside the same media
moment, footage of Serbian villagers frolicking beside the wreckage of a downed
F-117 stealth fighter punctured the technology's invincibility--and rekindled
the debate over U.S. reliance on high-tech weaponry. In 1981, at the dawn of
the stealth era, James Fallows warned in National Defense that
"airplanes, tanks, ships and missiles have grown too complex, expensive and
delicate to be useful in warfare or credible for deterrent purposes." Fallows
argued in vain that the United States should instead spend its defense budget
on cheap and simple armaments, and the military pumped around $50 billion into
stealth programs alone. Then, a decade ago, as the military redefined the B-2's
mission from an H-bomb taxi to a deliverer of conventional bombs, a Republican
senator from Maine articulated the silliness of the concept: "It's the
equivalent of saying we're going to send a Rolls-Royce down into a combat zone
to pick up groceries." Today, as secretary of defense, William Cohen sends the
B-2 out on Balkans milk runs.

            Although the B-2 stealth bomber, manufactured by Northrop
Grumman Corp., and the F-117 stealth fighter, built by Lockheed Martin, are
based on different underlying technologies, their names conceal a
little-appreciated similarity: They're both 
               bombers . The F-117
was originally imagined as an invisible dogfighter, but the Pentagon reframed
the plane's mission when the geniuses at the aircraft skunkworks failed to push
the technology far enough. While not a fighter, the $45 million F-117 ain't no
sissy, either. It carries a pair of 2,000-pound bombs into combat, but it's
slow and hard to maneuver. The 56-plane fleet only flies at night (which
explains why it's painted black) because it has no air-to-air combat
capabilities. If an enemy fighter spots and engages the F-117, it's toast. Very
expensive black toast.

            At least the stealth
bomber begins to live up to its name. Designed as a long-range weapon that
would penetrate deep into the Soviet Union to wage nuclear war, today it
subsists on a no-nukes diet, carrying 16 satellite-guided, one-ton bombs (or
eight 5,000-pounders) into battle. Editorial writers love to note that, ounce
for ounce, the B-2 is five times pricier than gold. Its incredible cost stems
from endless development snafus and such mind-bending design features as a
surface smoothness measurable to 1/10,000 th of an inch. The Air
Force defends the cost by saying that one B-2, with its heavy payload, can do
the work of several conventional bombers--risking fewer pilots in a safer
plane. But even the hawks who considered the B-2's sticker price a bargain when
the game was nuclear deterrence grudgingly admit that nobody would ever build
such a device to drop conventional bombs on Serbian factories.

            With its subtle curves, smooth surface, and intimidating
bat wings, the B-2 is the cooler big brother of the two planes. But the smaller
F-117's boxy and angular look gives it a nerdy cachet. The two designs
represent different strategies for evading radar: The B-2 absorbs enemy radar
waves; the F-117's awkward geometry mostly scatters them.

            Neither design is
flawless. It's commonly assumed that stealth planes are invisible to radar.
They're not--they're just very difficult to see. And sometimes they're not hard
to see at all. Stealth technology is vulnerable to older, long-wave radars and
well-coordinated radar systems. Also, the planes are exponentially easier to
spot when they open their bomb-bay doors, even during simple bank turns. For
those reasons, the Pentagon has abandoned its original boasts that stealth
planes would be truly "invisible."

            
The previous watershed for stealth technology
was the 1991 Gulf War, in which the F-117 pounded Baghdad with impunity and
apparent precision. The General Accounting Office, however, later downgraded by
half the Pentagon's claim that stealth fighters had scored an 80 percent
mission success rate. Naysayers continue to heap scorn on the two stealth
bombers, insisting that the weapons have yet to be truly battle-tested because
the Serbs and the Iraqis who have faced the technology have put up no more than
a token resistance.

            Even so, the anecdotal
success of the Balkans adventure has refueled the high-tech crusade. Despite
the B-2's piddling role over Serbia so far--two missions involving a total of
four planes--the Wall Street Journal 's Paul Gigot thumbed his nose last
Friday at Democrats who had opposed the bomber, cracking wise about "B-2 Bill"
and suggesting the Pentagon could use 40 more of the machines. The stealth war
news comes at a critical moment for the Pentagon, which is pushing for the
production of a new-generation stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor. (This one
really is a fighter.) The cost: About $60 billion to build more than 300
F-22s at $187 million apiece. That's nowhere near five times the F-22's weight
in gold, but still 10 times dearer than an F-16.

            The national love affair with stealthy weapons will endure
for several reasons. Although decades old, the technology is perennially
futuristic--it was the Romulans of Star Trek , after all, who first
invented "cloaking"--and it advances the ethos of American can-doism. (Planes
acquire an added allure whenever they're developed in secret: The military
didn't even confirm the F-117's existence until 1988, after 40 were built and
flying.) And then there's something perversely sexy about the vehicles'
max-tech black sheen, something peeping-tom kinky about the planes' advertised
invisibility, something magical about striking without being struck back.

            Despite their technological limitations, stealth
weapons appeal to us because they indulge our fear of commitment. And this is
what ultimately makes them pose their own kind of stealthy threat to us. As
we've seen, stealth weapons blind the risk-averse public and policy-makers to
the genuine perils of combat in the opening days of any military engagement,
turning war into an "out of sight, out of mind" proposition. They encourage the
view that there's nothing--from Iraqi germ weapons programs to Serbian
atrocities--that a few invisible planes can't fix. Enticing us into believing
that wars can be won with Futurama technology and without American blood
being shed, the seductive charms of stealth weapons ultimately evaporate into
nothingness. We are left unfulfilled by their limitations and cheated by their
costs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Abortion Apostate

            The media love an apostate,
and Ron Fitzsimmons is the apostate of the moment. In November 1995, at the
start of Congress' battle over so-called "partial-birth abortions,"
Fitzsimmons, the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion
Providers, went on Nightline to argue against a ban. Even ardent
pro-choicers concede the grisliness of the procedure--in which delivery is
induced, the fetus' skull is crushed, and its brains are suctioned. So,
Fitzsimmons now says, he deliberately underestimated how often the procedure is
performed and claimed incorrectly that most such operations were necessary for
the mother's health.

            But last
week Fitzsimmons came clean. "I lied through my teeth," he said in an interview
with the American Medical News . This became front-page news and revived
the partial-birth-abortion issue. Congress failed to override President
Clinton's veto of a ban last fall. But there is speculation that Clinton will
change his position now that the truth has been revealed.

            Media accounts of Fitzsimmons' confession have been
stirring. First, there was the critical moment of moral doubt: The day after
appearing on Nightline , Fitzsimmons says, he felt "physically ill. ... I
told my wife, 'I can't do this again.' " Next, heroic outrage: He stepped
forward when he could no longer watch the debate be "engulfed by spins and
half-truths." Finally, redemption: accolades from pols and pundits. On Meet
the Press , Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., declared in his
conscience-of-the-nation mode: "Mr. Fitzsimmons did the honorable thing."

            But the media are being as
credulous about Fitzsimmons' new story as they were about his old one. For
starters, why did it take him 16 months to retract lies he claims to have
immediately regretted?

            Then
there's the underplayed fact that Fitzsimmons' mendacity could not possibly
have influenced the national debate, because the segments of the
Nightline interview in which Fitzsimmons says he lied through his teeth
never aired!

            
Quite apart from the melodrama of Fitzsimmons'
recantation and confession, moreover, there is nothing new about what he
"revealed" last week. Last fall, both the Washington Post and the
Bergen Record ran front-page stories asserting that pro-choice groups
underestimate the number of "intact dilation and extraction" (IDE) procedures,
to use the medical term, that are performed. In a piece that pro-life groups
circulated all over the place, the Bergen Record 's Ruth Padawer showed
that one clinic in Englewood, N.J., had performed 1,500 IDEs in 1994. That is
1,000 more than pro-choice groups claimed had been performed in the entire
country. After interviewing doctors who perform the procedure, both papers
concluded that only in very few instances was the IDE actually necessary to
protect the woman's health. Most of them were performed on poor women who could
not muster the money to pay for abortions earlier in their pregnancies.

            Abortion
practitioners have publicly admitted the same for years. Martin Haskell, the
Ohio doctor who developed the procedure, asserted in one paper that 80 percent
of his patients choose it because it is safer and more convenient than the
alternatives. There was no medical necessity. The other leading late-term
abortionist, the now-deceased Dr. James McMahon, presented similar statistics
before a congressional committee two years ago. These two doctors together
performed 500 late-term abortions in one year, and there are at least eight
other doctors who administer it--obviously, this adds up to more than 500 IDEs
a year nationwide.

            Fitzsimmons now endorses the pro-life movement's figure of
5,000. But that figure is as unreliable as the pro-choice movement's 500. None
of the groups that provides reliable statistics about abortion tallies up the
total numbers of IDEs. Consequently, there's much improvisation and sleight of
hand involved when anyone throws around numbers. Both sides claim to have
derived their figures from interviews with doctors who perform IDEs, but
different doctors use different definitions of the procedure and, in many
cases, they probably make only rough estimates of their own caseloads. Whether
the correct figure is nearer 500 or 5,000, it is a minuscule percentage of the
1.5 million abortions performed each year in the United States.

            You might think, from the
attention paid to Ron Fitzsimmons' recantation, that he was a major player in
the abortion debate. But most reporters who cover abortion--to say nothing of
pro-choice insiders--say they had never heard of him. "This guy came out of the
blue," says an official at one major pro-choice group. At best, Fitzsimmons is
a B-league lobbyist. His group, a trade association, represents 220 clinics
(but not Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United
States). While it aims to protect abortion rights, its agenda is mostly more
mundane. Right now, its biggest task is negotiating contracts with
pharmaceutical companies.

            
Fitzsimmons (who isn't giving any interviews now) offers no new statistics to
back up his current claim that 5,000 IDEs are performed every year. And most
newspaper accounts fail to point out that, in spite of his confession,
Fitzsimmons continues to oppose a ban on IDEs.

            
There is little doubt about the pro-choice
media's unquestioning acceptance of the faulty pro-choice statistics. Editorial
boards at the Washington Post and the New York Times took the
position that a ban on late-term abortions is bad because it affects only women
carrying badly deformed babies who have no other alternative. Perhaps the
uncritical reportage of Fitzsimmons' new story can be explained by pangs of
guilt about the uncritical reportage of his old one.

            Pro-choicers have muddled
the debate over late-term abortions, and the Fitzsimmons affair is their
disingenuous strategy coming back to bite them. Instead of categorically
defending a woman's right to an abortion, they have chosen to challenge
pro-lifers on the pro-lifers' turf. They squabble over the details of late-term
abortions. But these details are their weakest points. Abortion is necessarily
an ugly business, and it doesn't do them any good to debate the extent of its
ugliness. Once Congress agrees to regulate one sort of abortion because it is
gruesome, the pro-lifers will immediately turn to another form of abortion and
insist that it, too, be regulated, because it, too, is gruesome.

            If a fetus is a fully human
life, then all abortion is murder and the debate over any particular procedure
is beside the point. But the pro-life movement recognizes it has lost the
larger debate, and has therefore adopted a step-by-step strategy. If abortion
is not wrong--irrespective of the circumstances--then the issue becomes a
tradeoff among unpleasant alternatives. And the question is not which of these
alternatives is more unpleasant, but whether the government should be making
the decision.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Stock Market Chicken-Counting Orgy

            The Dow Jones industrial
average is up by almost half in the past year. The NASDAQ Composite Index and
the S&P 500 are up more than 40 percent. Thanks to the portfolio tracking
services on financial Web sites like Microsoft Investor, millions of middle-class investors are
aware of their rising net worth, to the dollar, on a daily or even hourly
basis. Troubadours of capitalism celebrate each new high as evidence of the
system's ability to create wealth.

            But in
what sense has the stock market boom created wealth? This is not a
philosophical question. It's a mathematical one. Nor is my point that a Dow
breaking 8,000 is necessarily a speculative bubble that will burst (though I
reserve the right to claim that was my point if it happens). But when we
imagine how we will spend our stock market wealth, we're engaged in an orgy of
pre-hatch chicken counting. Is there any way the "wealth" that people are
spending in their minds can be spent in reality--that is, converted into goods
and services?

            Here's the puzzle. The shares traded on the New York Stock
Exchange are worth a total of over $8 trillion. "Worth" in the sense that a)
this is the sum of the prices they're trading at, little bits at a time; and b)
this is the sum of the numbers their proud owners mentally fondle. Perhaps $2
trillion of that "worth" has been added in the past year. Meanwhile, though,
the entire U.S. economy produces goods and services of about $7 trillion a
year, and grew less than 4 percent in the past year. Four percent growth is, in
fact, very healthy. But it means that the increase in goods and services in the
economy was $280 billion, less than one-seventh of the increase in claims on
goods and services implied by the rise in prices on the New York Stock Exchange
alone. Add the other exchanges, the NASDAQ, real estate, and various other
investments, and the growth in the economy's capacity to produce real wealth
shrinks into insignificance compared with the increase in "wealth" as perceived
by the owners of these investments.

            
No one loves a share of stock for its own sake.
Even shares in a company as wonderful as, say, Microsoft are treasured only for
their trade-in value. So what would happen if everyone suddenly tried to trade
the "wealth" we've accumulated during the past year for real stuff--cars,
houses, vacations, new washing machines, whatever? Two things would happen:
Stock prices would plummet and the price of "real stuff" would rise. As a
result, much of our perceived wealth would melt away.

            Of course we're not all
going to cash in our stocks tomorrow. One thing sustaining current stock-price
levels is baby boomers socking money away for retirement. But many experts have
predicted that this pleasant dynamic will reverse itself when the boomer
generation starts withdrawing and spending its retirement nest eggs. Instead of
sustaining the market, the aging-boomer factor will be depressing it. The
result needn't be a crash. But some combination of stock-price stagnation or
decline and general price inflation will deny boomers the value they think
they're accumulating.

            (This is
another reason that the notion of solving the Social Security problem by
investing payments in the stock market is such folly. The infusion of these
extra billions will drive prices up when boomers are all buying, and the
subsequent withdrawal will drive prices down when boomers are all selling.)

            So the alleged wealth accumulated in the stock market can't
be realized all at once now, and probably can't be realized all at once decades
from now. Can it be realized gradually over the years, as people sell off a
little at a time? It's possible, but pretty unlikely. Stock prices represent
the discounted present value of a company's future earnings stream. In other
words: What you're willing to pay for a share of stock is, or ought to be,
equal to what you would pay today for the right to claim that share's fraction
of the company's profits from now on. If prospects for future earnings have
actually improved by 40 or 50 percent in the past year, the economy will
generate enough wealth to cover all the new chits in people's pockets.

            There are
two ways the present value of future earnings might have increased by 40 or 50
percent during a period when the economy's general productive capacity
increased by only 4 percent. One possibility is that companies were radically
undervalued a year ago. The other is that something happened in the past year
to improve general corporate prospects by 40 or 50 percent. In either case,
stock prices and profit potential are, in theory, now correctly aligned.

            
But do you know of any dazzling new insight
about the past, or revelation about the future, during the past year that would
justify a 40 percent upward valuation of all of corporate America? Well, Ben
Stein wrote in Slate a while back attributing the bull market to new understanding
about the lack of risk in equity investments. Slate's Paul Krugman notes that
the past year has brought good news about the economy's ability to tolerate low
unemployment without igniting inflation. "But this news," Krugman says, "makes
us 2 or 3 percent richer at most--nowhere near enough to justify the rise in
the Dow." What's more, if the past year's huge rise in stock prices reflects a
new but accurate optimism about future economic growth, this means the payoff
for that future growth is already in the past. In other words, future
stock-price increases will have to trail economic growth.

            A related
possibility: The increase in stockholder wealth could reflect a transfer from
those Americans who don't own stocks. Or from our own non-stock repositories of
future value--i.e., our labor. Could it be that the rise in stock values
reflects the ongoing shift, from labor to capital, of the return to production
in our economy? In other words, we're not producing 30 percent more, but more
of what we do produce goes to corporate profits and less to wages? Well,
Krugman maintains that no such shift is taking place. (Another economist,
Lawrence Mishel, takes issue with Krugman in the current issue of the American
Prospect .)

            Then there's what economists call the wealth effect. Even
if the impression that we're a lot richer than a year ago is a fantasy, the
very fact that millions believe it might help make it come true. Prosperity is
like Tinker Bell: It lives on belief that it lives. Folks who believe (even
incorrectly) that their net worth is up by 40 percent will spend with zest, and
the economy will thrive and grow as a result. Of course this kind of
"demand-side" thinking is extremely out of fashion. After all, if spending
money you don't really have is the key to prosperity, big government deficits
would do the trick just as well. Yet deficits are deeply unpopular, most of all
with the sort of folks who celebrate the new wealth created by the stock
market.

            Of course this whole line of
reasoning would apply to stock market crashes as well as to booms. The one-day
crash of '87, for example, reduced people's net worth by billions without
directly reducing by as much as a single doughnut the amount of goods and
services or the economy's ability to produce more of them. Maybe the moral is
just the obvious one that stock prices occasionally overshoot the mark in both
directions. But maybe the moral is that the only folks who are going to get
their full chicken's worth out of the 8,000 market are those who stop counting
their chickens and start trading them in.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Take This Simple Test

            Here's a three-question quiz
to determine how rational you are. This will work best if you stop and answer
each question before going on to the next.

            Imagine
that each of your three fabulously wealthy cousins offers you a choice of two
Christmas gifts. In each case, choose the one you'd prefer.

            
               1.
Cousin Snip offers you a choice of:
            

            A. $1
million in cash.

            B. A lottery ticket. The
ticket gives you a 10-percent chance of winning $5 million, an 89-percent
chance of winning $1 million, and a 1-percent chance of winning nothing at
all.

            
               2.
Cousin Snap offers you a choice of:
            

            A. A
lottery ticket that gives you an 11-percent chance of winning $1 million.

            B. A lottery ticket that
gives you a 10-percent chance of winning $5 million.

            
               3.
Cousin Snurr offers you a choice of:
            

            A. $1
million in cash.

            B. A
lottery ticket that gives you a 10/11 chance of winning $5 million.

            Now that you've made your choices, you can read on to
discover whether you're a rational creature. "Rational" does not mean
"risk-neutral." A risk-neutral person is one who is indifferent when given a
choice between 50 cents and a 50-50 chance of $1. A risk-neutral person would
choose B in all three cases. In Snip's offer, 10 percent of $5 million
($500,000) plus 89 percent of $1 million ($890,000) equals $1.39 million, which
trumps $1 million. In Snap's offer, 10 percent of $5 million ($500,000) trumps
11 percent of $1 million ($110,000). In Snurr's offer, 10/11 of $5 million is
$4.55 million, which trumps $1 million.

            But it's
equally rational to avoid risk or to seek it out. The insurance and gambling
industries are based on these proclivities. Even so, rationality does imply
some logical consistency in your choices about risk. It would be embarrassing
if a lot of 
                  Slate
                readers failed this test, so I'm going to make
it easy by adopting a very broad definition of rationality. As long as you
satisfy two simple criteria, I'm willing to call you rational.

            
Here's my first criterion: If you prefer A to
B, then you should prefer a chance of winning A to an (equally large)
chance of winning B. And here's the test to see whether you've met that
criterion: Your answers to Questions 2 and 3 should be the same. That's because
Snap's choice A is an 11-percent shot at a million bucks, and Snurr's choice A
is a million bucks. Therefore Snap's A is an 11-percent shot at Snurr's A.
Meanwhile, Snap's choice B amounts to an 11-percent shot at Snurr's choice B.
(Do the math: A 10-percent chance of winning $5 million is the same as an
11-percent chance of winning a 10/11 chance of winning $5 million. 0.11 x 10/11
= 0.10) So, if you prefer Snurr's A to Snurr's B, you should prefer Snap's A to
Snap's B.

            Here's my
second criterion of rationality: If you're choosing between two lotteries with
identical chances to win, then your preference should be unaffected if I throw
in a consolation prize that you get if you lose in either case. You pass that
test if your answers to Questions 1 and 3 are the same. This is why:

            Snip's choice A is $1
million. Another way to say $1 million--weird, but bear with me--is "an
11-percent chance to win $1 million, with a consolation prize of $1 million for
losing." Snurr's choice A is also $1 million. So Snip's A is an 11-percent shot
at Snurr's A with a $1-million consolation prize.

            Snip's
choice B is a 10-percent chance of winning $5 million plus a 1-percent chance
of winning nothing plus an 89-percent chance of winning $1 million. The first
two items, taken together, amount to an 11-percent chance of a 10/11 chance of
winning $5 million. The third item means you get $1 million if that 11-percent
chance doesn't come through. Snurr's choice B is a 10/11 chance to win $5
million. Snip's choice B is therefore an 11-percent shot at Snurr's choice B
with a $1-million consolation prize.

            So if you
prefer Snip's A to Snip's B, you should prefer Snurr's A to Snurr's
B-- if you're rational.

            To sum up, if you are even minimally rational, your answers
to Questions 1, 2, and 3 should all be the same. But they probably aren't.
According to survey data collected by Nobel laureate Maurice Allais--and
duplicated by several subsequent researchers--most people answer A to Question
1 and B to Question 2. There is no way to reconcile that combination of answers
with the most rudimentary theory of rationality, no matter how you answer
Question 3. In other words, people prefer the cash over the lottery ticket--to
an extent that rational risk aversion can't explain.

            Economists
have variously viewed the "Allais Paradox" as a warning, a trifle, an
opportunity, and a challenge. If you're looking to explain all human behavior
on the basis of a few simple axioms, it's a warning. If you don't believe that
casual answers to abstract survey questions constitute an important part of
human behavior, it's a trifle. If the survey responses mean that people are
less rational than they ought to be, it's an opportunity for economists to
teach better decision-making skills. If you conclude that there's a critical
element missing from our theory of rationality, it's a challenge to identify
that element.

            
One missing element is regret . When you
choose a lottery instead of a sure thing (as in Question 1), you risk not just
losing the lottery but also feeling regretful about your recklessness. But when
you choose between two lotteries (as in Question 2), you can always reconcile
yourself to a loss by thinking, "Well, I'd probably have lost no matter
what I chose." Maybe that's why most people go for the sure thing in
Question 1 but are willing to go for the slightly riskier of the two bets in
Question 2. (Click for an experiment that could test this hypothesis.)

            Here's another
thought-experiment that indicates the importance of avoiding regret. Suppose
you belong to a company of 10 soldiers, of whom one must be chosen for the
distasteful task of executing a prisoner. Which of the following do you prefer?
A) One soldier is selected at random to shoot the prisoner? Or B) all 10
soldiers fire at once, without knowing which one of the 10 has been issued live
ammunition? Either way, you'd have a 10-percent chance of being the
executioner, so simple theories of rationality suggest that you should be
indifferent when asked to choose between the two options. Yet most people
prefer B), because in case B) you never know whether you've been
unlucky.

            The
analogy between the soldiers and the Allais survey respondents is imperfect;
the soldiers who choose method B) are trying to avoid regret over bad luck,
while the survey respondents are, perhaps, trying to avoid regret over bad
decisions. But in either case, ignoring the human impulse toward
regret-avoidance might give a social scientist cause for regret.

            
               Note to
readers: A week after this article was posted, Landsburg clarified the "simple
test." Read his addendum in "E-Mail to the Editors."
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Justice

            Two hundred years ago, a
lawyer named William Blackstone said it's better for 10 guilty people to go
free than for one innocent person to suffer. And for two centuries, legal
scholars have considered Blackstone's pronouncement a profound statement of
principle. Apparently, none of those scholars has thought to ask the obvious
follow-up question, namely, why 10? Why wasn't it 12 or eight? The answer, of
course, is that Blackstone invented a number out of thin air. That kind of
flippancy amounts to a defiant refusal to think seriously about the trade-offs
involved in designing a criminal justice system. But for 200 years, legal
scholars have cited Blackstone's refusal to think and mistaken it for an
example of a thought.

            There's
nothing profound about recognizing a trade-off between convicting the innocent
and acquitting the guilty. The hard part is deciding how many false acquittals
you're willing to accept to avoid a false conviction. That number matters. It
matters whether it is 10 or 12 or eight, because every time we rewrite a
criminal statute or modify the rules of evidence, we are adjusting the terms of
the trade-off. So it's got to be worth it to think about what terms we want to
aim for.

            Here's one approach: Imagine how a guilty man going free or
a free man getting convicted might affect your life. (Or, so we don't get too
deeply sidetracked into your personal idiosyncrasies, how the guilty going free
or the free getting convicted might affect the lives of your neighbors.) On the
one hand, your neighbors risk being falsely accused and convicted. On the other
hand, they risk being victimized by criminals who have been falsely acquitted
(or by others who were emboldened to become criminals because of the frequency
of false acquittals). In principle, the cost of either disaster can be measured
in dollars. In practice, we can approximate those measures by making a
reasonable guess as to how much your typical neighbor would be willing to pay
to avoid a year in jail or to avoid being robbed on the way home from work.

            After
estimating the costs of being either an imprisoned innocent or a crime
victim, we can estimate the probability that your neighbor will actually
face each of these problems. But once we know the cost and the probability
associated with a given risk, we can infer a lot about how undesirable that
risk is. We can do this, for example, by observing the way people behave in
insurance markets. Suppose you want to know just how unpleasant it is to face a
1 percent chance of a $100,000 loss. Then all you have to do is look at those
people who face a 1 percent chance of losing their $100,000 homes in a fire and
see how much they are willing to pay for fire insurance.

            
If you don't like insurance markets, you can
look at labor markets: How much extra must you pay a worker to get him to take
a 1 percent risk of, say, losing an arm? If we believe for independent reasons
that the value of an arm is $100,000 (no, I don't mean to say that is
the value of an arm; this is a hypothetical example), then we have another way
to put a dollar value on the unpleasantness of a 1 percent risk of a $100,000
loss.

            Or you
can use data from financial markets: How much more interest must you offer an
investor to get him to accept a 1 percent risk of a $100,000 financial loss?
That's relatively easy to observe, and it gives yet another measure of how much
people dislike this particular level of risk.

            False acquittals and false convictions are each associated
with certain levels and probabilities of risk. By examining behavior in
insurance markets, labor markets, and financial markets, we can make some
reasonable guesses about how much people dislike each of these prospects, and
also the extent to which people are willing to trade off one kind of risk for
the other. That will give an indication of whether we ought to be expanding or
restricting the rights of defendants.

            It would take quite a bit of
work to complete that project, and at the end all you'd have is a rough
estimate. Your final number would be suspect in a hundred ways. For example,
the data from insurance and labor markets tell a pretty consistent story about
people's aversion to risk, but the data from financial markets make the degree
of risk aversion appear much higher. There might be no entirely satisfactory
way to resolve such inconsistencies. But until you've done some kind of
analysis, quoting a number such as "10" is both dishonest and disreputable.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Small-Biz Blarney

            Everybody knows that small
business creates all the jobs. Why, only last week during the vice-presidential
debate, Jack Kemp argued with evangelical passion for a small-business
capital-gains cut to grow the economy faster. "How about the small businessmen
and women of America that create 91 percent of all the new jobs?" he asked. A
few weeks earlier, during the minimum-wage debate (in which small business was
once again singled out for favored tax treatment), virtually every opponent
argued that raising the minimum wage could hurt small businesses--which create
most of America's jobs.

            This mantra is repeated so
often that everybody believes it. But everybody is wrong.

            What does
it take to kill a bad statistic? More than a Nobel laureate, apparently. Milton
Friedman, a conservative economist and proponent of free-market solutions,
pointed out in a recent Journal of Economic Literature article that the
myth of small businesses' job-creating potency is one of the most durable
falsehoods of America's political economy. Numerous other economists--and even
the occasional columnist--have tried to debunk the myth, but to no avail.

            For example, in his paper titled "On the Size Distribution
of Employment and Establishments," Jonathan Leonard finds that large firms are
the main job generators. Three Census Bureau fellows, S. Davis, J. Haltiwanger,
and S. Schuh, recently published a report titled "Small Business and Job
Creation: Dissecting the Myth and Reassessing the Facts," in which they assert
flatly, "Conventional wisdom about the job-creation prowess of small business
rests on statistical fallacies and misleading interpretations of the data."
(.)

            Magazines
and newspapers have recently run articles like "Debunking the Small Business
Myth," "Small Is Not Beautiful," "Doing the Small Business Shuffle," and "The
Real Engine of U.S. Economic Growth Might Be Bigger Than Any Believe," all of
which have declared the small-business lobby's claim "phony."

            
               Where the
Bad Data Come From
            

            Not only politicians but
newspaper reporters continue to perpetuate the small-business fallacy, usually
without challenge. Take an article in the Los 
               Angeles

               Times on July 6, which referred to "98 percent of all jobs since 1989
being created by businesses with fewer than four employees." Where do these
numbers come from? The Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration
will gladly supply you with a table that might appear, at first glance, to lend
support to such claims (see Figure 1).

            Look
across the second row, for example, which seems to tell you that firms with no
employees in 1991 netted an astounding 1,898,600 jobs by 1993.

            
               Figure 1
            

            
               Net Job
Creation by Firm Size, 1991-1993 (Data in Thousands)

            Firm Size (Number of
Employees in 1993)

            [CHART 1 GOES HERE]

            
               *Computed
by subtraction within the same size class.
            

            
               ** Firms with no
employees, but some payroll expenses, in 1991.
            

            Add in the
jobs created by firms with one to 499 employees in 1991 (the next five rows),
and you would compute that small businesses (defined by SBA as having fewer
than 500 employees) added all but 44,800 of the total 2.4 million net jobs
gained by the economy over that period.

            
Well, what's the matter with that? The matter,
of course, is that the rows broken out by initial firm size tell only part of
the story--the happy part. What SBA doesn't make clear in the table it hands
out (though it will tell you if you persist) is that the firm-size rows only
include those firms that "made it"--i.e., those that stayed continuously in
business throughout the period.
            

            And, of
course, it is a fact of America's dynamic marketplace that while many
firms--especially small firms--open for business every year and hire new
workers, almost as many close their doors, sending their workers onto the
unemployment rolls. Overcounting gains and undercounting losses in this and
other ways is what produces the grossly exaggerated picture of small business's
contribution to the U.S. economy. (Economists call the SBA's technique of
sorting firms by class size in a dynamic situation the "regression fallacy."
For a simple example of why it produces a misleading result, click .)

            

               A Quick Fix
            

            To get a better, though
still static, picture of what's really going on, let's relabel and complete
SBA's table (see Figure 2):

            
               Figure 2
            

            
               Net Job
Creation by Firm Size, 1991-1993 (Data in Thousands)

            Firm Size (Number of
Employees in 1993)

            [CHART 2]

            
               *
Computed by subtraction within the same size class.
            

            
               ** Firms
with no employees but some payroll expenses in 1991.
            

            
               Source: Office of
Advocacy, U.S. Small Business Administration, from U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census Data, prepared under contract (table prepared July
1996).
            

            Focus on the top row, the one
optimistically labeled "Net Births" in SBA's version. These are the net changes
(mostly net losses) in job counts produced by firms that either opened or
closed during the period. Looking down at the now-complete bottom-row totals,
you will get quite a different picture of where the net new jobs are. By this
calculation, some 1,673,400 (or almost 70 percent) of the jobs still around in
1993 were added by firms with more than 500 employees in that year--i.e., by
"big" business.

            
Classifying firms by their end--rather than start--size might also seem unfair,
since some very successful small companies may end up big by the close of the
period, and vice versa. We need a more dynamic model to get a real sense of
what's going on.

            

               Going With the Flow
            

            Getting a
good fix on this phenomenon isn't easy, because most government data are
collected to measure monthly employment changes, and there are no current data
available on gross job flows by business size. As a senior economist at SBA,
however, I was able to specify the preparation of special tabulations by the
Census Bureau from business payroll tax reports for the entire private nonfarm
economy. These tabulations make it possible, for the first time, to study job
flows for the same firms as they migrate from one employment size class
to another.

            These
statistics-- never released by SBA and published here for the first
time --tell a fascinating story of job creation and destruction. For
example, the number of firms with employees increased by 30,000 in the period
between 1989 and 1991. This end result, however, was produced by some 1,260,000
firm "births" (a firm reporting no payroll in 1989, but some payroll in 1991),
which were offset by 1,230,000 firm "deaths."

            Looking at job flows by firm size (see Figure 3), we see
that firms that remained small (including those that entered or went out of
business) lost 192,000 jobs during this recession period.

            
               Figure 3
            

            
               Job
Generation by Size of Firm in 1989 and 1991
            

            (Numbers of Jobs in
Thousands)

            xxxxxxx

            * Net jobs
created by boundary crossers = 69,000

            
xxxxxxxxx

            

               Source: Bureau of the Census, special tabulations
            

            
Employment gains from firms going from small to
large were essentially offset by employment losses of firms that were large and
became small. But on net, there was a job gain of 69,000 for
"boundary-crossing" firms. At the same time, large businesses (again including
those that opened or closed) added 802,000 to their payrolls. Subtracting the
small-business losses from the big-business gains gives us a net total of
679,000 jobs added to the entire economy during this period. The analysis thus
confirms what earlier studies had suggested: Big business, not small business,
is the primary generator of U.S. jobs.

            
Predictably, SBA's counts show a totally different (and false) picture (see
bottom of Figure 3). By using the beginning-year counting rule, SBA reports
that small business generated 557,000, or 82 percent, of the jobs. If the
end-year counting rule is used, small business destroyed 872,000 jobs. Neither
statistic is reflective of the job-generation process; they measure only
economic volatility.

            Of course, the period between 1989 and 1991 was one of
recession. However, Census Bureau counts show that during the phase of rapid
growth between 1982 to 1987, an equal number of firms in each size class
reported job gains as losses. This same result held true in the period from
1989 to 1991, demonstrating again that, irrespective of business-cycle
conditions, the probability that a firm will add or lay off workers is
independent of its size. Analysis of the SBA net-change data for the
expansionary period between 1991 and 1993 also reveals that small businesses
created jobs in proportion to their numbers--no more, and no less.

            A simple economic explanation
accounts for these observations. Firms are constantly competing with each
other. Both small and large businesses expand when there is a demand for their
goods and services that they can meet efficiently. All the economic research
suggests that there is no difference in the efficiency of small and large firms
once a firm grows beyond a minimum size. It is for this reason that Census
Bureau data for the last 50 years show no evidence of any change in the
employment size distribution of firms and establishments.

            All this might not matter, if
the small-business fallacy were not used by its promoters as justification for
carving exemptions and preferences for small business into virtually every
piece of economic legislation that passes Congress. As the editor of this
magazine wrote in the Washington 
               Post in August 1993, "Small
business is an important part of the American economy. Most small-business
owners are admirable, hard-working, patriotic. But the case for tilting public
policy in favor of 'small business' is based on logical fallacies and
lobbyists' hokum."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Taken to the Cleaners?

            My dry cleaner charges $1.65
to clean and press a man's shirt and $5.25 for a woman's blouse. What's going
on here?

            The laws
of arithmetic allow only two possibilities. Women's clothing must be associated
either with higher costs or with higher profit margins for the dry cleaner.
Unfortunately, neither theory seems terribly plausible.

            Let's start with the "higher cost" theory. In its most
naive form, this theory predicts that if I move the buttons on my dress shirts
from the right side to the left, the cost of laundering them will more than
triple. That one's not going to fly. So, to give the theory a fair chance, we
have to look for more significant differences between men's and women's
clothing.

            Well, like what? You could
argue that women's clothing is typically made of more delicate fabrics than
men's. But if that's the relevant factor, why don't dry cleaners just quote
different prices for different fabrics? (For some materials, such as silk, they
typically do quote separate prices. The question is why this practice
does not completely displace that of distinguishing between men's clothes and
women's.)

            An
alternative version of the theory is that women's clothes are costlier to
process because women demand higher quality work. I can't disprove that
version, but I have no real evidence to support it, either. So, in a search for
better alternatives, I called three different dry cleaners and asked for
their explanations. The first said that men's shirts are machine
pressed, while women's are hand pressed. That left me wondering why they don't
simply quote different prices for different kinds of pressing. The second said
that women's shirts require specialized treatment because they are typically
doused with perfume. That left me wondering why men who use after-shave are not
chronically dissatisfied with their dry cleaners. The third said that this was
their pricing policy, and if I didn't like it, I was free to shop
elsewhere.

            
In the absence of a clear, convincing story
about gender-specific costs, let's see what kind of story we can tell about
gender-specific profit margins. In other words, let's ask whether my dry
cleaner is exploiting female customers through higher markups.

            To make
sense of that theory, you have to ask why dry cleaners would want to
discriminate specifically against women, as opposed to, say, men. That strategy
makes sense only if men are more price-sensitive than women and hence more
likely to walk away in the face of a high markup. But why should men be more
price-sensitive? You could argue that men are less diligent about cleanliness
and so more likely to respond to high prices by wearing unlaundered shirts. But
as long as we're dealing in stereotypes, you could argue equally well that
women are more willing to do their own laundry--in which case women
would be more likely to walk away from a high price, and it would make more
sense to discriminate against men.

            So it isn't clear which gender is the more natural
candidate for getting soaked at the cleaners. But there's a more fundamental
reason to doubt that either gender can be victimized by price
discrimination, and here it is: There are over half a dozen dry cleaners within
easy walking distance of my house. If they're all earning higher profits on
women's blouses than on men's shirts, why hasn't any of them decided to
specialize in women's blouses?

            Let me
make that more concrete. Suppose the going prices are $1.65 for a man's shirt
and $5.25 for a woman's blouse, even though (under the theory we're currently
entertaining) they are equally expensive for the cleaner to handle. Then if I
were a dry cleaner, I would announce a uniform price of $5 for all shirts and
blouses--thereby attracting all the women's business and none of the men's.
Because nobody has adopted that obvious strategy, we should suspect that
despite appearances, the profit margin on women's clothing can't be much higher
than on men's.

            
In fact, the process wouldn't stop there. As
soon as I announced a uniform price of $5, my neighbor would announce a price
of $4.75. Ongoing competition for the (temporarily) more lucrative women's
business would quickly eliminate any profit differential.

            That
argument rests on the fact that dry cleaners are highly competitive. If
Microsoft ran the entire dry cleaning industry, it might very well choose to
discriminate against women (or men, depending on market conditions). But in the
world we live in--or at least in the neighborhood I live in--there are
so many interchangeable dry cleaners that none of them should be able to get
away with exploiting anyone.

            One of my colleagues' wives insists I've got this
wrong--she says she's so loyal to her own dry cleaner that no discounter can
lure away her business. If most customers are as devoted as she is, then each
dry cleaner is like a mini-Microsoft, with its own captive customer base. In
that case, price discrimination can survive. But I am instinctively skeptical
that many customers are as fanatically loyal as my colleague's wife.

            The theory
that only a monopolist can price discriminate is standard textbook fare, and
it's borne out by a lot of observations. Movie theaters have a certain amount
of monopoly power (on a given night, a given moviegoer is likely to have a
strong preference for a particular movie at a particular theater), and they
price discriminate by offering discounts to senior citizens (which is
equivalent to discriminating against everybody under the age of 65).
Airlines have even more monopoly power--once you know where and when you want
to fly, you are likely to have an extremely limited choice of airlines--and
they heavily discriminate against business travelers by charging more for
midweek flights than for weekend flights (when most travel is for leisure).

            
By contrast, in the most competitive
industries, there is no price discrimination. As I am fond of pointing out to
my students, you've never heard of a wheat farmer who offers senior citizen
discounts. Likewise for gas stations, which are ubiquitous and sell to everyone
at a single price.

            Well, at
least that's what I used to tell my students. But I might have to make a
small change in my lesson plan. The gas station nearest our campus has just
announced a policy of senior citizen discounts on Wednesday afternoons. Is this
price discrimination in favor of seniors, or does it reflect a genuinely lower
cost of serving them?

            If you push me hard enough, I can probably concoct some
kind of story about lower costs. Maybe seniors tend to drive cars with bigger
gas tanks, so they buy 20 gallons at a time instead of 10, thereby saving on
the cost of processing credit cards. (A significant part of that cost is the
time spent waiting for the card to be approved, during which the pump is
unavailable.) But if this cost saving is significant, why has only one local
gas station recognized it? And why is it significant only on Wednesdays?

            I have suggested to my
colleagues that none of us should be permitted to present ourselves to the
world as economists until we figure out what this gas station is up to. Nobody
has risen to the challenge. A few have suggested that perhaps the gas station
owner is just a little quirky. Maybe that's right. But it would be far harder
to believe that the entire dry cleaning industry is just a little quirky.
Either there is enough monopoly power to sustain price discrimination, or there
is some reason why women's clothes are incredibly expensive to clean and press.
But I have no idea which.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Buy a House, Lose Your Job?

            Governments around the world
encourage homeownership in the belief that it fosters prosperity. But
unemployment statistics tell a different story. Higher rates of homeownership
seem to correlate with higher rates of unemployment. In Switzerland, where
about one-fourth of citizens own their homes, unemployment is only 2.9 percent.
In Spain, where homeownership is three times as common, unemployment is a
staggering 18.1 percent. Portugal's homeownership is midway between
Switzerland's and Spain's, and unemployment is a low-to-middling 4.1
percent.

            These
numbers come from a recent paper packed with evidence that homeownership and
unemployment generally move in tandem. The author, Professor Andrew Oswald of
the University of Warwick, points to similar patterns all over the
industrialized world. The patterns show up in comparisons between countries
(such as Spain and Switzerland) and in comparisons between regions within
countries (such as East Anglia and Yorkshire, or Iowa and Nevada), and they
show up whether you look at snapshots in time or at trends that span
decades.

            The data suggest that, on average, a 10-percent increase in
the rate of owner occupation is associated with a 2-percent increase in the
rate of unemployment. If that's right, it accounts for a substantial fraction
of the world's joblessness. What's going on here? Does homeownership cause
unemployment? Does unemployment cause homeownership? Oswald endorses the first
explanation--homeownership causes unemployment by tying people down
geographically. The jobless homeowner looks for jobs within commuting distance
of his home. The jobless renter is willing to move to where the jobs are.

            That
theory is testable, because it predicts that homeowners suffer longer
periods of unemployment, as opposed to more frequent periods of
unemployment. And in fact, Oswald's theory passes at least one version of that
test: As homeownership has risen over the past few decades, there has been an
increase in time spent unemployed but little change in the frequency of job
loss.

            
Alternative theories are possible. Maybe the
causality goes backward: Unemployment causes high rates of homeownership. My
irreverent colleague Mark Bils points out that if you lose your job, you'll be
spending a lot of time at home, and you'll want to buy a nice house. A more
plausible explanation is that when jobs dry up, renters move out, so that only
homeowners remain. The other side of that coin is that booming areas tend to
draw a lot of newcomers who want to rent for a while.

            But when
two things occur in tandem, it isn't always right to ask which is the cause and
which the effect. After all, mistletoe and eggnog tend to appear in the same
month, but neither causes the other. Instead, they're brought on simultaneously
by the Christmas season. Perhaps it's the same with unemployment and
homeownership. But then what plays the role of Christmas, the background force
that causes both phenomena? The most obvious candidates are age and wealth,
either of which can increase the odds of both homeownership and long-term
unemployment (the young and the poor scramble harder for jobs).

            My cynical colleague Alan Stockman suggests an alternative
candidate, namely, the regulatory climate. He points out that where regulators
run amok, they tend to disrupt the rental market and the job market
simultaneously. Consider the housing market in New York City, where rental
apartments are outrageously expensive. That's largely because New York
real-estate laws make it nearly impossible to evict a bad tenant, so landlords
are skittish about leasing to strangers. At the same time, labor laws make it
hard to fire a bad employee, so employers are conservative in their hiring.

            It's also
possible that the numbers themselves are wrong, because of some hidden bias in
the way they're collected. Maybe when you're counting the unemployed, it's easy
to overlook a transient and hard to overlook a homeowner. So you can tell a lot
of different stories to explain Oswald's numbers. But for the sake of
discussion, let me go back to the first (and, I think, most interesting) story:
Homeowners stay unemployed longer because homeowners are less mobile. If that
story is true, what is its moral?

            
Oswald speculates that mass unemployment exists
in the world today because of the rise in homeownership and the decline in
private renting--trends that are, in turn, the results of long-running attempts
by most Western governments to raise the degree of homeownership (largely
through subsidies). Where those attempts have been most successful, the
efficiency of labor markets has declined most dramatically.

            You could
interpret that as a story about well-meaning do-gooders who hurt the very
people they're trying to help, but such an interpretation would be hard to
defend. Surely home buyers are well aware that they're sacrificing mobility.
That's a voluntary sacrifice, and so (in the judgment of those who choose to
buy) it must be more than compensated for by the benefits of ownership. In
other words, high unemployment might be the price we pay for owner occupancy,
but apparently owner-occupants are convinced that it's a price worth
paying.

            That analysis is guided by an economist's faith in the
maxim that people are generally pretty good at looking out for their own
interests. The companion maxim is that people often make no attempt at all to
look out for the interests of others. So if we really want to pull every
possible moral out of our story, we should think about the other people whose
interests are at stake when you decide to buy a house. In other words, we
should think about your children.

            Residential stability is
extremely important for children. If your family moves during your school years
(ages 6-15), your chance of graduating high school falls by 16 percent, the
chance that you'll be "economically inactive" (out of school and out of
work) at age 24 rises by 10 percent--and, if you are female, your chance of
getting through your teens without an out-of-wedlock birth falls by 6 percent.
(I learned this from the book Succeeding 
               Generations , by the
economists Robert Haveman and Barbara Wolfe.) Like Oswald's numbers on housing
and unemployment, these numbers might allow a variety of explanations--like
"families that move are more likely to be poor, and that's why their kids don't
do as well." But in fact Haveman and Wolfe's statistical analysis is designed
to rule out this and similar alternative theories, leaving us to conclude that
the moves themselves are harmful.

            Perhaps when parents move,
they carefully weigh the damage to their children against competing benefits
and act in the interests of the entire family. Or perhaps when parents move,
they selfishly put their own interests ahead of their children's. In the latter
case, a government that cares about children would want to discourage household
moves (say through subsidies to homeownership), even at the cost of higher
unemployment.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I Smell a Rat

            The National Institute on
Drug Abuse concludes every press release on its Web site with the boast that
NIDA supports more than 85 percent of the world's research on the health
aspects of drug abuse and addiction, and publicizes the results of that
research.

            That the
government's drug warriors are the customers for most health studies on drug
abuse--and that they aggressively peddle these studies--doesn't make the
studies automatically suspect. In fact, the science behind NIDA-funded studies
is reputable 99.99 percent of the time. But what is suspect is the spin
NIDA routinely applies to its sponsored studies, such as the successful
flackery that accompanied the marijuana study that appeared in the June 27
edition of Science .

            The authors of the Science paper--"Activation of
Corticotropin-Releasing Factor in the Limbic System During Cannabinoid
Withdrawal"--suggest in their conclusion that marijuana may be as addictive as
heroin and cocaine, and that pot's "subtle disruption" of brain chemistry may
leave users " 'primed' for further disruption by other drugs of abuse."

            Both the New York
Times and the Washington Post published pieces based on the
NIDA-sponsored study. The first sentence of the Times story is
indistinguishable from that of the NIDA press release.

            The Times : "People who
regularly smoke large amounts of marijuana may experience changes in their
brain chemistry that are identical to changes seen in the brains of people who
abuse heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, nicotine and alcohol, scientists have
found."

            NIDA: "Long-term use of
marijuana produces changes in the brain that are similar to those seen after
long term use of other major drugs of abuse such as cocaine, heroin, and
alcohol."

            Although
the Post 's lead was more original, it, too, followed the NIDA line.
"Marijuana may be a far more insidious drug than generally thought," the
Post reported, "and apparently alters the brain chemistry of pot smokers
in ways that may make them particularly vulnerable to 'hard' drugs such as
heroin or cocaine, two independent research groups have found."

            
How seriously should we take these findings? In
one study, researchers injected rats with cannabinoids--chemicals that act like
THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana--for weeks, habituating them to
the compounds. Because cannabinoids can linger in the system for some time, few
marijuana users experience anything approximating physical withdrawal if they
stop smoking. To mimic cold-turkey withdrawal, the researchers then injected
these habituated rats with a drug that "blocks" the effects of all
cannabinoids. Following the injection of the blocker, the researchers observed
an increase of the brain chemical CRF in the amygdala, a portion of the brain
involved with the emotions of fear and aggression. The presence of CRF in the
amygdala is associated with stress and anxiety. Withdrawal from heroin,
cocaine, and alcohol also increases CRF in the amygdala. The authors of the
paper lean on these findings to suggest that marijuana acts on the brain as
other drugs of abuse do, and that users who stop smoking marijuana might
indulge in heroin, cocaine, or alcohol to stave off the unpleasantness of
increased CRF in the amygdala.

            A (not
financed by NIDA) that also appeared in the June 27 Science , and which
was also mentioned in the Times and Post articles, further
investigates the effects of cannabinoids on rats. The study found an increase
of the neurotransmitter dopamine in rats' nucleus accumbens--often termed "the
pleasure center of the brain"--following several cannabinoid injections. Most
recreational drugs, like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine, increase
dopamine in the accumbens. While recognizing that other researchers have tried
and failed to induce an increase of dopamine in the accumbens by injecting
cannabinoids, the authors use their results to suggest that marijuana is more
like heroin and cocaine than was previously thought.

            Before going any further, consider two points. First,
injected cannabinoids may not mirror the effects of smoked marijuana. There are
several other chemicals in marijuana that may modify the effects of THC alone,
and smoking a drug is a different experience from injecting it. (Imagine the
difference between smoking a cigarette and injecting pure nicotine directly
into a vein.)

            Second, rats are not humans.
This does not mean cannabinoid research on rodents is worthless. But there are
several pharmacological and social differences that reduce the relevance of rat
research to social policy. And since the pleasure derived from smoking
marijuana is a core issue, consider a third point: Rats don't like pot.

            I know
this firsthand from my on cannabinoids and rats. Initially, I felt guilty about
drugging rats and then killing them for the necessary dissection. "At least
they're getting stoned first," I rationalized. Then I realized that being
stoned means very different things to rats and humans. Marijuana makes rats
slothful, and they excrete all over themselves. Before the injection they're
quite friendly--these are lab animals, remember, not hardened street rats.
After the injection they--honestly--seem rather depressed.

            
Another fun fact about rats and pot is that
rats won't . When given the choice of receiving an injection of THC or a
placebo, rats consistently choose the placebo. And when given the choice
between a placebo and the cannabinoid blocker, rats choose the blocker. Tens of
millions of humans, as we know, willingly partake of marijuana, and these
differences between rat and human behavior should discourage us from using two
rat studies to assert that a) marijuana is addictive in the same way as harder
drugs are and b) marijuana primes humans for addiction to harder drugs.

            The
Science studies also ignore simple truths about brain chemistry.
Consider that sex causes dramatic increases in dopamine. Laughter, too,
increases dopamine. The syllogism that dopamine equals pleasure and pleasure
leads to addiction just doesn't apply directly to human behavior. How seriously
would anyone take a researcher who suggested that laughter could lead to drugs
and deadly addictions?

            And the CRF-producing process associated by the researchers
with marijuana withdrawal is not unique to drugs. Just as sex increases
dopamine in the accumbens, stubbing one's toe may ignite neurological anxiety.
Indeed, chronic toe-stubbing can lead to the abuse of analgesics like aspirin.
Again, the science reported in Science is reputable. It's just taken out
of context.

            Also lost in the mix is that
fact that other published and studies have found that cannabinoids don't
increase dopamine in the accumbens. Still other researchers have shown that
monkeys don't like the effects of cannabinoids any more than rats do. But
findings like these that don't support the government's drug agenda are rarely
catapulted into the news by the publicity machine.

            So let's set aside for a
moment the drug preferences and predilections and propensities of rats and turn
our attention back to humans. Of the estimated 70 million Americans who have
tried marijuana, only 1 percent have gone on to heavy cocaine use. Perhaps NIDA
and the pliant journalists should inject themselves with a big dose of common
sense.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Is The Kiss Really So Awful?

            I blurbed The Kiss .
The book scared me, not because it concerns incest or happens to be true but
because of the malign figure of the father, who reminded me of the character
played by Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter . I also appreciated
the drugged cadence of the prose, with a chasm between every two sentences, and
the frozen stare of the insistent present tense. I know Kathryn and Colin
Harrison, having encountered them professionally and socially (we live in the
same neighborhood, but literary New York is a small town, anyway), but I don't
know them well enough for it to carry gossip value. I judged The Kiss as
a book.

            Obviously
I was well aware of the holy-shit factor, sufficiently high that it could swamp
all discussion and become the sole focus of criticism. But I naively
underestimated its effect, imagining a bunch of dumb reviews and one or two
hand-wringing op-ed pieces. Instead came a flood of both, with a tone that rose
from shrill to vindictive. People went out of their way to attack not just the
book--some candidly admitted they hadn't bothered to read it--but Harrison
personally, and her husband, her agent, and her publishers for good
measure.

            Bad publicity is better than none, of course, but after a
time you could no longer ignore an odor of smoke, and it wasn't your usual
book-chat roast. It began to seem like a witch trial. Harrison has been accused
of being a liar, an opportunist, a traitor to all segments of her family, an
unfit mother, to have written the book solely for the money or the
attention--everything short of having fucked her father in order to write about
it. The Kiss has been called "slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical"
by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post , and things to that effect by
sundry others. The New Republic 's teaser triumphantly reads: "James
Wolcott Smacks Kathryn Harrison in the Kisser."

            No tort is
too trivial for the prosecutors. Take self-plagiarism, a well-documented
failing among writers of all sizes. In Harrison's case, it became the
centerpiece of a multiple-count indictment handed down by Michael Shnayerson in
the February Vanity Fair , the fallout of which was that The New
Yorker killed a scheduled excerpt. The publisher, attempting damage
control, rushed the book into stores two months before the publication date.
Self-plagiarism is usually a consideration for critics, not feature writers; a
textual weakness, not a matter of morals.

            
There's no question that the book is a long way
from perfect. But literary matters are not of much interest to the peanut
gallery--self-plagiarism is an exception because it sounds like a crime.
Comment has instead tended to focus on familial betrayal, dubious motives, and
the moral sink that is the memoir today.

            There are
those who fret about the effect on her two young children. While this is
reasonable, it is worth noting that Harrison has said she wanted to publish the
book now, "before our children were any older and more aware of the media
around them." She has a point: The dogs bark, the caravan passes. The furor
will be over long before the kids are able to understand it (the spotlight
would only be harsher if they were older), and the subject itself would either
come up or be repressed to everyone's detriment.

            Some people are worried that Harrison's father is still
alive; the book could hurt him. These tend to be the same people who describe
the relationship as "consensual," a word that could not occur to anyone who has
read the book. Of course, there are men who seem to think that rape is a sex
act rather than an act of violence. But the very notion of incest-- the last
taboo --unhinges readers, and they transfer blame onto Harrison, in effect
accusing her of having engineered her own defilement. (Shnayerson calls the
book's sexual inexplicitness "either proper ... or a tease.") Besides blaming
the victim, this attitude is also provincial and illiterate, if not
disingenuous.

            We're
sitting at the tail end of the century of William Burroughs and Georges
Bataille and The Story of O , a century in which literature would seem to
have shed its last gratuitous prohibitions. It is also a century in which
father-daughter incest continues all around, and not just up in the hills. But
you'd think, judging from the press, that recent authors of memoirs had called
incest or alcoholism or any number of species of abuse into being by writing
about them. When the reaction is not faux-naïf, it is censorious: Shut up
and sublimate . Practitioners of self-exposure are many these days, of
course, and none of them is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Literature might be better
served if rage or remorse were diverted into parlor comedy. Who knows? Again,
that isn't the point for many of your bien-pensants , who fear mess and
complication more than they care about the state of literature.

            
Aknow-nothing cynicism is pervasive now.
Everybody wants the inside scoop, the shoddy truth that lies at the core of all
decisions. Accordingly, it is widely believed that books are always planned and
written with marketing in mind. Fortunately or not, though, calculation usually
results in failure, and for most writers, the foolproof concept that briefly
shone at conception looks like a mirage within three days at the keyboard. Also
underfoot is the venerable "cousin Don" theory of literature--you know: "You're
a writer? You should meet my cousin Don. He's got a story that will make you
both rich!" The can't-miss story is the Northwest Passage of letters, a myth.
There are only 36 possible plot situations, as 18 th century
playwright Carlo Gozzi determined, and we already know them all.

            And then there is the vexed
question of memoir vs. novel. Critics are as frantic about saving their novel
these days as they were about killing it 40 years ago. Their panic is
reminiscent of the moral defenses of painting that were worked up when
photography began to look like a threat. That debacle should have taught the
world that media can coexist, and that artists can even migrate between them
depending on the flavor they seek. (The analogy is imperfect, because there's
no fixed line of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction, only a broad gray
field.) And anyway, who cares whether your kitchen-sink epic features short,
fat Mom and Dad or tall, thin contract players? As André Breton wrote of
fictionalization of actual events: "I do not regard such a thing as childish, I
regard it as monstrous. I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only
in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys." Fiction has
its glories, but concealment is merely squalid.

            Kathryn Harrison's status as
voodoo doll has nothing to do with the actual merits or failings of her book,
but is entirely owing to how economically her case concentrates the fears,
resentments, misconceptions, and idiocies prevailing right now. It also
reflects the fact that most cultural journalists are under constant pressure,
whether from above or from within, to whip up instant controversies tied to
some product on the shelf. They're over quickly and forgotten by all--except,
perhaps, their often hapless targets. In the meantime, they don't tend to
elevate discourse.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Paula Jones vs. Anita Hill

            When William Jefferson
Clinton vs. Paula Corbin Jones comes before the U.S. Supreme Court--as
expected--in January, all eyes will be on Justice Clarence Thomas. Will a
flicker of emotion crease his usually impassive glare as he ponders a she-said,
he-said fact pattern so hauntingly reminiscent of his own ordeal five years
ago?

            Millions of Clinton
supporters still disdain Clarence Thomas as a sexual harasser. But a comparison
of the Paula Jones and Anita Hill episodes suggests that the evidence against
the president is far stronger than the media has let on--and far stronger than
the evidence against Thomas.

            Jones' evidence, which I
detail in a 15,000-word article in the current issue of the American
Lawyer , includes clear proof, scattered through the public record, that
then-governor Clinton's state trooper-bodyguard interrupted the
then-24-year-old state employee on the job on May 8, 1991, and took her to meet
Clinton--the boss of Jones' boss--alone in an upstairs suite in a Little Rock
hotel, for the apparent purpose of sexual dalliance.

            The evidence also includes
strongly corroborative statements made to me by two of Jones' friends, complete
with tellingly detailed, seamy specifics remarkably consistent with Jones'
allegations.

            Pamela
Blackard and Debra Ballentine first told their stories in February 1994 in
exclusive interviews with reporter Michael Isikoff, then of the Washington
Post . But to Isikoff's chagrin, the Post printed only sketchy
fragments of their accounts, 11 weeks later.

            Other evidence, of course, warrants skepticism about Jones'
account, including the claim by Jones' trooper escort that she happily
volunteered to be Clinton's "girlfriend" just after leaving his hotel room. Yet
a careful review of the evidence makes clear that there are only three
logically possible scenarios: that Jones lied in a most convincing manner, and
in stunning, Technicolor detail, to both Blackard and Ballentine, on May 8,
1991, and to her sisters soon thereafter; that all four later conspired with
Jones to concoct a monstrous lie; or that Jones' allegations are substantially
true. And after conducting interviews and studying other evidence, I'm all but
convinced that--even if Jones embellished somewhat--whatever Clinton did was
worse than anything Thomas was even accused of doing.

            Meanwhile,
not one of the feminist groups that clamored first for a Senate hearing for
Anita Hill, and then for Clarence Thomas' head, has lifted a finger on behalf
of Paula Jones. What the Hill-Thomas and Jones-Clinton episodes have in common
is that each prompted a rush to judgment by people on both sides of the
ideological divide. And most striking, in my view, is the hypocrisy (or
ignorance) and class bias of feminists and liberals--who proclaimed during the
Hill-Thomas uproar that "women don't make these things up," and that "you just
don't get it" if you presumed Thomas innocent until proven guilty--only to
spurn Jones' allegations of far more serious (indeed, criminal) conduct as
unworthy of belief and legally frivolous.

            
               She Said: The
Proposition
            

            
The May 8, 1991, encounter began in the
conference-room area of Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel, where a "Governor's
Quality Management Conference" was in progress at which Clinton made a speech.
Jones claims, and Blackard confirms, that both noticed Clinton staring intently
at Jones while fielding questions from television reporters. A few minutes
later, according to Jones, trooper Danny Lee Ferguson--who had previously
introduced himself as a member of the governor's security detail--approached
Jones and said, "The governor said you make his knees knock."

            According to Jones'
complaint, Ferguson later returned to the registration desk, handed Jones a
piece of paper with a suite number on it, and said the governor would like to
meet with her there. According to the complaint, "Ferguson stated during the
conversation: 'It's OK, we do this all the time for the governor.' " Blackard
told me, as she told Isikoff, she generally recalls such a conversation.
Ferguson's carefully lawyered answer to Jones' complaint, in which she seeks
damages from him as well as Clinton, confirms that he then escorted Jones to
the upstairs floor and pointed out Clinton's suite.

            All this
amounts to clear and convincing proof of Jones' allegation--which has never
been specifically denied by the president personally or by his lawyer Robert
Bennett--that then-governor Clinton sent a state trooper to interrupt a state
employee's performance of her job and bring her to his hotel room.

            And that seems pretty shabby no matter what, exactly,
happened in that hotel room--shabbier than anything Clarence Thomas was ever
even accused of doing by Anita Hill. Hill said that Thomas, as her boss, had
persistently pestered her in late 1981 and 1982 to date him and talked dirty to
her about pornographic movies and his own sexual prowess. Hill did not accuse
Thomas of a single overt request for sex or a single unwelcome touching. And
Hill was not too horrified to follow Thomas' rising star from the Department of
Education to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), nor to keep in
touch with Thomas in subsequent years--getting him to write a letter of
recommendation that helped her land a law teaching job, phoning him repeatedly,
inviting him to make an appearance at the law school, and more.

            
               "I Know He Grabbed
Her"
            

            
The most impressive evidence supporting Paula
Jones' allegations comes from six witnesses, including Pamela Blackard and
Debra Ballentine, whom I interviewed separately by phone, as well as Jones' two
sisters, her husband, and her mother. All six--including a sister who has
impugned Jones' motives--have said they believe her account of Clinton's
conduct.

            As an
eyewitness to some of the events, Blackard provides especially strong
corroboration. "I could see her shaking" as she came walking back to the
registration desk, Blackard says. After "five or 10 minutes," Blackard recalls,
Jones related what had happened. Blackard says she has difficulty remembering
the details offhand but that "I know he grabbed her. She said he just kept on
moving close to her and putting his hand on her knee, and every time she
stopped him he did something else." I asked Blackard if she recalled Jones
describing something dramatic. "He dropped his pants," she responded, "and I
don't remember his exact words, but you knew what he wanted." Blackard added,
"... and she said, 'I don't want you ever to tell anybody.' " Why not, I asked?
"He's a governor," Blackard responded. "He's powerful. And we both had state
jobs."

            In her February 1994 affidavit, Debra Ballentine swore that
Jones had come to her office around 4 p.m. that day and, after describing the
circumstances, told her "she rebuffed three separate unwelcomed sexual advances
by the governor. Ms. Jones described in detail the nature of the sexual
advances which I will not now recount."

            In a fuller recounting to me
on Oct. 1, Ballentine confirmed Jones' essential allegations: "She said he was
putting his hands on her legs and he was trying to put his hands up her dress.
... She said, 'Debbie, he pulled his pants down to his knees and he asked me to
[perform oral sex] right then.' " Ballentine adds: "He also told her he knew
she was a smart girl and her boss--what's his name? Dave Harrington?--'is a
good friend of mine,' and he told her, 'I know you're a smart girl and you're
going to do the right thing.' "

            Ballentine recalls that Jones
also told her that day about the mysterious so-called "distinguishing mark"
that Jones' complaint says she saw on Clinton, and on which Jones' lawyers say
they are relying to corroborate her account.

            Paula Jones' two older
sisters say she also gave detailed accounts of Clinton's conduct to them. In an
Oct. 9 telephone interview, I asked one of them, Lydia Cathey, if Jones
described what Clinton had done. "Down to the very last detail," says Cathey.
"Dropped his drawers and tell [sic] her to 'kiss it.' "

            The other sister, Charlotte
Brown, has drawn more publicity than the other five witnesses combined, because
she has trashed Jones' motives in going public. Nonetheless, in a February 1994
interview, Isikoff noted, "Asked if she believed her sister's story, [Charlotte
Brown] said she did because she had never known Jones to lie."

            Taken
together, these six contemporaneous witnesses provide far stronger
corroboration than has ever been mustered on behalf of Anita Hill. While four
witnesses testified that Hill had told them in vague, general terms of being
sexually harassed, only one of them (Hill's friend Susan Hoerchner) said Hill
had identified Thomas as the harasser. The other three said Hill had complained
of harassment by an unnamed "supervisor."

            
               A Question of
Character
            

            
It's reasonable, and legally relevant, to
speculate that Jones' appearance, demeanor, and willingness to meet with
Clinton alone may have emboldened him to think that sexual overtures would be
welcome. But it's odd to hear such traits held against Jones by feminists who
would ordinarily go ballistic at any suggestion that a flashy-looking woman was
"asking for it."

            It's true that Paula Jones'
legal, as distinct from her factual, claims have their weaknesses. But her
legal theories are hardly frivolous. A single, extremely outrageous act of
sexual harassment, without much more, can arguably support a "hostile working
environment" claim under federal law.

            Given that Paula Jones'
claims against Bill Clinton are both more serious by far than Anita Hill's
against Clarence Thomas, and supported by much stronger corroborating evidence,
why have the media and a lot of other people acted as though the opposite were
true?

            Part of the explanation is
class bias against what one Washington bureau chief called "some sleazy woman
with big hair coming out of the trailer parks." But that's not all of it. Not,
that is, unless you believe that the press would have given similar coverage to
a similar accuser, making similar allegations, supported by similar evidence,
against Newt Gingrich, or Jesse Helms, or George Bush, or Steve Forbes.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Privatize the Independent Counsel!

            Kenneth Starr, as you're
surely aware, has spent about $40 million on his investigation of the
president. That comes to roughly 15 cents per American. If there's an American
who hasn't got 15 cents worth of entertainment out of this affair, I've yet to
meet him. On that basis alone, the Starr investigation might be one of the best
bargains the taxpayers have ever had.

            There is,
however, a larger issue. Independent counsels are not punished for
overspending, so in general they'll have a tendency to overspend. Over the past
seven months or so, a lot of people have made that point, but few have placed
it in its proper context. Overspending due to bad incentives is not a problem
with independent counsel investigations in particular; it's a problem with
government undertakings in general.

            To address that problem by tinkering with the independent
counsel statute--or even by abolishing the office altogether--amounts to a
failure of perspective. No matter how deeply you believe Starr has egregiously
misspent your 15 cents, it would require extraordinary naiveté to imagine that
he's dealt you the most devastating financial blow you've suffered at the hands
of an overzealous public official.

            So instead
of obsessing over a minor symptom of a major ailment, maybe we should devote
more attention to the underlying disease. If the disease is incurable, we can
at least think about how best to alleviate entire clusters of symptoms.

            
To that end, abolishing the independent
counsel's office is not terribly useful. Maybe that office should be
abolished--but it would be a shame if that was the only insight we gained from
this episode. Applying the same insight to more serious instances of spending
run amok, we'll end up making recommendations like "abolish the Pentagon" or
"abolish the Department of Health and Human Services"--recommendations that are
surely unrealistic and possibly unwise. We'll learn more if we ask questions
like this: Assuming that we're going to have an independent counsel, how can we
adjust his incentives to make him more fiscally responsible? By thinking about
that question, we might learn something about how to encourage fiscal
responsibility more generally.

            Here's an
idea: Make the independent counsel finance his investigations out of his own
pocket. At the same time, reward him handsomely for results, such as
convictions or impeachments. That sets up two good incentives. First, when
there's good reason to suspect provable wrongdoing, the prospective reward
encourages prosecutorial tenacity. Second, when investigations devolve into
nothing more than political or personal harassment, the prospective expense
encourages prosecutors to shut down sooner rather than later.

            There's another advantage to this system. Once the
independent counsels become independent contractors, it will be relatively easy
for legislators to adjust their activity levels. If a prosecutor is too lax,
Congress can either raise the bounty for convictions or subsidize the counsel's
expenses--say, by making him pay only some percentage of those expenses; the
percentage can be fine-tuned at will. If he is too inquisitorial, Congress can
do the opposite. So legislators retain control of the prosecutor's overall
fervor while inducing him to concentrate that fervor where it's most
warranted.

            Similar
schemes might improve the performance of any government agency that has clearly
defined goals. For example, the Food and Drug Administration is charged with
keeping dangerous pharmaceuticals off the market. Here the potential problem is
not so much excessive spending as excessive caution, which creates unwarranted
delays in the introduction of safe and effective new drugs. But that's not a
different problem--it's the same problem in a different guise. Just as a
prosecutor is tempted to overprosecute when he's spending other people's money,
so also is a regulator tempted to overregulate when he's playing with other
people's health. If the problems are fundamentally the same, then so are the
solutions. The regulator, like the prosecutor, should bear the costs of his
actions. One way to accomplish that is to pay FDA officials not in cash but in
pharmaceutical company stock, which ought to introduce an appropriate sense of
urgency to the drug approval process. Unfortunately, it will also discourage
diligence--but we can correct that by levying large fines against the
regulators whenever a deadly drug slips through to the marketplace.

            
The net result could be an FDA approval process
that is either more or less stringent than it is today, at the option of the
legislators who determine the size of the stock grants and the size of the
fines. But either way, it would give regulators an incentive to focus their
attention more precisely on those drugs that are most likely to be
problematic.

            Rewarding
people for good outcomes and punishing them for bad ones is relatively easy
when the quality of the outcomes is easy to measure. But it's harder for
officials with broader portfolios of responsibility. Take the president, for
example. How do we know when the president had done a good job? Should we
reward him for keeping us out of war? What if he keeps us out of war through
policies that make the world more dangerous for our children? Should we reward
him for prosperity? What if that prosperity is a temporary illusion? And who
should decide?

            Only one system of government has ever dealt adequately
with the incentive problem for the chief executive, and that's hereditary
monarchy. When you know that your beloved heirs are going to, in essence, own
the entire country, you tend to take a long-range view of the national
interest. Unfortunately, hereditary monarchy has offsetting drawbacks, which I
assume I don't need to enumerate for the readers of 
                  Slate
               .

            But here's
a way to recover some of the advantages of monarchy while retaining the
advantages of our current system of government. We could pay our presidents
their salaries in land instead of in cash. The price of American land reflects
the value of living in the United States of America. If the president mortgages
our future by weakening defense, the price of land will fall. If he raises
taxes to support "defense" programs that fail to justify their costs, once
again the price of land will fall. So by giving the president a sufficiently
diversified portfolio--some ranch land in Wyoming, a bit of California
coastline, a few blocks in the South Bronx, a hill in Tennessee--we can ensure
that the nation's interests and his personal interests coincide. Whenever the
president makes a bad decision, his pocketbook will surely feel our pain.

            
Here's another way to accomplish the same
thing. Allow the president, upon leaving office, to sell 10,000 U.S.
citizenships to the bidders of his choice. (We can add some side conditions
that prohibit him from dealing with known terrorists and other undesirables.)
If he does a better job, those citizenships will become more valuable, and
he'll get a better price for them.

            Let me close by answering in
advance the question that I know I'll be asked in e-mail, namely, "Are you
really serious?" The answer is no and yes. No, I don't believe that anything
I've said in this 1,000 word column amounts to a detailed policy proposal. But
yes, I believe that incentives matter and that we should seriously entertain
radical proposals for improving them. Even when we ultimately reject those
proposals, we learn something by articulating their flaws. And every now and
then a "crazy" idea stops seeming crazy once you've thought about it hard
enough.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Uninsured-Motorist Fun

            Ten years ago, an economics
professor named Randall Wright resigned from his job at Cornell and drove his
Dodge Daytona Turbo down to Philadelphia to begin teaching at the University of
Pennsylvania. When Professor Wright found out how much Philadelphians pay to
insure their cars, he gave up driving.

            If you
live in Philadelphia, your auto insurance probably costs about three times what
it would in Milwaukee--and more than twice what it would in Seattle.
Philadelphians have traditionally paid more for insurance than their
counterparts in Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland, despite much higher theft
rates in those other cities. This led Wright to ask a question that ultimately
became the provocative title for an article in the prestigious American
Economic Review : "Why is automobile insurance in Philadelphia so damn
expensive?"

            Areasonable first guess is that the answer has little to do
with economics and much to do with the behavior of state regulatory agencies.
But the facts don't support that guess. Pittsburgh is in the same state as
Philadelphia, and Wright could have insured his car in Pittsburgh for less than
half the Philadelphia price, even though Pittsburgh's theft rate was then more
than double Philadelphia's rate. Other states provide equally striking
contrasts: San Jose, Calif., is much cheaper than neighboring San Francisco;
Jacksonville, Fla., is much cheaper than Miami; Kansas City, Mo., is much
cheaper than St. Louis, Mo.

            While
Wright was puzzling over these discrepancies, a Penn graduate student named
Eric Smith was involved in an auto accident. The other driver was at fault, but
he had few assets and no insurance, so Smith had to collect from his own
insurer. That unpleasant experience gave Smith and Wright the insight that led
to a new theory of insurance pricing.

            
In brief, the theory is that uninsured drivers
cause high premiums, and high premiums cause uninsured drivers. In somewhat
more detail, a plethora of uninsured drivers increases the chance that, like
Smith, you'll have to collect from your own insurer even when you're not at
fault. To compensate for that risk, insurers charge higher premiums. But when
premiums are high, more people opt against buying insurance, thereby creating
the plethora of uninsured drivers and completing the vicious circle. Once a
city enters that vicious circle, it can't escape.

            In other
words, insurance rates are driven by self-fulfilling prophecies. If everyone
expects a lot of uninsured drivers, insurers charge high premiums and then many
drivers choose to be uninsured. Conversely, if everyone expects most drivers to
be insured, insurers charge low premiums and then most drivers choose to be
insured. Either outcome is self-reinforcing. A city that falls into either
category (for whatever random reasons) remains there indefinitely.

            So it's possible that modern Philadelphians are paying an
exorbitant price for a brief outbreak of pessimism among their grandparents.
If, for just one brief moment--and contrary to all past
evidence--Philadelphians could believe that insurance rates will fall and their
neighbors will become insured, that belief alone could cause insurance rates to
fall and the neighbors to become insured. And then forever after,
Philadelphia's insurance market might look like Milwaukee's.

            It's not certain that
a burst of optimism would be so richly rewarded; the Milwaukee-style outcome
will be undermined if Philadelphia is home to enough of the "hard-core
uninsured," who are unwilling to insure themselves even at Milwaukee prices.
The Smith-Wright theory predicts that some cities, but not all cities, have the
potential to maintain low insurance premiums in the long run.

            But in
cases where that potential exists, it would be nice to see it realized. One way
to accomplish that is by enforcing mandatory-insurance laws. (Smith and Wright
point out that enacting a mandatory-insurance law, which a majority of
the states have already done, is not the same as enforcing a
mandatory-insurance law, which is nearly unheard of. Moreover, even where the
laws are enforced, minimum liability limits are typically very low, and
probably too low to make much difference.)

            
In theory, mandatory insurance could make life
better for everyone , including those who currently prefer to be
uninsured. Philadelphians who are unwilling to buy insurance for $2,000 might
welcome the opportunity to buy insurance for $500. So if mandatory insurance
yields a dramatic drop in premiums, then both the previously insured and the
newly insured can benefit. (In practice, there will probably be a small segment
of the population-- presumably at the low end of the income distribution--who
will be unhappy about having to buy insurance even at $500. But income-based
insurance subsidies would allow even the poorest of the poor to share the
benefits of lower premiums.)

            For ideological
free-marketeers (like myself), theories like Smith and Wright's can be
intellectually jarring. We are accustomed to defending free markets as the
guarantors of both liberty and prosperity, but here's a case where liberty and
prosperity are at odds: By forcing people to act against their own
self-interest in the short run, governments can make everybody more
prosperous in the long run. (Though some diehard libertarians will object that
the prosperity is an illusion, because governments that have been empowered to
make us more prosperous will inevitably abuse that power to our detriment.)

            Is it worth sacrificing a
small amount of freedom for cheaper auto insurance? I am inclined to believe
that the answer is yes, but the question makes me squirm a bit.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Let the Rabbi Split the Pie

            A man dies, leaving more
debts than assets. How should the estate be divided among his creditors? Two
thousand years ago, the sages of the Babylonian Talmud addressed this question
in a mysterious way--by offering a series of numerical examples with no hint of
the general underlying principle. According to two Israeli scholars, the
reasoning of the ancient rabbis is best understood in the light of modern
economic theory.

            Take a
concrete example. Suppose three creditors are owed $100, $200, and $300,
respectively--a total of $600 in debts--but there is less than $600 to
distribute. Who gets how much? The Talmud (Kethubot 93a) makes the following
prescriptions:

            1) If there is $100 to
distribute, then everyone gets an equal share; that is, everyone gets
$33.33.

            2) If there is $200 to
distribute, then the first creditor gets $50, while the other two get $75
each.

            3) If there is $300 to
distribute, then the first creditor gets $50, the second gets $100, and the
third gets $150. (In this case, the payouts are proportional to the original
claims.)

            Where do these numbers come from, and how should we behave
if there is, say, $400 or $500 to distribute? The Talmud does not tell us. But
certain patterns are evident. Apparently the rabbis reasoned that nobody can
legitimately claim more than the value of the entire estate. Thus when the
estate contains only $100, the claims to $100, $200, and $300 are treated as
equal. When the estate contains only $200, the claims to $200 and $300 are
treated as equal (but superior to the claim of $100).

            Another
clue can be found elsewhere in the Talmud (Baba Metzia 2a): "Two hold a
garment; one claims all, the other claims half. Then the one is awarded 3/4,
the other 1/4." The rabbinical reasoning seems to have gone something like
this: "Both claim half the garment, while only one claims the other half. So
we'll split the disputed half equally and give the undisputed half to its
undisputed owner." Elsewhere in the Talmud, the rabbis apply similar reasoning
to settle a case where one claims all and the other claims a third.

            
Now we've stated two principles: First, claims
cannot exceed 100 percent of the estate, and second, we should follow the
contested-garment rule. With these, we can prescribe the division of any
bankrupt estate, provided there are just two creditors. Here's an example:
Suppose the estate consists of $125, and two creditors claim $100 and $200,
respectively. By the first principle, the $200 claim is immediately reduced to
$125. Now there is $100 in dispute and $25 undisputed. According to the
contested-garment principle, the $100 is divided equally. Therefore the $100
claimant gets $50, and the $125 claimant gets the remaining $75.

            But what
should we do when there are three or more creditors? According to Professors
Robert Aumann and Michael Maschler of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, we
can solve this problem by introducing just one more principle, which they call
consistency . According to the consistency principle, any pair of
creditors must divide their collective share according to the principles we've
already enunciated. To see what consistency means in practice, think again
about a $200 estate, to be divided among creditors who claim $100, $200, and
$300. The Talmud awards $50 to the first and $75 to the second; thus the first
two creditors have a collective share of $125. And this $125 is divided between
them exactly as we prescribed in the preceding paragraph. So the Talmudic
prescription satisfies the consistency principle in this instance. It's not
hard to confirm the same would be true if you started with the first and third
creditors, or the second and third.

            But wait! All we've done is checked that the first two
creditors divided their collective share of $125 appropriately; we haven't
explained why their collective share is $125 in the first place. Aumann and
Maschler have an answer: Any division other than 50-75-125 would be
inconsistent. (That is, with any other division, some pair of creditors would
have its collective share divided incorrectly.) In fact, they have proved more
generally that every bankruptcy problem has exactly one consistent
solution. Once you've found a consistent division, you can be sure that no
other is possible.

            So perhaps
the Talmudists proceeded by trial and error, considering various divisions and
rejecting each one as inconsistent until they hit upon the unique consistent
division of 50-75-125. Or maybe they had a more systematic approach. Systematic
approaches are possible but a bit complicated. Click for an explanation of the
simplest.

            
Whatever method the rabbis used, they appear to
have used it--pardon the pun--consistently. It's not hard to check that
all the Talmudic examples always satisfy the consistency principle. And
the consistency principle gives a complete explanation for each example, in the
sense that, in each case, only one consistent solution is possible, and we can
imagine that the rabbis kept trying until they found it. The consistency
principle is both universally applicable (because a consistent solution can
always be found) and universally unambiguous (because there is never more than
one consistent solution).

            Suppose,
for example, that an estate of $400 is to be divided among creditors who claim
$100, $200, and $300. A consistent solution is to award them $50, $125, and
$225. (Click for help on seeing why this is consistent.) But from Aumann and
Maschler's work, we know that if you've found one consistent solution, you've
found them all. So this is the only division that obeys all the
principles we've stated. Although the ancient rabbis failed to consider this
particular example, Aumann and Maschler express confidence that if they
had considered it, they would have endorsed this unique consistent
solution.

            Why is the consistent solution the right solution? Aumann
and Maschler argue that consistency appeals to our intrinsic sense of fairness.
But, in the Talmudic tradition, if you don't like that argument, Aumann and
Maschler have another.

            Imagine that all the
creditors are put in a room and told to agree among themselves on a division of
the estate; if they can't agree, nobody gets anything. Suppose also that any
creditor who is offered 100 percent of his claim (by a consensus among the
others) is required to accept it and leave the room. What would the bargaining
process look like, and what would the outcome be?

            There is a
branch of economics called "bargaining theory" that attempts to answer such
questions; unfortunately, the answers turn out to depend rather heavily on
auxiliary assumptions. But Aumann and Maschler have proved that in the case of
the bankruptcy negotiation, it follows from reasonable assumptions that the
creditors would eventually agree to divide the estate in accordance with the
consistency principle. Thus, according to Aumann and Maschler, all the Talmudic
prescriptions coincide with what the creditors themselves would have agreed to,
given appropriate bargaining rules and sufficient time.

            
               If you missed the
systematic way to solve the bankruptcy problem, click . If you'd like to review
why the $50, $125, and $225 distribution of the $400 estate is consistent,
.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Stolen Dream

            It's a common debating
tactic to assert that some respected figure of the past would endorse your
position on some controversy of the present. There is little doubt that the
originals would find the views attributed to them surprising sometimes. Abraham
Lincoln, for example, has been claimed as a forbear by everyone from Communists
to Dixiecrats. Lately, opponents of affirmative action have donned the mantle
of the civil-rights movement, claiming direct descent from Martin Luther King
Jr. The idea, presumably, is to insulate themselves against charges of racism
even as they pursue policies certain to prove detrimental to large numbers of
blacks.

            To
achieve this feat, they define King as a champion of "colorblind laws," and
reduce the civil-rights movement to an effort to end the classification of
citizens by race. In this way, programs that take race into account can be
demonized as violations of King's memory. Proponents of the ingeniously named
California Civil Rights Initiative, which would forbid all state government
affirmative-action policies, routinely invoke the sentence from King's "I Have
a Dream" speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged not by
the "color of their skin" but by "the content of their character." Calling for
the abolition of affirmative action in his book, The End of Racism:
Principles for a Multicultural Society , Dinesh D'Souza claims to be
following in King's footsteps even though he advocates repealing the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, one of King's crowning achievements.

            Ahigh or low point in this invention of a usable King came
in May. Clint Bolick, a prominent Washington conservative and frequent
spokesperson for the anti-affirmative action view, used the centenary of the
Supreme Court's Plessy vs. Ferguson decision (which upheld racial
segregation) to argue that since segregation was a system of "racial
classification," affirmative action is its modern equivalent. Thus, in Bolick's
view, opponents, not proponents, of affirmative action are King's legitimate
heirs.

            But the
revisionists are quite wrong. His writing and actions make it clear that Martin
Luther King Jr. was a strong supporter of what today would be called
"affirmative action." The phrase itself was not widely used during his
lifetime, but King spoke repeatedly of granting blacks special preferences in
jobs and education to compensate for past discrimination.

            In Why We Can't Wait , published in 1963 as the
movement to dismantle segregation reached its peak, King observed that many
white supporters of civil rights "recoil in horror" from suggestions that
blacks deserved not merely colorblind equality but "compensatory
consideration." But, he pointed out, "special measures for the deprived" were a
well-established principle of American politics. The GI Bill of Rights offered
all sorts of privileges to veterans. Blacks, given their long "siege of
denial," were even more deserving than soldiers of "special, compensatory
measures."

            King
said much the same thing in his last book. Where Do We Go From Here was
published in 1967, and in the intervening four years, King's optimism had given
way to foreboding prompted by the emergence of a white backlash and the
realization that combating the economic plight of black America would prove far
more difficult than eliminating segregation. He called for a series of
programs, including full employment and a guaranteed annual income, to uplift
the poor of all races. But he saw no contradiction between measures aimed at
fighting poverty in general and others that accorded blacks "special treatment"
because of the unique injustices they had suffered. "A society that has done
something special against the Negro for hundreds of years," he wrote,
"must now do something special for him."

            Throughout the 1960s, King targeted both economic and
racial inequality. His policy proposals embraced a variety of approaches, from
colorblind assaults on poverty to demands, such as setting specific goals for
the employment of blacks by private companies, that today would be called
"racial quotas."

            In one sense, what King
believed has little bearing on the 1990s. The civil-rights era has long passed,
and affirmative action must be defended or attacked on its merits. King aside,
what is most striking in current discussions of civil rights, race, and
affirmative action is the absence of any sense of history. Segregation was not
simply a matter of racial classification (or "thinking by race," as Justice
Antonin Scalia has written) but part of a complex system of racial
subordination whose political, economic, and social elements all reinforced one
another. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was not colorblind laws but
"Jobs and Freedom," and the movement's ultimate goal, King insisted, was to
"make freedom real and substantive" for black Americans by absorbing them "into
the mainstream of American life."

            This goal remains as
elusive today as it was during King's lifetime. King's real heirs are those
who, like him, see affirmative action not as a panacea or an end in itself, but
as one of many ways to reduce the gap between blacks and the rest of American
society bequeathed to us by history.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Trumpet Voluntary

            "Business as usual no longer
is enough," explains a press
release for the big Volunteer Summit (officially, "The Presidents' Summit
for America's Future") from April 27 to April 29. Of course business as usual
has never been enough and never will be. The concept exists only for the
purpose of being declared insufficient.

            Orgies of
high-mindedness like the Volunteer Summit--four presidents, Colin Powell, the
networks, celebrities, corporations, foundations, all huffing and puffing in
Philadelphia--are a cheap target for knee-jerk iconoclasm. In our culture,
attitude is easy and sincerity is hard. Newsweek 's cover story is so
defensive about endorsing the summit and its goal--encouraging voluntarism to
help (who else?) children--that you want to reach out, pat the author, and say:
"There, there. It's OK to want to help children." By contrast, recycling
the conceit of Swift's Modest Proposal (to eat children) would be
embarrassment-free.

            So let us stipulate that everyone involved in the Volunteer
Summit means well. President Clinton isn't triangulating. Colin Powell isn't
running. The ex-presidents aren't looking for attention. The corporations
aren't looking for a PR fix. Let us stipulate, furthermore, that a little bit
of good can outweigh a lot of bullshit, and the summit probably nets out as a
Good Thing. But let us also consider the summit's philosophy. Distilled from
all the hot air, this philosophy has two components: 1) American society should
pressure its citizens to do more good works, for children and in general. That
social pressure should be a cooperative project of government, employers, and
the media. 2) Those good works should involve active personal
participation--not just giving money.

            Why, to
start, is it obviously better to give your time than your money? This notion
contradicts one of the basic principles of free-market economics: the division
and specialization of labor. Take an extreme example: a successful
businesswoman earning $250,000 a year. That's about $100 an hour. If her
company thinks she's worth what she's being paid, why should it encourage her
to devote several hours a week to, say, working in a soup kitchen, when others
would gladly--gratefully--do that work for far less? Why shouldn't she work a
few more hours doing what she does best, and let the company turn the proceeds
over to the soup kitchen? Or, more realistically, why shouldn't she write a
large check and not feel guilty about it? Would the soup kitchen really prefer
an hour of this woman's time to $100 cash?

            
Something like tutoring a high-school student
obviously requires more valuable skills than serving soup does. But is it
compassion or arrogance for our executive to assume that her tutoring is worth
$100 an hour? Because that is exactly what she is assuming when she gives her
time instead of writing a check. True, the emphasis of the moment seems to be
less on specific services than on a kind of semi-adoption--"mentoring" troubled
kids, acting as a role model, and so on--and this kind of service is hard to
buy. But she has to be pretty confident in her mentoring skills to believe that
they're worth more than what $100 an hour could buy for a kid (not gym shoes
but professional tutoring and counseling, health care, etc.).

            Of
course, this assumes that our executive actually does write that contribution
check, and that she writes it to the soup kitchen or tutoring program and not
to her alma mater for a new science lab. It also ignores the potential benefits
to her of personal involvement in good works. She might quite reasonably
prefer spending a few hours a week tutoring a high-school kid, to spending them
poring over spreadsheets in her office. She might enjoy the moral
frisson . To be less unkind, she might well be truly morally enriched by
the experience. All of which is fine. But it is not cost-free. If she works in
the soup kitchen rather than donating the cash value of her time, this means
people are going hungry so that she can be morally uplifted. A strange moral
calculus.

            Gen. Powell and the Three Tenors--I mean the Four
Presidents--insist that the volunteer ethic is not supposed to be a replacement
for the government's role. Clinton, in particular, loves this sort of thing as
a way of achieving a national goal without costing taxpayers any money. But
logically, something either is an obligation of society or it isn't. And if it
is being left to voluntarism, that obligation is not being fully met. (That's
why each volunteer "makes a difference," as we are constantly being told.)
Perhaps this or that function cannot or should not be provided by the
government. But to say it is a social obligation that ought to be satisfied
through voluntarism is to have it both ways. Society accepts the
responsibility--and takes the credit--rhetorically, while evading the
responsibility in practice.

            When society's leading
elements--government, business, media, and so on--all start singing in unison,
it's not a pleasing noise. The summit itself is an example of the summit's
philosophy about how things ought to work: identical and mutually reinforcing
messages from your senator, your employer, your TV anchorman, your minister,
your cereal box, your FedEx delivery man ... all urging you to sign up and save
the country. Basically this is the propaganda machinery of war being revved up
in peacetime, which is one reason the rhetoric is so overheated and so full of
martial metaphors. Festivities like the Volunteer Summit address a national
psychological need--for the rhetoric and rallying-round of wartime--as much as
they do the practical problem that is their alleged subject. And the premise
that you must give of your body, not just of your money, makes voluntarism an
ideal theme for such an exercise.

            It's both comic and eerie to
see how easily the free press of a free country can be co-opted into these
pseudowars. (For another recent example, see Jacob Weisberg's recent column
about ABC and the war on drugs.) Offer them an interview with Colin
Powell, and they lose all critical perspective. In fact, a full-page newspaper
ad detailing NBC's abject surrender to the hijacking of all its news shows
touts two different interviews with the former general. One of them is
breathlessly but illogically labeled an "exclusive."

            Business as usual.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Theatrical Indecision

            With the opening of another
Broadway season imminent, you might be wondering about the health of American
theater. Is Broadway dying or thriving? Does Disney's new 42 nd
Street playhouse portend good things or bad things for the Great White Way?
Will extravagant productions funded by the megalomaniac Canadian mogul Garth
Drabinsky revitalize or destroy the American musical? Whither serious drama?
According to the New York Times , the answer to these questions is
yes.

            In the
Times ' pages, Broadway has died a thousand deaths and prospered in a
thousand booms. No season has ever been plain average. Consider this classic
example: a 1981 story by Carol Lawson headlined "Theater Enjoys Biggest Boom in
Years." The same author assesses the 1982 season: "Broadway Is in its Worst
Slump in a Decade."

            Plotting a trajectory of Times headlines from the
last five years, you begin to suspect that Broadway is mechanically acting out
some dialectical process that dooms it to fall on its face every other year.
1992: "On Broadway, the Lights Get Brighter." 1993: "Broadway Blues." 1994: "On
Broadway, the Numbers Are on the Rise." 1995: "Entertainment Is Killing
Broadway." 1996: "A Hit Season for Broadway: Seems Like Old Times With Influx
of Theatergoers." 1997: "Despite the Broadway Boom, Serious Plays Face Serious
Peril."

            
Compounding the confusion caused by these historical fluctuations are
contradictory assessments of Broadway's condition at any given moment. Take
Margo Jefferson's "Good Reasons to Have Faith in the Theater" (May 5, 1996) and
Robert Brustein's "The End of Broadway's Run" (April 8, 1996). Or Glenn
Collins' "Broadway Pays Big Dividends" (Feb. 17, 1994) and Bruce Weber's "Make
Money on Broadway? Break a Leg" (June 3, 1993).

            
The Times is torn constantly between
touting and panicking. It takes very little to set off alarms. In 1993, when
the Tony-winning Jelly's Last Jam announced that it had failed to recoup
investors' money, the paper editorialized, "The Great White Way is ailing." In
1995, the cause for concern was the opening of Edward Albee and Terrence
McNally plays off-Broadway: "Some of the most beautiful theaters in the world
are on the brink of permanent obsolescence."

            It is not
just a matter of theatrical exaggeration. Reporters and critics have a
deep-seated anxiety about the future of this institution they write about. A
LEXIS-NEXIS search shows that the metaphor of Broadway as an "endangered
species" has been reprised eight times since 1989 in the headline or lead
paragraph of an arts-section piece. Last year a Times 
               Magazine
piece titled "Broadway Is Dead; Long Live Broadway" excerpted quotes from the
paper's greatest drama critics--such as Walter Kerr and Frank Rich. Apparently,
for most of this century, theater's biggest boosters have been convinced that
they were celebrating an antiquated institution long displaced by movies and
television. In 1953, Brooks Atkinson wrote: "As usual, the theater is dying.
... From an economic point of view, the legitimate theater is like its
buildings: it is obsolete." This anxiety colors these critics' assessment of
Broadway's prospects. Any evidence of Broadway's prosperity is instantly and
optimistically greeted as a potential watershed, an end to the perpetual
crisis. All negative data merely exacerbate the fatalism.

            To be fair, it is possible to argue with logical
consistency that Broadway is simultaneously booming and busting. For instance,
the line adopted in several recent Times pieces is that while
extravagant musicals can score funding and bring in huge crowds of tourists,
serious plays using experimental techniques and tackling risqué subjects
languish. In other words, Broadway is thriving as a business but dying as an
art form. But wait. Maybe it's thriving as an art form but dying as a business.
When Rich celebrated the 1992 season, he qualified his enthusiasm for the shows
by adding, "As a business Broadway remains, more unhealthily and nervously than
ever, the oldest floating crap game in New York."

            Whatever.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            AIDS Isn't Over

            Ever since it was announced
at a 1984 press conference that HIV was the cause of the immune-system mayhem
known as AIDS, seers have periodically predicted that the end of the epidemic
was near. But the trumpets have grown louder in recent weeks, as the success of
the "triple-combo therapy" of protease inhibitors, AZT, and 3TC has been
recorded.

            
Popularizing these findings earlier this month were two HIV-positive
journalists. Writing on the front page of the Nov. 8 Wall Street
Journal , editor David Sanford described how new anti-HIV treatments had
rescued him from death's door ("Last Year, This Editor Wrote His Own
Obituary"). Two days later, Andrew Sullivan published his 8,400-word literary
tour de force, "When AIDS Ends," in the New York Times Magazine .
According to Sullivan, the success of new anti-HIV drugs has triggered the
"twilight of an epidemic"--for those who can afford the $10,000-plus-a-year
regimens. A diagnosis of HIV infection, he contends, "no longer signifies
death," but "merely signifies illness."

            Study after study has shown that in many patients, the
triple-combo therapy so dramatically reduces the amount of HIV found in
blood--their viral loads--that the most sensitive tests available cannot detect
the virus. An "undetectable" viral load is not the same as being free of HIV,
but many researchers believe that less virus equals less damage to the immune
system. For certain, the new treatments are having a visible effect on the
health of the HIV-infected, as David Sanford's Lazarus-like turnaround attests.
Some AIDS researchers, encouraged by the early results with triple-combo
therapy, are investigating whether it's possible to completely clear--"or
eradicate"--HIV from the bodies of people who begin treatment shortly after
becoming infected.

            Given
their personal struggles against AIDS, Sanford and Sullivan's exhilaration at
this news is understandable. But their celebrations are premature--the defeat
of AIDS is completely overstated. HIV still poses a sobering list of scientific
unknowns, which the optimists dismiss far too quickly. With all best wishes to
Sanford, it's foolhardy for him to say, "I've survived this scourge," and that
because of the advent of protease inhibitors, "I am probably more likely to be
hit by a truck than to die of AIDS." Sullivan's more daring pronouncement that
"this ordeal as a whole may be over" is likely to mislead sick people in need
of hope. And the argument that AIDS is conquered may also lend a sharper ax to
the legislators who perennially argue to cut the AIDS-research budget.

            
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical
about the power of these new treatments. There are scant data to explain how
long these new treatments will prevent disease and extend life--no formal
studies have been completed that compare hundreds of treated people with
hundreds of untreated people. Another downside to the drugs is that they often
make people feel nauseated and can have serious toxicities. In some people,
these drugs only work for a short time; in others, the drugs make HIV
undetectable, but their immune systems are too damaged to rebound. HIV remains
a stealthy foe: It can take refuge in body tissues (as opposed to blood), where
the drugs have a harder time reaching. And the virus routinely mutates into
strains that are resistant to every drug that has proven effective against
it.

            Sullivan's article notes
these depressing findings alongside his good news. But there is plenty of bad
news that he doesn't report. The lymph nodes (and other sites in the body) can
be packed with HIV even when the virus is undetectable in the blood. At last
summer's international AIDS conference, researchers described a patient who had
been treated for 78 weeks with a combination of drugs, and in whom they could
detect no virus. When he stopped taking his medicine, high levels of HIV
returned in a week. An AIDS researcher told me last week of four patients who
recently died from AIDS, even though their viral loads had become undetectable
with the new drug treatments. Just because you drive a viral load to the point
where it can't be detected doesn't mean the immune system returns to normal.
There are also the practical obstacles to AIDS optimism. Taking two dozen or
more pills a day, on a schedule, is a daunting task to carry out for years on
end. Missed pills lower the potency of the treatment, opening the way to
drug-resistant HIV mutants.

            HIV has a
long history of laughing last.

            I'm not a defeatist, mind you. Measured optimism is
warranted. Although the vast majority of HIV-infected people in the world
cannot afford these new treatments, for those who can, the drugs will possibly
stave off disease and death. But, because no one knows whether these new leases
on life should be measured in weeks, months, years, or decades, balancing
optimism and pessimism requires a delicate touch.

            Consider
the history of the drug AZT, which has seesawed in the public perception from
panacea to poison and back again. When first approved by the FDA in 1987, AZT
was hailed as a godsend. Then it was denounced as ineffective by activists,
after larger studies showed that, when taken alone, the drug offered little
except to the sickest people. Worse yet, many HIV-infected people viewed the
drug as a worthless poison being hawked by researchers who were on the take
from a greedy pharmaceutical company. Today, AZT is seen as a mediocre but
useful medicine: It has a place in the triple-combo therapy, and it can prevent
the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their babies two-thirds of the
time.

            
From here, many HIV researchers are putting
their hopes on combining drug treatments with strategies that boost the immune
system. For just one example, triple-combo therapy is now being tested in
conjunction with interleukin-2, an immune-system messenger that theoretically
can help rev up the natural machinery that clears the virus from the body.

            But the real hope for ending
the AIDS epidemic is not expensive drug therapies. Never in the annals of
medicine has a viral plague been stopped by any therapy. Viral plagues such as
smallpox, polio, measles, hepatitis B, rabies, and other once-terrifying
scourges have only been beaten back by vaccines. It is most perplexing then,
that Sullivan, who is writing about the end of an epidemic, after all, never
mentions the word "vaccine" in his article. That's because his true focus isn't
the end of the epidemic, but lengthening the lives of the already infected.

            The search for an AIDS
vaccine currently needs serious help, with the U.S. government, the biggest
investor in the effort, spending less than 10 percent of its AIDS-research
budget on the problem. And, primarily because of the daunting scientific
obstacles, woefully few companies have an aggressive AIDS-vaccine program.

            So roll
up the red carpet, send the band home, and recork the champagne. These rumors
of AIDS survival are greatly exaggerated.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dollars and Incense

            I was prodded into the
free-lance-writer business by the Oct. 19, 1987, stock-market crash. Having
been employed as a writer at a major media conglomerate for many moons, I had
collected a substantial stake in the company's profit-sharing plan. So when the
Dow fell 508 points that day and my stake shrank by over 20 percent, I was
hysterical. But then I discovered something quite amazing about my
profit-sharing plan. Its rules stated that when you left the company's employ,
your share got paid out at the values in effect at the end of the preceding
month . In other words, if I retired by Oct. 31, 1987, my payoff would be at
Sept. 30 prices. Dazzled by this magical opportunity to sell at pre-crash
prices, I negotiated a contract with my bosses to continue scribbling on a
free-lance basis, and on Nov. 1, I became a "vendor" of various editorial
materials.

            The first
thing a fellow notices after attaining vendor status is that it is harder to
get paid in a timely fashion. As a writer-employee, I had had my paychecks
deposited instantly and automatically in my bank account. When I became a
contract writer, I got paid only after somebody--initially it was a secretary
in the business department--put in a requisition for my pay. This seemed odd
and unnecessarily complicated, since my new contract called for me to receive
the same amount every month, on the first of the month. It seemed doubly odd
when months came where the secretary forgot to put the requisition through. Or,
alternatively, where the secretary put the req through but then couldn't
remember whether the blessed event had taken place.

            To be fair, there was only one "did-we-pay-you-this-month?"
call. But my diary shows endless fretting and nagging on my part as the sixth
or the seventh or the 12 th of the month arrived and the check did
not. The situation improved only marginally when the monthly requisitions
ceased and my payment problems were essentially turned over to the corporate
Accounts Payable department. The payments were still generally late, and once,
not having been paid as of the 12 th , I made the unsettling discovery
that I had somehow mysteriously dropped out of the AP payment program
altogether. In the summer of 1989, apparently responding to my endless
lamentations about late payments, AP started paying me ahead of time, i.e., a
few days before the first of the month. This was naturally fine with me until I
realized, late in December, that I was now in danger of getting a federal form
1099 showing 13 monthly payments and requiring more taxes sooner. So I
complained about this prospect, and before long we were back to the default
situation: chronic late payment. I do not believe--or at least cannot
prove--that this signifies a cash-management play-the-float strategy by senior
accounting executives. And yet, there is this nagging question: Would Accounts
Receivable be as relaxed as Accounts Payable plainly is about money regularly
changing hands a week or more later than had been contractually specified?

            Speaking
of form 1099, I have still not decided what to do about the one I got some
weeks back from Slate. I had yearned to write for this online journal, and was
delighted last fall when editor Michael Kinsley gave me a shot at an article.
It was about the huge losses taken by the Nevada bookmakers on the Holyfield-Tyson fight,
and I was delighted all over again when the article was "posted" Nov. 22, only
seven days after I had taken on the assignment. How fast it all goes online!
What a marvelous contrast to the slowpoke print media! Except for Microsoft's
payment, which arrived on Jan. 2, 1997, in an envelope bearing a Dec. 28, 1996,
postmark. The case law says, plain as day, that this is "constructive receipt"
in 1997, and the question I face is whether a sane person should fight to
uphold this principle after the Microsoft business-side characters have
nonchalantly stuck him with a form 1099 showing those earnings as 1996
income.

            
Free-lance writers must also deal with a lot of
paperwork and printed forms plainly designed with other kinds of vendors in
mind. These other vendors are not guys sitting alone at home writing articles.
They are real companies, with legal departments and human-resources
departments. And they are equipped to answer questions about the possibility
that the enterprise is a "small business concern" as defined by Section 3 of
the Small Business Act--to mention only one of many thorny issues raised in a
five-page form that landed on my desk several weeks ago.

            Leading
up to its arrival was a telephone query from an editor of a financial journal
that had recently published some of my thoughts on the stock market: "Did we
ever send you the paperwork we need so we can pay you?" Naively assuming that
this would be a request for my mailing address and Social Security number, I
volunteered to provide this information right then and there, on the phone. But
no, the publisher of the financial journal--again, it was a huge Fortune 500
company--needed to know much, much more about me. A special toughie was the
request for my "Dun & Bradstreet SIC number." I assumed at first that this
was some variant of the "principal business or professional activity code" that
free-lancers are required to enter on federal Schedule C (where you report
"business profits").

            Like thousands of others in my line of work, every year at
tax time I wrestle with the issue of which four-digit number to write in on
this schedule, the instructions for which mention a huge number of
self-employment scenarios, none of them envisioning a guy creating copy in his
den. Generally, I have ended up choosing No. 7880, meaning that I provide
"other business services," which leaves me feeling somewhat marginalized but
looks as though it would at least be defensible in a showdown with the IRS. But
that was my four-digit code. The D&B codes, as I ascertained after
extensive cruising around on the Internet, had eight or (in some accounts) nine
digits and provided much more detailed information about one's place in the
economy. But how to find out one's number? Instructions that came with the form
counseled checking with "your tax department" or--an even less realistic option
for a fellow needing to get some work done--the local office of the Small
Business Administration. In the end, I brazenly sent the form back without any
D&B code, and one of these days I hope to get paid for my musings on the
market.

            As a New York City resident,
I get to pay city income taxes twice. It's incredible, and it works this way.
The 1099s one garners during the year are of course cumulated and reported on
federal Schedule C, then carried over to New York state form IT-201, which
takes you through the state and then the city income-tax calculations. The
combined marginal rate for the state and city taxes was recently running around
11 percent, which is bad enough. But when you have paid it all, the New York
City Department of Taxation and Finance taps you on a figurative shoulder,
reminds you that the city also has an Unincorporated Business Tax, and states
firmly that free-lance writers gotta pay this too. The UBT covers the same
earned income paid to the city on form IT-201, and this time around, the bill
comes to a flat 4 percent (after $10,000 of deductions and exemptions).

            Not one employed journalist
in 100 has even heard of this ghastly double dip or experienced the surge of
fury I felt when I called up the Authors' League in 1987 to ask why they
weren't screaming about it. The woman I spoke to coolly asked how much I made
as a writer, judged the amount too high to warrant condolences, and said I
should be glad to pay my share. She was obviously not a vendor.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Wealthier Than Thou

            What do people really care
about: being rich, or being richer than their neighbors?

            Of course, people care about
a lot of things that have nothing to do with being rich. Just by logging on to
Slate instead of using this time to earn an extra dollar, you've refuted the
proposition that people pursue wealth the way sharks pursue food. Instead, we
compromise between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of leisure, sometimes
accepting less of one so we can have more of the other.

            Besides
wealth and leisure, there's a long list of other things we value. We like to
avoid risk; we care about the qualities of our mates; we want our children to
be happy. But wealth is one of the things we strive for, so it makes
sense to ask how we measure success in that dimension.

            One hypothesis is that it's only your raw wealth that
matters--a million dollars will make you happy regardless of whether it's half
or twice what your neighbor has. In other words, you measure the value of your
wealth by what you can buy with it. The alternative hypothesis is that you also
care about your place in the pecking order.

            If only raw wealth matters,
your hard-working neighbor is no threat to you. He keeps what he earns, you
keep what you earn, and you can each decide whether you'd rather earn more
money or enjoy more leisure. On the other hand, if people care about the
pecking order, you and your neighbor can get involved in a costly and futile
"arms race," sacrificing valuable leisure in your mutually frustrating efforts
to be the top earner on the block.

            To put
this in perspective, imagine that we could all agree to take an hour off from
work this week. Under the "raw wealth" hypothesis, there's no advantage to that
agreement. After all, you were always free to take an hour off. But
under the "pecking order" hypothesis, the agreement could serve as a sort of
"arms control" that leaves everyone better off by preserving our relative
positions while freeing up some extra time for leisure. But any such agreement
would be impossible to enforce, which (if the "pecking order" hypothesis is
true) is a failure of the marketplace.

            
Which hypothesis is true? Economists
traditionally have assumed that relative position does not matter, and
noneconomists traditionally have scoffed at that assumption. The scoffers point
to medieval monarchs who earned less (in real terms) than today's average
American; nevertheless, by the standards of their contemporaries, they
lived--literally--like kings. It's easy to imagine that ruling all of
15 th -century England brought greater satisfaction than does, say,
the life of a modern certified public accountant.

            But when
something is easy to imagine, it's often because your imagination is limited.
In this case, your vision probably has neglected to include the disease,
monotony, and isolation of medieval life. I think it not at all unlikely that
Henry V would have traded his kingdom for modern plumbing, antibiotics, and
access to the Internet.

            Here's another reason to be skeptical of the hypothesis
that people care deeply about how their income compares with others': I've
never met anyone who subscribes to the analogous theories about leisure or
risk. Do you care about the length of your vacation, or about whether your
vacation is longer than your neighbor's? Do you care about how well your air
bag works, or about whether you've got the best air bag in your neighborhood?
In each case, surely it's the former. But if we feel that way about leisure and
risk, why would we not feel that way about income?

            On the
other hand, if you really believe that people care about wealth only for what
it will buy them, it's hard to explain why Bill Gates gets up and goes to work
in the morning. Surely it's not because he's afraid he'll run out of money? But
it just might be because he's afraid he'll lose his No. 1 ranking in the Forbes
400. (Though here I'm tempted to respond that it's a mistake to generalize
about human behavior on the basis of a few extraordinary individuals who
probably--and quite atypically--love their work.)

            
Recently, three economists named Harold Cole,
George Mailath, and Andrew Postlewaite (for whom I will use the collective
abbreviation CMP) have proposed a compromise between the two theories: On the
one hand, people do not care directly about their relative positions in
the wealth distribution. On the other hand, they care indirectly about
their relative positions, because a high relative position allows you to
attract a better mate.

            The CMP theory sounds very
simple, but it has some remarkable implications. First, it implies that the
competition for mates drives most people to save too much money. Young people
oversave in an attempt to improve their own prospects, and old people
oversave in an attempt to improve their children's prospects. If
everyone could agree to save a little less, we'd all be better off: Our
relative mating-game scores would be unchanged, but we'd all have more money to
spend. And yet, while this "oversaving" is costly to any given generation, it
enriches future generations.

            When
people compete by saving, the rich have a head start. So the CMP theory
suggests that income inequality should grow over time. But if inequality
becomes so great that people lose all hope of changing their relative
positions, then the incentive to oversave disappears, and the inequality could
begin to shrink.

            The most striking implication of the CMP theory is that the
concern for relative position vanishes in societies where mates are allocated
by mechanisms other than wealth. Imagine an aristocracy, where your social
status is inherited from your parents and dictates your choice of mate. Such an
aristocracy might not be sustainable. People with low status and high wealth
can prove attractive to people with high status and low wealth, whereupon the
entire social structure disintegrates. Even families with low status and
low wealth might be able to save aggressively for several generations in
order to buy their way into the aristocracy, and again there is an eventual
breakdown.

            But the
CMP researchers have identified a way for an aristocracy to be sustained
indefinitely. Mixed (high status-low status) marriages can be effectively
deterred in a society where the children of such marriages are relegated to the
lowest status of all. In that case, a low-status man who wants to crack the
social barriers (and who cares about his offspring) must save enough to
purchase high-status mates for both himself and his children. CMP have
demonstrated that to succeed, such social rebels would have to achieve
impossibly high savings rates--so the aristocracy endures.

            
Now here is the punch line: Imagine two
societies that are identical in all the ways that economists traditionally view
as important. They have identical populations. They have access to identical
technologies. Their people have exactly the same preferences in all things. But
in Society A, you attract your mate by wealth, and in Society B, you attract
your mate by inherited status. Then the standards of living in these societies
will differ dramatically and diverge dramatically over time, because they offer
different incentives to save--and saving is one of the twin engines of economic
growth. (The other engine is technological progress, which we've assumed is the
same in both societies.)

            The moral of the story is
that cultural norms are extremely important. Of course, one could argue that
everyone except economists knew this all along. But the CMP research
demonstrates something genuinely new: that cultural norms can be extremely
important even if we accept all the standard simplifying assumptions
that economists like to make about human behavior.

            We can go further, imagining
societies where status is conferred not by accidents of birth but by learning,
or by physical strength, or by darkness of complexion. Clearly any one of these
societies will evolve very differently from all the others. But what makes them
differ in the first place? Part of the answer, according to the logic of CMP,
is that once a cultural norm is established--even for purely random reasons--it
can become self-sustaining. Ideally, though, we'd like a coherent account of
those "purely random reasons"--and I'm not sure anyone knows how to think about
that.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Marriage Contract

            Premarital agreements are
rare. This observation used to dismay the late Nobel laureate George Stigler:
He maintained that the grand institution of matrimony is demeaned by those who
can't be bothered to negotiate its details.

            A
marriage is a contract. You can write that contract yourself (in which case
it's called a "premarital agreement"), or you can accept the default contract
written by your state legislators. Now comes the state of Louisiana, determined
to expand its citizens' options. Henceforth, Louisianians will be able to
choose between two prefabricated contracts, each with very different
provisions for divorce. The first option is similar to the no-fault contract
that is standard in other states. The second--the so-called "covenant
marriage"--makes divorce far more difficult.

            Even if you never divorce, your choice among contracts can
affect the entire course of your marriage. That's because the
possibility of divorce alters your incentives to keep your spouse happy
(and vice versa). Of course, you might want to keep your spouse happy for other
reasons, the most notable of which is love. Sometimes, love is all you need.
But because we're talking about divorce law, I want to focus on cases where
love is not enough--and in those cases, to ask which contract provides the best
incentive for good marital behavior. The answer may not be what you think.

            While
we're at it, let's compare three kinds of marriage: a no-fault contract
(where either party can obtain a divorce on demand), a mutual-consent contract
(where both parties must agree to a divorce), and a covenant marriage (where
even mutual consent is not enough). You might think that no-fault marriages are
always the most likely to end in divorce. That isn't true, and here's one
reason why: A lot of marital issues are negotiable--like who should do the
dishes, who gets to operate the remote control, which one wears the anti-snore
device and which one wears the earplugs, and so on. Here the negotiating
process itself provides all the right incentives to respect your spouse's
needs. What you won't do for love, you'll still do for a bribe. And those
things you won't do even for a bribe are, presumably, sufficiently distasteful
that you shouldn't do them.

            
Bribery works equally well under no-fault and
mutual consent (though the choice of contract alters the balance of power and
therefore might alter the size of the bribes). Under either system, the
marriage survives as long as it's possible to keep both partners happier
together than they would be apart. Therefore, the two systems produce the same
number of divorces. (If you're not convinced by that argument--which is a
special case of a general principle that economists call the Coase theorem,
click for an illustrative numerical example.)

            On the
other hand, if you're in a covenant marriage--where you can't get a divorce
even by mutual consent--divorce might be impossible even when the marriage
turns bad for both of you. If we assume that all marital conflicts are
negotiable, the covenant marriage has no offsetting advantages: It keeps
couples together only in those cases where they'd both be happier apart.

            The analysis changes if there are important decisions that
can't be negotiated, like the decision whether to bring home a surprise
bouquet of flowers. Chronic thoughtlessness on such matters can cause a
marriage to deteriorate. The knowledge that divorce is impossible might make
you strive harder to avoid such deterioration--and it might do the same for
your spouse. In that sense, a covenant marriage is like the old nuclear-war
Doomsday Machine: You are each on notice that you'd better work hard to
preserve a good marriage, or you'll both be forced to live your lives in a bad
one. Doomsday Machines can be very effective. But sometimes they blow up. So
the covenant marriage is a mixed blessing.

            It's the
issues you can't negotiate that make the covenant marriage worth considering.
But that same inability can make no-fault marriages the strongest of all. In a
no-fault marriage, a happy spouse will treat you well to prevent your leaving.
That gives you an incentive to keep your spouse happy. And this process feeds
on itself: Your spouse works to make you happy, which makes you want to
preserve the marriage, which makes you work to make your spouse happy, which
makes your spouse want to preserve the marriage, and so on, in a great virtuous
circle.

            
By contrast, if divorce required mutual
consent, your spouse could accept your efforts to make him or her happy without
feeling a strong need to reciprocate. This prospect discourages you from
bearing gifts in the first place. But when either partner has the power to end
the marriage, kindness tends to be repaid with kindness, and therefore kindness
thrives. Notice, once again, that this analysis applies only to surprise
efforts. Efforts that are negotiated in advance can be negotiated equally well
under any contract.

            So here is the bottom line:
When marital issues are negotiable, we are in the domain of the Coase theorem,
where no-fault and mutual consent do equally well and where covenant marriage
is always a mistake. But when important issues can't be negotiated, both the
covenant marriage and the no-fault contract become more attractive, for
different reasons.

            This analysis is far from
exhaustive, and I know from much recent experience that Slate readers will
forcefully call my attention to scenarios I've failed to consider. Let me
pre-empt them and go a step further by pointing out a basic question I've
ignored: How does a change in the marriage contract affect a couple's decision
about whether to get married in the first place? There's a lot of interesting
economics in that question, and if I manage to sort it out, I'll let you
know.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            My Thoughts Exactly

            Last year I published a
book, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism,
precisely when people were inclined to think my central idea was crazy. The
thesis was that the U.S. environment is not declining but improving, and that
this demonstrates that federal health and safety regulations really work. But
the book appeared just as Newt Gingrich seemed poised to repeal the 20th
century and public opinion was retreating to the view that nature is doomed.
This year, though, Newt crashed and burned, while liberalism has grown eager
for arguments that government provides genuine benefits. Suddenly, my
hypothesis is catching on.

            In April 1995,
environmentalist Jessica Mathews torched A Moment on the Earth on the
Washington Post op-ed page. Mathews called me a dope for saying the U.S.
environment is recovering. She rejected my contention that ecological
initiatives represent "the leading postwar triumph for American government,"
and slammed me for using the word "success" to describe environmental
regulation. But last month, writing again for the Post , Mathews
rhapsodized about the marvelous U.S. ecological recovery. She called reduction
of pollution "government's one resounding success of the last 25 years." Her
repeated use of that word--"success"--was especially galling.

            The
column was so amazingly familiar I had to check the byline to see if I'd
sleep-written it. Could this possibly be the same Jessica Mathews who had
debated me on Charlie Rose last year, scowling as she told viewers
environmental optimism was an appalling notion? This must be the next frontier
in stealing ideas, I thought: Discredit someone, then write the same thing
yourself as if you'd thought of it. Then I cheered up a bit. A Moment on the
Earth predicts, "Soon we're all going to be environmental optimists." Could
I actually have been right?

            Sure didn't seem that way a year ago. On publication my
book was blistered by enviro lobbies, especially the Environmental Defense
Fund, which issued two book-length attacks on my thesis, one weighing in at 110
pages and boiling down to, "How dare you call us successful!" The EDF hoped,
for fund-raising reasons, to stamp out optimism before it gained a foothold.
With enormous self-restraint, I'll spare you my own analysis of the EDF's
analysis of me. But, to my mind, I was the victim of standard Washington
splatter tactics: Throw enough mud, some will stick. Stick it did, and the buzz
turned cold.

            Conspiracy theory was rolled
out to explain my sinister cheerfulness. The 
               Nation declared that
I must be in the pay of the electric-utility industry. (What is holding
up those checks?) In the sci.environment section of Usenet, I found a posting
from a research assistant "for a professor at Boston University" seeking
information on "who is behind" and "who is providing the money" for my work.
The notion that writers are supported by readers--my corporate master is called
Viking Penguin--apparently was too prosaic.

            Then in
July 1995, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt held a photo op to defend the
Endangered Species Act. The event was staged atop a Manhattan skyscraper where
peregrine falcons, birds that have rebounded from the brink of extinction owing
to federal protection, now nest. Babbitt hailed this as "a symbol of hope" for
the environment. Where'd he get that idea? Well, A Moment on the Earth
begins by describing wild falcons nesting on a Manhattan skyscraper as a symbol
of hope for the environment. Protocol says Babbitt should have invited me,
because authors can lend photo ops extra credence. But the grapevine said
Babbitt didn't want me around because my theory had lightning-rod status among
environmentalists.

            
In the meantime, I was attempting earnestly to
persuade Democrats that environmental optimism could be a potent political
idea. Perhaps anyone who tries to be his own spin doctor has a fool for a
patient, but Viking's publicists had shifted their attention to another book,
the slightly more remunerative The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. (One day of
your sales, Bill. It's all I ask.) I huddled with the Democratic Leadership
Council, President Clinton's centrist policy shop, and with the Senate
Democratic Policy Committee (run by Sen. Tom Daschle), urging members to become
environmental optimists before Republicans stole the march. Several Democratic
senators seemed taken but--or so I was told--were asked to steer clear by the
vice president's office.

            Wham! I
had hit the Al Gore glass ceiling. The vice president has staked out doomsday
as a favored issue, and will brook no optimists. An example: Last October, I
arranged for the normally anti-regulatory authors Philip Howard, Tom Peters,
and David Osborne to join me in condemning environmental rollback attempts on
the Hill. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner asked
Mike McCurry to read our statement in the White House press room. My wife, who
works for the administration under her maiden name, rolled her eyes, saying,
"Gore's office is never going to let you get away with the credit." Sure
enough, when McCurry read our pitch, my name had mysteriously been dropped from
the top of the (alphabetical) signers' list.

            Meanwhile, it turned out my fear that Republicans would
expropriate environmental optimism was unfounded. The last thing Republicans
wanted to hear is that the EPA is a blessing. I even heard that Rep. Tom DeLay
of Texas, the House Majority Whip, even banned the reading of A Moment on
the Earth in his office. (True? Who knows? But I take comfort in believing
it.)

            Naively, I had thought
environmental optimism would appeal to many political camps. Liberals would be
happy that regulatory intervention was protecting an essential aspect of life;
conservatives would be happy for proof that nature and industry are not
incompatible. Instead, left and right united in a screwball shared interest in
rejecting any positive environmental tidings. The left was using alarmism about
nature to raise money, while the right was raising money with alarmism about
regulations. Now with Newt in hiding, that dynamic has changed. Progressives at
last are noticing that the best argument for government activism is that it
works. Maybe even Al Gore will soon exalt with a broad smile the vibrant U.S.
ecology. Don't faint when it happens.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Tocqueville Missed

            Nostalgia is rampant among
public commentators today as they look for some critical juncture when U.S.
democracy was flourishing more than it seems to be now, hoping to draw
inspiration and lessons for what might be done to revive our apparently ailing
civic life.

            Those who still admit to
being liberals usually locate the golden era of U.S. democracy in the 1930s and
1940s, when, it is thought, Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided bold,
progressive leadership. Those of conservative or center-right proclivities
characteristically look at America's past through the eyes of Alexis de
Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the fledgling United States in
the 1830s, gathering observations and ideas that were, in due course, published
in Democracy in America . Tocqueville's opus has become one of the modern
world's most influential political ethnographies--that is, a set of densely
descriptive observations of another nation, written to influence political
debates back in one's own country.

            That message-to-home aspect
of Tocqueville's work is important in understanding its limitations. Alarmed by
the simultaneous expansion of democracy and an ever-more-centralized
bureaucratic administrative state in post-revolutionary France, he used his
explorations of early Republican America to make the case to his own countrymen
that they should encourage voluntary associations in civic society as a new
buffer against state centralization.

            "Americans of all ages, all
stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming
associations," Tocqueville reported in a famous, oft-quoted passage. This happy
situation was possible, he felt, because extralocal government seemed barely
present. "Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more," wrote
Tocqueville, "than the absence of what we would call government or
administration. ... There is nothing centralized or hierarchic in the
constitution of American administrative power."

            Given
Tocqueville's anti-statist purposes, it is not surprising that contemporary
critics of the U.S. federal government celebrate the great Frenchman's stress
on voluntary associations (understood as functioning in opposition to
bureaucratic state power). Still, before Americans plunge forward on a fool's
errand, we might want to notice that the best historical social science
challenges the claims of conservatives and centrists about when, how, and why
democratic civic engagement has flourished in the United States.

            Before the American Revolution, many towns of the requisite
size for commercialization and urbanization had already emerged, but without a
vibrant set of voluntary associations. By the early 1800s, however, the
emergence of associations in both smaller and larger communities was
outstripping commercial and demographic change. Social historian Richard D.
Brown emphasizes that the Revolution, political struggles over the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, and deepening popular participation in national, state,
and local elections served to spur associational life. So did religious and
cultural ideals about self-improvement, and growing awareness of extralocal
commercial and public affairs through widespread newspaper reading.

            
Tocqueville himself was well aware of many of these extralocal influences.
Present-day conservatives often overlook how much he stressed political
participation, marveling at the United States as the "one country in the world
which, day in, day out, makes use of an unlimited freedom of political
association," which, in turn, encouraged a more general "taste for
association."

            
In retrospect, it is obvious that what social
historian Mary P. Ryan has dubbed the pre-Civil War "era of association," from
the 1820s to the 1840s, coincided with the spread of adult male suffrage and
the emergence of competitive, mass-mobilizing parties: first the Jacksonian
Democrats, then the Whigs, and finally, the Free Soilers and the
Republicans.

            

               Democracy in America took note of early U.S. newspapers, too.
"Newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers," Tocqueville
wrote. "Thus, of all countries on earth, it is in America that one finds both
the most associations and the most newspapers." Yet, blinded by his negative
passions about state power in France, Tocqueville failed to grasp what his
observations meant about the early American state.

            As historian Richard John cleverly points out in
Spreading the News: The American Postal System From Franklin to Morse ,
Tocqueville traveled by stage coach in the "hinterland of Kentucky and
Tennessee," remarking on the "astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers
among these savage woods." Yet the Frenchman's travels might not have been
possible if many stage-coach companies had not been subsidized--through
Congress--so that mail could be carried, and representatives travel home, to
remote districts.

            A
well-known quip has it that early modern Prussia wasn't so much a state with an
army, as an army with a state. Similarly, the early United States may have been
not so much a country with a post office, as a post office that gave popular
reality to a fledgling nation. John points out that by 1828, only 36 years
after Congress passed the Post Office Act of 1792, "the American postal system
had almost twice as many offices as the postal system in Great Britain and over
five times as many offices as the postal system in France." In the 1830s and
1840s, the system accounted for more than three-quarters of U.S. federal
employees.

            
Obviously, the institutional structure of the
U. S. government had everything to do with the spread of the postal network.
The legislative system gave senators and (above all) members of the House of
Representatives a strong interest in subsidizing communication and
transportation links into even the remotest areas of the growing nation.
Special postal rates made mailing newspapers cheap and allowed small newspapers
to pick up copy from bigger ones.

            The
postal system was even more important for civil society and democratic politics
than for commerce. Congress could use it to communicate freely with citizens.
Citizens, even in the remotest hamlets, could readily communicate with one
another, monitoring the doings of Congress, and state and local governments.
Voluntary associations soon learned to put out their message in "newspaper"
formats, to take advantage of the mail. Emergent political parties in
Jacksonian America were intertwined with the federal postal system. Party
entrepreneurs were often newspaper editors and postmasters, and postmasterships
quickly became a staple of party patronage.

            In short, the early American civic vitality that so
entranced Alexis de Tocqueville was closely tied up with the representative
institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national
state. The non-zero-sum nature of U.S. governmental and associational expansion
becomes even more apparent when we consider that most of the big voluntary
associations founded in the 19 th century prospered well into the
20 th , often building toward membership peaks reached only in the
1960s or 1970s and in full symbiosis with public social provision.

            The Grand Army of the
Republic spread in the wake of state and national benefits for Union veterans
of the Civil War, for example. The Fraternal Order of Eagles was so active in
promoting state and federal old-age pensions that the Grand Eagle himself
received an official pen when FDR signed the Social Security Act of 1935. The
great women's federations of the early 20 th century were champions
of local, state, and federal regulations, services, and benefits for mothers
and children. New Deal laws and administrative interventions were vital aids
for nascent industrial unions. And the American Legion sponsored the GI Bill of
1944.

            
               Lessons for
Today
            

            
Maybe the problem today is that many Americans,
quite rightly, no longer feel they can effectively band together to get things
done either through, or in relationship to, government. The problem may not be
a big, bureaucratic federal government--after all, the U.S. national government
still has proportionately less revenue-raising capacity and administrative heft
than virtually any other advanced national state. The issue may be recent
shifts in society and styles of politics that make it less inviting and far
harder for Americans to participate efficaciously in civic life, except locally
or on very narrow issues.

            Data do
show an explosion of Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups between the
mid-1960s and the early 1980s. But apart from a few on the right--notably the
National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, and the National
Rifle Association--the few new big voluntary associations that have been
founded have been structured like thousands of smaller ones: They are
staff-led, mailing-list associations.

            Obviously, societal conditions so propitious for
encompassing voluntary federations have changed a lot. Higher-educated
women--once leaders of many such associations--now have nationally oriented
careers, and crowd into cosmopolitan centers. Indeed, by the 1960s, the United
States developed a very large professional-managerial elite that was, arguably,
more oriented to giving money to staff-led national advocacy organizations than
to climbing the local-state-national leadership ladders of traditional
voluntary associations.

            Voters these days are rarely
contacted directly by party or group workers. Politicians may not care much
about them at all if they aren't relatively well-off or members of targeted
"swing" groups of voters. This has happened in electoral politics at the same
time that all our mailboxes are full of computer-generated mailings from
single-issue advocacy groups seeking to raise money from paper
"memberships."

            Were Alexis de Tocqueville to
return to the late 20 th century United States for another visit, he
would be just as worried about these national trends as about possible declines
in purely local or small-group associationalism. After all, one of Democracy
in America 's insights was that vital democratic participation served as a
kind of "school," where Americans learned how to build social and civic
associations of all sorts. He would also surely be surprised that today's
conservatives are using his Democracy in America to justify a
depoliticized and romantic localism as an improbable remedy for the larger ills
of national politics.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Myth of the 500-Foot Home Run

            On June 24, fans at
Seattle's Kingdome witnessed one of the most dramatic pitcher-hitter
confrontations since Walter Johnson faced Babe Ruth. On the mound, the
Mariner's Big Unit, 6'-10" Randy Johnson, the tallest man ever to play in the
majors, and the most proficient strikeout pitcher in history. At the plate,
Oakland's Mark McGwire, the best and strongest home-run hitter since Ruth.

            Although
Johnson whiffed McGwire twice on the way to a record-breaking total of 19
strikeouts, McGwire hit what was estimated as the longest home run in at least
a decade. He got all of a 97-mph fastball, and launched it at 105 mph in the
general direction of Canada.

            On the radio, Mariner announcer Dave Niehaus marveled, "A
high fly ball, belted, and I mean belted , deep to left field, into the
upper deck! My, oh my, what a shot by Mark McGwire! That is probably the
longest home run ever hit here. ... It will be interesting to see how far that
ball will be guesstimated. ... We have often wondered if McGwire got ahold of a
Randy Johnson fastball how far he could hit it, and I think we just saw
it."

            Shortly
after, Niehaus gave the estimated distance: "538 feet--unbelievable, absolutely
unbelievable. The longest home run ever hit here in Seattle ... the longest
home run I think I have ever seen hit." Not only that, it seems to be the
longest ball hit since 1988, when the distance of major-league home runs was
first estimated on a wide scale. Sports pages and broadcasters across the
country are still heralding McGwire's homer as one of the great feats in
slugging history.

            
But there's a catch: The 538-feet figure,
announced by the Mariners about 40 seconds after the ball landed, was an
overstatement worthy of P.T. Barnum. According to three physicists who have
worked independently and have written extensively on the science of baseball,
the human limit for hitting a baseball at sea level, under normal temperatures
and with no wind, is somewhere between 450 feet and 470 feet.

            Curious
that anyone could hit a ball 538 feet in an indoor park near sea level, I
called the Mariners to see how they devised such a spectacular number. The team
repeatedly refused to explain how they arrived at the figure or to allow me to
speak to whoever made the estimate. Mariners PR Director Dave Aust stresses
that the figure is "a guesstimate." "We don't really believe in the process,"
Aust says, distancing the team from the McGwire number.

            That "process" has evolved over time. In 1988, IBM
established the "Tale of the Tape" program, devising a system by which home-run
distances could be estimated. Sponsorship of the Major League Baseball-licensed
program was assumed by telecom giant MCI in 1992 and redubbed the "MCI Home Run
Program." The program's Web site lists the 10 longest home runs of the year and
provides a searchable database of the home runs of the previous two years.

            "We do not
measure the home runs," says MCI spokesman Cal Jackson. The distances are
estimated by the individual clubs and then provided to MCI. "We act as a
warehouse for the numbers that Major League Baseball sends us."

            
Unsatisfied with the 538-feet number, I did my
own figuring. I consulted the 1976 Kingdome blueprints, a more recent
laser-survey diagram of the stadium, and the Seattle Times game story,
and visited the park twice. Here are the facts: McGwire's homer landed in the
eighth row of the left side of section 240 in the second deck--439 feet
(measured horizontally) from home plate and 59 feet above the playing
field.

            How much
further could the ball have gone? Based on a review of the trajectory charts in
The Physics of Baseball and Keep Your Eye on the Ball: The Science
and Folklore of Baseball , conversations with University of Puget Sound
physicist Andrew Rex, and correspondence with aerospace engineer and baseball
researcher Roger Hawks, I determined that the McGwire home run would have
traveled about 474 feet. A mighty home run, yes, but still 64 feet short of the
length claimed.

            Rex and Hawks agree that any home run hit that far must
approximate the "maximum-distance trajectory"--that is it can only be a high
fly or a normal fly, not a line drive. McGwire's homer was a high fly, as
Niehaus attested, and as was confirmed by his broadcast partner Rick Rizzs, who
marveled at the ball's hang time. According to the Major League Baseball
system, a high fly will descend at an angle whose cotangent is 0.6. In
trigonometry-for-dummies terms, what that means is that for every foot the ball
would have continued to drop vertically, it would have traveled another 0.6
feet horizontally. Here's the math: 439 feet + (59 feet x 0.6) = 474 feet.

            McGwire's
"538-footer" isn't the only questionable long ball of the season. The MCI Web
site claims six 500-footers in 1997, five by McGwire and one by Colorado
Rockies star Andres Galarraga, hit in Miami. Galarraga's home run, originally
announced as 573 feet, then revised at the park to 529 feet, is listed at 529
feet by MCI. By my calculations, it probably went about 479 feet. And yet
another reason to doubt the 1997 numbers: Apparently, the IBM/MCI program
recorded no 500-footers from 1988 to 1996.

            
Don't get me wrong--all the homers listed on
the MCI top-ten list were remarkable shots. And I'm not arguing that
500-footers are impossible. A few have been hit, but all were aided by
altitude, the elements, or both. The best-known of these, Mickey Mantle's
mythical 565-foot blast on a windy day at Washington's Griffith Stadium,
probably traveled about 506 feet, according to The Physics of Baseball
author Robert K. Adair.

            The MCI Web site spells out
the intended method of measuring these home runs. "Distances are measured using
a grid system matched to each ballpark's unique parameters and configuration.
Each home run is estimated based on how far it would have traveled from home
plate on a horizontal line had it not been obstructed by something (seats,
fence, roof, foul pole, other stadium parts, etc.)."

            If every team worked
according to the MCI plan, each stadium would be accurately diagramed with a
fine-grained grid related to its seating sections, level by level. This would
tell the estimator how far the ball was from home plate when it landed in the
seats, bullpen, or other stadium area, and how high it was above field level
when it landed. (In today's stadiums, very few home runs touch the ground
before hitting something higher first.)

            Working
with the distance and height, the estimator would assess the ball's
trajectory--was it a liner? a normal fly? a high fly?--and use a formula to
determine the ultimate distance the ball would have traveled. Click for the
formula.

            In theory this is not a bad system, but in practice it's
not always fully observed. Some teams work from arcs rather than grids, making
the estimators' jobs more difficult. Some teams measure only to the point of
impact, rather than to the likely field-level landing point. The Rockies don't
have height data, and must estimate that dimension. The Red Sox can't see where
balls, hit beyond "The Monster" into the street, land. If McGwire had hit his
home run in Baltimore, for example, it would have been measured at about 448
feet under the Orioles' point-of-impact house rules. Such departures make the
various major-league home-run distances inconsistent, and usually make them
less accurate as well.

            Major
League spokesman Patrick Courtney acknowledges that there have been questions
about the MCI program, and says that the measurement issue will be discussed at
league PR meetings next month "so everyone will be on the same page for next
year."

            
Let's hope so. Baseball, a game of inches and
meticulous record-keeping, deserves accurate and consistent data, and these
awful numbers have already tainted one set of record books. Click for the
story. The pity is that the home-run-measurement program, as conceived by IBM
in 1988, was never uniformly implemented. Now is the time for scientists to
review and refine the system and for Major League Baseball to ensure compliance
and train the estimators.

            After a period of
adjustment, during which many long home runs will seem puny, we'll slowly
reacclimate ourselves to reality. Weaned off the inflated estimates, numbers
that add 60 feet to big home runs, we'll finally appreciate the majesty of a
440-footer.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Child Abuse: Threat or Menace?

            With a new government-funded
study in hand, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala diagnosed a
rising epidemic of child abuse last month. She reported that "child abuse and
neglect nearly doubled in the United States between 1986 and 1993"--and that
was only the beginning of the ugly news. The number of "serious" cases had
quadrupled, and the percentage of cases being investigated by the authorities
had actually declined by 36 percent, trends that she called "shameful
and startling."

            Is
Shalala right? Is an unheeded child-abuse epidemic raging in America? Or, as I
think is more likely, is the methodology behind the study and the
interpretation of its numbers flawed? And if Shalala overstated the child-abuse
peril, is she undermining public interest in the problem by making it appear
too big and difficult to fix at a reasonable cost?

            

               A Look at the Numbers
            

            The secretary drew her
statistics from the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, which
was conducted by Westat Inc., a consulting firm that conducted similar studies
in 1980 and 1986. In the new study, about 5,600 professionals, a representative
sample, were asked by Westat whether the children they had served appeared to
have suffered specified harms or to be living under specified conditions.
Westat then determined if the reported "harms" and "conditions" met the study's
definitions of "abuse" and "neglect," and generated estimates of incidence.

            The odd
thing about Shalala's claim that the number of children abused and neglected
doubled from 1.4 million in 1986 to 2.8 million in 1993 is that no other signs
point to such a dramatic increase in child abuse and neglect. Fatalities
arising from child abuse have held roughly steady, ranging from 1,014 in 1986
to 1,216 in 1993, according to the National Committee to Prevent Child
Abuse.

            
Of the 1.4 million additional cases reported,
almost 80 percent fall into three suspect categories. (Anywhere from 13 percent
to 34 percent of the 2.8 million children suffered more than one type of abuse
or neglect. Unfortunately, the study did not "unduplicate" these reports.
Nevertheless, the proportions I describe below provide a general picture of
what is happening.)

            
               
                  Endangered
children
                account for 55 percent of the increase. These are cases where
the child was not actually harmed by parental abuse or neglect, but was "in
danger of being harmed according to the views of community professionals or
child-protective service agencies" [emphasis added]. (See Figure 1.)

            
               
                  Emotional
abuse
                and neglect account for another 15 percent of the increase. The
great majority of emotional-abuse cases, according to the 1986 Westat study,
involved "verbal assaults," and more than half of the emotional-neglect cases
involved "the refusal or delay of psychological care."

            

               
                  Educational neglect
               --the chronic failure to send a child to
school--added another 8 percent to the total of new cases.

            

               "Definitional Creep"?
            

            All these cases warrant
attention, but the explosion of numbers may be caused by the growing
reportorial sensitivity of professionals, that is, "definitional creep."
Professionals who become more sensitive to possible abuse, or more adept at
noticing it, would make more reports to Westat--even if the actual incidence
had not risen. In endangerment cases, at least, the study seems to accept this
explanation.

            According
to Shalala, the number of "serious" cases increased between 1986 and 1993 from
"about 143,000 to nearly 570,000." Her comments left the impression that the
cases involved life-threatening assaults, but the study defines "serious" cases
as any in which the child suffered "long-term impairment of physical, mental,
or emotional capacities, or required professional treatment aimed at preventing
such long-term impairment." Emotional maltreatment accounted for fully half of
the increase in serious cases. (See Figure 2.)

            

               I >n cases labeled as serious physical abuse, the reported injury
could be mental or emotional.

            Even in these "serious"
cases, the study seems affected by definitional creep. For example, in three
categories (sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect), the number
of cases described as "moderate" declined even as the number of "serious" ones
increased--strongly suggesting that cases once viewed as only moderately
threatening have now been "upgraded" to the most dire category.

            

               Uninvestigated Cases?
            

            Shalala's assertion that
investigations of child abuse and neglect cases have dropped by 36 percent
deserves closer scrutiny. In producing the number of uninvestigated cases, the
study compared the number of cases identified by professionals with those known
to local agencies. Of the cases not investigated, 33 percent involved
educational neglect. (See Figure 3.)

            The main flaw here is that
most educational-neglect cases are handled by the schools; reports are made to
protective agencies only when all else fails.

            Another 30 percent of
uninvestigated cases involved emotional abuse and neglect. But child-protective
agencies usually avoid these cases because they tend to involve subjective
judgments, and there is little that a quasi-law-enforcement agency can do about
them.

            
Definitional creep is clearly at play here, too. Professionals who are
increasingly willing to identify situations as harmful aren't necessarily ready
to equate them with the sort of abuse and neglect they are legally obliged to
report. And even if they did report these instances, child-protective agencies
would still be expected to screen them out.

            

               Does Shalala Believe Her Own Hype?
            

            Probably not. Radical action
would be required if Shalala's figures were even roughly correct. But instead
of proposing radical action when she released the report, she outlined modest
steps that had long been planned and budgeted.

            Having worked in the field
for 30 years, I can testify firsthand that the problem of child abuse and
neglect is real. But however well meant, exaggerating the severity of abuse
endangers children. In the late '80s, for example, the nation was told that
375,000 drug-exposed babies were born each year; Washington policy-makers were
immobilized by estimates that tens of billions of dollars were needed to
protect these children. In fact, the true number was closer to 35,000, and a
decade later, the government has yet to mount a meaningful program for the
children of addicts.

            Overstatement may also
obscure genuinely worrisome findings. Some of the increases in sexual abuse,
physical abuse, and physical neglect uncovered by Westat may well reflect a
true deterioration of conditions in disorganized, poverty-stricken households.
But Shalala paid scant attention to this possibility.

            And to claim recklessly that
too few cases are investigated is to play with fire. Child-protective agencies
are already overwhelmed investigating about 2 million reports a year,
two-thirds of which are dismissed as unfounded or inappropriate. For many in
the field, the most pressing need is to discourage inappropriate reporting--not
to blithely call for more.

            
               Figures
for specific types of maltreatment exclude endangerment cases. Percentages
total more than 100 because some children counted under more than one type of
abuse.
            

            

               Percentages total more than 100 because some children counted under more
than one type of abuse.
            

            
               These
exclude cases of endangerment.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Quotas and Colin Powell

            "The issue, Mr. President,
is not affirmative action but racial preferences," declared Abigail Thernstrom
to President Clinton at his "Town Hall" discussion on race in Akron, Ohio, Dec.
3. Clinton returned the volley: "Do you favor abolishing the affirmative-action
program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or No?" Thernstrom, co-author of an
anti-affirmative-action tome (and participant in a current dialogue on race in

                  Slate
               ), responded that she does not "think that it is racial
preferences that made Colin Powell."

            In the
current Newsweek , Thernstrom amplifies: Yes, Colin Powell benefited from
affirmative action. But the military has a good kind of affirmative action,
which expands equal opportunity without making racial preferences. She offers
as an example Powell's promotion to brigadier general by President Carter's
Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander. When originally sent an all-white
list of candidates for the position, Alexander rejected it, demanding a list
that included some blacks. From the revised list, Alexander chose Powell.

            As Jacob Weisberg noted
in last week's 
                  Slate
               , critics of reverse discrimination often
insist that they support affirmative action. And they often point to the
military as the one American institution that's got the distinction right. The
military, by all accounts, has indeed done a great job of integrating its
higher reaches and achieving racial harmony without harming its ability to
serve its mission. Affirmative action in the military is a success. But has the
military avoided the alleged poison of reverse discrimination? Not at all. The
real lesson of affirmative action in the military is that reverse
discrimination is not so poisonous. It gave us Colin Powell.

            
Thernstrom's anecdote about how Powell became brigadier general is ambiguous on
its face. The boss asked for a list that included blacks and then chose a black
off the list. Equal opportunity or reverse discrimination? A little more
information resolves the ambiguity. One reason Powell wasn't on the original
list is that he was, at 42, below the age normally considered eligible for
promotion to brigadier general. An exception was made in order to give
Secretary Alexander a black as he had requested. Powell, who has always been
forthright in his defense of affirmative action, says himself that he wouldn't
have appeared on the second list or been made the youngest general in the Army
if it had not been for preferential treatment.

            
Thernstrom and others imagine the military as a
place where (in her words) "people rise or fall according to their merits, not
their race." But this is a misconception. The services set stringent guidelines
for minority recruitment and promotion that sometimes surpass the supposed
excesses of racially obsessed university admissions officers. For instance the
Air Force, long the most resistant of the services to affirmative action,
recently changed its promotion policy to increase its number of black pilots.
Now, 90 percent of black applicants are accepted, compared with only 20 percent
of white applicants. Do you believe this is the result of pure "equal
opportunity," with nary a drop of "racial preference"?

            Both the
Navy and the Marines have set themselves five-year deadlines to make their
officer corps 12-percent African-American, 12-percent Latino, and 5-percent
Asian-American. In a Nation article supporting these quotas, an
ex-Marine recruiter boasts of his tactic for meeting these goals: "I routinely
turned down long lines of qualified white males to save room for blacks. I
denied whites interviews. I put their names on waiting lists. Every few months
I threw stacks of their résumés into the trash."

            But what about the Army--the service most celebrated for
its history of colorblindness? The Army implemented its affirmative-action
policy in the mid-'70s, responding to rising resentment of white superiors
among the black rank and file, which had resulted in race riots on bases. To
diversify its officer corps, the Army began targeting scholarship money
disproportionately to ROTC programs at historically black colleges and began
heavily recruiting blacks for West Point. At least 7 percent of each West Point
class must be black. That's an order.

            Army
guidelines explicitly require that the officer-promotion panels take
candidates' race into consideration. Promotions, the guidelines say, must
roughly match the racial composition of the pool of candidates. The regulations
naturally say that the panels should not lower standards simply to boost
numbers, but affirmative-action plans often say similar things, and critics
usually have little trouble seeing through it. Members of the panels are under
heavy career and political pressure to meet goals. According to the Pentagon,
more minorities and women have been appointed to promotion boards and
explicitly instructed to act as advocates for the minority and women candidates
who appear before them. To see that as expanding "opportunity" and not granting
"preference" is wildly naive.

            
Promotions are reviewed by a Pentagon agency
called the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute to ensure that the
process was racism- and sexism-free. A recent article in the Weekly
Standard showed that the officers who serve in the institute on a rotating
basis are trained in lengthy seminars, rife with the goofiest sort of political
correctness. In one class on the "White Male Club," an instructor lectured: "Q:
Who are the white males that sustain power over us? A: Ted Turner, Alan
Greenspan, and Bill Gates." In other sessions, they were required to confess
their own biases and were shown videos from the Oprah Winfrey Racism
Series .

            So if the
mechanics of affirmative action in the military mimic those of affirmative
action in higher education, why hasn't the military taken the same flak? Unlike
the universities, the military has none of the notorious statistics about
dropouts and racial separatism and it has many success stories, such as Colin
Powell's. The military's officer corps, especially the Army's, has been
successfully transformed from a clubby elite, where promotions depended on
golfing partners, into a more integrated meritocracy.

            To be sure, the Army's program insists, though more vaguely
than people admit, that affirmative-action beneficiaries must meet the same
minimum qualifications as their white counterparts. But there is a critical
difference between being qualified, in the sense of meeting some minimum
standard, and being better qualified than all those who are rejected. Choosing
a black over a better-qualified white is still racial preference, even if they
both are "qualified" in the absolute sense.

            The main difference between
military and civilian affirmative action is that the military has an
overabundance of minority candidates. Consequently, the Army can eliminate its
weakest candidates--about one-half of blacks and one-third of whites--and still
have a large number of blacks--about one-third of the Army. Most universities
and federal agencies must compete aggressively over a much smaller pool.

            When affirmative action
works, its critics deny its essential nature. For affirmative action to do
anything, it must involve advancing people who are slightly less qualified.
Not, one hopes, un qualified, but less qualified, under otherwise
prevailing standards, than people who get passed over. It is necessarily a
sloppy process that injects another arbitrary standard into an already
arbitrary decision-making process. But the Army shows the process can work, and
can help.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Smack Happy

            Last week, the press
reprised one of its favorite stories: Heroin is back. The news hook was the
July 12 death of Smashing Pumpkins side man Jonathan Melvoin, 34, while
shooting scag in a Park Avenue hotel. The Washington Post Page One obit
on Melvoin claimed--without substantiation--"a resurgence in heroin use in the
'90s," while the New York Times asserted that the "heroin vogue has been
building since at least 1993 and shows no signs of ebbing."
Trainspotting , the new movie about young Scottish junkies, provided
another useful occasion for noting this alleged trend.

            "Smack
Is Back"? For the press, smack is always back. It never goes away, but
it's always returning. Boarding the Nexis wayback machine, we find that nearly
every publication in America has sounded the heroin clarion yearly since 1989:
the New York Times ("Latest Drug of Choice for Abusers Brings New
Generation to Heroin," 1989); U.S. News & World Report ("The Return
of a Deadly Drug Called Horse," 1989); the San Francisco Chronicle
("Heroin Making a Resurgence in the Bay Area," 1990); the New York Times
("Heroin Is Making Comeback," 1990); Time magazine ("Heroin Comes Back,"
1990); the Los Angeles Times ("As Cocaine Comes off a High, Heroin May
Be Filling Void," 1991); the Cleveland Plain Dealer ("Police, Social
Workers Fear Heroin 'Epidemic,' " 1992); Rolling Stone ("Heroin: Back on
the Charts," 1992); the Seattle Times ("Heroin People: Deadly Drug Back
in Demand," 1992); NPR ("Heroin Makes Comeback in United States," 1992);
Newsweek ("Heroin Makes an Ominous Comeback," 1993); the Trenton
Record ("A Heroin Comeback," 1993); the Washington Post ("Smack
Dabbling," 1994); the New York Times ("Heroin Finds a New Market Along
Cutting Edge of Style," 1994); USA Today ("Smack's Back," 1994); the
Buffalo News ("More Dopes Picking Heroin," 1994); the Fort Lauderdale
Sun-Sentinel ("Heroin Makes a Comeback," 1995); the
Times-Picayune ("Heroin Is Back as Major Problem," 1996); the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ("State Gets Deadly Dose as Heroin Reappears,"
1996); Rolling Stone again ("Heroin," 1996); and the Los Angeles
Times ("Heroin's New Popularity Claims Unlikely Victims," 1996).

            The granddaddy of the genre appeared 15 years ago in
Newsweek ("Middle-Class Junkies," Aug. 10, 1981), with language that
reads as fresh today as it did then. We learn that heroin has breached its
ghetto quarantine: "[C]hildren of affluence are venturing where once the poor
and desperate nodded out. The drug is being retailed at rock clubs, at
Hollywood parties, and among lunch-time crowds in predominately white business
districts." As always, part of the problem is a glut of white powder: "[S]heer
abundance is prompting concern about a potential 'epidemic' spilling across
demographic divides." And heroin purity is increasing dramatically: "Purity
levels as high as 90 percent have been found in seized wholesale caches, with
street-level purities averaging up to 20 percent--around six times the typical
strength of the 1970 Turkish blend."

            Having hit 90 percent 15
years ago, you wouldn't think that heroin purity could keep rising. But for the
press, it has. The Washington Post 's story about Melvoin reported that
heroin purity has risen from "as low as 4 percent in past decades to upward of
70 percent today," while the Los Angeles Times ' piece noted that heroin
had gone "from 4 percent [purity] in 1980 to 40 percent in 1995." After Melvoin
died, the Associated Press reported that the heroin he shot was 60 percent to
70 percent pure.

            
Depending on where you drop the Nexis plumb line you can find references to
more potent street heroin in the recent past. A 1989 New York Times
story pegged the potency of heroin at 45 percent. In 1990, the Washington
Post placed average purity at 30 percent to 40 percent. A Seattle
Times story from 1992 quoted a Drug Enforcement Administration source who
said that in the '70s, heroin was typically 25 percent to 30 percent pure, but
that heroin seized in the early '90s was now topping the scales at 67 percent
pure. A 1996 government study puts purity at 59 percent, so if the DEA was
right a few years ago, recent purity actually has declined somewhat.

            There is good evidence that potency isn't the most
significant risk factor in overdose deaths. A study of heroin overdoses in
Washington, D.C., the findings of which were published by the Journal of
Forensic Sciences (1989), found no relationship between heroin purity and
death-by-overdose or nonfatal overdose. (On the night that Melvoin shot that 60
to 70 percent heroin and died, Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin shot the same
junk and survived.) The researchers attributed most overdoses to intermittent
or post-addiction use of heroin--meaning that people who OD'd tended to
misjudge tolerance when returning to the drug. Another risk factor that never
gets enough ink in the heroin-obsessed media is the danger of using heroin in
combination with alcohol. The mixture has an additive effect: A drinker could
spike himself with a lower-than-lethal dose and still OD.

            What do we really know
about heroin use? For one thing, the federal government's National Drug Control
Strategy for 1996 says that the addict population is basically stable. It
reports that the number of "casual users" (less than weekly) of heroin came
down by nearly half between 1988 and 1993 (539,000 to 229,000), the most recent
year measured, while the number of "heavy users" (at least weekly) dipped from
601,000 to 500,000. One statistic feeding the heroin "revival" stories is the
increasing number of emergency-room visits by people who mention heroin as a
reason for seeking ER treatment. But the statistics, which come from the
government's latest Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) survey, come with a
disclaimer suggesting that the explanation may be multiple visits by aging
druggies who are using the ER for a variety of health problems.

            My bet is that when the
medical examiner releases his report on Jonathan Melvoin next week, it will
disclose that the smashed pumpkin was drinking booze while shooting, a fatal
error that pre-'50s addicts almost never made. We'll learn that Melvoin--like
the press--was an amateur who didn't really know what he was doing with
heroin.

            
               What the Hell Are
"Flame Posies"?
            

            Seamus Heaney's poem
The Little
Canticles of Asturias, which appeared in the debut issue of SLATE, contains
a mesmerizing image of a "smouldering maw/ of a pile of newspapers lit long
ago," fanning "up in the wind, breaking off and away/ in flame-posies, small
airborne fire-ships." Heaney's verse reminded me that everything--even awful
newspaper stories--is beautiful when it burns. Such was the inspiration that I
embraced "Flame Posies" as the name for my occasional column on the press. I
also hope that the oxymoron will remind me to include applause as well as
condemnation in my dispatches.

            
               Illustrations by Robert
Neubecker
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            My Personal Trade Deficit

            To my vast delight, a Barnes
& Noble superstore has arrived in Pittsford, N.Y., about a mile from my
home in the neighboring town of Brighton. I shop at Barnes & Noble several
times a week--mostly for books, sometimes for music, occasionally for software,
and nearly always for coffee.

            My trade deficit with
Pittsford has grown explosively since Barnes & Noble arrived. In other
words, I spend more money in Pittsford than I did before. A trade deficit is
the amount you spend in a given place minus the amount you earn there. (A trade
surplus is just the opposite: The amount you earn in a given place minus the
amount you spend there.) I don't earn any income in Pittsford, so my trade
deficit is equal to the amount I spend.

             

            I've been thinking about trade deficits because I picked up
the local newspaper this morning and read an op-ed piece about the U.S. trade
deficit with Mexico. It says that, pre-NAFTA, the United States had a trade
surplus with Mexico--the average American earned more in Mexico than he
spent there. (Producing goods for sale to Mexicans counts as "earning in
Mexico"; buying goods made by Mexicans counts as "spending in Mexico.") Today
the opposite is true: The United States has a trade deficit with Mexico, and
it's growing.

            According
to the op-ed piece, that's proof that the average American was better off
without NAFTA. But the identical logic "proves" that I was better off without
Barnes & Noble. Not only is the conclusion false, it's the exact opposite
of the truth. When people take advantage of new opportunities to buy things
they want, it usually makes them happier.

            
The truth is that any change in our
trade position with respect to Mexico--in either direction--is evidence that
free trade has been good for Americans. My neighbor got a job at the new Barnes
& Noble. His trade surplus with Pittsford grew, just like my own
trade deficit . In both cases, the changes meant that our lives had got
better.

            The same
analogy illustrates another point: Although NAFTA-induced changes in the
U.S.-Mexican trade deficit are evidence of improvements, the actual
level of the trade deficit means virtually nothing. If Barnes &
Noble had located in the town of Penfield instead of in Pittsford, I'd have a
higher trade deficit with Penfield, a lower trade deficit with Pittsford, and
my life would be about the same as it is now.

            Amore interesting number is my overall trade
deficit--the total of all my spending minus the total of all my earning. My
overall trade deficit was pretty high yesterday: I spent $600 on a living-room
rug, and I earned $0. (It was a Sunday and I didn't feel like working.) My
overall trade deficit was $600.

            Traditionally, business
journalists describe every increase in the overall trade deficit as a
"worsening." According to that tradition, I had a very bad day yesterday. But
it didn't feel like a bad day--I like my new rug, and it would
have been inconvenient to put off buying it until a day when I felt like
earning enough to pay for it.

            When the
nation's overall trade deficit increases, it means that Americans, on average,
are spending more than they are earning. Maybe that's because your neighbors
are behaving foolishly; maybe it's just because they have the good sense to
realize that you can sometimes spend more than you earn--provided you're
willing to draw down your savings.

            
In any event, foolishly excessive trade
surpluses are a greater danger than foolishly excessive trade
deficits . That's because excessive trade deficits are self-limiting: If
you run a trade deficit every year, bankruptcy will eventually force you to
stop. But excessive trade surpluses can go on forever. A perpetual trade
surplus is likely to mean you're either working too hard or consuming too
little; either way, you're not getting enough enjoyment out of life.

            Here's the final thing you
should keep in mind when you read about the nation's overall trade deficit: The
nation is nothing but the sum of individual households. But there are limits to
how much you ought to care about what goes on in other people's households.
Even if you are convinced that the average American spends too much, or earns
too little, or spends too little, or earns too much, it's not entirely clear
why it's any of your business. As long you have your own household in order,
fretting about your neighbor's spending habits is a lot like fretting about the
color of his living-room rug. Maybe lime green was a big mistake, but it's
his mistake to live with.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Property Is Theft

            When your neighbor installs
a burglar alarm, thoughtful burglars are encouraged to choose a different
target--like your house, for example. It's rather as if your neighbor
had hired an exterminator to drive all the vermin next door. On the other hand,
if your neighbor installs video cameras that monitor the street in front of
both your houses, he might be doing you a favor. So the spillover effects of
self-protection can be either good or bad.

            Consider
the different ways that people self-protect against car theft. Devices like
alarm systems and the "Club" have a social upside: Their proliferation might
make car theft so unprofitable that potential thieves would decide to seek more
useful employment (though, on the other hand, it's possible that they'll seek
employment as, say, arsonists or killers for hire). But those same devices have
a social downside: They encourage thieves to prey more heavily on those who
haven't bought one. From a social viewpoint, if the total number of thefts does
not change, then the expenditure on alarm systems is pure waste.

            For a much lower cost, you can install "fake"
self-protection--say, a little blinking red light that looks like it's attached
to an alarm system, or a cheap piece of foam rubber that looks from a distance
like the heavy metal Club. Here again you're imposing a cost on your neighbors:
If these devices become common, the value of the real thing is diluted.

            That point was driven home to
me the last time I shopped for a car. Acura offered a security system as
mandatory equipment. Toyota allowed you to buy a car without a security system.
You could then go out and install your own system for considerably less than
what Acura was (implicitly) charging.

            But I
decided that Acura's system--even at a much higher price--was the better deal.
Professional car thieves know that the security system is mandatory on
an Acura, and therefore know that my blinking red light is for real. With the
Toyota, even if I do install a real security system, thieves might suspect me
of trying to fool them and smash my windows to find out.

            
There's another kind of security system,
available only in a few cities. The "Lojack" is a hidden radio transmitter that
can be activated after your car is stolen, to lead police to the thief (or,
better yet, to the chop shop that employs the thief). The transmitter is hidden
randomly within the car, so thieves cannot easily find it and deactivate
it.

            The Lojack is completely
hidden. There's no way to look at a car and know whether it has a Lojack
installed. So unlike, say, the Club, a Lojack will never prevent any particular
car from being stolen; it will only increase the chance of its being recovered.
But from a social point of view, the Lojack has the huge advantage of
helping your neighbors rather than hurting them. The Club convinces
thieves to steal someone else's car instead; the Lojack convinces thieves not
to steal.

            And it does so with
remarkable effectiveness. Economists Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt have examined
the effects of the Lojack in about a dozen cities over the past 10 years (its
first introduction was in Boston in 1986). Their task wasn't easy, because just
as the prevalence of the Lojack affects auto-theft rates, so auto-theft rates
affect the prevalence of the Lojack--first because consumers buy more security
equipment when theft rates are high, and second because regulators behave
differently when thefts are high.

            But after
sorting all this out, Ayres and Levitt found that the Lojack has an
astoundingly large effect on auto-theft rates. It turns out that a 1 percent
increase in Lojack sales can reduce auto-theft rates by 20 percent or more.
What's happening to all those car thieves? Are they moving to other cities, or
are they becoming house burglars, or are they turning into socially useful
citizens? Ayres and Levitt examined these difficult questions also, and their
bottom-line conclusion is that the Lojack really does prevent a lot of
crime, rather than just moving it to other venues.

            In fact, although it costs only about $100 a year to have a
Lojack, Ayres and Levitt estimate that each individual Lojack prevents about
$1,500 a year in losses due to theft. In most cases, that $1,500 benefit
accrues not to the Lojack owner, but to strangers.

            By the criteria that
economists usually employ, this suggests that Lojacks should be heavily
subsidized, just as visible security systems--like my neighbor's home burglar
alarm or the Club--should be taxed. When you're doing something that makes
strangers better off, you should be encouraged to do more of it.

            If we all used the same
insurance company, you might expect that company to supply the appropriate
subsidy. As long as your Lojack reduces the number of insurance claims, the
company should be willing to pay you to install it. But with multiple insurance
companies, that doesn't work so well: A company that insures only 10 percent of
the populace will reap only 10 percent of the Lojack's benefits, and so will
undersubsidize them. Worse yet, large insurance discounts are illegal in many
states.

            The media have recently paid
a lot of attention to research on other kinds of self-protection, most notably
the work of John Lott and David Mustard on concealed handguns. But the Lojack
research is in many ways more informative, because the authors were able to do
a thorough job of distinguishing between benefits to the purchaser of a
Lojack and benefits to the community at large. That discrepancy is the sort of
thing that leads markets to fail--in this case by providing too many Clubs and
not enough Lojacks.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Great Fleece Panic of '96

            By Jack
Shafer

            The capitalist horn of
plenty emitted a flat note last month, just 15 days before Christmas. Or, at
least, that was the sheet music provided by the New York Times ' Page One
story "Tardy Catalogue Shoppers Risk Losing Out as Supplies Run Short" (Dec.
10, 1996).

            "[T]hat Gore-Tex hat for
your brother-in-law" was out of stock at L.L. Bean and Lands' End, wrote
Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer. And the red silk pajama top from the
Victoria's Secret catalog you had your eye on? Forget it. What's more,
according to the Times , the mail-order-apparel folks were running out of
all sorts of outerwear and slippers and silk undershirts and lace nightdresses
just two weeks away from Christmas!

            "Shoppers
may find they won't be able to get what they want if they don't order this
week," Steinhauer warned, sounding more like a copywriter than a newswriter.
"The most popular items appear to be outerwear and all things made of fleece.
But one order went completely unfilled when L.L. Bean was called on Sunday for
a 'cardinal' blanket, a hat, a pair of moccasins, a silk undershirt and a
Stellar Scope."

            The Times story set off a panic--not among
consumers--but among Steinhauer's fellow journalists. You may think of the
Times as the Newspaper of Record; its competition thinks of it as the
Racing Form , a national news tip sheet, and the Times ' choices
about what's newsworthy are automatically cribbed by those lower in the
editorial food chain. During the next two weeks, CNN, NPR, the Kansas City
Star , the Detroit News , USA Today , and the CBS Evening
News all did variations on the Times story, flogging consumers in
the service of the capitalists with alarmist to semialarmist pieces about how
mail-order retailers were running out of stuff.

            Joining the "Buy Now or
You'll Regret It!" conspiracy was CBS News economic correspondent Ray Brady,
whose derivative story aired 12 hours after the Times story hit the
streets. Brady started with the "good news"--retail sales were up--but quickly
uncovered the "bad news" embedded in the good news. (Economic news is like
that. If somebody is making a killing, then surely somebody is dying.)

            "It's getting tougher and
tougher to find what you want, especially if you're shopping from catalogs,"
Brady said, stoking the hysteria with his report of "tight stock" at Lands' End
and L.L. Bean.

            Then, doing Steinhauer one
better as a copywriter, Brady alerted viewers to similar shortages afflicting
department stores, reporting that the shelves at Carson Pirie Scott were nearly
empty! "Carson's said today, forget that last-minute stuff. Get here quick.
Stocks are short. Many stores already are running tight on sizes and colors,
particularly cashmere and outerwear: coats, hats, gloves."

            Stocks are
short! Running tight! The New York Times and CBS Evening News have
reported that the taupe-and-mauve Polartec sky is falling!

            
Was there a great apparel shortage during
Christmas 1996? Keeping her perspective through the media madness is Catherine
Hartnett, spokeswoman for L.L. Bean, who says that this season marked a return
to mail-order normalcy . The anomaly, as the Times story sort of
acknowledges, was the downturn year of 1995, when Lands' End overordered and
was left holding the excess inventory. (For some reason, Lands' End's 1995
surplus didn't spawn a "Procrastinating Catalogue Shoppers Get Whatever They
Want as Late as They Want It" story in the Times .) As the Times
reports, Lands' End overreacted to the bad year by ordering 20 percent less
merchandise for 1996, and suffered for it.

            So, once
again, was there a great apparel shortage in Christmas 1996? Part of the
"shortage" was pure perception. Shoppers hold mail-order firms to a higher
standard than department stores when it comes to keeping things in stock,
because the catalogs afford them a photo and item number for every parka,
turtleneck, and blazer ever placed in inventory. When those same shoppers shop
at a department store, they have no way of knowing that it has sold all of its
fleece-lined garage booties or Scotchgard triple-stitched Velcro workboots
unless they ask a clerk or keep notes from previous visits.

            Also, the fact that mail-order retailers run out of their
"most popular items" shouldn't be much of a surprise. For one thing, you define
your "most popular items" by what you run out of. And for another, retailers
hope to start running out of stuff two weeks before Christmas. If
seasonal retailers like L.L. Bean and Lands' End kept everything in stock until
Christmas Day, they'd go broke warehousing the unsold surplus or marking it
down.

            The
mail-order "shortages" also reflect the new-found fashion consciousness of
retailers like Lands' End and L.L. Bean. These companies made their mark
selling sturdy commodities like chamois cloth shirts and field boots that are
easy to keep in stock because the demand for them is stable from year to year.
Not so with trendy new items like Lands' End's $395 "ultimate cashmere
sweater." The company's CEO despaired to USA Today that he couldn't
purchase enough of them to meet demand, but that he was swimming in $25 canvas
Christmas totes. Good economic news, as the man once said, always comes bundled
with bad.

            
During the Christmas season, L.L. Bean stocks
about 10,000 items. On the same day the Times conspired with the forces
of capitalism to herd recalcitrant consumers into buying, the company was down
to about 7,000 items. As long as shoppers weren't insistent on a specific color
or style, there was still enough stock on hand to keep America's Christmas
trees from falling over and to clothe the Michigan and Montana
militias.

            And, even at this late date,
there's plenty of cold-weather gear available. If you doubt that, check your
mailbox for the Winter '97 sale catalogs from L.L. Bean and Lands' End and the
others. The horn of plenty is still gushing Headwall jackets and Penobscot
Parka Gore-Tex shells and Double L shirts and Winter Woods hand-knit sweaters
and Irish wool-blend herringbone scarves.

            At markdowns of up to 40
percent.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Nobel Gas

            Nobody said the Nobel
Committee was infallible. It did, after all, give Henry Kissinger the peace
prize in 1973. But the folks in Stockholm have traditionally been conservative
about whom they bestow scientific awards upon. Albert Einstein got his Nobel in
physics 16 years after he published his work, but the committee declined to
endorse that reckless relativity stuff.

            What,
then, is one to make of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine awarded to
neurologist Stanley Prusiner this week? Prusiner's hypothesis is that fatal
brain maladies such as mad-cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are caused
not by viruses, bacteria, fungi, or some other mundane agent but by something
startlingly new that he has discovered--mutant, rampaging proteins known as
"prions," short for "proteinaceous infectious particles."

            But do prions cause these diseases? In the past year,
Science and Nature , the two most distinguished scientific
journals, have published three major papers suggesting that the causative
agents of these diseases are not prions, and that Prusiner's 15 years of
prion research is simply wrong. The latest of these papers was published last
week, in Nature 's Oct. 2 issue.

            Before
moving on, a quick course in molecular biology: All living creatures, from
viruses on up, pull off the feat of self-replication by encoding the necessary
information in nucleic acids--in particular the double-stranded DNA discovered
by Crick and Watson or, for a few renegade viruses, single-stranded RNA or even
single-stranded DNA. These nucleic acids then code for and generate proteins,
which are the stuff we're made of. Prusiner's proposition is that it is
proteins, not "slow viruses," that are the infectious agent in mad-cow-like
diseases. This is what makes Prusiner's hypothesis so radical: Prions would be
the only proteins on the planet that reproduce--not to mention infect and kill
animals--and thus the only known exceptions to the rules of the Crick-Watson
paradigm of molecular biology.

            
Prusiner's proposition has been controversial
from the get-go. The researcher who did Prusiner's lab work at the University
of California at San Francisco quit over the publication of Prusiner's very
first prion paper in 1982, arguing that Prusiner was overinterpreting the
available data to push the prion hypothesis.

            Over the
next 15 years, Prusiner won over virtually everyone to his prion
hypothesis--the lay press, the scientific press--but not the researchers in his
field. He got his share of bad press, for which I take--and am given--entirely
too much credit (read my December 1986 feature story in Discover by
clicking ). By 1985, when Prusiner's own papers were still suggesting that the
prion hypothesis was at best a long shot, he won a $4-million congressional
award "to determine the structure of prions and how they cause disease." In
1991, Prusiner reported at a major conference that he had proved that the
infectious agents of these diseases were proteins free of nucleic acids. In
particular, he had created mice with a genetic mutation that caused what was a
normal protein--the prion protein, in Prusiner's lingo--to become abnormal and
produce disease. He then took brain matter from these mice and injected it into
new mice, which promptly got sick, showing that no viral particles were
necessary to transmit the disease. But there was still no paper proving the
results to the scientific community.

            Two years later, when he presented the same mice work at
another conference, the news pages of Science and Nature wrote it
up as if it cinched the prion hypothesis. Although Prusiner's work had not been
replicated by anyone and he had still not published these supposedly seminal
findings that prions cause disease in a peer-reviewed journal, he won the
prestigious Albert Lasker Award in October 1994. (The Lasker Award is
considered a short-list for the Nobel.) When he finally published his
proof-of-prion paper, it was only after it had been rejected by the journal
Cell . Prusiner managed to find a home for it in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Science , where it wouldn't have to be
peer-reviewed. The paper was largely ignored, and it was dissed even by
Prusiner, who admitted to a New York Times reporter that it was
uncompelling. Scientists who read the paper suggested that its findings could
be explained by contamination, which is to say, by sloppy laboratory
procedures. But four months later, Prusiner was still describing the mice work
to Scientific American 's lay readers as "a persuasive experiment."

            Prusiner's
boilerplate response to prion critics has been that if mad-cow disease or any
of the other "prion diseases" is caused by a virus, then surely that virus
would have been discovered by now. The fact is, it's damned hard to find a
virus in a mishmash of animal brains, which is where you have to look. One
reason a virus hasn't been found--if indeed a virus causes these diseases--is
that no one is doing the laborious and expensive work to find it. It can take
researchers decades to find culpable viruses--hepatitis C is a famous example.
But at least those researchers got funded to look, which has not been the case
in the prion field. Prusiner has received in the neighborhood of $40 million in
funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1985. Qualified critics
who request money from the NIH to look for viruses are told by NIH bureaucrats
that if the virus turns out not to exist, then their study will have been "of
insufficient significance and scientific merit" and thus not worth doing.

            
Despite the vindication offered by Stockholm,
the prion hypothesis is still rife with loopholes. For instance, the diseases
that allegedly are caused by prions come in a few dozen different strains, the
same way that dogs come in different breeds. It's easy to imagine variations in
viruses or bacteria, because they contain nucleic acids, which encode for
variations. But even Prusiner hasn't been able to explain how a protein that
has no nucleic acid could encode for the variations. His own grant proposals,
available on the Web through the NIH CRISP database, are evidence of the problem. One
describes the problem of prion strains as a "fascinating conundrum," while
another explains that the goal of the research project is to find out "whether
the strains differ in the properties of the scrapie form of the prion-protein
... or [whether] a second component is responsible for strain specificity, the
obvious candidate being a nucleic acid."

            Strains
aren't the only problem with the hypothesis. Prusiner has yet to show, for
instance, that a protein sans nucleic acid can be infectious, and consequently,
he has invoked the potential involvement of yet another agent in the disease
process (although he insists it has no nucleic acid and calls it "Protein X").
Some of his fellow prion researchers suggest it might be a "viral co-factor,"
which is doublespeak for saying that the prion ain't the infectious agent, a
virus is.

            One member of the Nobel Committee says his colleagues were
aware of unanswered questions in the prion hypothesis but awarded Prusiner the
prize in recognition of the wealth of information he has unearthed on
mad-cow-like diseases. But if it turns out that viruses do cause the
diseases, then Prusiner will have won the prize for the discovery of something
spectacularly wrong.

            Good science, not just Nobel
Prize-caliber science, depends on hypothesis and test, and then the rigorous
demonstration that the preferred interpretation of the data was the only
interpretation. In other words, remarkable results demand remarkable evidence.
In the case of Prusiner's prize, the Nobel Committee has settled for enthusiasm
and single-mindedness.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Clinton's Medicare Cuts

            
During the first presidential and vice
presidential debates, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp were hit by Medicare attacks from
Bill Clinton and Al Gore some 22 times. That's an average of one Medicare
attack every four minutes.

            Dole's sins: Not only did he
want to slash $270 billion from the program--more than needed to protect the
Medicare "trust fund"--he wanted to hike premiums, force seniors to pay more
out of pocket for care, and push them into managed care. Dole and House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, the president and vice president said, wanted Medicare to
"wither on the vine." All these were, as Gore put it on Meet the Press
recently, "extremist measures that would have devastated Medicare."

            Thank God Clinton was there
to stop it.

            Dole's
limp response was that he would honor his mother's word not to cut Medicare. He
needn't be so defensive. Three years ago Clinton himself proposed basically the
same package of reforms for Medicare--a fact everyone seems to have forgotten
since it was embedded in his massive, ill-fated Health Security Act. Here's the
rundown.

            

               Big Cuts vs. Slower Growth . Consider
this exchange in the veep debate:

            Jack Kemp:
"The president himself suggested that the reduction in the growth of Medicare
over the next five or six years ought to be held to 6 percent. Under the
Republican plan, irrespective of the numbers, it will grow at 7 or even more
percent."

            Al Gore: "I think Mr. Kemp
has unintentionally made a mistake in saying that President Clinton called for
a reduction to 6 percent. ... It is not the president's position."

            Nobody bothered to check out
this one. But the fact is that in 1993 Clinton boasted he could cut Medicare
growth to 6 percent while protecting the program.

            Here's Clinton speaking to
the American Association of Retired Persons in October that year: "Today,
Medicaid and Medicare are going up at three times the rate of inflation. We
propose to let it go up at two times the rate of inflation." Given that prices
were expected to climb 3 percent a year, Clinton meant 6 percent growth for
Medicare.

            "That is not a Medicare or
Medicaid cut," he reassured seniors. "So when you hear all this business about
cuts, let me caution you that that is not what is going on. We are going to
have increases in Medicare and Medicaid, and a reduction in the rate of
growth."

            A draft summary of the Health
Security Act, released in September of 1993, contained a chart showing
projected growth for Medicare slowing to less than 6 percent by 1997, and less
than 5 percent by 1999. And in its independent review of the Clinton plan,
health-care consulting firm Lewin-VHI noted that the act "attempts to slow the
growth in public and private health spending to the rate of growth in the CPI
plus an allowance for population growth." That puts Medicare growth at just
over 4 percent a year.

            Far from devastating, this
slowdown was, the White House said at the time, good for seniors. Ira Magaziner
told a press briefing that "slowing the rate of growth actually benefits
beneficiaries considerably because it slows the rate of growth of the premiums
they have to pay."

            But looked at in the terms
the White House uses today, Clinton was proposing cuts in Medicare spending
beyond the $270 billion Republicans dared propose.

            Like the
GOP plan, Clinton wanted to take a big chunk of savings from Medicare
providers--doctors and hospitals--by cutting back payments to them.

            

               More Cuts Than Needed . At one point,
Clinton warned that the GOP cuts were "more than was necessary to repair the
Medicare trust fund." The implied political point was that Medicare cuts were
going to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

            Clinton's Health Security
Act, however, also cut Medicare more than was needed to repair the trust fund.
Most of the savings from Medicare were to be plowed back into new federal
health programs. As the Congressional Budget Office put it: "Reductions in
Medicare spending would provide a major part of the funding for the
Administration's proposal." More than a quarter of it, by White House
calculations.

            
               Raise Costs to
Seniors . Several times during the debates, Clinton and Gore said that the
Republicans' Medicare-reform plan would have boosted costs to seniors. "It
would have charged seniors more for out-of-pocket costs as well as more in
premiums," Clinton said at one point.

            Under Clinton's Health
Security Act, more than a quarter of the savings came out of the hides of
seniors. They were to be charged higher premiums for Medicare Part B, the
program that covers physician services. New copayments were to be added for
some Medicare services that are now 100 percent covered. Over six years, those
costs to seniors would have totaled $33 billion.

            To be
sure, Clinton concentrated the premium hikes for Part B on the
well-to-do--those seniors earning $90,000 a year or more. The rest would pay
only a quarter of the premium cost, with taxpayers picking up the rest. The GOP
set the contribution rate at just under one-third of the full cost, but they
also "means tested" the premiums so that seniors with incomes over $75,000
would pay a bigger chunk.

            

               Push Seniors Into Managed Care . "Sen.
Dole's Medicare plan ... would have forced a lot of seniors into managed care,"
Clinton said. That's something of a misrepresentation. The GOP plan would have
expanded the managed-care options open to seniors, and encouraged them to take
it. Today, seniors can stick with Medicare, or opt for Health Maintenance
Organization (HMO) coverage, with the government ponying up the premiums. The
GOP plan would have opened that door to the rest of the alphabet soup of
private managed-care plans, such as preferred-provider organizations,
point-of-service plans and physician hospital organizations.

            So would Clinton's 1993
reforms, and even his more recent Medicare proposals. One section in his Health
Security Act was titled "Encouraging Managed Care Under Medicare Program."
Clinton's current reform proposal suggests expanding managed-care options for
seniors. The only difference between the Republicans and Clinton on this score
is that the GOP wanted to give seniors one extra option--to enroll in a
"medical savings account" plan.

            Both
parties used basically the same regulatory machinery to try to make their plans
work in the market without creating a huge "adverse selection"
problem--healthier seniors opting into lower-cost plans. The Republicans'
machinery, in fact, was borrowed almost verbatim from Clinton's plan--which, in
a double twist, the GOP had previously attacked as unworkable.

            

               Let Medicare Wither on the Vine. Clinton
twice said that Medicare would "wither on the vine" under Republican reforms.
The reference is to a comment by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who said that the
GOP wanted the Medicare bureaucracy to wither on the vine, as seniors
opted for the private plans. But the quote has been misused by Democrats ever
since.

            In any case, Clinton also
forecast the decline of the Medicare bureaucracy. New retirees under his Health
Security Act would be able to stick with the plan they had when they worked.
The government would pay the premiums instead of the employer. Current retirees
could choose a private managed-care plan. According to the Congressional Budget
Office, Clinton's plan would have moved nearly 3 million seniors from Medicare
into private plans in 1998 alone.

            To be fair, the White House
wanted to sweeten the Medicare pot at the same time it was making these cuts by
adding a prescription-drug benefit.

            It has also claimed since
that its proposed cuts in Medicare were acceptable because they were in the
context of "universal health care reform." But that wasn't the argument it made
at the time. Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Senate panel in 1993 that savings in
Medicare were easy because "we have too many examples now of how it can be done
better at lower costs with the same or better quality, and that's what we're
counting on."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Texaco's Uncompensated Victims

            Suppose the management of a
large corporation (call it Texaco) discriminates against blacks in hiring and
promotion. Who are the victims of that discrimination? The most obvious
candidates are the black workers who are denied suitable positions. But there's
a second class of potential victims: the corporate stockholders, who are denied
the services of those black workers.

            You might
guess that when there is discrimination, stockholders suffer less than the
black workers do. In fact, it's more likely to be the other way around, for
reasons I will explain as I go along. In that light, boycotting Texaco products
would be cruelly ironic. Boycotts lower corporate profits, which punishes not
the discriminatory management but the innocent stockholders--that is, not the
sinners, but their victims. There is even greater irony in the reports that
management will atone for its sins with a $176 million payment to black
employees--all of which will come directly from the pockets of those now doubly
victimized stockholders.

            To see why the stockholders bear many of the costs of
discrimination, let's think through a few alternative scenarios.

            
               Scenario 1: Suppose
that jobs at Texaco are pretty much interchangeable with jobs at, say, Exxon,
Mobil, and other competing companies; suppose also that discrimination is a
problem only at Texaco. Then it's easy for Texaco's black employees to escape
discrimination by taking jobs elsewhere. The positions vacated by Texaco's
blacks will be filled by whites, presumably of about equal competence. (Because
we've assumed that Texaco jobs are interchangeable with Exxon and Mobil jobs,
there's a large pool of workers at those firms for Texaco to draw on.) In this
scenario, Texaco ends up with an all-white work force, but no harm is done to
anybody: Blacks who would have worked at Texaco end up in equally desirable
jobs at Exxon; Texaco stockholders who would have profited from the wisdom of
black executives end up profiting from the equal wisdom of white
executives.

            
               Scenario 2: Suppose
again that jobs at Texaco are interchangeable with jobs at Exxon and Mobil, but
suppose this time that discrimination is rampant throughout the industry. Then
Texaco can treat its own black employees badly, but no worse than the industry
standard; if conditions at Texaco get worse than conditions at Exxon and Mobil,
all Texaco's black employees will move to Exxon or Mobil. (Similarly, if there
are comparable jobs available in other industries, the oil industry as a whole
cannot treat its black employees any worse than the standard set by those other
industries.) So, in this scenario, blacks can be harmed by discrimination in
general--but they do not suffer any additional harm from Texaco's
policies in particular.

            In this
second scenario, it's the stockholders who suffer for the sins of the
management. To see why, consider this example: Suppose that throughout the oil
industry, white executives earn $100,000 while otherwise identical black
executives earn $60,000 because of discrimination. Then Texaco could slash its
payroll by firing all its white executives and hiring blacks to replace them
at, say, $65,000 each. If the management is too blinded by discrimination to
pursue that option, then the stockholders end up paying an unnecessary $35,000
per executive per year.

            
You might want to argue that paying blacks
$65,000 to do a $100,000 job is itself a form of discrimination. I'd want to
argue otherwise, because in the case I'm envisioning, the wage differential is
driven not by racial preferences at Texaco but by profit opportunities created
elsewhere in the market. But that is just a matter of definition, and we can at
least agree on this: No matter how you define discrimination, hiring
blacks at $65,000 is surely less discriminatory than refusing to hire
blacks at $65,000. And, again, no matter how you define discrimination, the
bottom line is this: If Texaco discriminates less than everyone else, it ends
up with lots of black executives and a tidy profit for the stockholders; but if
Texaco discriminates as much as, or more than, everyone else, that profit
opportunity is thrown away. So when Texaco's management is highly
discriminatory, Texaco's stockholders are the big losers.

            

               Scenario 3: Suppose that, contrary to the first and second scenarios,
it's not true that a job at Exxon or Mobil is pretty much the same as a job at
Texaco. Suppose, instead, that each job requires skills so specific that there
is a single best person for each job and a single best job for each person. In
this scenario, discrimination at Texaco is indeed costly to those black
employees who are thereby excluded from their ideal jobs or forced to accept
lower wages in order to remain in those jobs. But in this scenario,
discrimination becomes even costlier to stockholders, who now own shares in a
company that does not make the best possible use of its black talent--and even
drives some of it away.

            To summarize: In Scenario 1, there are no victims; in
Scenario 2, the stockholders are the only victims; and in Scenario 3, the black
workers and the stockholders are victims. The truth is probably some
combination of these three stylized scenarios. So, if Texaco has indeed
discriminated against blacks (and it's worth noting that the evidence for that
proposition is shaky, but I'll accept it for the sake of argument), it's quite
likely that Texaco's stockholders have borne most of the cost.

            If Texaco executives had
indulged their personal tastes for Van Gogh oil paintings at a
multimillion-dollar cost to the stockholders, it would be self-evident that the
stockholders had been plundered. If Texaco executives indulged their personal
tastes for racial discrimination at a multimillion dollar cost to the
stockholders, the same conclusion should be equally obvious.

            If there was enough
discrimination at Texaco to merit a $176 million settlement with the employees,
then there was enough discrimination to merit a commensurate payment to Texaco
stockholders--not from corporate coffers, but from the personal assets of the
corporate executives who bilked their investors by failing to hire the best
bargains in the labor market.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            More Sex Is Safer Sex 

            By Steven
E. Landsburg

            
               (1102 words; posted
Friday, July 5; to be composted Friday, July 12)
            

            It's true: AIDS is
nature's awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially
irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive
attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of sexual
conservatism.

            You've
read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of
self-restraint.

            Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex
partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year.
The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives
you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.

            But suppose all
once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on
any given night, you'd run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous
bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your
odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six.

            That's why increased
activity by sexual conservatives can slow down the rate of infection and reduce
the prevalence of AIDS. In fact, according to Professor Michael Kremer of MIT's
economics department, the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded
if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take
additional partners more frequently. That covers three-quarters of British
heterosexuals between the ages of 18 and 45. (Much of this column is inspired
by Professor Kremer's
research.

            If
multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a
country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female
partners per year. Under those conditions, a few prostitutes end up servicing
all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease
to the men; and the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of
those monogamous wives was willing to take on one extramarital partner, the
market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast
enough to maintain itself, might die out along with it.

            Or consider Joan, who attended a party where she ought to
have met the charming and healthy Martin. Unfortunately Fate, through its
agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the
party, Martin ran across one of those CDC-sponsored subway ads touting the
virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin's absence,
Joan hooked up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent
Maxwell--and Joan got AIDS. Abstinence can be even deadlier than monogamy.

            If those subway ads are
more effective against the cautious Martins than against the reckless Maxwells,
then they are a threat to the hapless Joans. This is especially so when they
displace Calvin Klein ads, which might have put Martin in a more socially
beneficent mood.

            You
might object that even if Martin had dallied with Joan, he would only have
freed Maxwell to prey on another equally innocent victim. To this there are two
replies. First, we don't know that Maxwell would have found another partner:
Without Joan, he might have struck out that night. Second, reducing the rate of
HIV transmission is in any event not the only social goal worth pursuing: If it
were, we'd outlaw sex entirely. What we really want is to minimize the number
of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters; the flip
side of this observation is that it is desirable to maximize the number of
(consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections.
Even if Martin had failed to deny Maxwell a conquest that evening, and thus
failed to slow the epidemic, he
could at least have made someone happy.

            To an economist, it's clear why people with limited sexual
pasts choose to supply too little sex in the present: Their services are
underpriced. If sexual conservatives could effectively advertise their
histories, HIV-conscious suitors would compete to lavish them with attention.
But that doesn't happen, because such conservatives are hard to identify.
Insufficiently rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their
standards insufficiently.

            So a socially valuable
service is under-rewarded and therefore under-supplied. This is a problem we've
experienced before. We face it whenever a producer fails to safeguard the
environment.

            Extrapolating from their
usual response to environmental issues, I assume that liberals will want to
attack the problem of excessive sexual restraint through coercive regulation.
As a devotee of the price system, I'd prefer to encourage good behavior through
an appropriate system of subsidies.

            The question is: How do we
subsidize Martin's sexual awakening without simultaneously subsidizing
Maxwell's ongoing predations? Just paying people to have sex won't work--not
with Maxwell around to reap the bulk of the rewards. The key is to subsidize
something that is used in conjunction with sex and that Martin values more than
Maxwell.

            Quite
plausibly, that something is condoms. Maxwell knows that he is more likely than
Martin to be infected already, and hence probably values condoms less than
Martin does. Subsidized condoms could be just the ticket for luring Martin out
of his shell without stirring Maxwell to a new frenzy of activity.

            As it happens, there is another reason to subsidize
condoms: Condom use itself is under-rewarded. When you use one, you are
protecting both yourself and your future partners, but you are rewarded (with a
lower chance of infection) only for protecting yourself. Your future partners
don't know about your past condom use and therefore can't reward it with
extravagant courtship. That means you fail to capture the benefits you're
conferring, and as a result, condoms are underused.

            It is often argued that
subsidized (or free) condoms have an upside and a downside: The upside is that
they reduce the risk from a given encounter, and the downside is that they
encourage more encounters. But it's plausible that in reality, that's not an
upside and a downside--it's two upsides. Without the subsidies, people don't
use enough condoms, and the sort of people who most value condoms don't have
enough sex partners.

            All these problems--along
with the case for subsidies--would vanish if our sexual pasts could somehow be
made visible, so that future partners could reward past prudence and thereby
provide appropriate incentives. Perhaps technology can ultimately make that
solution feasible. (I envision the pornography of the future: "Her skirt slid
to the floor and his gaze came to rest on her thigh, where the imbedded monitor
read, 'This site has been accessed 314 times.' ") But until then, the best we
can do is to make condoms inexpensive--and get rid of those subway ads.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Putting on Heirs

            Metaphors, like magic
tricks, may dazzle through deceit. Take, for example, the recurring metaphor of
society as an extended family (a particular favorite among those who aspire to
be the head of the household). The accompanying patter goes like this: Families
do not allow one member to prosper while another struggles; ergo , we
need something like a bigger welfare system or a more progressive tax code.

            Note the
rhetorical sleight of hand. While you were still pondering whether society is
really like a family, I slipped in the wholly invented "fact" that families
take from the rich and give to the poor. The truth, at least as it is revealed
by last wills and testaments, is otherwise. Apparently, among the children,
even when some children are much wealthier than others. A bequest is a final
opportunity to redistribute income among those you love the most; if most
parents reject that opportunity, then it's pretty hard to see anything
"familial" in using the tax system to redistribute income among strangers.

            But bequests aren't the only economic transactions within
families. Does the family function as a welfare state in other ways? What about
schooling? Let's think about that. Who would you rather send to college: your
smart kid, who can make the most of an education, or your dumb kid, who needs
all the help he can get? The answer--even if you have an egalitarian impulse to
pour resources into the dumb kid--is to send the smart kid to college and make
it up to the dumb kid through bequests (or other cash gifts). That strategy
maximizes total family income, which allows you to do more good for both
your children. So, even if parents really wanted to equalize their children's
incomes, they .

            If not
schooling, then what about time and attention? At least in large families, the
big winners in the time-and-attention sweepstakes are the firstborns and the
lastborns--those who get to spend a few years as an only child. The middle
siblings perform significantly worse on sixth-grade . This suggests that time
and attention are valuable in much the same way that schooling is, and that
they are, therefore, equally unsuitable as a medium for redistribution. So, the
general rule is that if people wanted to redistribute among offspring, they'd
do it through bequests.

            
An exception might be poor families, where
bequests are insubstantial. In those circumstances, lavishing the less-skilled
children with schooling, time, and attention might be the only way to transfer
income in their direction. This exception, incidentally, could explain why
programs like Head Start are disappointingly ineffective: When little Johnny is
accepted into the Head Start program, his parents compensate Johnny's brothers
and sisters by spending more time with them and less with Johnny. There's a
nice irony here. By and large, the folks who want to argue that most people are
instinctively redistributionist are the same folks who want to argue for the
efficacy of programs like Head Start. But the stronger the redistributionist
instincts of Johnny's parents, the less he'll gain from the Head Start
program.

            Returning to the general
rule, the best way to redistribute income is through bequests. But parents
don't use bequests to redistribute income. We are entitled to conclude that
parents don't consider redistributing income to be terribly important. That
leads to a natural follow-up question: What do parents consider terribly
important? How do they decide what to leave to whom?

            I like
the theory that parents believe there is something intrinsically fair
about giving equal amounts to everyone. But to test that theory, we'd need to
know more about the distribution of parental gifts--like schooling, time, and
attention--during the parents' lifetime. I don't know whether my pet theory
would survive that test.

            An alternative theory is that a bequest is a mistake.
According to this theory, parents would prefer to spend everything they've got
before they go. The only reason there's anything left over is that death
arrives unexpectedly. But if this alternative were correct, we'd see old people
using all their savings to purchase annuities that pay them a guaranteed income
for life. The limited market for such annuities suggests that people prefer to
leave something behind.

            Yet
another theory is that parents are governed by a "strategic bequest motive,"
using their estates to purchase attention from their grown children. The threat
of disinheritance keeps those children in line; when the threat is effective,
nobody is actually disinherited. If this theory were true, you'd expect parents
with a lot of bequeathable wealth (stocks, bonds, etc.) to get far more visits
from their children than parents with an equal amount of nonbequeathable wealth
(such as pensions). That prediction and found accurate, which is one good
reason to believe the theory.

            
Parallel to the strategic bequest motive, we
can hypothesize a "strategic gift motive" that operates while the parents are
still alive. Those children who are struggling, and hence more likely to burden
their parents (say, by returning to live with them), get extra help in the hope
that they (the children) will become self-sufficient. (As a variation on this
theme, one can imagine a "strategic schooling motive," whereby the
least-accomplished children get extra schooling, in the hope that they will
become more interesting to converse with.) At bequest time, the strategic gift
motive would evaporate, and the favored child would be favored no longer.

            Bequest motives interact
with economic policy in surprising ways. The effects of a deficit-financed tax
cut can depend on whether most parents are altruistic or strategic. Altruistic
parents would save the money from their tax cuts and leave it to the children,
who must pay off all that government debt someday; that saving would hold
interest rates down. Strategic parents might spend a large portion of their tax
cuts, causing interest rates to rise.

            It's that
interaction with fiscal policy that has drawn economists' attention to bequest
motives in recent years. But a deeper reason for investigating bequests is that
they reveal something about people's instinctive sense of justice. That
instinctive sense is the best guide we have to economic policy in every
sphere.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Jesse Helms' Poison Gas

            Since Jesse Helms became
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1995, many of his
missteps have been harmless, even amusing. Who among us didn't chuckle when he
introduced the prime minister of Pakistan to the Senate as "the distinguished
prime minister of India"? But now comes the horrifying prospect that Helms
could actually play an important role in world history. The Chemical Weapons
Convention, signed by roughly the entire civilized world, awaits Senate
ratification and is bottled up in Helms' committee.

            According
to Helms, the CWC has two large defects. First, the treaty's verification rules
would violate U.S. sovereignty, allowing foreign inspectors to swoop down on a
factory "without probable cause, without a search warrant," and "interrogate
employees," "remove documents," and so on. Second, the treaty isn't tough
enough to reliably sniff out chemical weapons. Hard man to please.

            Let's leave aside Helms' factual errors (he's about the
search warrants) and look at his basic paradox: that the treaty is too tough,
yet not tough enough. This is not logically impossible. Chemical weapons could,
in theory, be so elusive that even a sovereignty-crushing inspection regime
couldn't find them. But if that's Helms' view, then he is opposed not just to
this CWC, but to the very idea of such a convention. Why doesn't he just
admit it?

            In any
event, the second half of Helms' paradox is the claim now being emphasized by
his allies in their crusade against the CWC. Via radio, TV, and op-ed pages,
we're being told that the treaty is "not verifiable." In a sense, this is true.
The convention will definitely not succeed in sniffing out all chemical weapons
everywhere. But it will definitely do a better job than is being done--or not
done--now. Given this upside, the question becomes: What's the downside? Helms
and his allies offer five downsides, all of which vaporize under
inspection.

            
1 Huge regulatory burden. Opponents of
the treaty initially exercised the basic Republican reflex of complaining about
the cost to U.S. business. It's true that U.S. chemical manufacturers will have
to fill out some forms. But if the United States doesn't join the
treaty, these same manufacturers lose sales to nations that do join. That's one
reason the Chemical Manufacturers Association heartily supports the treaty.

            2. Medium-sized
regulatory burden. Faced with the big chemical companies' support of the
treaty, opponents tried arguing that America's small businesses would
bear an unwarranted burden. Helms resoundingly declared on the Senate floor
that the National Federation of Independent Business opposes the treaty.
Unfortunately, an NFIB spokesman then pointed out that this isn't true. It is
"our belief," the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal , that "our
members are not going to be impacted" by the treaty.

            3. Our men in
uniform. Some treaty opponents argue that if the United States destroys its
chemical weapons, it will have surrendered a vital deterrent to chemical
attacks. But you don't need chemical weapons to deter chemical weapons. As
Leonard Cole, author of The Eleventh Plague , has observed, Saddam
Hussein refrained from using his vast chemical stockpile during the Persian
Gulf War not because he feared retaliation in kind , but because he
feared retaliation of comparable, or greater, magnitude . (Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf, who has retired and thus needn't toe the administration's line,
supports the CWC.) Even before the treaty, the United States had decided to
destroy its chemical arsenal, deeming it a needless headache. No one had even
bothered to complain about this until the treaty linked it to the dreaded New
World Order.

            4. Surrender of
sovereignty, Part 2. In a USA Today op-ed piece, Helms asserted that
the treaty would "require that the U.S. assist Cuba and Iran in modernizing
their chemical-weapons facilities." That would be strange, wouldn't it? A
treaty expressly devoted to eliminating chemical weapons obliges members to
help build them? This claim is based on of a somewhat opaque section of the
treaty, and is widely considered ridiculous.

            5.
Triumph of the rogues. Helms: "North Korea, Libya, Iraq, and Syria--all
principal sponsors of terrorism and repositories of chemical weapons--are not
signatories and won't be affected." Well, it's true that these nations aren't
signatories (though most suspected chemical-weapons possessors, including China
and Iran, are). But it's quite false to say that they "won't be affected." In
fact, they will be shut out of the market for many chemicals, including "dual
use" chemicals that are ingredients of both nerve gas and things like ink. This
is part of the innovative genius of the CWC: permanent economic sanctions
against nonmembers.

            Right now about two dozen countries are suspected of
pursuing chemical-weapons programs, and they do so with impunity. After the
treaty, they will fall into one of two camps: 1) those that suffer economic
sanctions and a clear-cut stigma, and 2) those that have agreed to allow
short-notice inspections of any suspicious site in their territory. That's not
progress?

            It's true
that once an inspection is demanded, Iran (for example) can stall. Though the
national government must escort inspectors to the perimeter of the suspected
site, it can then argue that the search violates its constitution, or whatever.
(If this national prerogative weren't preserved, Helms and company would be the
first to object.) Such a standoff, when it occurs, will trigger a global media
event, with CNN broadcasting satellite shots of the suspected facility every 30
minutes, and so on. If this drags on for too long, and Iran (say) seems
inexcusably obstinate, it can be judged noncompliant by a vote of convention
members, and sanctioned accordingly.

            
All told, the treaty is so much tougher than
anything in the history of global arms control that to call it an important
evolutionary step borders on understatement. And it comes just in time, because
technology for making biological weapons is spreading. What, you may ask, is
the key difference between chemical and biological weapons? Oh, about a million
corpses. Industrious CW-armed terrorists could kill thousands of New York
subway riders in a day. Industrious BW-armed terrorists could more or less do
Manhattan in the same time. Right now there is nothing approaching an
international regime for keeping biological weapons out of the hands of
terrorists. If there is ever to be one, it will have to resemble this treaty at
least broadly: surprise inspections of suspicious sites, the economic and moral
ostracism of nations that don't cooperate, etc.

            Will this approach work? We
don't know. It depends on such questions as 1) how effectively the
industrialized nations can monitor the average rogue state once they start
synergistically pooling their intelligence, and 2) how tough economic sanctions
have to be before even the Syrias of the world fall into line. It's much better
to answer these questions now, with chemical weapons, than 10 years from now,
with biological weapons.

            The basic flow of world
history, as I'm not the first to note, is toward interdependence. Increasingly,
the world's nations face common problems soluble only through concerted effort.
This often involves some marginal sacrifice of sovereignty: an agreement by
each nation to constrain its future behavior so long as others do, and
systematic deference to international judgment. You see this logic at work in
environmental issues (the Rio accords, now being toughened), economic issues
(the World Trade Organization, growing in importance), and other areas. The
proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is a paradigmatic problem of
the future, and the CWC is a paradigmatic, if imperfect, solution. Jesse Helms
is a paradigmatic relic.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Absurdity of Family Love

            Don't get me wrong. Kids are
great. I have some, and I adore them. Every Christmas I become a slave to my
camcorder. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow, and so on. But now that the
radiance of the yuletide season is fading, it's time to confront a sobering
scientific truth: The more you think about the biology of parental love, the
more absurd it seems. The same goes for love of kin generally--brothers,
sisters, nephews, etc.

            Readers
familiar with my obsessions may fear that this column is just another attempt
to spoil everyone's fun, to replace the beautiful mystery of life with ugly
Darwinian clarity. Actually, what I hope to dispel isn't pre-Darwinian mystery,
but a kind of post-Darwinian mysticism, a confused exaltation of genetic
affinity. You see the confusion when biological parents invoke "blood ties" to
reclaim a child from adoptive parents. You see it when opponents of
cross-ethnic adoption argue--as in a New York Times op-ed piece a few
months ago--that we must respect "the strength of the biological and cultural
ties that Indian tribes can offer their own children." In a sense, you see it
every year around Christmas, when people pay lip service to the idea of
universal brotherhood but believe in their hearts that it's ridiculous, that
truly loving people to whom you aren't related violates some law of nature.

            Thanks to the biologist William Hamilton, it is now clear
why people feel brotherly love in the literal sense--and sisterly love,
maternal love, and paternal love. It's all due to the operation of "kin
selection" during evolution. A greatly oversimplified textbook example: Two
million years ago, two hominids, Loveless Bob and Loving Bob, stand on two
different riverbanks, in identical situations. Each is watching his full
sibling Bill drown. Loving Bob has a gene inclining him to love his brother and
thus jump in the raging river, even though his risk of dying is 10 percent.
Loveless Bob has no such gene, and thus stands on the bank wondering whether
his brother's corpse will attract any large, edible fish. Which Bob's genes
will survive the Darwinian reaper--genes for love or for cold indifference?

            Love triumphs. True, there's
a one-in-10 chance that the love gene will sink along with Loving Bob. But
consider the upside. There's a one-in-two chance that Bob's full sibling Bill
has the same gene and, thus, that a successful rescue mission will pluck an
otherwise doomed copy of the gene from the dustbin of history. Do the math, and
you'll see that, over time, Loving Bobs send more genes to posterity than
Loveless Bobs. As love genes spread at the expense of indifference genes,
Loveless Bobs slowly become extinct. Die, selfish scum! Genes for sibling love
come to permeate our species--as, in fact, they now do. So do genes for
maternal love and paternal love. All brought to you by kin selection.

            As modern
Darwinism gets popularized, the basic idea of kin selection is approaching the
status of conventional wisdom. So are some attendant misconceptions.

            
Misconception No. 1: Genes are smart .
People often assume that kin-selected altruism is foolproof; that a gene can
magically sense copies of itself in other organisms--or, at least, can somehow
ascertain with perfect accuracy which organisms are close relatives of its own
host organism and thus may carry copies of itself. In truth, genes aren't
omniscient, or even sentient. If kin-selected genes are going to induce love of
kin, they'll have to determine who qualifies as kin in some pedestrian and
probably fallible way.

            For
example: Back when Loving Bob was 6 years old, if his mother was nursing some
infant named Bill and sleeping by its side every night, there's a very good
chance that Bill was Bob's sibling. So a gene disposing Bob to love children
whom he sees his mother nurturing could spread through the population until
everyone obeys the same rule. But this rule would misfire now and then, when a
mother is for some reason nurturing a non-offspring. It's just that the
misfiring wouldn't happen often enough to greatly dilute the genetic math
favoring the gene's proliferation.

            Little is known about which rules for identifying
kin--"kin-recognition mechanisms"--do operate in our species. But clearly, they
are fallible. Even mothers, who you'd think would have a damn good idea of who
their offspring are, can in principle be fooled. When hospital staffers for
some reason handed hours-old Kimberly Mays to a mother who was not hers, the
mother's kin-recognition mechanisms--a k a bonding processes--kicked in. This
woman wound up loving Kimberly like a daughter (though the mother died two
years later, so that Kimberly was reared mostly by a stepmother). Meanwhile,
Kimberly's genetic mother, having missed years of bonding, can never love
Kimberly quite like her own child, even though Kimberly is her own
child. Because genetic relationship per se doesn't matter.

            This
irrelevance of genes is why surrogate motherhood is so messy. Even when, thanks
to in vitro fertilization, the birth mother is unrelated to the fetus she
carries, she will, upon giving birth, fall in love with the child. During
evolution, after all, having a baby come out of your womb was reasonably strong
evidence of kinship. The power of the hormones that govern this bonding is
familiar to anyone who has watched a woman clutch her just-born child and turn
into a love-drunk cuddle-bunny. (When my wife went through this magic moment, I
briefly considered snatching the baby and replacing it with an 8-by-10 glossy
of myself.) This hormonal power was also observed by researchers studying
oxytocin, a hormone that's present in human and other mammalian mothers at
birth. The researchers put it in a syringe and used it to shatter all previous
records for cuddling among laboratory rats. By the way, the synthetic version
of oxytocin, Pitocin, is what doctors use to induce labor.

            
Misconception No. 2: People are smart--or,
at least, they are smart Darwinian robots . Darwinian theory does posit that
homo sapiens were "designed" to get their genes into the next generation, but
not that they were designed to do so consciously and rationally. As surrogate
mothers have proved, knowing that you've given no genes to an infant needn't
stop the bonding process. Thus, "kin- recognition mechanism" is a doubly
misleading term--first because, as we've seen, the mechanism doesn't positively
identify kin, but just identifies factors correlated with kinship; and second
because people aren't really aware of doing the identifying. We don't
think, "There's strong evidence that she's my daughter, so I adore her." More
like, "God but my daughter's adorable."

            It is
good news for adoptive parents that neither genetic relationship nor conscious
awareness of genetic relationship is a prerequisite for love. Still, it is bad
news that maternal bonding begins with hormones at birth. It is also bad news
that breast-feeding, which adoptive mothers usually can't do, releases the
bonding hormone oxytocin. Then again, there is no reason in principle that
adoptive parents couldn't take Pitocin once a day for synthetic bonding
sessions. (Oxytocin seems to be part of the bonding formula in men, too.)
Besides, some genetic mothers aren't conscious at birth, and many don't
breast-feed, yet they all nonetheless wind up loving their kids. As the many
successful adoptive parents know, lots of the magic moments that add up to
durabonding have nothing to do with birthing or breast-feeding. (Tiny tots,
with their eyes all aglow ... )

            Anyway, the main point is that when genetic parents give up
a child for adoption and have second thoughts weeks, months, or even years
later, their appeals to blood ties should count for zilch. Their love of their
child, and their child's love of them, depends not on genetic math but on a
long and complex chain of bonding, much of which they have already voluntarily
missed out on.

            Similarly,
the idea that Native American babies, or black babies, or whatever, have some
mystical genetic affinity with their "own" kind is silly. Obviously,
cross-ethnic adoption is dicey. It draws sidelong glances and playground
taunts, and it may give the adopted child an identity crisis. But it won't do
this because of some ancestral memory in the genes. As attitudes change,
cross-ethnic adoption will get easier; and as cross-ethnic adoption gets more
common, attitudes will change. (There are other pop-genetics arguments against
cross-ethnic adoption, and against adoption in general. One is that genes
influence personality so powerfully that mixing unrelated siblings is like
mixing oil and water. This idea is .)

            
Misconception No. 3: Our genes, though
perhaps not real smart, aren't downright stupid . Here we come, at last, to
the true absurdity of familial love. As we've seen, the genes that sponsor it
flourished by encouraging an "altruism" that was, in fact, self-serving at the
genetic level (the inexorable triumph of Loving Bob's genes). As we've also
seen, these genes can be "fooled" into encouraging altruism toward non-kin,
altruism that presumably is not self-serving at the genetic level.
Still, you might argue, in defense of your genes, they usually direct
familial love toward genuine kin, and thus usually succeed in being efficiently
selfish. Wrong! When genes confine altruism to kin, and deny it to needy
non-kin, they are in fact failing spectacularly to be efficiently selfish.
Because nowadays, copies of these genes do reside in non-kin--in your
next-door neighbor and, for that matter, your worst enemy. After all, the
Darwinian logic behind love of kin was so relentless that these genes permeated
our entire species! Loveless Bob is extinct, remember?

            You can
be forgiven for doubting my logic. People like me, in writing about kin
selection, often talk about full siblings sharing "half their genes," implying
that nonrelatives share none. But in truth, you share virtually all your genes
with any randomly selected homo sapien on any continent. What people like me
really mean is that full siblings share half of any genes that are newly
minted--genes that have recently arisen and on which natural selection is just
starting to pass judgment. Genes that natural selection fully endorsed long
ago--the basic genes for hunger, for lust, for familial love--are in everyone.
So genes that originally flourished by bestowing love with discerning
selfishness--by discriminating against people not containing copies of
themselves--now, having spread through the species, discriminate against people
who do contain copies! You may doubt that natural selection, a process
that supposedly maximizes genetic selfishness, could fail so abjectly to do so.
But it's true. .

            So this past holiday season, as you rushed to buy presents
for your kids or your siblings or your nieces or nephews, impelled by
"selfishly" altruistic genes, you were operating under flawed Darwinian logic.
These "selfish" genes could do just as much for themselves by encouraging you
to instead spend your money on the beggar outside the department store. In
fact, they could do more, since the beggar is closer to perishing than your
relatives are. (Also, the beggar might buy something useful such as food, as
opposed to a hair-eating Cabbage Patch doll.) But our genes are too stupid to
so deftly serve their own welfare.

            Not that I attach much weight
to what is and isn't "good" from the standpoint of genetic self-interest. As
virtually all ethical philosophers who have pondered the matter agree, it
doesn't make sense to model our moral values on the logic of nature anyway; to
infer ought from is --to commit the "naturalistic fallacy"--only
leads to moral confusion. For example, you might, after observing the natural
behavior of praying mantises, be tempted to conclude that it is morally good
for females to eat males after sex--and this, I submit, would be a repugnant
and wrongheaded doctrine! (Though slightly less repugnant than the idea of
eating males before the sex.)

            Most people implicitly
recognize the naturalistic fallacy in some contexts. They sense that there's
something visceral about, say, malice; yet they'll tell you (when not in its
thrall) that they disapprove of it. It's obvious, they believe, that the
natural strength of hatred is not a good thing. They're right. What is equally
right, but a bit less obvious, is that the "natural" limits of love aren't
necessarily good either. And, on close inspection, these limits turn out not to
be all that rigorously "natural" anyway.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Vote for Women

            President Clinton, we're
told, is reckless. He was reckless with Gennifer Flowers (in a bathroom during
a party), with Kathleen Willey (just off the Oval Office), and with Monica
Lewinsky (ditto, ditto, ditto). Heedless of the consequences, Clinton again and
again has followed, as Joseph Campbell used to say, his bliss.

            All this
may be true. But if it is, how do we reconcile it with Clinton's behavior in
the political realm? There he has carried risk aversion to rarely reached
heights. He will pay almost any price, in terms of policy, to marginally reduce
the chances of losing an election.

            To pick up some superfluous Slavic-American votes, Clinton
decided to expand NATO, something virtually no policy analyst anywhere near him
on the ideological spectrum considered a good idea. To pick up some superfluous
Cuban-American votes, he signed the Helms-Burton law, which predictably enraged
America's key allies and trading partners. Meanwhile, over in domestic policy,
Clinton's lodestar has been the focus group.

            How can it
be that these two identities--bold, reckless pursuer of bliss and timid,
desperate pursuer of office--exist in the same man?

            
There are to resolve this paradox. One is to
remember that the pursuit of office can lead to bliss. Maybe Clinton's fondness
for the Gennifers and Monicas who are the perks of a job like governor or
president keeps him from taking policy risks that might deprive him of the job.
Maybe his emulation of John F. Kennedy's lifestyle is what keeps him from
abiding by Profiles in Courage .

            Come to
think of it, Kennedy himself, though nominally the author of that book, didn't
glaringly exemplify its message of principle above politics. Hence, a general
theory: Men who obsessively convert power into sex are less willing to risk
power for principle.

            We can test this theory by using as our control group
Richard Nixon. For all we know Nixon had a tryst or two--but he can't hold a
candle to the legends of Kennedy or Clinton. Try picturing him cavorting in the
White House pool with nude staff nymphs or confidently steering a beautiful
woman's hand southward.

            So does our theory hold? Did
Nixon's presumed freedom from sex addiction leave him free from addiction to
office? Um, no. That Nixon had more than a casual attraction to power is a fact
to which various convicted felons on his staff can attest. If we want
principled leaders, electing more men like Nixon and fewer like Clinton
wouldn't seem to be the ticket.

            On the
other hand, it might make sense to elect fewer men generally. The point here
isn't just the well-known claim that men by nature are more blindly libidinous
than women. It is the Darwinian corollary of that claim: Men by nature pursue
power more desperately than women do.

            
During evolution, the whole Darwinian
point of male power--lots of sex, lots of offspring--didn't compute for
females. For women, lots of sex didn't mean lots of offspring. Power, to be
sure, brought other benefits to a female's genetic legacy, so women naturally
like having power. They just don't like it as much as men do.

            
Chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, are political animals. As the primatologist
Frans de Waal has observed, male chimps "seem to live in a hierarchical world
with replaceable coalition partners and a single permanent goal: power." For
females, on the other hand, "coalitions withstand time." Thus a male
chimp--call him Bill--might be making nice to his liberal internationalist
friends one day and signing simian bills sponsored by Jesse Helms the next. In
contrast, a female chimp--call her Pat Schroeder--would hew truer to her core
constituency.

            So the Bill Clinton paradox--his reckless pursuit of sex
and his timid clinging to office--is indeed no paradox. The former does
seem to explain the latter. But only in a broad, species-wide sense. The reason
men to put power above principle is because during human evolution, power led
to sex. This evolution-bred hunger for power is built into men generally,
including those (such as Nixon) for whom translating power into sex is not a
high personal priority.

            The
solution is obvious: If you want elected officials who put principle ahead of
power, voting for women gives you better odds.

            
But do keep in mind that gender differences,
even fairly firm ones, are only aggregate differences. The average woman
will surrender less principle for power than the average man. And women
who become heads of state are not average. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
certainly, was no stereotypical female. (Britain's war with Argentina over a
few barren islands, which Thatcher prosecuted with the zeal of a Churchill, has
been compared to two bald men fighting over a comb.)

            Still, though Thatcher may
have been more ambitious than the typical woman, she was a paragon of
ideological fidelity compared with Clinton (or Ronald Reagan). Just as female
politicians are more power-hungry than the average female, so also are male
politicians (even) more power-hungry than the average male. While admitting
that Clinton is representative of my gender, I must add, on behalf of men
everywhere, that he's an especially egregious example.

            Clinton's
detractors have argued that his alleged treatment of Lewinsky and Willey is a
betrayal of the feminist values he professes. Maybe. But in another sense his
feminist credentials look better than ever. He has provided--indeed, he has
become--a potent argument for bringing more women into public office.

            
               If you
missed our links in the story, click to read Wright's evolutionary take on 1)
how Clinton can be and 2) why .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Perfect Tax

            The expansion of government
is limited by the consent of the governed. Once upon a time, that consent was
harder to come by. In 1776, American colonists took up arms against a
government far less oppressive than the one that now spends 40 percent of our
incomes. We're more docile now, but the threat of revolution--or at least mass
dissatisfaction--remains an important force for good. We can harness that force
by designing laws and institutions that require each new government burden to
be widely shared. Politicians are less likely to risk annoying 60 percent of
the electorate than 10 percent.

            That
wisdom underlies the "takings clause" in the Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution, which says, in effect, that the government can't take your front
lawn and turn it into a park without paying you for it. The takings clause
forces taxpayers to share in the cost of any taking, and so ensures that
frivolous takings will meet broad opposition. Inspired by the same logic, I
propose a constitutional amendment capping everyone's tax bill at (say) five
times the average. Thus, if the average American pays $10,000 in taxes some
year, no American could be required to pay more than $50,000 that year. That
would force many taxpayers to share the cost of any new government spending,
and so ensure broad opposition to the growth of government.

            It's traditional to evaluate tax proposals according to the
twin standards of "equity" and "efficiency." Before I subject my own proposal
to those standards, let's talk a bit about the standards themselves.

            A tax system is "inefficient"
when it discourages beneficial economic activities. By discouraging working,
saving, and investment, the United States tax code--like any tax system--meets
that standard with ease. The only completely efficient tax would be one that
does not depend on anything the taxpayer can control--such as a "head tax" of
$5,000 per year. If your behavior can't affect your tax bill, your tax bill
won't affect your behavior.

            That kind
of head tax is interesting not as a realistic policy proposal but as a
benchmark for comparison: Economists like to say that a head tax has the
advantage of being perfectly efficient (it does not discourage any economic
activity), but the disadvantage of being perfectly inequitable (the rich and
the poor pay equal amounts). But those economists are wrong on both counts.

            
Let's talk first about equity. It is an act of
violence against the English language to describe as "inequitable" a tax that
charges everyone an equal amount. In the rhetoric of tax policy, the word
"inequitable" almost never means "inequitable"; rather, it means something like
"less redistributionist than the speaker would prefer."

            But I
don't want to dismiss a substantive concern just because people frequently
choose the wrong word to describe it. Instead, let me make a substantive
response: Even if you believe that the tax system should be used to iron out
income differentials, it's still perfectly easy to devise a head tax that is
consistent with your redistributionist philosophy. The key is to make taxes
dependent on variables that are good predictors of income but entirely
outside the taxpayer's control. For example, whites (on average) earn more than
blacks do. A direct tax on income might discourage work. But taxing whiteness
would not discourage anything, while still redistributing income (on average)
from the relatively rich to the relatively poor. A tax of "$10,000 per year if
you're white and $5,000 per year if you're black" is a perfectly .

            On similar grounds, we could tax people for being male or
tall or beautiful; all these traits are positively correlated with income. In
the case of beauty, though, we'd have to be careful to tax only natural beauty.
Otherwise, we'd discourage expenditure on shampoo, cosmetics, and dentistry.
(In fact, if we enjoy having beautiful neighbors, we might want to
subsidize beauty rather than tax it; you can't always pursue two
goals--in this case income redistribution and an attractive
population--simultaneously.) Regardless of what you mean by "equity,"
therefore, you can always adjust the head-tax system to conform to your
philosophy. Thus "inequity" (or, more accurately, "insufficient redistributive
power") is not a good .

            But just as the alleged
inequity of head taxes is no vice, so may their vaunted efficiency be no
virtue. The problem with an efficient tax system is that it provides no
built-in brake on the government's avarice. A government that takes $10,000
from everybody this year could decide to take $20,000 or $30,000 next year.
That is much less likely under an inefficient tax system. The income tax, for
example, is gloriously inefficient. The higher the tax rate, the less people
work. If the government raised the income-tax rate to 100 percent, we'd all
stop working, and tax revenue would be zero. To convince us to earn an income
worth taxing, the government is forced to let us .

            The challenge is to make
taxes more efficient without making them too easy to raise. This brings
me back to my proposed constitutional amendment: capping individual taxes and
tying the cap to the average tax bill. Adding a cap to the current system would
improve efficiency (there would be no disincentive to earn income beyond a
certain level), while maintaining the natural safeguards against confiscatory
government that are built into the income tax. In fact, those safeguards would
be strengthened by the fact that any tax increase would have to be quite
broad-based. As a bonus, a cap would bring the income tax closer to being
equitable, in the true sense of the word. The offsetting disadvantages? None,
as far as I can see.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Giving Your All

            CARE is a noble organization
that fights starvation. It would like your support. The American Cancer Society
is a noble organization that fights disease. It would like your support, too.
Here's my advice: If you're feeling very charitable, give generously--but don't
give to both of them.

            Giving to either agency is a
choice attached to a clear moral judgment. When you give $100 to CARE, you
assert that CARE is worthier than the cancer society. Having made that
judgment, you are morally bound to apply it to your next $100 donation.
Giving $100 to the cancer society tomorrow means admitting that you were wrong
to give $100 to CARE today.

            You might protest that you
diversify because you don't know enough to make a firm judgment about where
your money will do the most good. But that argument won't fly. Your
contribution to CARE says that in your best (though possibly flawed) judgment,
and in view of the (admittedly incomplete) information at your disposal, CARE
is worthier than the cancer society. If that's your best judgment when you
shell out your first $100, it should be your best judgment when you shell out
your second $100.

            When it
comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to
diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly
the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing
golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing
or talk to your children.

            So why is charity different? Here's the reason: An
investment in Microsoft can make a serious dent in the problem of adding some
high-tech stocks to your portfolio; now it's time to move on to other
investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the
problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is
worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will
never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The
problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally
deserving child.

            That is
not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have
done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is
precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously
about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen.

            
People constantly ignore my good advice by
contributing to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society,
CARE, and public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I
think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see
what I can do about cancer." But such delusions of grandeur can't be very
common. So there has to be some other reason why people diversify their
giving.

            I think I
know what that reason is. You give to charity because you care about the
recipients, or you give to charity because it makes you feel good to give. If
you care about the recipients, you'll pick the worthiest and "bullet"
(concentrate) your efforts. But if you care about your own sense of
satisfaction, you'll enjoy pointing to 10 different charities and saying, "I
gave to all those!"

            Here's a thought experiment for charitable diversifiers.
Suppose you plan to give $100 to CARE today and $100 to the American Cancer
Society tomorrow. Suppose I mention that I plan to give $100 to CARE today
myself. Do you say, "Oh, then I can skip my CARE contribution and go directly
on to the American Cancer Society?" I bet not.

            But if my $100
contribution to CARE does not stop you from making CARE your first priority,
then why should your $100 contribution to CARE (today) stop you from
making CARE your first priority tomorrow? Apparently you believe that your $100
is somehow more effective or more important than my $100. That's either a
delusion of grandeur or an elevation of your own desire for satisfaction above
the recipients' need for food.

            We have been told on
reasonably high authority that true charity vaunteth not itself; it is not
puffed up. You can puff yourself up with thank-you notes from a dozen
organizations, or you can be truly charitable by concentrating your efforts
where you believe they will do the most good.

            Early in this century, the eminent economist Alfred
Marshall offered this advice to his colleagues: When confronted with an
economic problem, first translate into mathematics, then solve the problem,
then translate back into English and burn the mathematics. I am a devotee of
Marshall's and frequently follow his advice. But in this instance, I want to
experiment with a slight deviation: Rather than burn the mathematics, I will
make it available as a link.

            I propose to establish the
following proposition: If your charitable contributions are small relative to
the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as
opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will
bullet all your contributions on a single charity. That's basically a
mathematical proposition, which I have translated into English in this column.
If you want to see exactly what was gained or lost in translation (and if you
remember enough of your freshman calculus to read the original), then .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Go Ahead

            Every night thousands of
parents, following standard child-care advice, engage in a bloodcurdling
ritual. They put their several-months-old infant in a crib, leave the room, and
studiously ignore its crying. The crying may go on for 20 or 30 minutes before
a parent is allowed to return. The baby may then be patted but not picked up,
and the parent must quickly leave, after which the crying typically resumes.
Eventually sleep comes, but the ritual recurs when the child awakes during the
night. The same thing happens the next night, except that the parent must wait
five minutes longer before the designated patting. This goes on for a week, two
weeks, maybe even a month. If all goes well, the day finally arrives when the
child can fall asleep without fuss and go the whole night without being fed.
For Mommy and Daddy, it's Miller time.

            This is
known as "Ferberizing" a child, after Richard Ferber, America's best-known
expert on infant sleep. Many parents find his prescribed boot camp for babies
agonizing, but they persist because they've been assured it's harmless. Ferber
depicts the ritual as the child's natural progress toward nocturnal
self-reliance. What sounds to the untrained ear like a baby wailing in
desperate protest of abandonment is described by Ferber as a child "learning
the new associations."

            At this point I should own up to my bias: My wife and I are
failed Ferberizers. When our first daughter proved capable of crying for 45
minutes without reloading, we gave up and let her sleep in our bed. When our
second daughter showed up three years later, we didn't even bother to set up
the crib. She wasn't too vocal and seemed a better candidate for Ferberization,
but we'd found we liked sleeping with a baby.

            How did we
have the hubris to defy the mainstream of current child-care wisdom? That
brings me to my second bias (hauntingly familiar to regular readers):
Darwinism. For our species, the natural nighttime arrangement is for kids to
sleep alongside their mothers for the first few years. At least, that's the
norm in hunter-gatherer societies, the closest things we have to a model of the
social environment in which humans evolved. Mothers nurse their children to
sleep and then nurse on demand through the night. Sounds taxing, but it's not.
When the baby cries, the mother starts nursing reflexively, often without
really waking up. If she does reach consciousness, she soon fades back to sleep
with the child. And the father, as I can personally attest, never leaves
Z-town.

            
So Ferberization, I submit, is unnatural. That
doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. The technique may well be harmless (though
maybe not, as we'll see below). I don't begrudge Ferber the right to preach
Ferberization or parents who prefer sleeping sans child the right to practice
it. Live and let live. What's annoying is the refusal of Ferber and other
experts to reciprocate my magnanimity. They act as if parents like me are
derelict, as if children need to fall asleep in a room alone. "Even if
you and your child seem happy about his sharing your bed at night," writes
Ferber, "and even if he seems to sleep well there, in the long run this habit
will probably not be good for either of you." On television I've seen a father
sheepishly admit to famous child-care guru T. Berry Brazelton that he likes
sleeping with his toddler. You'd think the poor man had committed .

            Why,
exactly, is it bad to sleep with your kids? Learning to sleep alone, says
Ferber, lets your child "see himself as an independent individual." I'm
puzzled. It isn't obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of
autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and
rendered powerless to influence its environment. (Nor is it obvious these days,
when many kids spend 40 hours a week in day care, that they need extra autonomy
training.) I'd be willing to look at the evidence behind this claim, but there
isn't any. Comparing Ferberized with non-Ferberized kids as they grow up would
tell us nothing--Ferberizing and non-Ferberizing parents no doubt tend to have
broadly different approaches to child-rearing, and they probably have different
cultural milieus. We can't control our variables.

            Lacking data, people like Ferber and Brazelton make
creative assertions about what's going on inside the child's head. Ferber says
that if you let a toddler sleep between you and your spouse, "in a sense
separating the two of you, he may feel too powerful and become worried." Well,
he may, I guess. Or he may just feel cozy. Hard to say (though they certainly
look cozy). Brazelton tells us that when a child wakes up at night and
you refuse to retrieve her from the crib, "she won't like it, but she'll
understand." Oh.

            According
to Ferber, the trouble with letting a child who fears sleeping alone into your
bed is that "you are not really solving the problem. There must be a reason why
he is so fearful." Yes, there must. Here's one candidate. Maybe your child's
brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which
mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves
completely alone at night it often meant something horrific had happened--the
mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to
respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within
earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left
alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a
theory.

            
Afew weeks of nightly terror presumably won't
scar a child for life. Humans are resilient, by design. If Ferber's gospel
harms kids, it's more likely doing so via a second route: the denial of
mother's milk to the child at night. Breast milk, researchers are finding, is a
kind of "external placenta," loaded with hormones masterfully engineered to
assist development. One study found that it boosts IQ.

            
Presumably most breast-feeding benefits can be delivered via daytime nursing.
Still, we certainly don't know that an 11-hour nightly gap in the
feeding schedule isn't doing harm. And we do know that such a gap isn't part of
nature's plan for a five-month-old child--at least, to judge by hunter-gatherer
societies. Or to judge by the milk itself: It is thin and watery--typical of
species that nurse frequently. Or to judge by the mothers: Failing to nurse at
night can lead to painful engorgement or even breast infection. Meanwhile, as
all available evidence suggests that nighttime feeding is natural, Ferber
asserts the opposite. If after three months of age your baby wakes at night and
wants to be fed, "she is developing a sleep problem."

            Idon't generally complain about oppressive patriarchal
social structures, but Ferberism is a good example of one. As "family bed"
boosters have noted, male physicians, who have no idea what motherhood is like,
have cowed women for decades into doing unnatural and destructive things. For a
while doctors said mothers shouldn't feed more than once every four hours. Now
they admit they were wrong. For a while they pushed bottle feeding. Now they
admit this was wrong. For a while they told pregnant women to keep weight gains
minimal (and some women did so by smoking more cigarettes!). Wrong again. Now
they're telling mothers to deny food to infants all night long once the kids
are a few months old.

            There are signs that yet
another well-advised retreat is underway. Though Ferber hasn't put out the
white flag, Brazelton is sounding less and less dismissive of parents who sleep
with their kids. (Not surprisingly, the least dismissive big-name child-care
expert is a woman, Penelope Leach.) Better late than never. But in child care,
as in the behavioral sciences generally, we could have saved ourselves a lot of
time and trouble by recognizing at the outset that people are animals, and
pondering the implications of that fact.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            We're All One-Worlders Now

            Back when I first joined
the ranks of one-worlders, more than a decade ago, we were an easy species to
describe: earnest, well meaning, and hopelessly naive. We envisioned an
eventual era of global peace, a time when nationalism had lost its edge and
nation-states had surrendered some sovereignty to global forums like the United
Nations or even a true World Parliament. This fuzzy idealism earned us the
moniker "woolly-minded one-worlders" as well as the (often correct) stereotype
that we were raving lefties.

            But then came the 1990s.
With the Cold War over and economic globalization accelerating, the ideological
map went topsy-turvy. Suddenly books giddily proclaiming The Twilight of
Sovereignty were being written not by the beads-and-sandals crowd, but by
capitalists (former Citibank head Walter Wriston, in the case of that title).
Meanwhile, less enthusiastic tracts, with ominous titles like One World,
Ready or Not , were being written by raving lefties (William Greider), who
now saw the withering of the nation-state as deeply problematic.

            While
this new debate rages, though, one-worldism marches on. We may never get to the
World Parliament phase. But the migration of governance from the national to
the supranational level is proceeding apace, in lots of little but ultimately
momentous ways. If this fact were more widely appreciated, globalization might
get a warmer reception on the left.

            
The reason left and right seem to have traded
places over "one-worldism" is that the term has more than one meaning.
Old-school one-worlders (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) were concerned mainly with
peace. The aspect of the nation-state they most wanted to constrain was
aggression. What excites people like Wriston (and Newt Gingrich) is the
constraint placed on a nation's domestic policies by worldwide capitalism.
Global bond markets punish national governments that splurge on safety nets.
Global labor markets punish nations with a high minimum wage or costly
environmental standards. "One world" now means a single planetary market that
can sweep away national policies designed in a simpler era to blunt the
market's sharp edges.

            Hence
the sudden provincialism of liberals. Supranational bodies like the World Trade
Organization and NAFTA are seen as mere lubricants of laissez faire. And for
now, at least, they indeed are little more than that. Still, even the new
one-worldism ought to hold some appeal for believers in the old version, like
me, for three reasons.

            
First, remember world peace? You know--the
mushy ideal that got us laughed off the stage in the first place? Supranational
bodies are its friend. In the recent book War Before Civilization ,
Lawrence Keeley observes that trade by itself is not inherently pacifying.
Indeed, the dependence it creates can be volatile. Witness Japan's testy
response, on Dec. 7, 1941, to the United States cutting off oil exports. But,
as Keeley also notes, when international tribunals exist to resolve disputes,
trade is generally pacifying. So the WTO should spell less bloodshed.
The European Union already does.

            Second, remember universal
brotherhood? You know--concern for the world's poor and downtrodden? As Paul
Krugman recently
noted in Slate, free trade gives millions of poor people a step up the
ladder. Yes, that may mean working in a sweatshop. But these people manifestly
prefer that to their prior condition. It may come as a shock to some suburban
American liberals, but for children in Pakistan, the alternative to stitching
Reebok soccer balls is not being driven to soccer practice in a Volvo station
wagon. It's deeper poverty.

            Third,
even leaving lofty universalism aside, international trade organizations can
help promote a liberal agenda domestically. In Britain the left supports the
European Union and the right doesn't. One reason is that the EU meddles in
national affairs with intrusive lefty regulation. Maybe the Tories are right
that some of the regulation is excessive, but much of it isn't. And, anyway, my
point is just that a supranational trade body can in principle be supported
by--and thus be shaped by--a center-left coalition, rather than a center-right
coalition.

            
Consider NAFTA. It passed on a center-right
coalition and reflects that fact. But it's not beyond change. For negotiations
to admit Chile, President Clinton wants a reluctant Congress to authorize him
to include labor and environmental accords. So, if Clinton sticks to his guns
(a big "if") and prevails, we may have a new and improved NAFTA. It could, say,
impose stricter environmental standards on Mexico and Chile and give Mexican
and Chilean workers the right to bargain collectively. Both provisions would
raise Latin American labor costs, and thus dull NAFTA's adverse effect on some
low-wage American workers. In essence, this approach would use political
globalization to to a slightly less jarring pace.

            It is
strange that so many of those most offended by globalization call themselves
"progressives." Early this century, the progressives were people who realized
that communications and transportation technologies were pushing the scope of
economic activity outward, from individual states to the United States as a
whole. They responded by pushing economic regulation from the state to the
federal level. The analogous leap today is from national to supranational
regulation. Yet many of today's progressives are economic nationalists, viewing
unilateral tariffs as the policy tool of choice.

            
Evolutionary psychology tells us that economic
intercourse is about as deeply ingrained in the human brain as any other form
of intercourse. (If you doubt this, read Matt Ridley's excellent new book,
The Origins of Virtue .) That's one reason the ever expanding scope of
economic activity is essentially a force of nature--it can be guided, it can be
slowed, but it can't, realistically, be stopped. The original progressives
chose to swim with this basic current of history. Many of today's
"progressives" are swimming against it.

            Still,
globalization is, willy-nilly, turning even progressives into de facto
one-worlders. Witness the new anti-sweatshop consortium, featuring Nike, Liz
Claiborne, Kathie Lee Gifford, et. al. It sets minimally humane working
conditions that foreign factories must meet if their products are to sport a
"No Sweat" label. And it arose not out of the goodness of Nike CEO Phil
Knight's heart, but to keep left-wing nongovernmental organizations--especially
"progressive" ones--off his back. (The of supranational NGO lobbying in general
is analyzed by Jessica Mathews in the January/February Foreign Affairs .)
Thus the old left, intentionally or not, is pushing us from national regulation
to supranational regulation--albeit, in this case, a kind of private-sector
supranational regulation.

            
In a way, the "one-world" battle is over. Once
you exclude fringe elements on both sides--Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan,
basically--both Democrats and Republicans accept the reality of NAFTA and the
WTO even as they argue about whether these bodies should include environmental
and labor laws, à la the EU. Thus, the existence of supranational bodies with
significant functions of governance is no longer the issue. (Mainstream
conservatives sure aren't complaining about the WTO's power to penalize
countries that fail to open their telecommunications to foreign investment.)
The issue, rather, is the perennial issue: whether governance will be to the
right or the left. In that sense, we're all one-worlders now.

            In fact, we're all
one-worlders even in the old beads-and-sandals sense. Well, almost all. As this
column is posted, the Senate is poised to vote on the Chemical Weapons
Convention. CWC opponents may muster the 34 votes needed to prevent a
two-thirds ratification vote (thanks to the earnest but clueless Jesse Helms
and two of the most rabidly reactionary institutions in politics today: the
Wall Street Journal 's editorial page and a reptilian Cold War vestige
called the Center for Security Policy). Even so, the fact remains that this
unprecedentedly strong form of global arms control--the sort of thing peacenik
hippies could only dream about a decade ago--now commands mainstream support:
all Senate Democrats, around half of all Senate Republicans, Presidents
Clinton, Carter, Ford, and Bush (and, for all we know, Reagan).

            In the old days, liberals
wanted peace and conservatives wanted law and order--a nice, stable environment
for commerce. Many of the CWC's Republican supporters are people who realize
that, in the modern world, where neither commerce nor terrorism knows national
boundaries, peace is order.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Judge Not

            Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki has
instructed the jurors in the O.J. Simpson civil trial to ignore everything that
happened in the criminal trial. This makes him the judicial equivalent of the
automatic-elevator operator who will not allow the passengers to press the
buttons. If passengers started pressing their own buttons, there would be fewer
jobs for elevator operators; if jurors started gathering their own information,
there would be fewer jobs for judges.

            Economic
theory predicts that special-interest groups will try to manipulate the rules
of the workplace to make themselves indispensable. Everybody knows about union
featherbedding, and everybody knows about complex legislation--written by
lawyers--that only lawyers can interpret. But it seems to have escaped popular
notice that judges have developed the arcane rules of evidence that keep judges
in demand.

            Judicial featherbedding explains why judges insist on
filtering everything the jurors hear. In the Simpson case in particular, a lot
of interesting arguments have been made, and not all of them have been made in
Fujisaki's courtroom. Why would we want to shield jurors from perfectly good
reasoning just because it happens to arise not in the courtroom but in an
editorial or over the dinner table?

            The
standard response, of course, is that we want to shield jurors from bad
reasoning. But, if we trust these people to sort out wrongheaded analysis from
sound reasoning in the courtroom, how can we not trust them to do the same with
the editorial page?

            
In fact, the entire system of shielding jurors
from "irrelevant" information (like past convictions, in criminal trials)
betrays a disturbing inconsistency. A juror who is capable of sorting through
conflicting claims from dueling DNA experts surely is capable of judging the
informational content of a past conviction.

            
Nevertheless, we allow judges to exclude evidence even though, once evidence
has been introduced, we trust jurors to decide how much weight it should
receive. In other words, we believe that jurors are perfectly competent to
decide whether a given piece of evidence should be given a weight of 30 percent
or 70 percent or 90 percent, but not whether that same piece of evidence should
be given a weight of 0 percent. I can think of no set of beliefs about the
limits of jurors' competence that would recommend such a policy.

            Either jurors are capable of deciding how much weight to
assign a given bit of evidence or they're not. If they are capable, then by all
means show them all the evidence and let them ignore what they think is
irrelevant. If they are not capable, then why do we have juries in the
first place? Either we have a very muddled view of what jurors can accomplish,
or the system has been devised to serve the interests of judges and lawyers who
thrive on confusion.

            I'm not
talking about things like the exclusionary rule, which prohibits jurors from
seeing evidence that was gathered illegally. The exclusionary rule serves a
clear purpose by discouraging overzealous police officers from inappropriate
behavior. Whether that benefit is worth its cost in terms of false acquittals
is arguable, but at least there is a clear benefit. By contrast, the
limited admissibility of legally acquired evidence serves no apparent
purpose, except to generate motions by lawyers, rulings by judges, and grounds
for appeals.

            
You might think that without judges to
carefully control the flow of evidence, jurors would drown in a sea of
irrelevant information--and trials would go on forever. But that problem is
solved most efficiently by having lawyers pay (in cash) for excessive use of
courtroom time, not by the long and costly process of motions and appeals.

            The jury-selection process
is another good example of judicial make-work. The officers of the court go to
enormous lengths to choose unbiased jurors. But what is so desirable about the
absence of bias--and of the informed speculation that might have led to that
bias? At election time, we are not urged to avoid the media so as to remain
unbiased until we get to the voting booth. Isn't it inconsistent to prefer both
a well-informed electorate and an ignorant jury?

            
(Sometimes, apparently, jurors are chosen not just for specific ignorance of
the case but for general ignorance of the world around them. I have a friend
who was excluded from a jury because he answered "yes" to the question, "Do you
think a man who's been arrested is more likely to be guilty than a man who
hasn't been arrested?" Presumably his place was taken by another juror who
really believes that the police arrest people completely at random.)

            Jurors are kept off-balance--and in need of additional
guidance from the bench--by the judge, who instructs them to convict if the
defendant is guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt," without telling them whether a
"reasonable doubt" consists of a 1 percent risk of error, a 5 percent risk of
error, or a 10 percent risk of error. Lawyers scoff at the notion that doubt
can be quantified so precisely. Their scoffing is justified, but it's also
irrelevant. It is true that no juror can be sure whether his or her doubt is
more or less than 5 percent, but it is equally true that no juror can be sure
whether his or her doubt is more or less than "reasonable." With a quantified
target, jurors would at least know what to aim for, even if they can't be sure
of hitting it.

            It's crazy to think that
jurors who are unsure about two criteria (what is a reasonable doubt,
and does my own doubt exceed that level?) will be more accurate than jurors who
are unsure about only one criterion (does my doubt exceed 5 percent?).
And quantified standards have the added advantage of flexibility--they can be
adjusted to different levels for different crimes. But judges, whose jobs
depend on judicial procedures being impenetrable, convoluted, and
self-contradictory, systematically conceal what they are thinking of when they
use the phrase "reasonable doubt."

            The entire
purpose of legal tradition and precedent is to make outcomes predictable. But
judges have both the motive and the opportunity to contort tradition and
precedent in ways that render outcomes illogical and un predictable.
Respect for the law is enshrined in our culture, but it should not blind us to
the possibility that the law can be corrupted to serve sordid ends.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Gorilla Warfare

            The current effort to
sexually integrate the U.S. military is not without precedent. Consider the
natives of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, who earned their place in
military annals by subduing and then eating the crew of a French survey ship in
1850. The men and women typically headed off for war in unison, although their
roles did differ once the fighting began. The women would fall back to the
rear; then, as one 19 th -century observer put it, "whenever they see
one of the enemy fall, it is their business to rush forward, pull the body
behind, and dress it for the oven."

            OK, so these women aren't
quite the role models that proponents of sexual integration would order up from
central casting. But history has provided few candidates for that job. As
Maurice Davie noted in 1929 in his cross-cultural survey, The Evolution of
War , "war is the business of half the human race."

            As a
rule, the fact that women have not traditionally performed a given role has no
bearing on their competence to perform it now. Centuries of female exclusion
from academia or civil engineering haven't rendered modern women unfit for
those professions. However, male dominance of the killing business seems to
have been going on for a lot longer than a few centuries--maybe long enough to
have influenced human evolution, shaping the biological foundation of human
psychology. If so, does that mean male and female psychology are so different
that the sexual integration of the military is misguided? The question breaks
down into three subquestions.

            1 Are men designed by natural selection for warfare?
As regular "Earthling" readers may recall, the premise of evolutionary
psychology is simple: Those genetically based mental traits that, during
evolution, consistently helped their possessors get genes into the next
generation became part of human nature. Careful thought experiments have shown
that, in a context of regular violence, mental traits conducive to killing
would do more for your genes than mental traits conducive to getting killed
would. So if during human evolution men often fought in wars and women didn't,
then indeed men might be naturally better warriors than women.

            Of course,
the frequency of war in prehistory is not well recorded. (Hence the term
"prehistory.") But various hunter-gatherer societies--the nearest real-life
models of the social environment of human evolution, and thus the purest
observable expression of human nature--have been known to engage in
intervillage raids. Australian Aborigines of the 19 th century,
according to one chronicler, made it a point "to massacre all strangers who
fall into their power." In some of these societies, more than a fourth of the
males die violently.

            
And whether or not our distant male ancestors
often participated in actual "war," they probably fought other males and
sometimes killed them. The warless !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari
Desert, once romanticized as The Harmless People , were found a few
decades ago to have homicide rates between 20 and 80 times as high as
industrialized nations. (And some of this killing is coalitional--two brothers
and a friend gang up on an enemy, etc.) So, ethnographic evidence alone
suggests that men could well be designed by natural selection to fight, and
perhaps to do so in groups.

            There is
more evidence, which we'll get to shortly. However, the policy implications of
any male propensity to fight would depend on other questions. For example:

            2 Are women by nature shrinking violets, innately
repulsed by war, incapable of violence? Hardly. Feuding Australian
Aborigine women would sometimes square off and whack each other with yam sticks
until somebody intervened. Among the Ainu, the indigenous hunter-gatherer
people of Japan, women would go to war and actually fight, though only against
other women.

            Even when women aren't
combatants, they hardly shy away from the thought of war, or from its gore.
Among the Dayak of 19 th -century Borneo, women would surround a
returning warrior, singing songs of praise, while the head of one of his
victims sat nearby on a decorative brass tray. Among the Yanomamo of South
America, women watch the one-on-one "club fights" that sometimes escalate into
intervillage conflicts, screaming insults and egging their men on. Among the
Ba-Huana of the Congo, one 19 th -century ethnographer reported, "the
chief instigators of war are the women." If their men are insulted by other men
and don't retaliate, "the women make fun of them: 'You are afraid, you are not
men, we will have no more intercourse with you! Woma, woma [afraid]! Hu!
Hu! Hu!' Then out go the men and fight."

            All told,
though women as a group are less combative than men, they are not wholly averse
to combat. And plainly, some women are more eager and capable fighters
than some men. (I'm male, but no one has ever confused me with Charles
Bronson.) So why deny high-testosterone women an opportunity to join in the
fun? If there is a good reason, it has to do with our final question.

            
3 Why do men fight so much? Here we come
to a problem that will prove stubborn if the military tries to sexually
integrate ground combat forces such as the infantry. The problem isn't so much
that men are designed by natural selection to fight as what they're designed to
fight over: women .

            Even today, Yanomamo men
raid villages, kill men, and abduct women for procreative purposes. Moreover,
tough, mean men enjoy high social status, which attracts women and helps the
men get genes into the next generation. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has
shown that Yanomamo men who have killed other men have more wives and more
offspring than average guys.

            It's not
just a question of men disinclined to violence getting killed off. Two men
might fight over a woman until one man submits and the winner gets the woman.
Or, men might fight for seemingly nonsexual reasons, but the winner still
enjoys the high social status that wows the ladies. Indeed, it's possible that
non-lethal violence has done more to shape the male propensity for violence
than simple killing has.

            Male combat is common among primates. It is the reason
that, in many primate species, males are so much bigger and stronger than
females. Indeed, the more polygynous the species--that is, the more females a
dominant male can sexually monopolize--the larger the size difference between
the sexes. The toughest male gorillas get a whole harem of females to
themselves, and the wimpiest get zilch. Eons of combat over such high genetic
stakes have led to males that are about twice the size of females. In our
species, the more modest but still marked difference in size and strength
between men and women is hard evidence that violence, whether lethal or
non-lethal, has paid off for men in Darwinian terms. Among the other evidence
is the fact that testosterone makes people aggressive.

            The
problem with fielding a sexually integrated army of gorillas wouldn't be that
the females can't fight. Try stealing a female gorilla's baby and see how you
fare. The biggest problem is that if you put three male gorillas together with
one unattached female, esprit de corps will not ensue.

            
Yes, of course human males are better at
controlling their hatreds and rivalries than gorilla males are. But are humans
so good that it makes sense to sprinkle a few women into a group of infantrymen
and send them all off to war, where everyone's prospects for survival will
depend on their solidarity? Hoping (even subconsciously) that one of your
comrades will die seems a poor frame of mind to carry into battle.

            Does the
same argument apply to nonmilitary workplaces? Doesn't sexual integration sow
dissension there as well? I'd say that any downside to sexually integrating
nonmilitary workplaces is not severe enough to restrict the rights of women (or
men). And--in many workplaces--there may be a big upside to sexual integration.
But the military is special. The cost of dissension is death, not lower
earnings. (And during big wars, when the draft is on, many of the victims are
people who didn't volunteer for the job. That's one big difference between this
issue and the issue of sexually integrating police forces.)

            This logic has no direct bearing on the currently topical
issue of sexually integrated basic training. The troops that take basic
together don't go off to war together, so their bonding isn't a matter of life
and death. Still, basic training is meant to model some of the rigors of war,
and it turns out to be a useful model indeed: The complaints of sexual
harassment that deluged the Army after the Aberdeen scandal (which itself
didn't involve basic training) show how male and female psychology can
complicate life for a sexually integrated army. Obviously, the more conspicuous
problems--men propositioning women, for example--can be minimized with
sufficiently harsh punishment. But the underlying psychological forces will
still be there, taking their toll. And remember: When soldiers go from training
camps to actual war, things get more primitive, not less.

            One can imagine combat roles
for women that wouldn't fly in the face of human nature. (Why not try ?) But
reflecting on human nature doesn't seem to be a common pastime at the Pentagon.
Sexually integrating ground combat forces is now favored by one assistant
secretary of the Army. The secretary himself, Togo West, has said he is open to
the idea. And already combat forces are somewhat integrated in the Air Force
(squadrons of pilots) and Navy (ship crews). (These things, though, as
integrating the infantry would be.) Given the stakes, shouldn't such decisions
be informed by some knowledge of sexual psychology? Or, instead, we could just
wait for a war and use 20-year-olds as guinea pigs in a poorly researched
social experiment.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Be Fruitful and Multiply

            The day you were born, you
brought both costs and benefits into this world. The costs include the demands
you made (and continue to make) on the world's resources. The benefits include
your ongoing contributions to the world's stock of ideas, love, friendship, and
diversity.

            Do the costs outweigh the
benefits, or vice versa? In other words: Should the rest of us consider your
birth (or any child's birth) a blessing or a curse?

            Let's not try to
settle this by listing all the costs and benefits of sharing the world with
other people. After an evening stuck in summer traffic, you'll remember that
the driver in front of you imposed a cost, but you might forget that the guy
who invented your car's air conditioner conferred a benefit. New Yorkers
remember to complain about the crowds, but sometimes forget that without the
crowds, New York would be Cedar Rapids.

            Instead
of making a list, let's think about the decision your parents faced when they
were considering whether to conceive a child. Is it more likely that they
undercounted costs or that they undercounted benefits?

            I'll start with benefits. The clearest benefit of your
birth is that it gave your parents a child to love; they certainly counted that
one. But the other benefits are spread far and wide. If you build a better
mousetrap, millions will be in your debt. If all you do is smile, you'll still
brighten thousands of days. We don't know how to list those benefits, but we do
know that many of them fall on total strangers. That makes it unlikely that
your parents took them fully into account.

            Now let's look at costs. The
costs of your existence fall into two categories. First, you consume privately
owned resources like food and land. Second, you might consume resources to
which you have no clear property right--for example, you might open a factory
that pollutes the air I breathe, or you might become a burglar who steals my
stereo system.

            (You might
imagine that there are also costs associated with your competing in the
marketplace, bidding some prices up and others down, applying for the job I
wanted, and so forth. But each of those costs has an offsetting benefit. If you
bid up the price of cars, sellers will gain as much as buyers lose. If you
prove a stronger job candidate than I do, my loss is the employer's gain.)

            
Stealing and polluting clearly impose costs on
strangers. But if you're at all typical, your consumption of staples like food
and land will far exceed your consumption of other people's air and other
people's property. In other words, for most people, the first category of costs
is the big one. So let's concentrate on that.

            Where do you get all those
resources you own and consume? Some you create; those don't cost anybody
anything. Some you trade for; again, those don't cost anybody anything. The
rest you inherit; and those come from your siblings' share. That means your
siblings--not strangers--bear most of the costs of your birth.

            That's a
point that's often missed. When people think about overcrowding or
overpopulation, they typically imagine that if, for example, I had not been
born, everyone else would have a slightly bigger share of the pie. But that's
not right. If I had not been born, both my sisters would have substantially
bigger shares of the pie, and everybody else's share would be exactly what it
is now.

            So when parents are deciding whether to have a third,
fourth, or fifth child, they are generally more conscious of the costs than of
the benefits. Most of the costs are imposed on their other beloved children,
while many of the benefits are dispersed among strangers.

            When a decision-maker is more
conscious of costs than of benefits, he tends to make decisions that are overly
conservative. That almost surely means that parents have fewer children than is
socially desirable, and that therefore, the population grows too slowly. My
daughter is an only child, which makes me part of the problem.

            Somewhere
there is a young lady whose life has been impoverished by my failure to sire
the son who would someday sweep her off her feet. If I cared as much about that
young lady as I do about my own daughter, I'd have produced that son. But
because I selfishly acted as if other people's children are less important than
my own, I stopped reproducing too soon.

            
Population growth is like pollution in reverse.
The owner of a polluting steel mill weighs all its benefits (that is, his
profits) against only a portion of its costs (he counts his expenses, but not
the neighbors' health). Therefore, he overproduces. Parents weigh all--or at
least most--of the costs of an additional child (resources diverted from their
other children) against only a portion of the benefits (they count their own
love for their children, but not others' love for their children). Therefore,
they under produce.

            This argument seems to
suggest that I should have had more children for the sake of strangers. A
second, completely separate argument says I should have had more children for
the sake of those children themselves. Presumably they'd have been grateful for
the gift of life. I'm not sure how far to push that argument. There's obviously
nothing close to a consensus on how to assign rights to the unborn, so we can
hardly hope for a consensus on how to assign rights to the unconceived. But the
second argument does tend to buttress the first.

            Personally, I ignored both
arguments when I selfishly limited the size of my family. I understand
selfishness. But I can't understand encouraging others to be selfish,
which is the entire purpose of organizations like Zero Population Growth.
Instead, we should look for ways to subsidize reproduction. A world with many
people offers more potential friends who share our interests, more small acts
of kindness between strangers, and a better chance of finding love. That's the
kind of world we owe our children.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tax the Knickers Off Your Grandchildren

            As of this writing, Bill
Gates' estimated net worth is $24 billion. On the conservative assumption that
he's earning 3 percent after taxes and inflation, his investment income is
about $2 million a day.

            It's difficult for one to
even imagine what it would be like to have that kind of pure income. But it
won't be as difficult for your grandchildren. If U.S. per capita income manages
to grow in real terms at a plausible 2 percent per year, then in just 400
years, the average American family of four will enjoy a daily income of $2
million. And those are not some future, ravaged-by-inflation dollars--I'm
measuring everything in the dollars of 1997.

            More remarkably, if the
United States could achieve the growth rates that have been reported by South
Korea in the past couple of decades, it would take only about 100 years until
the average family's income approaches $2 million per day. If the United States
grows like South Korea, your children's grandchildren can live like Bill
Gates--unless they rise above mediocrity and live even better.

            So each time the Sierra Club
impedes economic development to preserve some specimen of natural beauty, it is
asking people who live like you and me (the relatively poor) to sacrifice for
the enjoyment of future generations that will live like Bill Gates.

            Taking from the poor and
giving to the rich is the opposite of income redistribution as it is usually
practiced. If we were consistent, we'd insist that those wealthy future
generations owed us something, not the other way around. If some moral
principle allows the tax collector to confiscate 40 percent of Gates' income,
that same moral principle should allow the unemployed lumberjacks of Oregon to
confiscate your rich grandchildren's view of the giant redwoods.

            (I am
accepting, for the sake of argument, the Sierra Club's presumption that it can
accurately foresee what our descendants will value. But it's worth mentioning a
separate reason to be skeptical of the conservationist agenda: For all we know,
those descendants might prefer inheriting the proceeds of economic development
to inheriting the redwoods.)

            

               The conservationists are not alone in
their pathological concern for future generations. The same impulse has
launched an epidemic of hysteria over federal deficits. The national debt is to
the '90s what the nuclear freeze was to the '80s: It's the one issue you don't
really have to understand before you can start feeling morally superior to your
neighbors. From that point of view, it's even better than the nuclear
freeze--not only does your expression of deep concern put you on the moral high
ground, but you actually get to stand on that ground and prescribe suffering
for everybody else.

            Thus we have the Concord
Coalition types, who are always whining that the national debt forces them to
live well at their grandchildren's expense. I have news for them: Nobody
can force you to live well at your grandchildren's expense. If you think your
lifestyle is too extravagant, spend less and bequeath the savings to your
grandchildren.

            The arithmetic works. If the
government cuts your taxes by $1,000 and sticks your grandchildren with the
bill--say $2,000 with accumulated interest--you don't have to spend the $1,000.
You can put it in the bank, where it will grow to $2,000 by the time your
grandchildren withdraw it to pay their taxes.

            While it makes no sense to
worry that you are living well at your grandchildren's expense, you
might legitimately worry that someone else is living well at your
grandchildren's expense. Maybe your neighbor applies his $1,000 tax cut to buy
a car made of steel that could otherwise have been a girder in a factory that
might have employed your grandchildren. Economists disagree about how plausible
that story is, but we all agree that if you're out to protect your
grandchildren from the national debt, it's basically the only story you have to
worry about.

            If you are worried about that
story, it means one of two things. Either 1) you believe that your neighbor has
no right to live well at your grandchildren's expense or 2) you believe
that your neighbor has that right, but you'd prefer to prevent him from
exercising it. In Case 2, I assume you have sufficiently little interest in
moral niceties that you wouldn't be reading a column like this one in the first
place. That leaves Case 1. But if you believe that your neighbor has no right
to live well at the expense of your fabulously wealthy grandchildren, you must
also believe that your neighbor has no right to live well at the expense of
Bill Gates. In other words, if you're unhappy about the national debt, you
should be doubly unhappy about the progressive income tax.

            The popular philosophy of
income redistribution requires us to transfer income from the few high
earners of today, while the popular philosophies of conservation and "fiscal
responsibility" require us to transfer income to the many high earners
of tomorrow. Those who embrace all these philosophies at once--Bill Clinton
comes to mind--have about them at least a mild air of intellectual
schizophrenia.

            (For a
more technical analysis of what we owe to future generations, click .)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Boycott Nike and Reebok

            Two decades ago, when I went
from a middle-class public high school to a fancy East Coast private college, I
noticed an irony. The jumbo egos that now surrounded me were less conspicuous
than the garden-variety egos I'd previously dwelt among. In my new cultural
milieu, it was considered bad form to note that you'd made a good grade, or to
engage in any other obvious form of self-advertisement. Adjusting to this new
environment, I soon began to affect a fairly convincing air of humility.
(Sounds like an impressively deft adaptation, I know, but--really--it was
nothing.)

            The basic
principle here is that the higher the socioeconomic class, the less conspicuous
the self-promotion. "Less conspicuous" doesn't mean "less chronic," and it
certainly doesn't mean "less effective." On the contrary. What my college
classmates knew is that, as a rule, less overt self-promotion is more
effective. Having an obviously high opinion of yourself threatens and alarms
both peers and superiors, often to your ultimate detriment. All of which, I
contend, explains how ill-suited the ethos of inner-city teen-agers is to
economic advancement, and how big shoe companies such as Nike, Reebok, and
Converse make the problem worse.

            College basketball coach Al McGuire once said that, whereas
many coaches took white players and tried to get them to play black, he took
black players and tried to get them to play white. He was alluding to a rarely
spoken but widely known truth: There are two cultural styles of basketball,
which we can conveniently label with the familiar code words "inner city" and
"suburban." In inner-city playgrounds, basketball is more conspicuously
egotistical. There is less passing to set up the open shot, more driving to the
hoop and other forms of mano a mano confrontation. More showboating,
more trash talking. Vividly humiliating the man guarding you is highly
prized.

            One can argue about whether
this style of basketball reflects only the general tendency of lower-income
people to self-advertise conspicuously, as described above, or reflects also
the unique historical travails of American blacks. (The latter, I'd say.) One
can even argue about whether the inner-city or the suburban style of play is
better basketball. But one cannot argue about which ethos is more conducive to
advancement in the wider world. Like it or not, the mainstream American economy
is culturally suburban.

             

            
Try this thought experiment. Two job candidates
sit before you. One is an 18-year-old version of Chicago Bulls forward Dennis
Rodman. There are no visual cues to bias you--no tattoos, no purple hair, no
pantyhose. Just Rodman's in-your-face attitude, complete with a sensibility
that perceives roughly all human behavior as a sign of disrespect. (Recall his
recent kicking of a photographer for sitting courtside, where photographers
always sit.) The other candidate is an 18-year-old version of Hakeem Olajuwon,
the great Houston Rockets center who, though black, is a stereotypically
"suburban" player--selfless and humble, yet exuding quiet self-assurance on the
court and off. (Obviously, "inner-city" and "suburban" are ultimately cultural,
not racial, categories. Olajuwon twice won NBA championships with all-black
starting fives that had a suburban playing style. By contrast, Larry Bird, a
white player of low-income origins, was a noted trash talker.)

            OK, faced
with the young Rodman and the young Olajuwon, whom do you hire? Correct:
Olajuwon. Ergo, who would be a better role model for poor black kids? Correct:
Olajuwon. Now, which of the two has a big shoe-endorsement contract? Correct:
Rodman (with Converse).

            Aside from athletic talent, nothing is more helpful in
getting you a big shoe contract than being an asshole. There are exceptions,
yes, such as Detroit Piston Grant Hill, who wears Fila shoes. But the good-guy
shoe icons are vastly outnumbered by the likes of the Seattle Supersonics' of
Gary Payton (Nike) and Shawn Kemp (Reebok), Chicago's Scottie Pippen (Nike),
and Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson (Reebok). Iverson has done jail time and is
famous for employing his talent in awe-inspiring ways that do his team little
good. And humility is not his specialty. When he won the Rookie of the Year
Award this month, he said: "I thought the award should go to the person who had
the biggest impact. I know we only won 22 games [out of 82] but if you look at
impact players as a rookie, I thought I had the greatest impact." Reebok,
enchanted by Iverson's charisma, has designed a new shoe in his honor.

            Reebok is
fast displacing Nike as the Darth Vader of the shoe world. Reebok sponsors, and
thus elevates, Shaquille O'Neal, a huge mass of self-absorption whose teams,
like Iverson's, seldom fulfill expectations. O'Neal's Lakers just got blown out
of the playoffs by perhaps the most suburban (and ethnically whitest) team in
the league, the Utah Jazz--whose black superstar, Karl Malone, is another good
citizen and great player who gets dissed by the shoe companies. O'Neal, like
Iverson, in the average job interview.

            
Obviously, it's easy for me to complain about
players who aren't big on self-effacement or deference to authority. My
ancestors weren't slaves. I didn't spend my teens being viewed by merchants and
cops as a likely shoplifter. Maybe in that sense, the behavior of the Pippens
and Iversons of the world is defensible. But when that behavior is in some
small way helping to keep young blacks trapped in poverty, defending it is not
the liberal thing to do. Certainly celebrating it isn't. (And, beyond a
point, defending it is patronizing.)

            Nike CEO
Phil Knight likes to pose as capitalism with a human face, a man devoted to
social justice. Witness Knight's ostentatious donation to the legal-defense
fund of blue-collar skater/thug Tonya Harding. (Since Nike doesn't make
ice-skating equipment, that's the closest Knight could come to subsidizing that
sport's biggest asshole.) Well, let's see Knight truly put his money where his
mouth is. Pick a great basketball role model, put him on a pedestal, and let
the financial chips fall where they may. (No, Michael Jordan as a great role
model.)

            Abit of genuine morality at Nike (or Reebok or Converse)
needn't be vastly expensive. Surely Madison Avenue has enough brains to make a
Hakeem ad--or a Clyde Drexler ad, or a Malone ad--that appeals to inner-city
kids. Remember, I'm not asking for "Just Say No" ads or any other form of
moralism. Those don't work anyway. On the contrary, I'm asking for ads that
make their stars look cool, thus boosting the prominence of athletes who, in
their on-court conduct and post-game interviews, are good influences. And I'm
asking that a shoe company's elevation of someone like Iverson become a source
of stigma among socially conscious shoe buyers. Let's have a real boycott!

            Which companies to boycott? A
tough call, since no shoe company with a big-name hoops line is wholly without
blame. For now, is that we start with Nike and Reebok and let Converse off with
a stern warning, since Dennis Rodman is its first major offense. And remember:
We're boycotting not just hoops shoes, but running shoes, hiking boots,
sweatpants, socks. The Nike and Reebok logos are now officially declared badges
of shame. Of course, it will be hard, with those two companies dominating the
shelf space of every Foot Locker, to sniff out Brooks, Saucony, Asics, Fila, or
New Balance. But go ahead. Just do it.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Styles of Polygamy

            One of the great
applause-getters in Bob Dole's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention
was, "It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a
child." Pretty nervy line, coming from a man who left his first wife and their
daughter. Then again, some people found it nervy when Bill Clinton, at a
Memphis church in 1993, delivered his famous sermon on family values. All that
stands between Clinton and bushels of illegitimate children, after all, is
contraceptive technology.

            It seems
to me we have rough parity between Clinton and Dole in the personal failings
department, at least as far as "family values" go. Yet Clinton's escapades are
generally perceived as constituting a "character" problem, whereas Dole's
divorce gets only the occasional raised eyebrow. Am I confused, or is America
confused? In an attempt to settle this question impartially, I will now put on
my lab coat and take up the tools of modern science. We will dissect the
question of which (if either) is worse--Clinton's infidelity or Dole's
divorce.

            
But first let me stress that, although I will
eventually shift into moral-indignation mode, I have deep sympathy for both
men. They are, after all, Earthlings. They were created by the process of
natural selection and thus, are inherently absurd--driven by impulses that
exist today only because they helped our ancestors transmit their genes.

            Consider the extreme thirst
for status and power found in male homo sapiens in general and Clinton and Dole
in particular. According to evolutionary psychologists, this thirst exists
because during evolution, it led to lots of offspring. Those of our male
ancestors who most doggedly climbed to the top of the local status hierarchy
were often rewarded with sex partners--either multiple wives (the Dole
approach) or multiple lovers (the Clinton approach).

            Hence the
cruel irony facing Clinton and, to a lesser extent, Dole: From nature's point
of view, a central purpose of pursuing status is to convert it into sex. Yet,
demonstrated success in making this conversion is now deemed a disadvantage in
the quest for the highest-status slot in the world. The very point of being
alpha male is considered evidence, in modern America, of unfitness for the job!
Talk about defeating the purpose.

            
How did our culture get mired in this
puritanical paradox? Well, consider the limited menu of options:

            1.
Polygamy . This is the natural state of our species. Then again, the
natural state of our species is also a small hunter-gatherer society, with
little wealth and thus, only mild inequalities of status and power among men.
In this "ancestral environment," large harems were rare; competition for women,
though intense, was seldom epically intense. But then came agriculture and
other sources of economic surplus. Suddenly some males could be way more
powerful than others. The commensurately massive sexual rewards made men
ill-inclined to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. According to the
Guinness Book of World Records , the most prolific genetic replicator in
the history of our species was the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had
888 offspring. He was known as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Get the
picture?

            And, in polygamous
societies, low-status males weren't exactly pacifists either. With scads of
women monopolized by the well-to-do, less fortunate men could get mighty lonely
and become very unhappy campers. This volatile discontent may be the reason
that, as anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown, polygamy and authoritarianism
have gone hand in hand. Back when the Zulu king was entitled to more than 100
women, coughing or spitting at his dinner table was punishable by death.

            In this
sense, monogamy meshes better than polygamy with the egalitarian values of a
democracy. One-man-one-vote, one-man-one-wife. Unfortunately, monogamy is hard
to sustain given our species' naturally polygamous bent. And that's especially
true in a place like America, with great status inequality. Rich or powerful
married men feel an extravagant sense of sexual entitlement, and many women
feel like gratifying it. Hence option No. 2:

            
2Serial monogamy. This is what we have now. You
can acquire a second spouse so long as you discard the first one. This is
basically a covert, and mild, form of polygamy: High-status males get to
monopolize more than one fertile woman. Thus Dole, having risen from crippled
war veteran to U.S. senator, traded in his 47-year-old first wife--as her
fertility was expiring--for a 39-year-old. (This isn't to say Dole was
pondering his wives' relative fertility.)

            But serial monogamy has a big
downside not shared by polygamy: Lots of kids get reared either without fathers
or with stepfathers, who often lack the Darwinian devotion of a biological
father--and who may even be downright hostile. As evolutionary psychologists
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson showed in their book Homicide , children not
reared by both biological parents are at greatly elevated risk of physical
abuse, even murder. That's one piece of the larger truth at the heart of the
"family-values" crusade: Divorce and unwed motherhood are bad for kids.

            True
monogamy, then, would seem a very worthwhile institution. But if monogamy is at
odds with human nature, how do you keep it from metamorphosing into serial
monogamy?

            
3Monogamy Victorian style. When high-status
males leave their wives for a younger model, you can stigmatize them, damaging
their social, and even professional, standing. In 19 th -century
Britain, this tough love helped keep the divorce rate near zero even amid the
stark status inequality of a modern nation. Note its ingeniousness: To repress
the powerful polygamous impulse in men, you employ their equally powerful
thirst for social status. The irony facing Dole--that converting your status
into multiple wives can threaten the status itself--is thus a remnant, though
greatly diluted, of our Victorian heritage.

            The central theme of Dole's
campaign is that he embodies the Victorian values that were still robust in the
America of his youth. He says he stands for "God, family, honor, duty,
country." Well one duty, back then, was to stay with your family. In explaining
his divorce, Dole says his marriage had become unhappy. But if doing your duty
was easy, they wouldn't call it "duty," would they?

            It's not
enough to note that Dole's daughter Robin was 17 when he divorced, and now
seems well adjusted. Children of her socioeconomic class obviously stand a
better-than-average chance of recovery. But the (factually correct) premise of
Victorian morality was that one person's transgression, if unpunished, invites
emulation. That's true in spades for society's biggest role models--senators,
presidents, etc. Dole's divorce, in some incalculable but not trivial way,
makes other divorces more likely--including divorces with more vivid casualties
than his; including divorces that will push women and children into poverty. To
elect a divorced president is to reject a central pillar of the moral order
Dole says he'll rebuild.

            
And what about re-electing a world-class
philanderer? Obviously, infidelity is a less-direct contributor to the divorce
rate than divorce. Indeed, in some cultures, permissible infidelity is paired
with stigmatized divorce as part of the family-values formula: high-status
males get a mistress as compensation for sticking with their aging wives. And
even in Victorian England--and in the America of Dole's youth--a man's
infidelity was forgiven more readily than his desertion.

            But this doesn't add up to an
alibi for Clinton. Clinton's infidelity, like Dole's divorce, has consequences
that aren't merely local. The man is role model in chief. So it's not an excuse
that he didn't get Gennifer Flowers pregnant. Sometimes, casual sex does
get single women pregnant. And unwed motherhood is as big a part of the
"family-values" problem as divorce. Clinton's defenders sometimes cite the
trysts of other presidents--Kennedy, FDR, even Ike in his WW II days. Well,
those men lived back when it was possible to keep such things a secret. Which
made them less culpable, under the perfectly logical hypocrisy of Victorian
standards.

            In the end, I would say there
is indeed rough moral parity between Clinton and Dole on the family-values
front. Dole is marginally more vulnerable because his moralizing is more
detailed, and thus its irony is more glaring. ("If I could by magic restore to
every child who lacks a father or a mother, that father or that mother, I
would," he said at the San Diego convention. How about starting with your
daughter?) Democrats historically have been more guarded in their family-values
rhetoric. This probably represents a failure of vision, but it may partly
represent a certain clarity of vision as well. It's harder to be smug if you're
aware of your own failings. And it's harder to yearn so unreservedly for the
golden age of Victorian America if you realize that morality is like economics:
There's no free lunch.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dead Head

            Back when I was a
journalist--before I became a provider of digital content--I thought life would
always be simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them.
But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a scenario
painted by cyberfuturists John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson. As all media move
online, they say, content will be so freely available that getting paid to
produce it will be hard, if not impossible. At first, I dismissed this as
garden-variety, breathless overextrapolation from digerati social theorists.
But even as I scoffed, the Barlow-Dyson scenario climbed steadily toward the
rank of conventional wisdom.

            Barlow and Dyson do have a
solution. In the future people like me, having cultivated a following by
providing free content on the Web, will charge our devotees for services that
are hard to replicate en masse. We will answer individual questions online,
say, or go around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, or
(this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. The key, writes
Barlow, will be not content but "performance." Barlow, a former lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: The Dead let people tape concerts, and
the tapes then led more people to pay for the concerts.

            The
seminal version of the Barlow-Dyson thesis is Barlow's 10,000-word 1994 essay
in Wired . It is with some trepidation that I challenge the logic of this
argument. Barlow is a noted visionary, and he is famously derisive of people
less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes roughly
everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to deal correctly
with cyberissues depends on the "depth of the presiding judge's
clue-impairment." Well, at the risk of joining Barlow's long roster of the
clue-impaired, here goes.

            Barlow's argument begins with a cosmic premise: "Digital
technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law
of all sorts has always found definition." This is wrong on two counts. First,
all information does take physical form. Whether digital or analog, whether in
ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or electrons, information always resides
in patterns of matter or energy (which, as Einstein noted, are interchangeable
manifestations of the physical world).

            To be
sure, the significance of information is independent of its particular
physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this article from Slate's
servers and copy it onto your own hard disk, and it's still worth--well,
nothing, but that's a . Suppose it were a Madonna video: You'd get just as much
enjoyment out of it regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied
it.

            

               B >ut this independence of meaning and value from physical incarnation
is nothing new. It is as old as Sumerian tablets, to say nothing of the
Gutenberg press. Indeed, the whole reason intellectual-property law exists is
that people can acquire your information without acquiring the particular
physical version of it that you created. Thus Barlow's belief that "property
law of all sorts" has always "found definition" on the "physical plane" signals
a distressing confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that
information is "detached" from the "physical plane"--the fact that
information's value transcends its physical incarnation--not only fails to
qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make
intellectual-property rights obsolete; it's the very insight that led to
intellectual-property rights in the first place! Barlow announces from the
mountaintop: "It's fairly paradigm warping to look at information through fresh
eyes--to see how very little it is like pig iron or pork bellies." Maybe so,
but it's hard to say for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh
look have been dead for centuries.

            If you somehow forced Barlow
to articulate his thesis without the wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say
something like this: The cost of copying and distributing information is
plummeting--for many purposes, even approaching zero. Millions of people can
now do it right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like
fruit flies. Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for
nothing?

            Answer: Because it can't.
The total cost of acquiring a "free" copy includes more than just the
copying-and-transmitting costs. There's 1) the cost--in time and/or money--of
finding someone who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for
cheap; 2) the risk of getting caught stealing intellectual property; 3) any
premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you get copies
from bootleggers); and 4) informal punishments such as being labeled a cheat or
a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will depend on how norms in this area
evolve.

            Even in
the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, thus figured,
will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way closer to zero than it used
to be. But the Barlow-Dyson scenario still is wrong. Why? Because whether
people cheat doesn't depend on the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the
cost of cheating compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of
getting data legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it
illegally--maybe faster.
            

            In their writings, Barlow and Dyson make clear they're
aware of this fact. But they seems unaware of its fatal impact on their larger
thesis. How could cybersages have such a blind spot? One theory: Because
they're cyber sages. You have to be a career paleohack like me, getting
paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how much of the cost of legally
acquiring bits of information goes into the ink and paper and allied
anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, and displaying the inky paper. I
wrote a book that costs $14 in paperback. For each copy sold, I get $1. The day
may well come, as Barlow and Dyson seem to believe, when book publishers as we
know them will disappear. People will download books from Web sites and either
print them out on new, cool printers or read them on superlight wireless
computers. But if so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to
get a copy of my book legally from my Web site.

            Now
imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional materials, and deciding
you'd like to read the book. (Thank you.) A single keystroke will give you the
book, drain your bank account of five shiny quarters, and leave you feeling
like an honest, upstanding citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to
call a few friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy? And don't imagine that
you can just traipse on over to the "black-market book store" section of the
Web and find a hot copy of my book. As in the regular world, the easier it is
for Joe Consumer to track down an illegal distributor, the easier it is for
cops to do the same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for
this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by much. And there are , too,
why the cost of cheating will be nontrivial.

            

               M >eanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's another reason
for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a much larger
audience on the Web than they do now. The "magazine" model of bringing
information to the attention of readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's
not egotistical of me to think that when I write an article for, say, the
New 
               Republic , I am not reaching nearly everyone who might have an
interest in it. Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself.
Search engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. But
most observers--certainly the Barlows of the world--expect radical improvement.
(I'm not saying all journalists will see their audiences grow. The likely
trend, when you , will be for many obscure and semiobscure journalists to see
their audiences grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their
audiences shrink. Cool.)

            One
much-discussed cybertrend is especially relevant here: the scenario in which
various data brokers offer a "Daily Me," a batch of articles tailored to your
tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the Web. When this happens, guys like me
will be living the life of Riley. We will wake up at noon, stumble over to the
keyboard in our pajamas, hammer out 1,000 words, and then--without talking to a
single bothersome editor--make our work available to all data brokers. Likely
fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of paragraphs. If they
want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will you try to steal a copy
instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at checkout counters? The broker and the
electronic cash service will pocket a dime of that. I take my 15 cents and head
for the liquor store.

            Of course, this "disaggregation of content" may be ruinous
for magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the efficiency
of the system permit rock-bottom pricing that discourages cheating, but the
fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential cheating. If you
subscribe to a regular, old-fashioned online magazine, it's easy to split the
cost of a subscription with a few friends and furtively make copies. (You
wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to the "Daily Me," this arrangement makes
no sense, because every Me is different. Sure, you may e-mail a friend the
occasional article from your "Me." (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this
sort of "leakage" will be higher than in pre-Web days. But it would have to
reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency that will
keep people like me in business.

            This argument, like all
arguments about the future, is speculative. It may even be wrong. But it is
consistent with the history of the world. The last half-millennium has seen 1)
data getting cheaper and easier to copy; and 2) data-creation occupying a
larger and larger fraction of all economic activity. Thus far, in other words,
as the realm of information has gotten more lubricated, it has become
easier , not harder, to make a living by generating information.
Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in lubrication.

            Barlow's insistence that
intellectual property will soon be worthless is especially puzzling since he is
one of the biggest troubadours of the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes
he seem to think it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger
and bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that sector
breaks down. He writes: "Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy
primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be
eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for
the utility or pleasure others may find in their works." Far out, man.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Who Shall Inherit the Earth?

            Surely you've known couples
like this: They have two children, and are undecided about having a third. They
lean one way and then the other; they weigh the pros and cons; and finally,
they decide to go ahead. Then from the instant that third child is born, the
parents love it so deeply that they'd gladly sacrifice all their assets to
preserve its life.

            Compare
that with the way people shop for appliances or furniture or compact discs.
Generally speaking, if you know you're going to treasure something, you don't
hesitate to buy it. By contrast, the CDs you waver over, though sometimes
surprisingly good, are often unsurprisingly forgettable--and on average
unlikely to be cherished. Why, then, are children so different?

            One of my colleagues maintains that there's no real
inconsistency here. He says it's wrong to think of a baby as the equivalent of
a microwave oven; instead, you should think of it as the equivalent of an
addictive drug. People hesitate about whether to try heroin, but once they try
it, they become addicted and can't give it up. Likewise with babies.

            But that,
I think, is a very bad analogy, because heroin addicts tend to be people who
believed at the outset that they could escape addiction. Perhaps that's because
they're foolish, or perhaps it's because they're high-stakes gamblers, but that
is what they were thinking. (Why else would we hear so many addicts recounting
their experiences with the phrase "if only I had known ..."?) That's not true
of parents. Parents know in advance, and with near certainty, that they will be
addicted to their children. They choose their addiction with eyes wide open,
just like a customer choosing a microwave oven.

            
Moreover--and here is the key difference
between parents and heroin addicts--parents know in advance, with near
certainty, that they won't want to break their addiction. If you've already got
two kids and are wavering over a third, then you've already got a pretty good
idea of what parenthood is like, and you already know that, unlike the addict
who despises his addiction, you're going to treasure your attachment to your
children. When you know you're going to love something that much after you've
got it, how can you hesitate about getting it in the first place?

            But as
the parent of an only child, I can verify that people do behave that way. I
know that my unconceived children would be my most valuable "possessions" if I
brought them to fruition, yet I've chosen to leave them unconceived.

            Iam inclined to conclude that nobody--including me--has a
coherent way of thinking about how to make decisions that appropriately reflect
emotional and moral attachments to people who are not yet born. The resulting
confusion makes it almost impossible to resolve important questions of public
policy.

            For
example, the following question seems to me to be of both supreme importance
and supreme difficulty: Do living people have any moral obligation to the
trillions of potential people who will never have the opportunity to live
unless we conceive them?

            
The answer is surely either "yes" or "no," but
either answer leads to troubling conclusions. If the answer is "yes," then it
seems to follow that we are morally obliged to have more children than we
really want. The unconceived are like prisoners being held in a sort of limbo,
unable to break through into the world of the living. If they have rights, then
surely we are required to help some of them escape.

            (In an
earlier Slate column, "Be Fruitful and Multiply," I argued that we should reproduce more
quickly because it would improve living standards for existing people. Here I
am raising the entirely separate question of whether we should reproduce more
quickly in order to give life to potential people.)

            But if the answer is "no"--if we have no obligations to
those imprisoned souls--then it seems there can be no moral objection to our
trashing Earth, to the point where there will be no future generations. (That's
not to say that we'd necessarily want to trash Earth; we might have selfish
reasons for preserving it. I mean to say only that if we ever did want to trash
Earth, it would be morally permissible.) If we prevent future generations from
being conceived in the first place, and if the unconceived don't count as moral
entities, then our crimes have no victims, so they're not true crimes.

            So if the unconceived have
rights, we should massively subsidize population growth; and if they don't have
rights, we should feel free to destroy Earth. Either conclusion is disturbing,
but what's most disturbing of all is that if we reject one, it seems we are
forced to accept the other. Perhaps there's a third way, and that's just to
admit that we're incapable of being logically rigorous about issues involving
the unconceived.

            Ted Baxter, the anchorman on
The Mary Tyler Moore 
               Show , planned to have six children in the
hopes that one of them would grow up to be a creative genius who could solve
the population problem. Right now, I'd settle for a creative genius who could
teach us how to think about the population problem. I hope the next generation
is large enough to include that person.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Pay Scales in Black and White

            This column is about racial
discrimination. But more importantly, it's about how a little arithmetic can go
a long way toward settling a controversy.

            The controversy I have in
mind is, Why do blacks earn less than whites do? The easiest hypothesis is that
the employers discriminate. Some commentators have attempted to dismiss that
hypothesis on the grounds that discrimination is costly (because it entails a
willingness to pay premium wages for white workers) and therefore unattractive
to employers with an eye on the bottom line.

            But that
kind of dismissal is too glib, because it is not based on any estimate of how
much it costs to discriminate. Without that estimate, we can't even
begin to think about whether the cost is high enough to make much
difference.

            Iwant to provide the missing estimate, starting with a few
assumptions that are reasonably commensurate with reality. First, I'll suppose
that blacks constitute 10 percent of the work force. Second, I'll suppose that
blacks, because of discrimination, earn 60 percent of what whites earn. Third,
I'll make an assumption (again guided by real-world observations) about what
happens to corporate revenue: I'll assume that for every dollar paid to the
workers, a half dollar gets paid to the bondholders and the stockholders
collectively--let's say the bondholders and the stockholders each get a
quarter.

            To make those assumptions
more concrete, suppose you're the manager of a corporation that employs one
black and nine whites, paying the black $60,000 and the whites $100,000 apiece.
That makes your total wage bill $960,000. The bondholders and the stockholders
each receive one fourth as much as the workers, thus each group gets $240,000.
So your payouts look like this:

             

            (The
specific numbers in the preceding paragraph don't matter. If you assume 100
employees instead of 10, or wages of $6,000 and $10,000 instead of $60,000 and
$100,000, the conclusions to follow will remain unaffected.)

            
Now we can estimate the cost of your
discrimination. Notice first that discrimination must be quite common in your
industry; otherwise your black worker would have gone elsewhere long ago. That
means there are a lot of blacks working for $60,000 in this industry. If you
could put aside your racism, you'd fire your nine $100,000 white employees and
replace them with some of those $60,000 blacks--cutting your wage bill by
$360,000.

            Where would the $360,000 in
savings go? The same place any corporate savings go--into the pockets of the
stockholders, increasing their earnings from $240,000 to $600,000--a 150
percent increase overnight. Your payouts now look like this:

             

            When the
return to stockholders rises by 150 percent, so must the price of your
company's stock. That's enough to put you on the cover of Time magazine
as the financial genius of the century. To continue discriminating is to throw
away an opportunity for unprecedented financial success.

            In fact, that same opportunity is available to every other
corporate manager in the industry as well, and they're rejecting it too
(remember that discrimination must be widespread or all blacks would move to
nondiscriminatory firms). So in order to believe that discrimination explains
the black/white wage differential, you must believe that managers throughout
the industry are so blinded by racism that they are willing to throw away a 150
percent gain for their stockholders, and the acclaim of all Wall Street for
themselves. Personally, I find that wildly implausible.

            That's not an irrefutable
disproof that discrimination exists, but it's at least a calculation that needs
to be taken seriously. If we had come up with a number like 10 percent rather
than 150 percent, it would have been far easier to maintain a belief that
employers discriminate.

            The figure
of 150 percent is based on numerical assumptions that are reasonable but not
ironclad. If you juggle those initial assumptions a bit, you'll get a number
other than 150 percent coming out at the end, and you might or might not
discover a scenario in which discrimination is plausible. (My guess is that you
won't, but then again, you and I might have different standards for what's
plausible.) Regardless of how that experiment turns out, it's well worth
performing. Without some such test, there is simply no way to know whether
discrimination is a credible hypothesis.

            
If we rule out employer discrimination, there
must be some other explanation for the black/white wage differential. Suppose,
for example, that there is discrimination not by employers but by customers,
who are willing to pay a premium for goods and services produced by white
workers. To advocate that theory convincingly, you'd have to estimate the size
of the premium and assess whether it's something that consumers would plausibly
pay. I invite readers to do their own arithmetic.

            Alternative theories posit
that blacks earn less because they have fewer marketable skills. Like theories
of discrimination, these theories are best judged by quantitative criteria, but
now we have to go beyond what can be computed on the back of an envelope and
look, for example, at what we can learn from standardized test scores.

            According
to recent research by Derek Neal of the University of Chicago and William
Johnson of the University of Virginia, black/white wage differentials are
largely explained by differences in skill levels which are already detectable
at an early age. (Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray had previously
reported similar findings in their best-selling book The Bell Curve .) To
explain those skill differentials, one can try pointing either to training or
heredity.

            Herrnstein and Murray argued that heredity plays a
substantial role, but Neal and Johnson's more recent findings tend to refute
that interpretation. For one thing, Neal and Johnson report that the
performance gap between blacks and whites is considerably larger for young
adults than it is for teen-agers. That's hard to explain if the gap is caused
by heredity (why should an inherent difference become larger over time?), but
not if it's caused by training (if blacks get inferior schooling, then it's not
surprising that the effects are greater after 10 years of schooling than after
six).

            Much research remains to be
done, and is being done, and will be done. All of that research, at least when
it is useful, will be quantitative in one way or another. Some of it requires
sophisticated techniques and sophisticated measurements. But there are
cases--and discrimination is one of them--where the inherent plausibility of a
theory can be well tested with nothing more than the back of an envelope and an
open mind.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Highbrow Tribalism

            In American foreign-policy
circles, everyone is waiting for the next X. "X" was the byline on the famous
1947 essay in Foreign Affairs , actually written by George Kennan, that
analyzed Soviet communism and laid out the post-World War II policy of
"containment." Where is a comparably compelling vision of the post-Cold War
world, a new lodestar for American foreign policy? Who is the next George
Kennan? Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has a suggestion: How
about him?

            Huntington's The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is now hitting the
bookstores. The jacket copy says that the germ of the book--Huntington's 1993
Foreign Affairs essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"--drew more
discussion than any Foreign Affairs piece since Kennan's (at least,
"according to the editors of that distinguished journal"). Blurbs from
Brzenzinski (effusive) and Kissinger (guarded) reinforce the air of
eminence.

            
Huntington's book is devoted to a currently ubiquitous theme: tribalism. In
politics, the tribal theme shows up in the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and so on. In the intellectual world, the
tribal theme shows up in treatises about the importance of the sentiments
aroused by such men. Now that the bipolar order of the Cold War is gone, we're
told, the primal bonds of ethnicity, language, and religion will be a
central--if not the central--organizing principle in world affairs. Huntington
carries this idea to new heights of theoretical elaboration. Surely tribalism
has never sounded so cerebral. But it's one thing to analyze a phenomenon and
another thing to encourage it. Huntington crosses the line so easily as to make
you wonder: How different, really, are the lowbrow and highbrow expressions of
the vogue for tribalism?

            Huntington's 1993 essay was, by design, a downer. The end
of the Cold War had inspired such upbeat visions as the inexorable triumph of
liberal democracy (Francis Fukuyama's The End of History ) and the "New
World Order" (global peace mediated by the United Nations). Huntington insisted
we recork the champagne. The world would remain strife-torn, he said, only now
the main actors would be not ideological blocs or nation-states or superpowers,
but distinct "civilizations"--Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese,
Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, Hindu, and African. (In the book, he adds a
ninth civilization, Buddhist.) "Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes,
and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale," he writes
in the book. Relations between nations from different civilizations will be
"almost never close" and "often hostile"--"trust and friendship will be rare."
Wars will tend to break out along civilizational "fault lines" and will tend to
expand along the same lines.

            How should we respond to this
tribalism? Tribally. The very "survival of the West" depends on Westerners
"uniting to renew and preserve" their civilization "against challenges from
non-Western societies." Thus, Australia should abandon efforts to mesh with its
local Asian milieu and instead should join NAFTA. The United States should
de-emphasize engagement with Asia and turn back toward Europe.

            How exactly Huntington's
diagnosis (perilously deep fault lines) leads to his prescription (further
deepen the fault lines) is a puzzle to which we'll return. But first, a word
about the diagnosis. Does his notion of "civilizations" as tribes writ large
make sense?

            Back in
1993, most commentators said no, and this book is unlikely to change their
minds. For example, Huntington has renamed "Confucian" civilization "Sinic,"
but that doesn't tidy up the concept. South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, China,
Singapore, and Vietnam are very motley and definitely not a crew. In fact, the
thriving capitalist democracies of South Korea and Taiwan seem to blatantly
violate Huntington's logic, showing how fast cultures can switch orientations
from one "civilization" to another. Yet Huntington not only sees hidden
coherence in the Sinic bloc; he sees the bloc as part of an even larger
threat--the "Confucian-Islamic connection." This consists of China and North
Korea "cooperating" with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Algeria to
thwart the West on such issues as arms proliferation. But the grab bag of
national policies that supposedly add up to this grand transnational
"connection" doesn't even include most Sinic or most Islamic states. If we
wanted to use one variable to predict whether a nation is involved in
Huntingon's Sinic-Islamic "connection," we'd be better off knowing whether it's
one of the four remaining Communist dictatorships than knowing whether it's one
of the five Sinic nations (50 percent predictive power vs. 40 percent).

            
I could , as others have, about the
civilizational paradigm's lack of analytical elegance. But that's not what
really bothers me. Though ancestral cultures aren't the mystical epoxy that
Huntington imagines, language, religion, and other aspects of cultural heritage
do matter a lot in the post-Cold War world. The "civilizations" part of
Huntington's thesis is less troubling than the "clash" part. Why is it an
inherent property of intercivilizational relations that they be "usually cool"
and "often hostile"? Why, for example, must Western relations with a Sinic bloc
be typically tense? Obviously, current Western-Chinese relations are
pretty tense. But why can't this change with, say, a new, more cosmopolitan,
regime in China, or firmer and more consistent diplomatic signals from
Washington?

            It isn't enough to say, as
Huntington does, that Sinic civilization lacks the West's bent for democracy.
The cliché that democracy hobbles the conduct of a coherent foreign policy is
true. If Chinese leaders are freed from the burden of domestic pandering, they
should be able to calmly find their zones of common interest with the West and
cut the appropriate deals. So why does Huntington think we can't do business
with these people? Are only Westerners capable of perceiving their rational
self-interest and acting on it? Are only Westerners reliable negotiators?

            Sometimes
Huntington seems to think so. After criticizing naive American attempts at
"constructive engagement" and "dialogue" across the Pacific, he writes, "To the
Asians, American concessions are not to be reciprocated, they are to be
exploited." Ah, yes, those wily Asians. Pat Buchanan couldn't have said it
better. (Here, again, Huntington conflates with other explanatory
variables.)

            Huntington--like Buchanan--claims not to be a cultural
supremacist: He is defending the integrity of all cultures, theirs and ours.
Indeed, he sounds almost like a lefty relativist when he says we must accept
"global multiculturality" and discard the "linear" view of history, which sees
Western values as the inexorable fate of humankind. But of course, that's just
another way of saying that liberal democracy--a value Huntington surely ranks
above the alternatives morally--may never fit some peoples as naturally as it
fits us. In this light the meaning of his call to "maintain the
multicivilizational character of global politics" seems clear: separate but
equal. You let one alien nation move into your trade bloc, and pretty soon the
whole neighborhood goes downhill. (And already, Huntington worries, the West is
suffering "decline" and "decay.")

            The Barbarians, in short, are
at the gate--and conspiring against us. The future, Huntington says, may boil
down to "the West against the rest." Raise the drawbridges!

            And yet,
toward the end of this book, just when I was about to file Huntington in the
"Pat Buchanan" section of my brain, he underwent a miraculous transformation.
Up until this point he has been ignoring or downplaying the interdependence
among modern nations. He doesn't seem to think the Chinese reliance on Western
markets, say, or Hong Kong's thirst for Western capital, can help keep
trans-Pacific relations smooth. And God knows he doesn't waste time talking
about environmental problems soluble only by international cooperation. On the
contrary, hovering like white noise throughout his 1993 essay, and through much
of this book, is the that international relations are typically zero-sum, so
that "natural conflicts of interest" dominate world affairs.

            
But then, in the book's final few pages,
Huntington does his sudden turnaround and finally sees what he missed in 1993:
It is in the interests of civilizations not just to "coexist" but to actively
cooperate. We live in a world not just of "transnational corporations" but of
"transnational mafias and drug cartels," problems that nations can solve only
by acting in concert. In the book's final paragraph he repeats that, "in the
clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang
separately," but he adds that in "the greater clash," the "global" clash
between chaos and order, "the world's great civilizations ... will also hang
together or hang separately." Huntington, who set out in 1993 to debunk the New
World Order, is suddenly talking like Boutros Boutros-Ghali!

            On behalf of one-worlders
everywhere, I celebrate Huntington's Road to Damascus experience and officially
disassociate him from Pat Buchanan. But before we teach him the secret New
World Order handshake, we'd like him to resolve some paradoxes in his thinking.
In particular: the tension between his prescriptions of (a) the West turning
inward for its own salvation; and (b) the world's different tribes cooperating
for global salvation. Clearly, the first can complicate the second. If, for
example, America focuses on nourishing its European kinship and is wary of
joining Pacific regional organizations, then building a bridge to Asia will be
tricky.

            One can imagine another book
that would synthesize and elaborate the of this one. For example, Huntington
suggests putting an Islamic nation on the U.N. Security Council--an interesting
idea, and proof that thinking "civilizationally," or at least culturally, has
its uses. But the growing academic fad of thinking in primarily, almost
obsessively, tribal terms is another matter. In addition to being analytically
sloppy, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Huntington notes, as evidence
of tribalism, that foreign investment in America encounters more hostility when
it's Japanese than when it's Canadian. Regrettably, this is true. But one
reason it's true is because Huntington and other tribalism aficionados spend so
much time talking about people from other "civilizations," as if they lived on
another planet. Turns out they don't.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Squeal or Deal?

            Suppose you're a convicted
Arkansas felon with some juicy private information about the president of the
United States. An aggressive prosecutor offers to purchase that information
with a lenient sentencing recommendation. Do you take the deal?

            If all
your motives are selfish, you'll probably first make some discreet inquiries to
determine whether the president is prepared to outbid the prosecutor--say with
the promise of a full pardon.

            But suppose it's an election year, and the president can't
risk granting a controversial pardon in the midst of the campaign. If you
choose to remain silent, you'll have to wait till after the election to collect
your reward. Do you dare wait that long?

            A lot depends on just how
juicy your information is. If you know enough to trigger an impeachment, the
president won't dare cross you. You might as well sit tight, confident that
you'll get your freedom on the second Wednesday in November.

            On the
other hand, if the offenses you know about are embarrassing but short of
impeachable, you've got to make the best deal you can right away. Once the
election has passed, your leverage at the White House will be severely limited.
You'd better call the prosecutor.

            
There's also a third hand: You might know
nothing at all. Then, assuming you can't get away with bogus accusations, your
only option is to serve your time in silence.

            Consider
the two Friends of Bill who now await sentencing. At the moment I write this
(though not necessarily at the moment you read it), reports indicate that Jim
McDougal is negotiating with special prosecutor Kenneth Starr while Susan
McDougal adamantly refuses to cooperate. From those reports I conclude that if
Susan knows anything, she knows
a lot more than Jim does. Her silence means either that she knows nothing
or that she knows enough to extract a high price for her silence. If she knew a
middling amount, she'd be following Jim's lead.

            That analysis is an excursion into the branch of economics
called game theory--the study of strategic behavior. Unfortunately, game theory
is notorious for its ability to generate radically different conclusions in
response to small changes in the underlying assumptions. Thus I have only a
moderate degree of confidence in my deductions.

            Other branches of economics
yield far more reliable predictions, and the theory of competitive markets is
the most reliable branch of all. So that's the branch we should climb out on if
we really want to use economics to get at the truth about the scandals
surrounding the Clinton administration.

            I'm not
sure how to apply competitive-market theory to Whitewater, but fortunately
there is no lack of additional scandals to analyze. Take the case of the late
Ron Brown, who was accused of selling favors to the Vietnamese government for a
price of $700,000. Those favors, involving arrangements for international
trade, appear to have been worth many millions of dollars to the Vietnamese. In
other words, if the stories are true, then the Vietnamese got a fabulous
bargain.

            

               F >abulous bargains don't come along every day. When they do, it's
usually because of heavy competition among many sellers. If Ron Brown had been
the only administration official willing and able to sell out to the
Vietnamese, he could have extracted a price commensurate with the
multimillion-dollar value of his product. So by selling out for a mere
$700,000--if he really did--Brown revealed his expectation that competitors
(presumably other high-ranking officials with the means to influence trade
policy) were prepared to undercut him.

            I don't
know whether Ron Brown was guilty. But economic theory tells me that if the
charges against him were accurate, there must have been others in the
administration who shared his ethical laxity. Those others are presumably still
in office. It might be worth an attempt to ferret them out.

            Similar reasoning could be useful to investigators who are
concerned with national security leaks. It would, for example, be interesting
to determine whether the Aldrich Ames spy case was an anomaly or a symptom of
widespread corruption in the CIA. Ames sold information to the Soviets for a
price of $4.6 million. As with Ron Brown, we'd like to know whether Ames was a
monopolist or one of many sellers in a competitive marketplace.

            One way to
find the answer is to begin with a different question: How much was Ames'
information worth to the Soviets? If it was worth only 4.6 million, then the
Soviets were paying top dollar, indicating that Ames was the only willing
seller. That would be reassuring. If, on the other hand, the information was
worth many times $4.6 million, then Ames sold cheap, suggesting that he was
forced to underbid a host of potential competitors. In that case, those
potential competitors constitute an ongoing security risk.

            
One way to find out whether the CIA has been
infiltrated by moles is to conduct elaborate investigations of employees and
institutional procedures. A much faster, cheaper, and more accurate way might
be to investigate whether Aldrich Ames offered his customers a bargain.

            More generally, when someone
is behaving surreptitiously, we frequently have to guess what he's up to. We
can't hope to guess right all the time. But we can strive to make our
guesses consistent with all the evidence and with the basic laws of human
behavior. In that enterprise, a little economic theory goes a long way.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Shadow Boxing

            The good news for Sky
Dayton, 24-year-old chairman of one of the fastest-growing companies in the
world, is that the Internet is a place where a smart young man can become a
tycoon overnight. The bad news for Sky Dayton is that the Internet is a place
where anyone with a home computer, a modem, and some animus can make your life
miserable, and perhaps do real damage to your business. The bad news for the
rest of us is the larger moral of Dayton's story: The famously "egalitarian"
properties of the Net have a creepy and oppressive flip side.

            In 1994,
Dayton founded an Internet access provider called EarthLink (not to be confused
with "The Earthling," the name of this column). In less than two years,
EarthLink's staff has grown from two to 400, its annual revenue to more than
$30 million, and its customer base to 140,000. If you research Internet access
providers, you'll discover why: No company that matches EarthLink's network of
nationwide access points beats its price. But if you do your research on the
World Wide Web, you'll probably discover something else, too: a Web page
ominously titled "earthlink.net and Scientology: The Links." Subtitle: "Sky
Dayton's Scientology Training."

            With EarthLink preparing for its first public stock
offering, this is not good publicity. On the Net, the Church of Scientology is
the antichrist. It slaps lawsuits on church critics who post quotes from
copyrighted church documents, sometimes getting federal marshals to search
homes and seize computer disks. There's no evidence that the church currently
uses extralegal weapons against online critics--pries into their e-mail, say.
Still, among the desirable qualities of an Internet access provider--the
company whose computers all your e-mail and cyberwanderings pass
through--"Church of Scientology affiliated" does not rank high.

            
               Is EarthLink Church of
Scientology affiliated? Apparently not, but we'll get to that later. First,
note that this isn't just another case of accusations speeding across the Net,
hopping from newsgroup to newsgroup (e.g., last year's rumor that Mrs. Fields
had supplied free cookies for O.J. Simpson's acquittal party). There's a
subtler dynamic at work here, a property not of the Net at large but of the Web
in particular. This dynamic will affect more of us as the Web grows and more
people's reputations are mediated there. On the Web, anyone can construct a
kind of "shadow identity" for anyone else--not just an unkind characterization,
but an unkind characterization that sticks to your cyber-identity like
glue.

            Suppose,
for example, that some business heavyweight is pondering a business deal with
Sky Dayton--or is just curious about him, having met him at a cocktail party.
She revs up a Web search engine--say, Alta Vista--and types in "Sky Dayton" and
"EarthLink." And there it is, on the first page of listings: "earthlink.net and
Scientology: The Links." As long as this shadow page contains key words that
are in Dayton's home page and EarthLink's home page, it will be seen by almost
everyone who finds either of those pages through a search engine. This is the
cyberspace equivalent of hanging a sign around someone's neck saying
"Scientologist"--or "child molester," "bedwetter," whatever. Except that in the
physical world, the victim can remove the sign. Shadow pages, in contrast, are
indelible.

            
Sky Dayton is victim of an oft-applauded trend.
As copying and transmitting data get cheaper, the distribution of power grows
more equal. After publishing technology evolved from its scribbling-monks phase
to its Gutenberg phase, a form of power once dominated by popes and other big
shots was diffused, and the Reformation happened. Now the power over
reputations is passing from magazines, radio stations, and so on to--well, to
everybody.

            It can be fun watching the
Davids take on the Goliaths--the "Kmart sucks" web page, for example, authored
by the guy who ran Kmart's own web page until Kmart fired him. (Mistake.) But
remember: Kmart could be you. (You may doubt that someday you'll have a Web
page, but you may also have doubted two years ago that someday you'd need
e-mail.) Your cyber-tormentor could be a nutcase former client, an envious
former colleague, an aggrieved ex-spouse or ex-lover. Their technological
empowerment may take some of the thrill out of your own empowerment. On the
Web, every man can be president--and every woman Gennifer Flowers. (Note to
gender police: You know what I mean.)

            Of course
you can always shadow your shadow identity with a rebuttal, so that people who
see the charges against you also see your reply. When I mentioned this to a
legal-scholar friend, he joyously declared cyberspace a "perfectly efficient
information market." His apparent assumption--that bringing all relevant
information to bear on an issue fixes Truth in the minds of observers--reflects
a touchingly pre-postmodern view of human objectivity. Alas, the news from
evolutionary psychology is less touching. Natural selection did not, in fact,
design our brains to apprehend Truth. Our moral evaluations of people are often
subordinate, by design, to our social agendas, and as a result, our whole
machinery for appraising other people is gunked up with unconscious bias.

            Anyway, Sky Dayton faces something more elusive than lies.
It's true that he's a Scientologist (like John Travolta, Chick Corea, etc.). "I
practice my personal right to choose my own beliefs," he says. Some of the
shadow page's other specific claims also are true. But there's no evidence
that, as the shadow page intimates, EarthLink is an arm of the church. The
company's CEO is Southern Baptist, and its chief financial officer is Roman
Catholic. Scientology "is a large religion," says Dayton. "If I were to ask you
if, because you were a Jew, your company was owned by the state of Israel,
everybody would laugh at me."

            In a way, truthful shadow
pages are the scariest of all. As many have noted, these days, much of your
"private" life is vulnerable to intrusion. E-mail is less secure than snail
mail or a phone call. Most financial transactions don't involve cash, and are,
thus, recorded. Your wanderings on the Web leave more footprints than you may
realize.

            Much of this vulnerability
may eventually be neutralized by encryption and other tricks. But until then,
technology will in some ways be pushing us backward in time. The Net, though
celebrated as a libertarian institution, can also be the opposite. It can be a
bit like a claustrophobic small town, where your private life is part of the
public dialogue. Winesburg, Ohio, like cyberspace, was a "perfectly efficient
information market."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            This idea that harmony
between the races is impossible--let's call it the "National Review
fallacy"--rests largely on confusion about a form of natural selection known as
"kin selection." The issues are a bit arcane, but I'll try to provide a rough
sketch of some of them.

            "Kin selection" accounts for
the evolution of altruistic impulses toward close relatives. The textbook
example of kin selection is a newly minted gene that inclines a ground squirrel
to stand up and give an alarm call upon seeing a predator. At first glance,
this gene would seem to have no chance of proliferating via natural selection,
since it attracts the predator's attention and thus endangers the organism in
which it resides. But remember: The gene will also reside, on average, in half
of that organism's siblings--and their survival prospects are enhanced
by the gene's effect (i.e., by the warning call). So, even if this "warning
call" gene occasionally causes the death of its possessor, the gene itself may
still flourish by natural selection, as long as more than two siblings are
saved for every one ground squirrel that is lost. (If this Cliff Notes
version of kin selection doesn't seem to make sense, then please go and read
the excerpt from the chapter titled "Families" on the Web site for my book,
The Moral
Animal, then come back, and keep reading.) In our species, the result of
this evolutionary process seems to be a kin-directed altruism that is roughly
proportional to the closeness of relatives. Most people would be more inclined
to risk their lives for a sibling than for a cousin, and for a cousin than for
the average Joe. (This assumes, among other things, that these people have been
reared in close enough proximity to these relatives to develop the emotional
bonds that mediate kin-selected altruism.)

            Here is where confusion
enters the minds of people eager to believe that whites and blacks are innately
hostile toward one another. They try to extend the logic of kin selection
beyond the scope of the family and carry it all the way up to the level of
whole races. They are assuming, in other words, that there is a universal law
dictating that altruism between individuals be proportional to their degree of
genetic relatedness--and that natural discord among people thus will be
proportional to their genetic difference.

            There are at least two major
problems with this logic. The first is a fairly technical (though
consequential) analytical flaw, first identified in another context by Richard
Dawkins and labeled "Washburn's fallacy." (See his "Twelve Misunderstandings of
Kin Selection." Zeitschr. Tierpsychol, no. 51 [1979]: 184-200). I won't
even try to explain the fallacy here, except to say that a) It consists of
assuming that kin selection would make altruism proportional to overall
genetic relatedness--that is, the percentage of all your genes that you
have in common with another organism; and b) This assumption has been memorably
characterized as implying that humans should, in theory, be "nicer to mosquitos
than to marigolds." That characterization was made by Martin Daly, Catherine
Salmon, and Margo Wilson. For their explicit application of Dawkins' analysis
to the National Review fallacy (they don't call it that, of course), see
their chapter in the forthcoming textbook Evolutionary Social
Psychology , edited by Douglas Kenrick and Jeffrey Simpson, and published by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

            The second problem with the
idea of some iron law correlating altruism with genetic relatedness--and thus
correlating natural discord with genetic difference--is at least slightly more
accessible. Kin selection isn't some inexorable force of evolution. It's just a
theoretical possibility, one that will only be realized if the circumstances of
evolution are conducive to its realization. In the case of altruism directed
toward close relatives, we know that circumstances were indeed so conducive:
Throughout human evolution, people were reared a) near close relatives; and b)
near people who weren't close relatives. Thus there was lots of opportunity for
the flourishing of genes that led humans to discriminate between the two,
favoring the former at the expense of the latter. But in the case of comparable
discrimination between members of one's own race and members of other races,
there was no significant opportunity for the evolution of such a trait. Because
during human evolution (that is, during that short span of human evolution that
took place after distinct races began forming), there was roughly zero
contact among different races; people in Africa didn't vacation on the Riviera
back then. Saying that white people evolved an innate aversion to blacks, or
blacks an innate aversion to whites, is like saying people evolved an innate
aversion to some poison plant that grows only on Mars; the opportunity simply
wasn't there.

            None of this is to suggest
that human nature doesn't vastly complicate race relations. People are
obviously inclined to derogate groups whose interests seem to clash with those
of their own group, and to identify those groups by whatever means are
available. Skin color can be an unfortunately handy means of doing the
identifying. What's more, kin selection itself may complicate race relations in
various subtle ways. For example: Nepotism, one legacy of kin selection, is
often de facto racial discrimination, since your close relatives are usually
members of your race. When a white boss promotes his niece, he is
discriminating against some whites (the ones who aren't in his family), but
against all blacks.

            All told, the obstacles to
intergroup harmony posed by human nature are big enough that there is little
exaggeration in saying that xenophobia is a part of human nature, at least in
this sense: Uncritical hostility toward an identifiable group of
people--identifiable by language, dress, color, whatever--is an inherent
capacity, activated under certain predictable circumstances. But that is very
different from saying we are designed to automatically dislike people with
particular skin colors, and that racial harmony therefore is impossible--which
is what the National Review article said.

            Full-disclosure paragraph:
The article in which the "National Review fallacy" appeared was a review
of my book, The Moral Animal . One of the review's major complaints was
about my alleged failure to realize that Darwinism is a thoroughgoing
vindication of the reviewer's various political beliefs (e.g., the
impossibility of racial harmony). No doubt some of my animus toward the article
is related to these comments about my book. Still, I'm not inventing the idea
that the "National Review fallacy" is indeed a fallacy. The same opinion
is held by, for example, George Williams, one of the greatest evolutionary
biologists of this century and arguably the chief architect of evolutionary
psychology. By the way, his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection
(Princeton University Press), which laid the theoretical foundation for the
modern Darwinian study of social behavior in animals, still is in print.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Kwitcherbellyachin'

            Do you worry that the
national debt will impoverish your children? Are you incensed about paying
thousands in taxes just to cover the government's interest costs? And do you
long for a political hero who will dare to close the budget gap, even if it
means raising taxes? If so, I have one word for you. I learned it from Ann
Landers. The word is: kwitcherbellyachin'. Your share of the debt is an
entirely voluntary burden. If you don't want it, you can dispose of it this
afternoon. You can do the same with your children's share. All you have to do
is pay off what you (or your children) owe.

            Be
careful, though: There's a wrong way and a right way to handle this. The wrong
way is to send the U.S. Treasury a contribution earmarked for debt reduction.
They'll accept your gift all right, but they won't credit your personal
account. Instead, your share of the burden--like everyone else's--will fall by
a tiny fraction of a cent.

            Here's the right way to retire your share of the
debt. First, calculate how much you owe. Suppose, for example, that you're the
average American. Your share would be about$15,000. All you have to do is lend $15,000 to the government.
The easiest way to do this is to buy a $15,000 Treasury bond. From that moment
on, you will owe $15,000 to yourself , which is as good as owing it to
nobody at all. Each year, you'll pay taxes to cover your share of the interest
on the debt, and each year, that money will come right back to you as interest
on your bond. For all practical purposes, you'll have opted out of thedebt burden entirely.

            If it's your children
you're worried about, give them the bond. Let them collect interest
until the day of reckoning when that political hero finally arrives to raise
taxes and retire the debt. Then they can sell the bond and use the
proceedsto pay their
taxes.

            The
only possible objection to this scheme is that you have to come up with $15,000
to buy a bond. But on the other hand, if the politicians take your advice and
raise taxes in order to pay off the national debt, you'll have to come up with
that same $15,000 to pay your share of those taxes. So buying bonds is no
more attractive than being taxed for debt reduction, but it's no
less attractive either. If your mantra is, "Go ahead and tax me but
spare me this debt burden," it's time to stop chanting and essentially,tax yourself.

            Ageneration ago, economics textbooks used to dismiss the
debt burden by asserting that we "owe it to ourselves," meaning that some of us
(the taxpayers) owe it to others of us (the bondholders). That was scant
comfort to those who paid taxes but didn't hold bonds. But the old semi-wisdom
becomes genuine wisdom when embellished with the observation that anybody who
wants to can become a bondholder--and that buying bonds is no more painful than
paying taxes to alleviate the debt.

            Whenever I hear somebody
griping that the national debt is too high, I nod in apparent agreement and
point out that the problem is more general than that. "Not only is the debt out
of control," I say, "but so is my front lawn. The grass is ridiculously high.
When will the politicians finally face reality and force me to mow it?"

            This
usually has one of two desirable effects. Either the griper moves to the far
end of the room, or he asks, "Why not just mow the lawn? Why would you need the
government to force you?" In that case, I reply: "Well, why not just buy a bond
and eliminate your share of the national debt? Why would you need the
government to raise your taxes?" I don't mean to say that everyone should buy
Treasury bonds. I'm saying only that everyone who complains about the
debt should buy Treasury bonds--and then stop complaining.

            In dismissing bogus concerns about the national debt, I do
not mean to dismiss legitimate concerns about government spending. Your share
of government spending is something you can't opt out of, short of
emigrating or resorting to felonious tax evasion. That makes government
spending a fair target for your indignation.

            Suppose a reckless
Congress decides to appropriate $10,000 of your money to finance a worthless
aircraft carrier or a worthless social program. Then one of two things must
happen: Your taxes will rise by $10,000, or else, your share of the debt will
rise by $10,000. Either way, you've got a legitimate gripe.

            But if Congress opts for
debt over taxation, you can count on thoughtless commentators to denounce the
interest payments on that debt as a second, and separate, outrage. That's
wrong, because you can (if you wish) buy a $10,000 Treasury bill that will
bring all your interest payments right back to you--thereby, in effect, taxing
yourself to pay off the debt right away, and limiting your damage to the
initial $10,000.

            The great burden of
government is that it spends your money. Those politicians who have devoted
their lives to exacerbating that burden--like Bob Dole and Bill Clinton--would
prefer to divert your attention to relative nonissues like the deficit. Don't
fall for it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Homo Deceptus

            At the risk of sounding
grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less
a personage than Stephen Jay Gould. It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his
book Wonderful 
               Life for the New 
               Republic . I argued,
basically, that Gould is a fraud. He has convinced the public that he is not
merely a great writer, but a great theorist of evolution. Yet, among top-flight
evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest--not just a lightweight,
but an actively muddled man who has warped the public's understanding of
Darwinism.

            Gould,
alas, paid me no mind. No testy letter to the New 
               Republic ,
nothing. I heard through the grapevine that he was riled. But, savvy alpha male
that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny,
marginal primate such as myself. Then, last month, my big moment finally
arrived. Gould's long-repressed contempt burst forth from the reptilian core of
his brain and leapt over the fire walls in his frontal lobes. In an essay in
Natural 
               History magazine, while dismissing evolutionary
psychology as "pop science," he called my book The 
               Moral

               Animal "the most noted and most absurd example."

            It is, of course, beneath my dignity to respond to this
personally motivated attack (except to note that if you think Stephen Jay Gould
actually deigned to read my puny book, you must be getting him mixed up with
someone whose time is less precious). Instead, I will use the occasion of
Gould's essay to make a major contribution to Western thought. And actually,
come to think of it, making this contribution will entail responding to Gould's
personally motivated attack. We'll start with Gould and get to Western thought
later.

            Gould's
Natural 
               History essay, in keeping with his long tradition of
taking courageous political stands, argues against genocide. Its final lines
are: "It need not be. We can do otherwise." You may ask, "Where's the news
value in noting that people can refrain from committing genocide?" Well, Gould
spent the previous half-dozen paragraphs cultivating the impression that some
people think genocide is hard-wired into our genes.

            
Who are these people? Good question. Gould
doesn't name names. Instead, just when you're starting to wonder who exactly is
making this ridiculous claim, he changes the subject to an allegedly analogous
example of biological determinism: currently popular Darwinian ideas about male
and female psychology. Here he can name names--or, at least, one name. That's
where I come in.

            Gould
begins by distorting a basic evolutionary psychology argument: that because men
can reproduce more often and more easily than women, natural selection (which
favors traits conducive to genetic proliferation) has made the minds of men and
women different. Gould puts the posited difference this way: Women, in theory,
"should act in such a way as to encourage male investment after impregnation
(protection, feeding, economic wealth, and subsequent child care), whereas men
would rather wander right off in search of other mates in a never-ending quest
for maximal genetic spread." The "wander right off" part is wrong. Evolutionary
psychologists classify our species as having "high male parental investment."
Men are naturally inclined to fall in love with women, stay with them through
pregnancy, and fall in love with the endearing little vehicles of genetic
transmission that roll out of the womb.

            To be sure, men may be tempted to philander on the side,
even to fall in love with a second woman; they are more inclined than women to
both infidelity and polygamy. (Women do have a penchant for cheating or
straying, but under a narrower range of circumstances.) Moreover, men find it
easier to have sex without emotional attachment, so they do sometimes
want to "wander right off" after sex. Still, the fact that evolutionary
psychologists don't view desertion as standard male procedure vaporizes what
Gould considers one of his killer arguments: "Any man who has fiercely loved
his little child--including most fathers, I trust--knows that no siren song
from distinctive[ly male] genes or hormones can overcome this drive for
nurturing behavior shared with the child's mother." If Gould knew the first
thing about evolutionary psychology (if he had, say, read my book), he'd know
that this "drive for nurturing behavior" isn't some news flash to evolutionary
psychologists. It is central to their view of the tensions within male sexual
psychology.

            More
noteworthy than Gould's warping of evolutionary psychology is that he actually
embraces some of its premises. On sex differences: "I don't ... think that the
basic argument is wrong. Such differences in behavioral strategy do make
Darwinian sense." Hmm. Gould has denounced evolutionary psychology for years
without (to my knowledge) making such concessions. Now, as it gains support
within both biology and psychology, he seems to be staging a strategic retreat.
But, of course, he can't be seen retreating. He must, in the end, still manage
to depict evolutionary psychologists as simpletons. What to do? Create
confusion.

            
Gould informs us that the sexual strategies of
men and women are mere "capacities, not requirements or even determining
propensities." Now, first of all, a truly determining propensity
is a requirement. So Gould, without conspicuously positing a simplistic
dichotomy, has posited a simplistic dichotomy: Every behavior--infidelity,
genocide, whatever--is either a mere "capacity" or an "inevitability."
Evolutionary psychologists, Gould suggests, tend to take the "inevitability"
view, while a more discerning interpretation of biology (his) takes the
"capacity" view.

            Let's not dwell on the sheer
dishonesty of insinuating that I, or any serious writers on evolutionary
psychology, believe infidelity or genocide or anything else is rendered
inevitable genetically. (Well, OK, let's dwell briefly. There.) The key point
is this: Isn't the range of alternatives to inevitability too broad to cram
under the single heading of "capacity"? Do I just have the "capacity" to eat
doughnuts and hamburgers and broccoli? No. Unfortunately, it's more complicated
than that. I almost always feel a very strong attraction to doughnuts. To
hamburgers I feel a fairly strong attraction under most circumstances. For
broccoli I can muster mild enthusiasm if I'm feeling hungry or guilty. All
these attractions can be bridled, but the amount and nature of the necessary
effort differs by food type and by circumstance.

            I concede that my inner
turmoil over doughnuts is not of great moment. But let's get back to things
like infidelity, men's desertion of their families, or even genocide. If we can
learn something about how the underlying emotions wax and wane, about the
circumstances under which bad things are likely to happen, wouldn't that be
useful information? Amazingly, Gould suggests not. After saying "we learn
nothing" from current Darwinian theorizing about any "darkness" in human
nature, he continues, "At the very most, biology might help us to delimit the
environmental circumstances that tend to elicit one behavior rather than the
other."

            At the
very most? Delimiting those circumstances is the central aspiration of
20 th -century psychology! So, even if Freud and Skinner had wholly
succeeded in explaining how upbringing and social experience shape us, it all
would have been a waste of time? Too bad they didn't have a luminary like Gould
to explain that to them. I've heard many criticisms of evolutionary psychology,
but this is the first time I've heard anyone dismiss it by saying that all it
can do is find the Holy Grail of behavioral science.

            Obviously, evolutionary psychology hasn't yet come close to
finding the Holy Grail. But, it has provoked ideas about the role of
environment that, if confirmed by further study, can inform moral discourse and
public policy. For example, I've argued from ev-psych premises that extreme
inequality of income, all other things being equal, tends to raise the divorce
rate. This claim may turn out to be wrong, but, contrary to Gould's basic
indictment of evolutionary psychology, it is neither obvious nor, if true,
useless.

            I grant
Gould that evolutionary psychology hasn't taught us much about genocide that we
didn't already know. So far, its main contribution is to illuminate not epic
enmity, but the everyday, subtle kind. For example: I just referred to Gould's
"dishonesty" in misrepresenting my views, but maybe the dishonesty isn't
conscious. Once I wrote that 1990 review, I became a threat to Gould's social
status, an enemy. According to evolutionary psychology, it then became hard for
him to objectively appraise anything I've written (though I suppose actually
reading it would have been a start). Tactically caricaturing my beliefs became
an essentially unconscious process.

            
Similarly, now that Gould has attacked me, I
have trouble being objective about him. My radar readily picks up, even
magnifies, his distortions and confusions, but is less sensitive to my own
missteps. (The editors of Slate will contact Gould and invite him to have an
online debate with me, during which the truth can emerge from dueling
egocentric biases. I predict Gould will ignore the invitation, reverting to a
risk-averse alpha-male strategy.) Anyway, the point is just that we are all, by
nature, deeply and unconsciously self-serving in our judgments of others. Gould
and I are convinced of each other's confusion, and the Hutus and Tutsis, long
before the slaughter began, were convinced of each other's treachery.

            One big problem with Gould's
simplistic capacity/necessity dichotomy is the way it obscures this commonality
between us and the Hutus. Gould (in another sign of strategic retreat) concedes
that people have a biologically based "capacity" to view enemies as "beyond
fellowship and ripe for slaughter." But that makes it sound as if most of us
are entirely civil human beings, while occasionally--in some remote part of the
world--a "genocide" switch gets flicked, and slaughter happens. Those Serbs and
Hutus may act like animals, but we Americans have kept our "capacity" for evil
turned off.

            Many Germans, presumably,
had a similarly high opinion of themselves in the early 1930s, and no doubt
such blithe self-regard lubricates descent. OK, OK--I won't get carried away.
I'm not saying Americans are on a slippery slope toward genocide, and that only
evolutionary psychology can save the day. My point is just that (here comes my
contribution to Western thought) evolutionary psychology needn't, as Gould
fears, be used to excuse evildoers as victims of biology. It can actually serve
humanity by making it harder for any of us to casually assume our own goodness.
It says we all warrant skeptical self-scrutiny, and it warns us that this
scrutiny, being unnatural, is very hard. But it also suggests that the effort
is needed. If you sit around waiting for some switch to get flicked, you'll
have waited too long.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Slanted

            The New York Times
runs a lot of headlines about scandals, but rarely does it run a headline that
is a scandal. On Saturday, Dec. 28, it came pretty close. The headline
over its lead Page One story read: "DEMOCRATS HOPED TO RAISE $7 MILLION FROM
ASIANS IN U.S." On the inside page where the story continued, the headline was:
"DEMOCRATS' GOAL: MILLIONS FROM ASIANS." Both headlines were wrong. The story
was actually about a 1996 Democratic National Committee document outlining a
plan to raise (as the lead paragraph put it) "$7 million from
Asian-Americans."

            Memo to
the New York Times : "Asian-Americans" are American citizens of Asian
ancestry. "Asians," in contrast, are Asians--citizens of some Asian nation. And
"Asians in U.S." are citizens of some Asian nation who are visiting or residing
in the United States. This is not . It gets at the heart of the subtle,
probably subconscious racial prejudice that has turned a legitimately
medium-sized scandal into a journalistic blockbuster.

            Would a Times headline call Polish-Americans "East
Europeans in U.S."? (Or, in the jump headline, just "East Europeans"?) And the
headline was only half the problem with Saturday's story. The story itself was
wrongheaded, implying that there's something inherently scandalous about
Asian-Americans giving money to a political campaign. In fact, the inaccurate
headline was necessary to prevent the story from seeming absurd. Can you
imagine the Times running--over its lead story--the headline
"DEMOCRATS HOPED TO RAISE MILLIONS FROM U.S. JEWS"?

            Political parties target
ethnic groups for fund-raising all the time (as Jacob Weisberg recently showed
in these pages). They target Hispanics, they target Jews, they pass the hat at
Polish-American dinners. To be sure, the Asian-American fund-raising plan was,
in retrospect, no ordinary plan. It went quite awry. Some of the projected $7
million--at least $1.2 million, according to the Times --wound up coming
in the form of improper or illegal donations (which, of course, we already knew
about). Foreign citizens or companies funneled money through domestic front men
or front companies. And sometimes foreigners thus got to rub elbows with
President Clinton. For all we know, they influenced policy.

            But the
truly scandalous stuff was old news by Dec. 27. What that day's story added was
news of the existence of this document outlining a plan to raise money from
Americans of Asian descent. And that alone was considered worthy of the
high-scandal treatment.

            
Leave aside this particular story, and consider
the "campaign-gate" scandal as a whole. What if the same thing had happened
with Europeans and Americans of European descent? It would be just as improper
and/or illegal. But would we really be so worked up about it? Would William
Safire write a column about it every 15 minutes and use the loaded word
"aliens" to describe European noncitizens? If Indonesian magnate James Riady
looked like John Major, would Newsweek have put a huge, ominous, grainy
black-and-white photo of him on its cover? ("Clinton's European connection"
wouldn't pack quite the same punch as "Clinton's Asian connection"--the phrase
that Newsweek put on its cover and Safire has used 16 times in 13
weeks.) Would the Times be billing minor investigative twists as lead
stories?

            Indeed,
would its reporters even write stories like that Saturday's? The lead
paragraph, which is supposed to crystallize the story's news value, is this: "A
White House official and a leading fund-raiser for the Democratic National
Committee helped devise a strategy to raise an unprecedented $7 million from
Asian-Americans partly by offering rewards to the largest donors, including
special access to the White House, the committee's records show." You mean
Democrats actually offered White House visits to Americans who cough up big
campaign dough? I'm shocked. Wait until the Republicans discover this tactic!
The Friday after Christmas is a slow news day, but it's not that slow.
And as for the "unprecedented" scale of the fund-raising goal: Virtually every
dimension of Clinton's 1996 fund-raising was on an unprecedented scale, as
we've long known.

            There are some interesting nuggets in the Times
story. But among them isn't the fact, repeated in the third paragraph, that
fund-raisers told Asian-American donors that "political contributions were the
path to power." And among them isn't the fact, repeated (again) in the fourth
paragraph, that "the quid pro quo promised" to Asian-American donors was "in
many cases a face-to-face meeting with the President." And, anyway, none of
these nuggets is interesting enough to make this the day's main story. The only
way to do that is to first file Asian-Americans in the "alien" section of your
brain. That's why the story's headline is so telling.

            The funny
thing about this scandal is that its root cause and its mitigating circumstance
are one and the same. Its root cause is economic globalization--the fact that
more and more foreign companies have an interest in U.S. policy. But
globalization is also the reason that the scandal's premise--the illegality of
contributions from "foreign" interests--is increasingly meaningless. Both the
Times and the Washington Post (in its blockbuster-lite
front-page story, the next day) cited already-reported evidence that a $185,000
donation (since returned) may have originated ultimately with the C.P. Group.
The C.P. Group is "a huge Thai conglomerate with interests in China and
elsewhere in Asia" (the Times ) and is "among the largest foreign
investors in China" (the Post ). But of course, Nike, Boeing, General
Motors, Microsoft, IBM, and so on are also huge companies with interests in
China and elsewhere in Asia. They, no less than Asian companies, at times have
an interest in low U.S. tariffs, treating oppressive Asian dictators with kid
gloves, and so on. Yet it is perfectly legal for them to lubricate such
lobbying with big campaign donations.

            
Why no journalistic outrage about that ?
Well, for starters, try looking at a grainy newsweekly-sized photo of Lou
Gerstner and see if it makes you remember Pearl Harbor. (By the way, neither
the Times nor the Post noted that the ominous C.P. Group is
involved in joint ventures with Ford and Nynex.)

            You might think that, in an
age of globalization and with the United States' fate increasingly tied to the
fate of other nations, the United States' best newspaper would be careful not
to run articles that needlessly feed xenophobia. Guess again. Six weeks ago a
Times op-ed piece by political scientist Lucian Pye explored the
formidable mindset that governs China today. Current Chinese leaders have
"distinctive characteristics" that give them "significant advantages" over the
United States in foreign policy. They "see politics as exclusively combative
contests, involving haggling, maneuvering, bargaining and manipulating. The
winner is the master of the cleverest ploys and strategems [ sic ]."
Moreover, Chinese leaders are "quick to find fault in others" and try "always
to appear bold and fearless." Finally ("in a holdover from classical Chinese
political theory"), China's leaders "insist on claiming the moral high ground,
because top leaders are supposed to be morally superior men." In short, China's
"distinctive" edge lies in combative, Machiavellian, mud-slinging, blustery,
self-righteous politicians. Gosh, why didn't we think of that?

            These peculiar traits, Pye
noted, aggravate another disturbing feature of modern China. It seems that the
Chinese people vacillate "between craving foreign goods and giving vent to
anti-foreign passions." In other respects, too, they evince a "prickly
xenophobic nationalism." Imagine that.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Katz on the Cross

            By Jack Shafer

            Media critic Jon Katz has
achieved the impossible: He's recast some of America's most fortunate sons and
daughters as victims in a cultural civil war.

            Critics are self-appointed,
not made, and Katz is no exception. After a journeyman's career as a reporter
and editor at the Washington 
               Post and several other big city
dailies, he made his first electronic news as the executive producer of the
CBS 
               Morning 
               News in the late 1980s. There, he says, he
"was run out of journalism" and turned free-lance media critic. His first
(belated) taste of cyberspace came in 1991, when he connected to the WELL, the
Bay Area bulletin-board system. "I'd come home," he writes, and join the
"raging debates about media, religion, politics, and the cyberculture."

            Plying his media-crit trade
at Rolling Stone and New York , he eventually joined Wired
and its Web sibling, HotWired , becoming "Media Rant" columnist on the
Netizen channel in January 1996. He struck an instant pose as the Web's
troubadour and great defender, simultaneously promoting it to outsiders and
protecting it from arrivistes like Slate, which launched five months
later. The persona worked. He quickly became one of the Web's signature voices,
a Dave Garroway or Milton Berle who defined the nascent medium for most
people--inside and outside Webworld. Brainy, quick to identify enemies and
flame them, Katz indulged the clannishness of the Web pioneers who swarmed to
the site. And they indulged him, answering and amplifying his
provocations--call-and-response style--in threaded discussions linked to "Media
Rant."

            Katz's
adopted constituency--Web surfers, hackers, rap artists, violent-film buffs,
pint-sized Super Mario 64 champions, Web-porn peddlers, and TV-talk-show
fans--make for unlikely victims. Who can shed tears for folk who are blessed
with smarts, youth, leisure time, and moxie, and who own $2,000-plus
Pentium computers? If any group has a right to consider itself vulnerable in
these cybertimes, it's America's computer illiterates, who stand in awe of the
Katz Corps.

            But in Katz's world, cybernauts are oppressed daily by "The
Mediaphobes," the old-media-worshipping, Judeo-Christian-ethics-preaching,
backward-facing "windbags and pious souls who presume to know what is moral for
you and your family." They despise the fact that you now get your news directly
from Usenet groups or chat rooms, untainted by effete journalists; they fume
because today's politicians speak directly to the people via Larry King
Live and MTV; they are furious because kids play interactive Nintendo games
instead of passively watching television cartoons.

            Although Da Man may jam Ice
T's signal, he's been extraordinarily good to Katz. The Old Media boys at
Random House have just published his new book-- Virtuous Reality: How America
Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits 
               &
Blockheads Like William Bennett --and the Old Media boys at the New York
Times excerpted it in the Jan. 19 "Arts and Leisure" section.

            "Their
loss of control has been jarring to our traditional media and political
organizations, who had sat astride a tight monopoly over politics and news,"
Katz writes in Virtuous Reality . "They fought back and have been
fighting ever since, complaining that these new interactive media are dangerous
and destructive of public discourse. New media have brought with them enormous
cultural displacement--the journalists, producers, publishers, editors, and
academics who controlled most of our information flow have all been, to varying
degrees, pushed aside. They don't like it."

            
Katz's fury against the Mediaphobes is
impressive; yet, only rarely does he name those conspiring to deny him and his
cyberweeny buddies their maximum media liberty. (He insinuates on many pages
that the Big Media suffer from Mediaphobia, but he mostly leaves them off the
hook.) At the top of his short hate list resides popular scold William Bennett.
Bennett's books on "virtues" sell well. But how effective a censor is he? Well,
he did succeed in coercing Time Warner into selling its interest in the
gangsta-rap heavy Interscope label--only to see the label and its artists
thrive under the patronage of its new co-owners MCA. Also infected with
Mediaphobia is the opportunistic gang of legislators who passed the
Communications Decency Act, knowing full well that the Supremes will overturn
it. And don't forget Tipper Gore. During her brief and brilliant mid-'80s
career in rock 'n' roll Comstockery, she convinced some labels to affix
"voluntary" warning labels to mature material--a ratings system that many
younger listeners embraced as a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Today, she's a ribbon-cutting second lady who avoids controversy. Oh, and
Time magazine cried wolf about the prevalence of porn on the Net.

            Some
cultural civil war.

            If there is a cultural civil war going on, the
Mediaphiles--led by Wall Street--have routed the 'phobes. Big business has
wagered hundreds of billions of dollars on the development of high-tech,
low-cost media technology--broadband services, satellites, encryption
technology, miniaturized computers and communications devices, you name
it--that is largely impervious to the Bennetts and Gores of this world.

            Katz's war
is won, but declaring victory and resting his vocal chords would mean giving up
his career as the Jeremiah of cyberspace and finding a new hustle. Still,
commercial calculation isn't sufficient to explain his stand. He identifies so
deeply with the victims he has invented, the aggrieved Internet comrades and
the chastised Jerry Springer fans, that he's become one of them. Lest one think
I'm exaggerating Katz's martyr complex, check out Virtuous Reality 's
Chapter 7, in which he chronicles the life and times of another political rebel
who embraced a new technology to speak truth to power and suffered greatly for
it: Thomas Paine.

            
Katz-equals-Paine is an awful stretch, but his
book invites the comparison. Actually, Katz better resembles that other
iconoclastic 1990s media hacker, Ted Kaczynski, the alleged Unabomber. Not to
imply that the Katz would threaten murder to get published in the Washington
Post : To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't maimed or killed anyone except
the characters in his "Suburban Detective Mystery" series-- Death by Station
Wagon , The Last Housewife , The Father's Club , and The
Family Stalker . But, like the Unabomber, Katz is driven frothy by a world
that won't conform to his expectations. Consider the parallels:

            Ted Kaczynski brooded alone
in his cabin, limiting his contact to the outside world to letters and books
obtained through the interlibrary loan systems. He stands accused of authoring
an impenetrable screed titled Industrial Society and Its Future , and of
building bombs.

            Jon Katz broods in the
isolation of his suburban basement office, apparently limiting his contact to
the outside world to e-mail from other self-pitying souls: He composed his
Victims' Manifesto, that impenetrable screed called Virtuous Reality. I
hope it bombs.

            Not
really. I wish Virtuous Reality and Katz great success, because he
deserves it. Wrapped tightly in his Web cocoon, the First Netizen of the Church
of Cyberspace suffers hourly in the service of his new media victims: the
timorous who prefer the Internet to the terror of face-to-face contact; the
paranoid who extrapolate "the world is out to get me" conspiracies from the
detritus of politics; Game Boy boys; phone phreaks; the kids down at the Smut
Shack; and the teeming millions whose idea of a reality check is consulting a
Web address.

            Katz's basement sounds like a clammy and frightening place
to work, but it's not the scariest place he knows, as he confided to New
York magazine two months ago in a piece about his suburban community of
Montclair, N.J.

            "[Montclair] is a place where
I'm totally comfortable walking my dog at one or two in the morning--which I do
all the time," Katz said. "But I'm far too frightened to go to a schoolboard
meeting."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I Fit the Profile

            I've been through security
countless times at countless places, and I pride myself on wasting the least
amount of time. This requires that I be fully cooperative. I am also a private
pilot, and so I can affect a pretty good "yes, sir, yes, ma'am" style of snappy
camaraderie. When airport security is tightened, and everyone is being asked,
"May I look into this bag, please?" I reply happily, "You bet, sir! Let me open
it for you!"

            On a
recent Friday, I picked up my prepaid, overnight round-trip tickets 20 minutes
before departure, without any check-in luggage. The ticketing agent told me
that my carry-ons would be searched, and that I needed to obtain a signature
from security on an attached label in order to board. I said, "Yes ma'am, no
problem." I thought, "Security must be really tight today."

            With no lines at security, I got through in record time. My
bags got X-rayed, and my level of whatever those portals you walk through
measure was determined to be under the threshold. I must be the person with the
lowest metal content in the history of air travel. I do not even carry small
change. (I am practical.) So I asked the security people, "What about the
signature?" A supervisor appeared, quickly signed while avoiding my naively
friendly gaze, and handed me to Junior, who then proceeded--methodically, if
not neatly--to unpack everything I was carrying, and to toss my clothes,
toiletries, etc., into a dirty bin nearby.

            Then it
hit me. It was not that security was especially tight: It was only me
they wanted. And that "May I?" polite foreplay had gone out the window. The
label my friendly hometown airline had affixed to my bags had unexpectedly made
me a marked man, someone selected for some unknown special treatment. The
routine was broken; the power had shifted; the violation had begun. I suddenly
felt as if in the grip of a giant vise, a terrible feeling I had last
experienced as a teen-ager before fleeing Communist Hungary.

            
When I recount this story to friends, this is
where they start to smile, as if a diagnosis of my condition had suddenly
become apparent. After all, if someone with post-traumatic stress disorder
jumped 2 feet in the air every time a door slammed shut, good friends would be
more concerned about the person's condition, not the door. In a like manner, my
friends may suspect I am suffering from some Hungarian Refugee Syndrome, which
makes me overly sensitive to perfectly reasonable intrusions by the state.

            I try to
explain: The communism I had fled was hardly traumatic or violent. One aspect
of the horrible vise was the constant minor humiliations I had to suffer, such
as interaction with the block warden, the party overlord of a block of houses,
who had to give his assent to all matters tiny or grand, including travel. On
this Friday in the United States, I was being singled out for an unusual and
humiliating search. My personal goal was to fly to Los Angeles for a meeting
that was important to me. If I had refused the search--cried "NO!" as it
were--I assume they would have let me go home, but I would have been forbidden
to board the plane and would have missed my meeting. So I did what I had done
30 years ago: I chose to be humiliated just so I could reach my goal.

            I've just had my FAA physical for my pilot's license. It is
a thorough search for diseases and disabilities. I knew what it would entail,
why they do it, and that everybody is treated the same way. I had no problem
with that.

            The airport-security search
took about six minutes. Junior kept up an awkward canned patter, assuring me
that I would be a safer person for this and that he understood my anger. I
mumbled a lie about how I was not angry with him personally. First I attempted
to hang onto my dignity by being passive. However, as time stretched out, I
found myself cooperating to get it over with.

            I
collected my clothes from the bin, my tie from the floor. I was free to go to
L.A.

            The next day, I found the Note in the return-ticket
envelope. Of course, it had been there from the beginning, slipped in by the
ticket agent. But who reads those inserts next to the "Limitations on Baggage
Liability"? The salient paragraphs from the Note:

            
               Why was
I chosen?
            

            Passengers
are selected both randomly and through an objective systematic approach based
on direction from the FAA.

            
               How can
I avoid this in the future?
            

            Please understand that
Federal Regulations prohibit FAA personnel, XXXX Airlines, and all other air
carriers from sharing specific information regarding this program with the
public.

            Who could
be against an "objective systematic approach" (except for the inventor of the
automatic buzzword generator that gives us terms like "synchronized synergistic
systems")? What does "based on" mean? Is the airline just following orders, or
is it adding its own fantasies? And as to what one can do to avoid this
treatment in the future (good question!), the pamphlet is clear: nothing.

            The following Wednesday, I had to fly to L.A. again, this
time with an associate. I decided against carry-ons. I still felt like a total
paranoiac when I repacked the contents of my soft carry-on bag into a hard-case
bag to check in, and when I asked my associate to do the same. But I was
determined not to be humiliated again. And of course, we flew Another Airline.
At curbside check-in the agent noticed my one-way ticket. Uh-oh. "We'll have to
check it inside." Surprise!

            "Both of you guys have been
tagged by the computer."

            "What does this mean? Why?" I
asked innocently.

            "It is a random selection by
the computer," came the reply.

            "I do not believe it is
random," I opined with conviction.

            "Sir, I assure you it is
completely random," said the agent quite sincerely, adding for reassurance,
"Why, half an hour ago [the computer] tagged a guy who could barely walk."

            "But what does it mean to be
tagged?" we asked again.

            "You have to identify your
carry-ons!" the agent ordered.

            "We have none," we said
triumphantly.

            "In that case you do not have
a problem."

            My
associate was impressed by my prescience, and we both felt free and in control
as we walked off with our hands in our pockets, carrying only a few dollars,
the boarding card, and a driver's license. We had a great day. I felt much
better: I was not completely paranoid. I fit the profile. But a profile of
what? I could not even begin to imagine.

            
My associate was returning before me. Early
next morning there was a phone message from him. "I am calling you from the
gate. I've been tagged again and this time, they wanted to search my check-in
luggage. I was livid and made a big scene. They relented and bypassed the
computer." I am a shaggy-looking guy with a foreign accent. My associate is an
Air Force Reservist who has the bearing of "Iceman" in Top Gun . What
profile does he fit?

            I returned to my hometown
later, using another form of transportation.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Know Maass

            When I first moved to
Manhattan, a neighbor approached me in the corridor of my apartment
building.

            "Are you Peter Maass, the
writer?"

            Though I have heard this
question many times over the years, I still don't know the correct response.
Yes, I am; no, I am not. Both are accurate. Unfortunately, I offered my
neighbor a reply that raised more questions than it answered.

            "Yes, I am, but there are
two of us."

             

            He looked at me oddly and adopted one of those
don't-mess-with-me expressions that New Yorkers are born with. If an
opportunity for amity had existed between us, it seemed to have vanished. He
slipped into the elevator, I slipped into my apartment, and I imagine he rolled
his eyes to the ceiling and thought, "Great, another nut case in the
building."

            If only he knew the
truth.

            I am a writer--a very good
writer, according to my mother. I worked for the Washington Post for
nearly a decade, and I have written a book about my experiences covering the
war in Bosnia. It was published last year and got positive reviews. It even won
a couple of awards. So when people ask whether I am Peter Maass, the writer, I
should feel good, I should feel triumphant, I should feel like a master of the
literary universe receiving the adulation he so rightly deserves, and I should
reply in a voice of elegant humility, "Yes, I am."

            But I
don't. I can't.

            
My problem is this: Although I am Peter Maass,
the writer, I am not Peter Maas, the writer. Peter Maas--one "s," not two--has
a career's worth of books under his belt, and he's famous. Serpico
famous. Valachi Papers famous. This has created a great deal of
confusion. I've received letters intended for him, phone calls intended for
him, compliments intended for him, a publishing solicitation intended for him,
even a job offer intended for him (which I turned down).

            I have never met the
guy.

            Until
recently, I enjoyed the confusion. There's something flattering about people
thinking I was capable of writing a best seller about a New York cop when I was
a teen-ager in Los Angeles, or that I could write one book after another in my
20s, while at the same time reporting one newspaper story after another. I had
a great laugh when I was in North Korea a few years ago and someone
congratulated me on my phenomenal output. In North Korea!

            Circumstances have changed. I now have my own literary
oeuvre . This entitles me to certain privileges, such as employing
foreign words in my writings (see previous sentence) and living on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. Also, I should be able to revel in praise rather than
worry about it. But in my case, praise from a stranger is like a glass of water
served at a restaurant in Bombay: You drink it warily, if at all, fearing it
may be tainted. Even if the water tastes pure and delicious, you cannot enjoy
it as much as you should. There's nothing more pleasant than being
congratulated for your literary skills, but there's nothing less pleasant than
realizing the congratulations are intended for a guy who writes about the
mob.

            I had
hoped that my book would end the confusion, that I would emerge as the
one-and-only Peter Maass (or Maas), though I suspected this was unlikely. At
the least, I hoped the confusion would turn to my favor. Shortly before my book
was published, I wrote a piece about my identity crisis suggesting that if an
admirer who thought I was Peter Maas asked for my signature, I would scribble
away and confide that my "newest" opus was far better than "my" previous ones.
If thousands of Maas' fans bought my book by mistake, I would not complain.

            
Yet I miscalculated. No sooner did my book
start getting some attention than Peter Maas released a book that turned into a
best seller. It's about Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, a mobster who
turned state's evidence against John Gotti. From what I hear about the
book--and I hear quite a bit--it's not bad, and that's unfortunate, at least
for me.

            I went to
the Washington, D.C., public library recently to do a reading. There was a sign
at the entrance announcing the event, and my name was spelled "Peter Maas." I
thought little of it until a beefy audience member walked out shortly after I
started talking about Bosnia. I am pretty sure he wanted to hear about Sammy
the Bull. It's not that I can't drive people away from my readings, but it
usually takes more than 35 seconds.

            Ignominy has many forms. Once, after I signed a pile of
books at a bookstore, a clerk told me not to leave because there were more
copies in back. He returned with a stack of books by Peter Maas. I was tempted
to sign them, and nobody would have been the wiser, but something held me back.
Integrity? Honesty? No--try jealousy. Signed books sell much better than
unsigned ones.

            I was in Los Angeles not long
ago to attend a book festival. A number of people lined up for my book signing,
and I was very pleased until some of them pulled out copies of his
books. It was a bit embarrassing, especially as my father was sitting next to
me at the time.

            Could it
get worse?

            
After a lull, a middle-aged couple approached
me, and the husband had my book. My book. I introduced him to my father,
and I explained how amusing it was that some people thought I was Peter Maas
and wanted me to sign his books. A distraught look emerged on the husband's
face and his wife stared coldly at him. "I told you!" she sneered.

            There was an awkward
silence. I quickly wrote a personal inscription in the book--"Best regards from
the real Peter Maass"--and he smiled and thanked me. I would like to
think my inscription soothed the pain for him, cheered him up, and naturally
this was my intention. It was only later, of course, that I realized my
inscription made it impossible for him to get a refund.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            FDA Smoke Rings

            My father was the supreme
regulator in our family, promising each of his six children a $100 cash subsidy
from the family treasury if they did not partake of nicotiana before age 21.
Dad was a Camel man, and his offer usually came as he filled the air with smoke
and ash. He so despised his deadly habit that he routinely thumped any kid
caught sneaking puffs in the attic.

            
Tomorrow's parents won't have to regulate their tobacco-tempted teens, because
the federal government has taken the job. President Cigar (I mean Clinton) made
teen smoking a federal affair two years ago when he unleashed the Food and Drug
Administration on the problem. And there is a problem: A recent study shows
that 34 percent of high-school seniors now smoke, compared with 25 percent of
adults.

            Clinton's FDA commissioner, David A. Kessler, inserted the
federal government into the fray by diagnosing teen smoking as a "pediatric
disease." Assuming regulatory control over the noxious weed for the first time
in the agency's history, he defined tobacco as a "drug" and tobacco products
(cigarettes, cigars, chew) as "drug-delivery devices" under the Food, Drug, and
Cosmetic Act. Discovering these regulatory powers--which had escaped the notice
of other FDA commissioners for more than 80 years--Kessler issued a slew of
rules designed to suppress teen smoking, most of which were upheld by U.S.
District Judge William L. Osteen Sr. late last month. Although Osteen's
decision is currently under appeal, he approved Kessler's ban on tobacco sales
to anyone under 18, as well as the commissioner's various prohibitions on
cigarette-vending machines, self-service cigarette displays, and free samples
of tobacco. He also approved the FDA's new warning label for cigarette packs:
"Nicotine-Delivery Device for Persons 18 or Older."

            Of course, the evil tobacco
bastards recoiled from Kessler's rules. In court, they argued that the Food,
Drug, and Cosmetic Act limits the FDA's regulatory powers to drugs and medical
devices that provide medical benefits . The tobacconists' perverse logic
held that poisonous products like cigarettes, for which no health claim
is made, should fall outside government regulation. The tobacco bastards didn't
actually call their product poisonous in court, but that's their
take-home message: Regulate us if our product heals, but don't regulate us if
our product kills. And make no mistake about it, tobacco kills: The average
cigarette smoker lives eight fewer years than the average nonsmoker.

            But just
because the tobacco companies are evil doesn't mean that we should sympathize
with the FDA, which has convoluted the law to wound its foe. If the FDA were
consistent, it would leapfrog the Drug Enforcement Administration and start
regulating marijuana. (The drug here is THC, and the delivery system is a
joint.) Or it would police whiskey and shot glasses. Or it would go after the
Big Mac as an unhealthful fat-delivery device. (You laugh. The FDA currently
regulates that nonfat delivery device, olestra.)

            
So how did the FDA succeed in regulating
tobacco? In the guise of protecting children.

            Don't get me wrong. Some of
my best friends are children--but I don't want to live in a childproof world,
and most kids don't want to grow up to inherit such a safe place, either. The
joy of being an adult lies in the freedom to take chances--even if you have to
pay the consequences. Osteen's decision proves that almost any liberty can be
nibbled away if suffering children can be associated with it. But even the
judge approved only the most overt nanny-state measures requested by the FDA,
acknowledging the agency's power grab by rejecting the proposals that don't
directly deter teen smoking. For instance, the FDA wanted to bar tobacco
companies from sponsoring sports events or placing Marlboro Man and Joe Camel
logos on T-shirts, caps, and other gear.

            The FDA
claims that its ad-busting rules are the best way to achieve the
administration's goals of halving teen smoking in the next seven years. But
young Americans aren't as helpless in the face of the tobacco-industry
juggernaut as the Clintonites would like to imagine: Black teen-agers are
already hitting the president's goals.

            A1995 government study found that while 38 percent of white
teen-age boys smoke cigarettes, only 19 percent of their black contemporaries
do. Young black girls are even more resistant to tobacco: Forty percent of
young white girls smoke vs. only 12 percent of young black girls.

            It wasn't
always so. Just 20 years ago, young blacks and young whites smoked in equal
percentages. What changed? One theory holds that young white girls (unlike
young black girls) subscribe to a cult of thinness, and smoke to block their
appetite. Some black teens tell researchers that they feel that society has so
thoroughly stacked the deck against them with racial discrimination, crime, and
poverty that their very survival depends on resisting tobacco. And still others
maintain that young blacks are quicker to see through Joe Camel's charms than
young whites. To the sociologists' speculations, add mine. Everybody likes a
little danger in their lives, but perhaps most black kids are already
experiencing all the hazards their psyches can take. Meanwhile, kids (of all
races) who live inside elaborately constructed safety cones--airbags; mandatory
bicycle helmets; mommy pagers; home-security systems; anti-drug campaigns;
anti-sex propaganda; and sanitized-for-your-protection suburbs--yearn for
something to rebel against. At 15 cents per protest, smoking is a cheap ticket
to danger. (The buzz ain't bad, either.)

            
Another reason the FDA got away with the power
grab is because the Zeitgeist has been moving in the agency's direction
for some time. Our culture now interprets nearly all pleasures as
addictions--or potential addictions. Case in point: Time magazine's
reductive cover story of May 5 on the neurotransmitter dopamine. According to
Time , dopamine explains how and why we become "addicted" to sex, drugs,
booze, gambling, food, cheap thrills, and yes, tobacco. Shall we call in the
FDA regulators to protect us from our addictive desires? The FDA may have no
current plans to dispatch referees to our bedrooms to enforce safe sex, but
when it does, you can be sure it will be in the guise of protecting
children.

            My mom and dad eventually
quit the cigarette habit, as did my oldest brother and my baby sister. The
juvenile delinquent in the brood smoked for 12 years before he died in an
accident at the age of 26. Two of my brothers still smoke, although both would
press the magic button and quit tomorrow if they could.

            I alone collected the $100
bounty posted by my Dad. I've still never smoked a cigarette, although I'll
enjoy a Cuban cigar if you're buying. I collected my C note at my
21 st birthday party. Dad planted it in my birthday cake on a
makeshift flagstaff. I don't remember what I spent the money on, but I do
recall how I rebelled my way through high school. I drank to howling, puking
excess.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            William Bennett, Gays, and the Truth

            "This is tough news. It's
not pleasant to hear," said former Education Secretary William Bennett on ABC's
This Week Nov. 9. "But it's very important, and it's part of telling the
truth." The occasion for tough-but-needed truth telling: Bill Clinton's
first-ever presidential speech to an organized gay-rights group, the Human
Rights Campaign. Clinton had conferred respectability--wrongly--on the gay
quest for approval when in fact, said Bennett, he "should tell the truth on
this one": Homosexuality "takes 30 years off your life." The average life
expectancy for gay men, Bennett declared, was just 43.

            Many a mother's heart around
the country must have sunk at that moment amid premonitions that she would
outlive her son. A well-known public figure would think twice before delivering
tidings that grim, right? And Bennett's statistic was no slip. Only days later,
in the Nov. 24 Weekly Standard , he repeated the assertion phrased for
maximum emphasis:

            "The best
available research suggests that the average life span of male homosexuals is
around 43 years of age. Forty-three ." (Italics his.)

            Yes, it's a sensational, arresting number, which may soon
pass into general circulation. Already, for example, the National

               Review has repeated it unskeptically in an editorial. Where did the
figure come from, and how plausible is it?

            Bennett
got the number from Paul Cameron, a researcher well known to followers of gay
controversies. Cameron, a former assistant professor at the University of
Nebraska who has consulted for such gay-rights opponents as former Rep. William
Dannemeyer, R-Calif., heads a group called the Family Research Institute.
Cameron resigned under fire from the American Psychological Association and was
later formally terminated from membership following complaints about his
research methods. He has had run-ins with other professional groups, including
the Nebraska Psychological Association and the American Sociological
Association. According to Mark Pietrzyk's exposé in the Oct. 3, 1994, New
Republic , the state of Colorado initially hired Cameron as an expert
witness to defend its statute restricting gay-rights ordinances, then elected
not to use his testimony after it got a closer look. His life-span figures have
circulated for years in religious-right circles, but Bennett's comments appear
to represent their first real breakout into wider public discussion.

            
Cameron's method had the virtue of simplicity,
at least. He and two co-authors read through back numbers of various urban gay
community papers, mostly of the giveaway sort that are laden with bar ads and
personals. They counted up obituaries and news stories about deaths, noted the
ages of the deceased, computed the average, and published the resulting numbers
as estimates of gay life expectancy.

            What do vital-statistics
buffs think of this technique? Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise
Institute sums up the reactions of several of his fellow demographers: "The
method as you describe it is just ridiculous." But you don't have to be a
trained statistician to spot the fallacy at its heart, which is, to quote
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistician John Karon, that
"you're only getting the ages of those who die." Gay men of the same generation
destined to live to old age, even if more numerous, won't turn up in the
sample.

            Other
critics rattle off further objections. The deaths reported in these papers,
mostly AIDS deaths, will tend to represent the community defined by such papers
or directly known to their editors. It will include relatively more subjects
who live in town and are overtly gay and relatively few who blend into the
suburbs and seldom set foot in bars. It will overrepresent those whose passing
strikes others as newsworthy and underrepresent those who end their days in
retired obscurity in some sunny clime.

            Bennett is a busy man, but even he has access to the back
of an envelope. A moment's thought might have suggested a few simple test
calculations. Suppose he assumes--wildly pessimistically, given current
incidence data--that half the gay male population is destined to catch the AIDS
virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been
about 40. (Presumably protease inhibitors will extend average longevity, but
that will only increase Bennett's difficulty.) For the number 43 to be the true
average death age for the entire population of gay males, HIV-negative gay men
would, on average, have to keel into their graves at 46. Looked at another way,
if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average
age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS
die at an implausibly early average age (11, actually).

            Against
this, Cameron and his supporters argue that, according to their survey of
obits, even if they don't have AIDS, homosexual males tend to die by
their mid-40s (and lesbians by their late 40s). Some downright peculiar results
followed from this inference. One is that--contrary to the opinion of virtually
everyone else in the world--AIDS in fact hasn't reduced gay males' life
expectancy by that much--a few years, at most. Moreover, the obits also
recorded lots of violent and accidental deaths. From this Cameron and company
concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays
must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly
straight face they report, for example, that lesbians are at least 300 times
more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general.

            
Unfortunately there really is no satisfactory
measure of actual life expectancy among gay men. However, Harry Rosenberg, the
mortality-statistics chief at the National Center for Health Statistics, says
he's unaware of evidence that HIV-negative gays have a lower life expectancy
than other males. Rosenberg also points to one reason to think the HIV-negative
gay male may actually live longer on average than the straight male: Gays may
have higher incomes and more education on average than straights--two factors
powerfully correlated with longer life spans. (Bennett himself appears to share
this view, terming gays, "as a group, wealthy and well educated.")

            Challenged by the Human
Rights Campaign's Elizabeth Birch in the letters column of the Dec. 8
Standard , Bennett, remarkably, dug in to defend the Cameron numbers,
which he said coincided with the views of other authorities such as
psychiatrist . Satinover's 1996 book, Homosexuality and the Politics of
Truth , does discuss gay life spans, but cites as its authority ...
Cameron's study. In other words, Bennett is not adducing a second authority for
his assertions but merely falling back on the first via its recycling by
another writer.

            Throughout the controversy,
Bennett has made much of the cause of "truth" with a capital T. His
Standard article, portentously titled "Clinton, Gays, and the Truth,"
accused the Clintonites of scanting that important commodity. Bennett is right
to the extent that there's no excuse for telling falsehoods in the course of
raising otherwise legitimate issues. He should mind his own lesson.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Any Volunteers?

            A stickup artist shoves a
Smith & Wesson in your face: Your money or your life, he says, by which he
means you can surrender your money or you can surrender your slightly bloody
money and your life.

            Compare
the gunman's direct approach with the "voluntary standards" shakedown practiced
by the federal government. In recent years, the government has demanded--I
mean, requested--that the computer industry voluntarily accept its encryption
standards. The government also made volunteers out of the TV networks,
imploring them to rate TV programs to reflect sexual content and violence. (All
the networks--except NBC and BET--submitted meekly.) Last October, President
Clinton persuaded a number of firearms makers to voluntarily supply trigger
locks with new handguns. So much for Mao's thesis that political power grows
out of the barrel of a gun.

            Why is the government so keen on seeking voluntary
standards in the first place? Why doesn't it just pass laws or issue
regulations instead? It would if it could. Usually, the request for volunteers
signals the government's recognition--or at least suspicion--that it lacks the
legal authority to force industry or others to bend to its will. It doesn't
want to seek that authority either because it doubts it can muster the
necessary votes in Congress or because the Constitution stands in the way.

            The war on
tobacco offers the most telling example of this sort of extralegal extortion.
While negotiating the tobacco settlement last year, the government wanted
desperately to bar Big Tobacco from advertising its products. The First
Amendment prevents the government from stopping the tobacco companies from
advertising, however, so the negotiators worked out a deal. Limit advertising,
and we'll cap your liability lawsuits. Fearing that ultimately the tort lawyers
would bankrupt them, the tobacco companies agreed to give up their
constitutional ace in the hole. Only when Congress reneged on the immunity side
of the deal this spring did the industry unvolunteer its First Amendment
surrender.

            
Another reason the government prefers
coercion--I mean, persuasion--over legislation is that a law formalizes the
power relationship between the government and the governed. A law provides the
governed with the independent venue of the courts for whatever arguments might
unfold. The last word a bureaucrat wants to hear from the courts about a new
regulation is "unconstitutional."

            Yet
another advantage: Laws can be repealed, but voluntary standards are forever.
Seagram Co. learned this lesson the hard way last year when it abandoned the
five-decades-long voluntary agreement to keep liquor ads off television. Rep.
Joe Kennedy II, D-Mass., responded by introducing the "Just Say No Act,"
banning the ads outright. Observers gave Kennedy's bill little chance of
passing, but Seagram found itself flummoxed anyway. The networks and most
stations refused to sell Seagram air time because they feared liquor ads would
prod Congress into investigating the proliferation of beer ads on television.
Millions of dollars of ad revenue would be lost if Congress chose to regulate
beer ads or, worse yet, proposed new voluntary standards.

            Some industries embrace voluntary standards as a way to
dodge more onerous government regulation. Currently, commercial Web publishers
think they've staved off Federal Trade Commission regulators by establishing
voluntary privacy standards for online users. (
                  Slate
                is one such
publisher. Click here to read its privacy statement.) The FTC completed a survey of
Web policies and practices and will deliver its report to Congress in June.
Other industries, especially pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, love
to wear voluntary regs as a beard and use them to rat out the competition. "Oh,
look, we're in compliance with the voluntary regulations, but Company X
isn't."

            But bowing to voluntary
standards doesn't automatically get a company off the government's hook,
either. When dozens of youngsters found themselves either strangled or
entrapped in the rungs of their bunk beds, the American furniture industry and
the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission worked together to establish a
set of voluntary safety standards. The two sides agreed on guardrail design
standards and provided warning notices for the proper use of the beds (such as
not letting children younger than 6 use them). The CPSC presented the industry
with a Commendation for Product Safety in 1996 for its cooperation, and
commission Chairwoman Ann Brown boasted about its relationship with the bed
makers. "We are a regulatory agency," she said, "but we prefer to work
voluntarily with industry."

            Today, the
industry probably regrets having cooperated. Even though 90 percent of all new
bunk beds sold conform to the voluntary standards, Newsday reported last
month that the commission's staff is now recommending mandatory
standards. Mandatory standards enlarge government power to penalize makers who
don't abide by the rules and also give U.S. Customs the right to reject imports
that don't conform. Having previously agreed to voluntary standards, the
furniture industry finds itself stuck in the regulatory maw. No wonder the
first thing you learn in the military is to never volunteer.

            
The corrupting thing about compulsory
voluntarism is that it preys on the high-minded to the benefit of the
unscrupulous. It turns government suggestions into veiled threats and devalues
true voluntarism. At its worst, it can kick up a stench that would have made
George Orwell gag.

            In fact, the Soviets had a
name for this sort of voluntarism: subbotnik , the voluntary day of
labor. Invented by Lenin, subbotniks were convened on weekends for
cleaning, maintenance, and construction projects that the commissars decided
needed attention. Since communism closed shop in Russia, all the volunteers
have disappeared.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Wound

            Dole is "reluctant,"
"reticent," and "loath" to discuss it, claims the press corps. Or "even to
think about" it, as Newsday 's Elaine S. Povich wrote Aug. 12, "because
to do so would unearth the demons that he has lived with--and mostly hidden
from the public--for the majority of his 73 years."

            "It," of course, is the war
wound, the battlefield maiming of his arm and shoulder during World War II--or,
as the Washington Post 's David Maraniss and other writers have upgraded
it for their journalistic purposes, the Wound.

            The press
loves the Wound for the reductionist power it affords them when they write
about the candidate. Writing in the New Republic on behalf of hacks
everywhere, the otherwise estimable Matthew Cooper (now bound for
Newsweek ) calls the Wound Dole's "Rosetta stone." Dole speaks in
shorthand? Explanation: Infirmities prevent him from scribbling much beyond
his signature, so he's trained himself to compress the world into verbal
hieroglyphics. Dole refuses to give up? Explanation: He was left for
dead in Italy and marked a goner several times in hospitals, and he'd be taking
the dirt nap today if not for his interminable spirit. Dole is a hatchet
man, a mean guy given to angry outbursts? Hell, goddamnit! He grew up
hardscrabble and was crippled in the bloom of his handsome prime! He earned
everything he has, unlike softies like Bush and Forbes, who had the world
handed to them, and Clinton, who was anointed by Fulbright and got his own free
ride!

            But most of all, the press corps loves to touch the Wound
because they've convinced themselves that subject was previously taboo. Give a
listen:

            
               Most
revealingly, [Dole is] willing more and more to speak of being shot in World
War II, and of his lengthy recovery from wounds that almost killed him and left
his right shoulder incapacitated.
            

            -- Los
Angeles Times , Feb. 24, 1996

            
               Senate
Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, the laconic Kansan who for more than three
decades in Congress has been to reluctant to draw attention to his wounds from
World War II, returned today to a hospital building where he suffered
excruciating pain and nearly died.
            

            

               --Washington Post , March 15, 1996

            
               Midwest
stoicism being what it is, Dole still seems uncomfortable talking about the
wounds that nearly killed him as he lead (sic) a platoon up an Italian hill
April 12, 1945.
            

            
               As he
wrapped up his party's nomination, his generation's World War II experience is
at the heart of his third run for the presidency. But he talks about it
reluctantly.
            

            
               "I've
just never done it," Dole said in an interview with GNS. "I've always felt it
was private."
            

            --Gannett
News Service, March 22, 1996

            
               Recently,
[Dole] has given up his reticence to discuss his war wounds.
            

            --Helen
Thomas, UPI, April 17, 1996

            
               Dole
specifically chose last April to jump into the race, marking the 50th
anniversary of when he was wounded in Italy during World War II to highlight
his military record.
            

            

               Showcasing the 1945 grenade explosion which kept him in the hospital for
three years and left him with a useless right arm signaled a change in the very
private man who has been reluctant to discuss the episode.
            

            --Agence
France Presse, May 15, 1996

            
               Once
reluctant to discuss his injuries and his grueling recovery, Dole has been
warming up to the subject in interviews and speeches.
            

            --Associated Press, May
31, 1996

            But the notion that Dole is just now exiting the Wound
cocoon is a perennial press fantasy. Dole is always talking about his Wound,
and the press is always asserting that he is doing so reluctantly, for the
first time, and so on. He blabs about the Wound in the 1988 and 1996 editions
of Unlimited Partners: Our American Story , his book with wife Elizabeth,
and his reflections on the Wound and the aftermath consume a great chunk of
Richard Ben Cramer's nonpareil book about the 1988 campaign, What It Takes:
The Way to the White House . And he discussed it candidly during his last
run for the White House, as this déjà vu clip by Edward Walsh from the
Feb. 19, 1988, Washington Post proves:

            
               For the
first time in his public life, he has forced himself to speak openly about the
horrible war wound that turned a strapping, athletic youth into an emaciated,
bed-ridden hospital patient. The experience left him bitter and disillusioned,
Dole has told audiences this year.
            

            
               But Dole and his
advisers have also sought to turn the toughness that enabled Dole to overcome
his injury into an asset, the counterpoint to the Bush "wimp" image that is the
other side of the deeply personal contest between the two men.
            

            Did the press miss Walsh's story? Have they forgotten the
1988 campaign? If so, one would think that after six months of Dole
non-reticence on the hustings, including a pit stop for the press at the Battle
Creek, Mich., Army hospital where he recuperated from the Wound, and a full
nine months after the release of a campaign video, An American Hero , in
which Dole himself describes the Wounding in graphic detail ("Some
high-explosive bullet entered my right shoulder, fractured my vertebrae in my
neck. I--I saw these--things racing--my parents, my house. I couldn't move my
body, I couldn't move my arms, my legs."), the press would finally say with
authority that Dole is not only comfortable with talking about the Wound, he's
practiced.

            Not a
chance. In the final hours of the Republican National Convention, reporters
were still writing that Dole was only just coming to grips with his
infirmity.

            
               One
touchy subject is Dole's grievous war wound. He has always been loath to talk
about it, but his advisers have viewed it as an asset--a symbol of his will to
survive.
            

            

               --Philadelphia Inquirer , Aug. 15, 1996

            
The media's misperception about the Wound pairs
nicely with their other blind spot: that a "new, sensitive Dole" has emerged to
replace the "mean hatchet man." When Dole misted up at the convention,
reporters wrote as if the "Midwest stoic" had finally found his heart, when in
fact a sluice of his tears courses its way through his recent career. He sobbed
when he paid a recent visit to Ike's boyhood home in Abilene, Kan.; when he
retired from the Senate earlier this summer; when he visited his hometown of
Russell, Kan., in March; when he helped plant Nixon in Whittier in 1994; when
he talked on 60 Minutes in 1993 about his father visiting him in the
hospital; when he attended a Senate party in 1992 for the defeated George Bush;
whenever he hears "You'll Never Walk Alone" (which he played continuously
during his recovery); during a Ford/Dole campaign stop in Russell (he always
seems to cry in Russell) in 1976, which he included in a later campaign
video.

            Why then,
does the press paint Dole as a New Age '90s guy who is finally making the big
hug with the inner child who was ravaged by the Wound?

            Don't blame Dole. He hasn't exploited his war record for
political purposes any more than did John "PT109" Kennedy or George "Grumman
Avenger" Bush. And while he hasn't rubbed his game wing directly in Clinton's
draft-dodging face in pursuit of votes, he'll probably do whatever it takes to
win if he's woefully behind in October.

            Neither
exploiting the Wound nor shunning it, Dole has folded it into his life,
establishing the Dole Foundation to help the disabled, pushing the Americans
With Disabilities Act through Congress, and going out of his way to align
himself with the physically impaired. When he gave the commencement address
this year at Gallaudet University--the federal school for the deaf--Dole wasn't
engaging in political grandstanding. He was working his constituency.

            
The only disability that needs more exposure
this election cycle is the media's Campaign Cognitive Disorder, a seemingly
incurable condition whose symptoms are amnesia and treacle. CCD-impaired
journalists blot out the past and embrace the mawkish. In the case of Bob Dole,
afflicted reporters repeat the well-grooved narrative of his Wound, Recovery,
New Sensitivity, because it makes for a good and easy story--and because it
fits with their line that the formerly taciturn/stoic, mean/hatchet-wielding
Dole has evolved, even when the record shows that he's been a serial blubberer
since the '70s and, despite the tears, is just as mean as ever.

            
Meanwhile, the crybaby candidate must be chortling about the media's naiveté.
He's probably been chortling for more than three decades. In a Dole profile
published last December in the Los Angeles Times , former Dole aide Jim
French talks about chauffeuring the candidate to campaign stops during his 1966
re-election bid for the House. Even then, Dole knew the political value of the
Wound--and of his reluctance to talk about it. The Times reports:

            
               Few
gatherings passed without a tactful mention of [Dole's] military service in
Italy and the frozen right arm. It hit home with the veterans, as did Dole's
stern warning to dike the Communist tide in Asia. Dole rarely fished for
sympathy when he retold the tale of his battle injury, leavening the reference
by saying it won him a "bedpan promotion" to captain.
            

            
               But "if
a meeting wasn't going good, sometimes I'd have a guy in the back of the room
ask him about the war wound," says French. "It would switch the conversation to
make it more positive."
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Therapeutic Laws

            Bill Clinton wants to be an
activist chief executive, but a paradox of his own making stands in the way. In
his last State of the Union address, he repudiated big government. "We know
there's not a program for every problem," he said. "The era of big government
is over." With the help of Dick Morris, Clinton has turned this paradox,
this--let's face it--logical contradiction, into an electoral strength. Clever
rhetoric has helped. But so did his embrace of what might be called
"therapeutic legislation."

            Therapeutic legislation is
intended to make people feel good, not actually to accomplish anything.
Sometimes, it addresses a virtually nonexistent problem or, at least, a problem
that ranks lower on any sensible scale of national concerns than the fuss and
self-congratulation would indicate. Sometimes, it addresses real, major
problems, but in an almost totally symbolic manner. Often, therapeutic
legislation exploits the electorate's short attention span, its capacity to
become suddenly obsessed with an issue and then--especially if provided with
legislative catharsis--to forget it just as quickly. In any case, therapeutic
legislation costs the taxpayer little or nothing and generally offends almost
no one. (In an important subclass of therapeutic legislation, however, stagily
offending an unpopular interest group--e.g., the tobacco lobby--is part of the
therapy.)

            This week, Clinton signed
another of the many therapeutic laws for which he has taken credit. This one
makes stalking across interstate lines or on U.S. government property a federal
offense, punishable by five years to life in prison. The law was sponsored by
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, proving that Democrats aren't
alone in the dirty habit of pleasuring themselves this way. The anti-stalking
law is typical of much therapeutic legislation in that it addresses a hunger
for the federal government to do something about a matter--usually crime
or education--that is properly the concern of the states. I wouldn't be so
callous as to suggest that stalking isn't an urgent problem, fully worthy of
immediate action by a Congress that can't pass a budget on time. But is
stalking across state lines or on federal property really such a
pressing concern? Undoubtedly it is terrifying when it happens (as it
apparently happened to Sen. Hutchison). The reason Congress and the president
have outlawed it with such a flourish, however, is as a way of expressing
symbolic concern over stalking in general. Sen. Hutchison's office concedes
that it has collected no information on the number of interstate stalking
cases.

            Indeed,
if there were thousands of interstate stalkers, if they did pose
a serious law-enforcement problem, Hutchison's legislation would have smoked
out some sort of constituency to oppose the bill. If a stalkers' lobby itself
didn't pipe up, at least civil libertarians who deplore the double-jeopardy
implications of a federal stalking law would have criticized it. Instead,
Hutchison's solution to the nonproblem passed 99-0 in the Senate. A law that
passes with no opposition is a good bet to be therapeutic legislation. (And it
is doubly hypocritical for Republicans, who claim to believe in less government
and in state government, to be clotting the federal statute books with laws
that mess in areas of state concern.)

            

               M >any therapeutic laws are superfluous. Some are passed unanimously.
But the defining characteristic of a therapeutic bill is its thrift: It doesn't
increase the budget; it requires no new taxes; and it offends no
special-interest group. The anti-stalking bill cost Clinton and several hundred
members of Congress absolutely nothing, but allowed them to inflate their
anti-crime résumés.

            A good third of Clinton's
acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention was used to publicize
therapeutic laws passed on his watch or new ones he wanted Congress to
consider:

            He called for a ban on
"cop-killer" bullets; reiterated his support for a victims'-rights
constitutional amendment; argued for an extension of the Family and Medical
Leave law and a measure to keep moms and their babies in hospitals longer than
48 hours; promoted a measure that would place taggents in explosives; and asked
for a Brady Bill amendment to keep guns out of the hands of perpetrators of
domestic violence.

            He touted the television
V-chip; praised the Kennedy-Kassebaum law (an ultra-therapeutic law that
guarantees portability of insurance but places no ceiling on the rates insurers
can charge); applauded the ban on "assault" rifles; and bragged about the new
FDA regulations that curb the advertising and sale of cigarettes to
children.

            To much
applause, he deplored the fact that "10 million children live within just four
miles of a toxic waste dump" (four miles ?) and urged that we make it
illegal "even to attempt to pollute" (whatever that means).

            
Clinton isn't the only therapeutic politician,
just the best. Linguistic nationalists are pushing their English-first
measures. The ultrapatriotic want an amendment to ban flag-burning (hell, why
not just mandate flag-waving?). The spit-and-polish crowd campaigns for
school uniforms. The drug warriors seek more drug-free zones. To ward off child
molesters, the city of San Mateo, Calif., has proposed background checks and
fingerprinting of Little League coaches, den mothers, and others who volunteer
their time to children (never mind, as the Wall Street Journal reports,
that less than 10 percent of all child molestations take place in an
institutional setting; that most accused child molesters have no previous
convictions; and that child abuse is down in the '90s). And with the continued
Balanced Budget Amendment follies, Congress indulges itself in the grandest of
therapeutic fantasies. If it really wants to balance the budget it should just
do so, rather than passing feel-good laws that say the budget should be
balanced.

            No doubt
somewhere in the above list I've included a law that you, dear reader, support
and believe is more than merely therapeutic. Your particular law, or two,
address problems fully worthy of a national fuss and Rose Garden signing
ceremony. But surely even you will agree that most of these laws are merely
therapeutic. We can all agree on that, without agreeing on which are the
exceptions.

            Therapeutic laws become props for rhetoric that might be
called demagoguery, except that it disgraces the memories of Joe McCarthy and
Huey Long and the ambitions of Pat Buchanan to call Clinton a demagogue. The
genuine demagogue assails minorities and labels his foes Communists. The modern
"semigogue" speaks liltingly about children and education and health and public
safety. He artfully constructs his debate to make his foes sound as if they are
against children, for gun violence, against safe streets, and for pollution.
The semigogue in chief has buried Dole with so many positives during this
election season, it's enough to make you long for the days of negative
campaigning.

            And for genuine activism.
Even though my personal tastes in legislation tend toward the kind that begin,
"Congress shall pass no law," I admired the old Bill Clinton who attempted to
reorganize the $1 trillion health-care business and who forthrightly called for
a workfare program that would cost more, not less, than simple handouts. That
Clinton didn't pussyfoot around. He stood for what he believed in. He
stimulated a thunderous and enlightening debate. He demonstrated to the
electorate that real change is not cheap and easy.

            He also got his ass
kicked.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            More Time With My Family

            Nobody in the press wanted
to call Rep. Bill Paxon a liar last month when he announced that he was
quitting his day job (plotting and scheming against the House Republican
leadership) to spend more time with his family--toddler Suby and wife Susan
Molinari. Less than a year ago, Molinari left her seat in the House to
become a TV anchor and, according to news reports, to spend more time with her
family.

            So
reluctant were reporters to call Paxon a prevaricator that most of them waited
a decent interval--a few paragraphs--before reporting the apparent reason for
Paxon's resignation: His challenge to Majority Leader Dick Armey was doomed and
he faced a career as a Republican backbencher, a fate the ambitious pol
apparently couldn't face.

            ANexis dump indicates that at least twice a day somebody
tells the press he or she has swapped the horrors of work for the bliss of
family. In one recent week:

            A Baptist minister in North
Carolina (who was in hot water for performing a gay marriage ceremony) doffed
his collar to spend more time with the missus.

            The CFOs of both the New York
Times Co. and Kaiser Permanente copped the family plea when they left their
jobs--though a Kaiser Permanente spokesman felt it necessary to add that the
resignation was unrelated to a $270 million loss in 1997.

            Three
coaches hung up their clipboards, one software CEO stored his last file, and a
village board member cast her last vote because they allegedly wanted more time
with their loved ones.

            
Obviously, I don't think all these fine
individuals are lying about their motives. It's safe to say that in the course
of a year, perhaps two or three people on the planet really do quit so they can
watch their kids grow up. Another half-dozen or so may be deceiving themselves
rather than us, individuals such as the mayor of Delray Beach, Fla., Tom Lynch.
Lynch quit in 1996 because he wanted more time with his family and his
business. Lynch has since learned that the sure cure for wanting to spend more
time with your family is spending more time with your family: He's just thrown
his hat in the ring for the Delray Beach School Board.

            Many
tender the family alibi because they're ashamed of having been fired, or
embarrassed to admit that they've conceded defeat to the god of success
(Paxon's case, I'm sure), or because they're going nuts on the job. By citing
family, the worker neutralizes the stigma and efficiently blocks further
questions. No responsible reporter will allege a firing if she can't prove it,
because that would risk a libel suit. Besides, only a pit bull would continue
to tear into the flesh of a foe that has rolled over on its back to signal
surrender.

            In Washington, the time-honored lie is to pair a new
interest in one's family with a profound disgust for the system. Or to say that
you want to get back to the "real people." Vin Weber left the House of
Representatives in 1992 rather than face the "vicious, negative, and highly
personal campaign" he saw looming. Today, Weber labors in the genial, positive,
and highly impersonal business of lobbying, with clients like Microsoft, ITT,
and Boeing. Then there's the Rev. Al Sharpton's variation: Last week he
announced that he would not seek office this year because he wants to spend
more time on civil rights issues.

            (I fed the
family alibi to the Washington Post when I quit my Washington job in
1994. I did, however, add that I had failed to acquire a family, and I hoped to
secure a wife and two children as soon as possible so we could spend more time
together.)

            
Another indemnifying exit strategy is to claim
that you're seeking "new opportunities," without naming them. This excuse
usually appears in the form of a corporate press release, because nobody can
keep a straight face when it's spoken out loud. In a more honest world, it
wouldn't be tacky for titans of industry to say they're leaving to pursue a
fully deployed golden parachute as they bail out.

            The
person who actually does quit to spend more time with the family may discover
that paid work is almost always more rewarding than the "tedious work" of child
rearing. Or so says Arlie Hochschild in The Time Bind: When Work Becomes
Home and Home Becomes Work . The modern home is like an assembly-line
factory, with an endless stream of clothes to clean and kids to shuttle and
broken windows to fix and meals to cook. Why not escape the noise and the
pressure of being a Superadult for the rewards of the workplace, where
supervisors are trained to understand you?

            Let's call Paxon's bluff and see if he stays close to home
to nurture Suby or takes another demanding job. Of course, I'm betting on the
demanding job. During the farewell tour of his legislative district, Paxon
indicated the depth of his enthusiasm in raising Suby when he let Molinari
change the diaper as their plane touched down in Buffalo, N.Y. His technique is
"too methodical and slow," she said.

            My hero, though, is Richard
Heseltine, the chairman of the Overseas Investment Trust, who resigned earlier
this month in opposition to the business plan forced on him by his superiors.
Heseltine declined to enumerate his disagreements with his bosses but said:
"Put it this way, it's nothing to do with ill health, it's not to pursue other
interests, it's not to spend more time with my family."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bill Clinton: My Story

            I wish to issue a forceful
denial of sexual relations with that man, President Bill Clinton. I never told
anyone to lie about it. Any intimation that our relationship was improper will
be a source of deep distress to me, to my husband of many years, and to other
members of my family.

            While I
have met with the president at the White House on occasion, I did so only to
discuss matters relating to family structure, teen-age pregnancy, and social
consequences. Any elation or dishevelment observed in me upon leaving those
meetings was strictly professional. I just have that kind of hair. All the
White House faxes, memos, and other messages I have in my possession deal with
subjects such as I detail above.

            Ihave examined the five copies of the poetry of Khalil
Gibran in my library and find no inscription from the president of the United
States in any of them. All items of underwear in my possession were purchased
either by me or by my widowed mother. While items of my clothing are currently
at the cleaners, I can provide explanations for all the spots.

            My recent orthopedic
difficulties were in no way related to any unwillingness on my part to discuss
these or any other matters with attorneys for Paula Jones, Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr, or the media.

            I deny any implication that
the character of Dave Cranston in my still-to-be-published novel, Secondary
Powers , was based upon my intimate knowledge of any real person. Readers
can judge for themselves.

            Media relations: Domenika
Flack at Bill and Howlton; phone: (202) 888-3737; fax: (202) 888-3738. (Photos
available upon request.)

            Lawyer: Clifford Clark, at
Pudge & Pose; phone: (202) 899-0679.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Living in a Second-Best World

            Attention, all shoppers! A
marvelous new marketplace is opening its doors. Soon, thanks to the next great
wave of deregulation due to arrive in neighborhoods across the nation, you will
be able to haggle over your electricity rates. What's that you say? You are not
thrilled at the prospect of a new bunch of utility companies calling you at
dinner time to offer you their special one-time-only package of cut-rate prices
for customers who turn on their air conditioning only after 8 p.m., never run
the clothes dryer except between 10 a.m. and noon, and use only fluorescent
bulbs?

            Are you
worried, perhaps, that, when most of your neighbors are buying their kilowatts
from elsewhere, your local utility will no longer gladly send crews to restore
your power in an ice storm? Or that competing electricity producers won't
invest in cleaner generators--or that they will switch to the cheapest and
dirtiest coal they can find? Or that average prices won't really fall after
they've paid for all the new executives and middlemen and advertising
copywriters and telemarketers they will need in order to compete?

            If you're suffering such qualms, you're probably the sort
of person who doesn't appreciate the ample benefits telephone and airline
deregulation have brought.

            You're
someone who still thinks it wouldn't be such an awful thing to have a single
phone company reaching from coast to coast, because it means you need only one
phone card to call anywhere in the country, who would willingly relinquish
exciting new features such as dialing 11 extra digits in order to protect
yourself against "surprise charges" by "no name" telephone companies (a fun
service my local carrier recently introduced). You would just as soon avoid all
those arguments about being "slammed" for charges by a phone company you didn't
choose or being "crammed" for special services you didn't order.

            
You're also probably one of those people who
needs to make flight reservations at the last moment, who has better things to
do than search the Internet for bargain rates, and hates feeling the person
next to you paid only half as much for a ticket. You long for leg room and
semi-edible meals in coach class. You remember when confirmed reservations
meant the airline would a) hold your seat and b) feel obliged to find you a
substitute--on another carrier if necessary--if, for some reason, your flight
didn't take off.

            In other
words, you're someone like me. What's the matter with us? Surely we know, from
both economic theory and concrete example, that open competition is the best
assurance of consumer satisfaction. Companies shielded from market pressures by
monopoly position or government intervention grow fat, lazy, and indifferent to
their customers. Why are we so dubious about the benefits that freely competing
telephone companies and airlines shower upon us?

            Well, partly it's because the world keeps offering us more
and more choices--except the choice of lengthening the day. We've already got
our hands full doing our jobs and caring for our families and shopping for the
everyday things of life in malls and catalogs and now the Internet. We are not
wrong to suspect that many of the corporate efficiency gains the economists
extol come at the (usually uncounted) expense of our own time and convenience.
When airlines overbook to minimize the chance they might fly with empty seats,
the value of the hours we waste doesn't get counted in their costs. Unless it
cuts our own employer's productivity--which in hard-to-track ways it may well
do--it doesn't even get subtracted from the GDP. Ditto the time we spend trying
to figure out whom to call when our phone is out of order. In other words,
these companies are improving their bottom lines by shifting costs from
measurable cash to immeasurable hassle.

            What's
more, there are theoretical as well as practical reasons why deregulation may
not always produce net gains. That's because, for much of our day, we live in
the world of the second best.

            
Popular economists don't like to talk much
about the world of the second best because it's such a messy place. It inhabits
those sectors of the economy where one or more requirements of purely
competitive markets--many suppliers, a relatively homogeneous product, easy
access for new companies to the market, enough information for consumers to
make the best buys--cannot be met to a substantial degree.

            Sometimes
the operative constraint is physical--you can't build airports just any old
place. Or entry costs are so high that no one will pay them unless guaranteed a
return, at least initially--as when cable TV was new. Sometimes it arises from
the nature of the enterprise--you wouldn't want to have to have dozens of
different telephone lines in your house just so you could connect with all the
different phone companies your friends might select. Sometimes it's because
there are nonmarket goods involved--the high value people place on personal
safety, national security, a clean environment, or social welfare. Sometimes
the products being sold--such as sophisticated medical care--really are too
complex for anyone but a specialist to understand fully.

            Of course, no markets are really perfect in this imperfect
world, and you want to be careful not to let suppliers exaggerate the
constraints to buttress an unwarranted case for de facto or legislated
monopoly. But second-best situations abound, and here's the upsetting thing
that economic theory tells us about them: In the world of the second best it
is not guaranteed that a move toward eliminating the market imperfections will
make the market more efficient . In such a situation, for example, cutting
regulations and increasing competition might make consumers better off--or it
might make them worse off. There are no guarantees.

            This, of course, is not a
very satisfactory state of affairs for theoretical economists--or, for that
matter, policy-makers or speech writers. It means that instead of blandly
assuming less regulation is better than more or more competition is better than
less, you have to study the specifics of each case very carefully. And you have
to keep experimenting with alterations and examining the results as external
conditions change over time. And this can be very tiresome for everyone
involved.

            So I can't tell you if
deregulating utilities will necessarily lead to lower-cost, more efficient
electricity service. Or whether the recent move to consolidation among the
regional companies created in the federal breakup of AT&T will make
telephone service better or worse. But, a priori, neither can anyone else.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Monopoly Shopping

            Microsoft is paying me to
write this column. Does that affect my objectivity? I don't think so, but I
might be wrong. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. I'm not asking for your trust.
I'm going to lay out a simple logical argument that you can check for yourself.
The argument stands or falls on its own merits.

            In other
words, I aim to occupy the same high ground claimed by Abraham Lincoln in his
sixth debate against Stephen A. Douglas:

            If you have ever studied
geometry, you remember that by a course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the
angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to
work it out. Now, if you were to undertake to disprove that proposition, would
you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar?

            I am
prepared to go Lincoln one better and to assert that you could not prove
Euclid's proposition to be false even by calling him a Microsoft employee.

            Now, then, let's talk about Web browsers. More
specifically, let's talk about what will happen if Microsoft extends its
operating system monopoly into the browser market as the Department of Justice
claims it is trying to do. Microsoft denies that intention, claiming it bundles
browsers with operating systems only to take advantage of technical
synergies.

            Who's
right about that one? I have no idea. Well, OK, I have some ideas, but they're
probably no better informed than yours. Instead, I want to ask a related
question, one that is central to this whole affair but has been almost entirely
ignored in the dozens of op-ed pieces that have cropped up over the past couple
of weeks. Namely: Would a Microsoft browser monopoly be good or bad for
consumers?

            
Well--good or bad compared with what? What is
the alternative to a Microsoft browser monopoly? There are several scenarios
you might envision. One is an eternal competition between Microsoft and
Netscape, each striving to capture market share through innovation. The upside
of that scenario is that browsers would get better; the downside is that
innovation uses a lot of resources that might be better employed elsewhere.
It's not clear whether the benefits of that competition would outweigh the
costs, or vice-versa.

            Another
alternative to a Microsoft monopoly is a Netscape monopoly. Which of
those would be better for consumers? Your gut response to that question
is likely to depend pretty heavily on whose software has caused you the most
recent frustration. For the record, my own level of frustration with
both companies' products is so high that I don't run Windows 95
or Netscape Communicator. But let's you and I try putting aside our
individual peeves and recasting the question at a more abstract level. Assume,
for the sake of argument, that there will be only one browser and that its
quality will be the same regardless of whether Microsoft or Netscape supplies
it. Then should you, the consumer, care who supplies it?

            Under those assumptions, there's an unambiguous answer: You
should root for Microsoft. Give me a few paragraphs, and I'll explain why.

            Windows 95
costs about $90 at my local computer superstore. Why doesn't it cost more?
Because, despite its monopoly power, Microsoft remains subject to the laws of
the marketplace. At a higher price, too many customers would walk away. (If you
doubt a small price increase would significantly affect the sales of Windows
95, you must conclude Microsoft is undercharging out of either foolishness or
generosity--neither of which is terribly consistent with the way the Justice
Department and the public at large think of Microsoft.)

            
In fact, every time Microsoft raises the price
of Windows 95, it gets punished twice. First, it loses sales of Windows 95.
Second, with each of those lost sales, it loses a potential user of Internet
Explorer. For example, if Microsoft has half the browser market, then 2,000
lost Windows sales imply 1,000 fewer users of Internet Explorer. (This assumes
people who don't buy Windows won't need a browser.)

            You might
ask why Microsoft is "punished" by the loss of an Internet Explorer user, given
that Internet Explorer can be downloaded free. The answer, of course, is that
in the long run, it won't be free. Even when it comes packaged "free"
with Windows 98, you'll really be paying a combined price for the operating
system and the browser, which will surely be higher than the price Microsoft
would charge for an operating system alone.

            Now think what would happen if Microsoft had a monopoly in
the browser market. The second punishment would be doubled--2,000 lost Windows
sales would mean 2,000 lost Internet Explorer sales, not 1,000. That's good
news for consumers. Give Microsoft a monopoly on browsers, and you'll intensify
the downward pressure on the price of its operating systems.

            In fact,
the same kind of pressure works to lower browser prices too. Just as a doubly
monopolistic Microsoft would be reluctant to raise the price of Windows 95 for
fear of losing Internet Explorer users, it would be equally reluctant to raise
the price of Internet Explorer for fear of losing Windows 95 users (who might
not be willing to invest in a computer at all if the price of browsers is too
high). Of course prices will still rise and fall in response to other
forces--but they will never rise as high under a dual monopoly as they would
under two separate monopolies.

            
That doesn't prove that a Microsoft monopoly
beats any alternative. But it does prove a Microsoft monopoly beats a
Netscape monopoly, assuming the companies provide products of comparable
quality.

            I promised to make an
argument that would stand or fall on its own merits, and I claim to have
fulfilled that promise. You can judge the argument for itself, and it doesn't
matter who else has endorsed it. But I do want to mention for the record that
it has a lot of endorsements. In economics textbooks, it is commonplace to
observe that vertical integration of monopolies tends to reduce consumer
prices--for essentially the same reasons I've given in this column. That
observation wasn't always commonplace, but it has been for nearly 20
years now--ever since one Robert H. Bork forcefully called it to economists'
attention. (In my own textbook, the discussion of this issue is peppered with
quotes from Bork.) In his recent public statements, he has skirted this issue
entirely. Of course, Netscape pays him a lot more than Microsoft pays me.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Changelings

            When did the Washington
Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed,
the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next
suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the
Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady
persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise.

            The
switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through
the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the
Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I
know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the
expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they
exchanged virtues as well as vices .

            In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot
of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national
newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has
burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the
sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at
the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's
"Business Day" (a k a "The Information Industries") and Saturday's "Arts and
Ideas," while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the
template since the "Style" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best
general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.

            Other
traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't
(yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent
Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page
Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as
the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The
Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston
were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim
Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the
once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some
would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side,
Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that
he doesn't vote.

            
On the vice side of the exchange, the
Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what
Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the "holy shit" story--pieces so
astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The
downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit,
as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet
Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.

            In its
pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991,
it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of
rape--for no particular reason--and then apologized for it. That same year, the
paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page
1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times
published a seven-part series alleging that the downsizing of the American
workforce was creating "millions of casualties." Actually, job creation was
booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA
Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of "PETN" residues
in the wreckage. The Times reported: "Law enforcement officers said it
was impossible to know, for now, whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or
a missile because PETN is an explosive component commonly found in both.
Still, the discovery would seem to knock from contention the theory that
mechanical failure caused the airplane to explode on July 17, killing all 230
aboard ." (Emphasis added.) Eventually, the Times and the
investigators abandoned the PETN/bomb theory for the mechanical failure
theory.

            Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid
off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a
book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about
police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would
be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff
spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg
also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's
circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded
the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did
not cash checks made out to the government).

            Horrible!
Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain
white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive
Volvos to work?

            
The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet.
But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness
and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the
Post has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing.
Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story.
In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from
China + the extravagant campaign donations by Loral Space & Communications'
chief executive to Democratic coffers = Clinton's OK of U.S. satellite
launches. The Post 's sober coverage expands the theme to detail how the
president was as happy to fulfill the satellite dreams of the Republican
businessman from Hughes who lobbied heavily and donated sparingly as he was to
satisfy the Democratic businessman from Loral who gave hundreds of thousands of
dollars (see John Mintz's June 25 article, "How Hughes Got What It Wanted on China"). The
Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I
didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage
more.

            Of course
the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance
pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for
Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and
China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a
breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In
1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until
after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it
spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek ,
where he has led the Flytrap story.

            Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post ,
except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for
some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen,
Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and
David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have
been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It
desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent
stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and
Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the
Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a
vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?

            

               Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at
the Post 's annual "Pugwash" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor
Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the
Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', "does more for
its readers, day in and day out." Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old
Times as he repeatedly calls for "authoritative journalism" and higher
journalistic "standards," and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual
and creative. "Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest
standards must have intellectual content," Kaiser says at speech's end as he
road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!

            
The question of how the audacious paper turned
stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy
answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at
the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but
complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town
competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to
diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as
publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away
from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national
competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they
wanted to make.

            Don
Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine,
and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after
Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed
after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has
closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business
sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is
immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company,
whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making
machine?

            The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986,
when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post

               Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York
Times 
               Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with
the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who
unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with
demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded
Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the
Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and
downscaled it.

            Various
sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily
in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of
its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with
an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow
science/history section ("Horizon")--but it's taken no publishing risks.

            
The boldest Post stroke in recent years
came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed
Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served
as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also
laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York
Times : "[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to
excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to
tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to
be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers." Good luck, Steve,
you'll need it.

            Perhaps the Times
derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as
Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on
its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the
paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste,
before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his
tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the
Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel,
brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one
story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph
Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.

            Meanwhile, the 56-year-old
Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be
farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like
the pope.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Glass Houses

            According to the Business
Times of Singapore, there's a bond dealer at the New York firm of RBL who
keeps a hand-held urinal at his desk so he never misses a market turn. And
according to both the Independent and the Sunday Times of London,
the booming Monica Lewinsky novelty market includes 3,000 items, such as
"Monicondoms" (designed for oral sex), talking Lewinsky dolls, and Monica
birthday cards ("I'll blow out your candle!").

            Great
stories, both false--cribbed from articles by Stephen Glass in the New

               Republic . Glass was fired last week by TNR after a Forbes
reporter alerted TNR editor Charles Lane that an article about a
teen-age computer hacker ("Hack Heaven," May 18) was full of fabrications, and
Lane's own investigation confirmed that Glass had made things up wholesale in
many New 
               Republic pieces. (The details are in Forbes
Digital Tool.)

            Checking the Web and Lexis-Nexis for the people and
organizations mentioned in Glass' articles, you do not come up empty-handed.
Although there are often no references before Glass published his fantasies,
there are often references afterward . These are generally in British
publications--or publications in places to which Britain brought the benefits
of advanced civilization, such as hack journalism.

            Between
the Web, Nexis, and the good old telephone, it took little effort to discredit
such apparent Glass inventions as the National Memorabilia Convention,
Monicondoms, or the investment firm RBL. Other untraceable organizations,
publications, and individuals include Patriotic Profits, P.J. Hozell, Isaac
Tyo, Climate Lookout, Truth in Science, the Association for the Advancement of
Sound Water Policy, Jim Sackman, Back to Eden, Naked Truth , Ryan Hogin,
Andrew Zubitsky, the "Newt-O-Meter," the First Church of George Herbert Walker
Christ, the Committee for the Former President's Integrity, Steve Tellis, the
Tellis Times , and the Commission to Restore the Presidency to
Greatness.

            
Listed here, it all seems transparently bogus
or at least deeply suspicious. Yet I'm embarrassed to confess that every Glass
story passed my stink test when first published in the New Republic .
Now, plowing through the big Nexis dump, my hindsight is golden. Glass moved
monumental piles of bullshit past me, a vain skeptic. I shouldn't have believed
his story about the alleged sex orgy staged by of a bunch of pot-smoking young
Republicans at a D.C. convention. It's just too good to be true. And why
weren't my suspicions aroused after three New Republic pieces
discovering bizarre cults centered on implausible political figures? First, he
documented the adoration of Paul Tsongas by "Susan," an 80-year-old Chicago
widow with no last name. Then he discovered the First Church of George Herbert
Walker Christ. Finally, he stumbled upon an Alan Greenspan Shrine at an
investment firm.

            I can't
say why the New Republic failed to catch Glass before Forbes did.
Editor Lane declined to answer my questions. (The magazine's New York PR
officer called with the magazine's regrets.) Glass could not be reached for
comment. But I can speculate about my own failure to see what seems so clear in
hindsight.

            One explanation is that factoids such as the bondsman's
portable urinal, which seem starkly implausible when presented alone, are less
so when woven in with easier-to-believe fictions. Glass skillfully eases you in
by "reporting" that assistants serve bond dealers lunch at their desks and do
their Christmas shopping for them. Like the famous frog, you would jump out if
dropped in boiling water but cook to death in water that heated up
gradually.

            Another
partial explanation is that Glass built up credibility as each story was
published and went unchallenged. You figured that if RBL didn't have a bond
dealer with a urinal on his desk, someone from RBL would call the writer's
bluff. What you didn't figure is that Glass would make up RBL itself. The
principals in his stories didn't complain about the falsehoods for the simple
reason that they often didn't exist.

            
But the main reason Glass spoofed everybody's
radar is that his stories were, in the self-mocking journalists' phrase "too
good to check." As a reader, not his editor, it was not my job to check them.
But I didn't even bring my usual editor's skepticism to reading them, because I
wanted them to be true.

            The
Glassworks contain what editors crave--stories with energy and imagination and
originality. The filigree of detail dazzles. Some of his better pieces read
like textbook examples of New Journalism, fusing the world of fact with the
literary power of narrative. He doesn't just write about teen-age hackers, he
tracks a pimply member of the species down to his Bethesda home where a
software company is signing him to a contract. He interviews the adoring mom.
No wonder George , the New York Times 
               Magazine , Rolling
Stone , and Harper's failed to snoot out the stink factor and
assigned pieces to him. (
                  Slate
                published a piece co-authored by
Glass last year. See "Readme" for the editor's comment.)

            Colleagues describe Glass as an extraordinarily
hard-working and personable 25-year-old who gladly pulled all-nighters to
improve his pieces whenever his editors asked him to. He was completely open to
criticism. He regularly entertained the staff at editorial meetings with
previews of the dish to come in his next piece. It's a testimony to his energy
that when editors questioned his hacker piece, he erected a Web site to prove
the existence of a nonexistent software company. A layabout would simply have
written a true story. When you like somebody, you tend to trust him. (Let this
be a lesson to us all.)

            But where
were the New 
               Republic 's fact checkers? TNR does have a
fact checking department. It was established following New Republic
staffer Ruth Shalit's serial plagiarisms. The person in charge of setting it
up? Stephen Glass. That is ironic, of course, but the joke is not on the
New 
               Republic . It's on the conceit of fact checking in
general.

            
No publication is safe from a trusted reporter
who makes things up. And hindsight is easy. That said, a publication can make
scamming its readers more difficult than the New Republic made it for
Glass. Giving young reporters unimpeded access to anonymous quotations is like
handing a toddler a loaded gun. Years ago, a young free-lancer submitted a
story to me about Iran-Contra that was filled with anonymous sources. I asked
for their names. "Bob Woodward doesn't tell Ben Bradlee who his sources are!"
the writer objected. "Well, you're not Bob Woodward, and I'm not Ben Bradlee,"
I responded. As he coughed up his sources he sheared the sharper edges off his
story. I never used him again.

            The conventional wisdom in
Washington this week is that young writers such as Glass who crack up deserve
sympathy because the system pressures them into becoming stars before they are
journeymen. Please. This explanation exonerates dishonest writers while
providing protective cover for careless editors. If there's any moral to be
taken from this story, it should be "No more excuses."

            One final clue should have
alerted us--readers and editors--to Glass' deception: Life is not so good that
it places reporters at the center of action as frequently as it did the young
Glass. And he wrote so well. Anyone can doubt a bad writer. It's the good ones
who need watching.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Letters to the Summer Tenants

            Aug. 30, 1997

            Dear
P's,

            I'm so glad you enjoyed your
stay on the island. We were delighted to arrive after our long trip yesterday
and find everything in such fine shape. It is always such a pleasure--after the
fuss with the boat, the baggage, and the groceries--to walk the porches, and to
watch the sun set behind the lighthouse to the west, the moon rise from the
tinted sea to the east, the water darken and cap with white in the south. Of
course, you probably didn't spend much time on the deck looking south because
of the smell from the garbage cans.

            Well, they're all clean now,
though it did take some scrubbing. Next year I must make sure to leave you a
larger supply of the 39-gallon can liners. I know I've left you notes about the
others being too small, which means the lobster shells and fish juices spill
over and mix with the chewing gum and pasta in the bottom of the can. You can
buy the liners right in the harbor at the supermarket, though I suppose it is
easier to grab the 30-gallon size. And with all the guests you have while
you're here, I'm sure time must be at a premium!

            I did find a minute to relax
in a rocker on the porch this morning, to watch the seabirds and admire what's
left of the garden. (It's amazing what a little watering will do for the
flowers in a dry summer like this one.) Unfortunately, I didn't realize until
it was too late that one of the spokes holding the left rocker had come loose,
and that someone had tossed it away. (You know, it's really easy to reglue that
sort of thing before the whole frame collapses and the rattan tears--but I
suppose it does make handy kindling. I noticed there were only a couple of
beads of the carving left when I cleaned the fireplace.) But I didn't really
hurt myself--one always picks up a few bumps and scrapes around the house.

            Many
thanks for the bottles of wine. I can see from all the empty cartons that you
must have enjoyed it too. Hope you're having a great summer's end.

            As ever, etc.

            Aug. 31, 1997

            Dear
P's,

            It struck me this morning
that you can see water from every window of the cottage. I noticed this as I
was moving the furniture on the second floor back into the bedrooms. It's easy
to sort out--as you've probably noticed, when restoring the paint on all the
old pieces, I color-matched them to the bedspreads and rugs. Oh, and don't
worry, I did finally find all the rugs. No doubt they'll dry out in time and be
as good as new. You know, it's not a bad idea to close the windows when it
rains.

            Oh say, I
don't want to be intrusive, but if your guests do get into another knife fight
or whatever, it's really easy to get the blood splatters out of the white
frilled curtains if you wash them in cold water right away. (You can just throw
them in the washing machine, if the kids' sandy clothes haven't stripped the
gears yet.)

            All the best, etc.

            Sept. 3, 1997

            Dear
P's,

            I just thought I'd drop
another line to remind you for next year that the cottage is made of wood. The
shingles, the tongue-in-groove paneling, the polished-pine floors are all old
wood. That means they burn very easily. So: Do not lean the pleated shade on
the bedside lamp against the bulb while it is lighted. As you have no doubt
noticed after two such experiments in consecutive years, when you do that, the
shade melts and finally burns. Left long enough, the burning shade will set the
house on fire. I assume you leave the house when you conduct these little
trials, but there is always the chance that someone else may have lingered.

            By the way, if you think of
it next year, don't let the kids remove the front legs of the pedestal sink in
the east bathroom and fill them with Q-Tips--children are so imaginative these
days! And if they must do it, try not to discard the peculiar bolt fittings, so
that I can put them back--they don't make that kind of sink anymore, so parts
are hard to find. Ditto the handles on the bureau drawers. I know they are old
and can come unscrewed. But the nut will always fall inside the drawer, so all
you have to do is thread it back on the screw and then tighten it. Well, I
suppose that's a bother on a vacation, but wouldn't it be just as easy to put
the whole thing inside the drawer as in the wastebasket? Speaking of
screwing--no, no, I'm not concerned about the mattresses--but did anyone ever
show you how to replace a light bulb? There are lots of brand new ones in the
sideboard in the dining room, and I would have thought you'd find it
inconvenient to read or wash dishes in the dark.

            And, speaking of washing
dishes in the dark, the Italian cook you brought with you this year must be a
great chef. Of course, great cooks don't usually make great cleaners. But not
to worry, I'll get the grease off the pots and pans before we close the house
for the winter. What a good thing, though, that I happened to look under the
cast iron stove while searching for the corkscrew. Otherwise I'd never have
found the six bags of garlic and onions. They'll help fill up the composter,
which is really very empty after such a busy season--I guess you didn't have
time to mind all those recycling rules posted at the town hall.

            Well,
have a great winter.

            Sincerely, etc.

            P.S. The mail just came.
How thoughtful of you to have paid the rent a whole year in advance. And the
timing couldn't be better, as I've just got the bills for the taxes and
insurance and the chapel and library and conservation society appeals and the
down payment on the roof re-shingling. I always tell myself how lucky I am to
have such wonderful guests as tenants.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Booked Up

            Following a survey of our
wall space, plus of the attic, the garage, the basement, and every closet in
the house, my wife has estimated that I own something on the order of 14,000
books--enough, she points out, that if I read one a day for the rest of my
life, there's an excellent chance I won't live long enough to finish them all.
Still, I keep buying books at an alarming rate. That's only partly because I'm
attempting to deny my own mortality. It's also because buying books is so much
fun these days.

            Of
course, there have always been plenty of ways to have fun buying books--such as
prowling through cavernous used-book stores in search of hidden treasure or,
for Washington, D.C., residents, driving three hours through glorious Virginia
countryside to attend the equally glorious Green Valley Book Fair. But two
recent innovations have ushered in a true golden age of obsessive book
shopping: You can head over to a luxurious store such as Barnes & Noble,
lounge in comfortable chairs, sip coffee, and listen to music while you
contemplate your selections. Or, if you prefer, you can shop from a Web-based
service such as Amazon.com, which offers a sophisticated search engine, reviews
at your fingertips and, best of all, one-click ordering. Ordering from Amazon
is so easy that I often come away from a virtual visit with the exhilarating
sense of not having the vaguest idea how many books I've just purchased.

            By and large, the amenities you get from Barnes & Noble
are quite a bit costlier to provide than the amenities you get from Amazon. One
reason B & N feels so comfortable is that it's spacious--and space costs
money. By letting you browse among physical books, B & N invites damage and
theft. The well-stocked shelves require a substantial investment in inventory.
Amazon avoids most of those costs, and it passes some of the savings on to the
consumer--popular hardbacks (except for best sellers) are typically about 20
percent cheaper at Amazon. You can enjoy luxury at B & N, or you can enjoy
convenience and low prices at Amazon.

            So far, so
good. The market offers a range of options. Those options that provide
consumers with sufficient value will thrive; in the long run, those that fail
to justify their costs will face extinction. If enough consumers are willing to
pay B & N prices for B & N comfort, B & N will prosper; if not,
not. Either way, economists will applaud the triumph of consumer sovereignty.
Likewise, if enough consumers are willing to sacrifice physical browsing for
Amazon discounts and convenience, Amazon will prosper; if not, not. Once again,
economists will stand ready to endorse the judgment of the marketplace.

            
But there's another potential outcome, and it's
one that economists would not endorse. Some consumers browse in the
comfortable atmosphere of Barnes & Noble but then head home to buy their
books from Amazon at discount prices. In sufficient numbers, such consumers
could spell B & N's demise. (Even in much smaller numbers, those consumers
surely limit B & N's growth and its willingness to provide even greater
comforts to its patrons.)

            It's one
thing to watch a business fail because of its own inefficiency; that's just the
market doing its job. But its quite another thing to watch a business fail
because it's efficiently providing a service for which consumers have managed
to avoid paying. In the scenario I've envisioned, B & N falls victim to the
economic equivalent (though not, I think, the moral equivalent) of theft. Among
the ultimate losers are book shoppers themselves.

            How can this disagreeable outcome be avoided? One solution
is for the bookstores to own the Web sites; B & N won't mind losing
business to one of its own subsidiaries. And to a certain extent that's
happening: It, and other large "superstores" such as Borders, has begun
operating Amazon-like sites. But as long as Amazon itself remains independent
and holds a substantial market share, at least a part of the problem
remains.

            In
principle, publishers could come to B & N's rescue by pressuring Amazon to
raise its prices. (Amazon relies on publishers for timely book shipments, so
the instruments of pressure are readily at hand.) But publishers might or might
not want to play that role. On the one hand, they have a considerable stake in
the success of large and luxurious bookstores; on the other hand, they also
have a considerable stake in the success of services like Amazon. My friends in
the publishing industry tell me that, on balance, they wish Amazon well.

            
At other times and in other industries, things
have gone the other way. For many years, the Schwinn Bicycle Co. famously
refused to supply bicycles to discounters. In recent decades, the manufacturers
of mattresses, patent medicines, electronics equipment, herbicides, and light
bulbs have insisted that their products be sold only at the full retail
price.

            Why would
Schwinn want to maintain a high retail price for bicycles? The naive
explanation is that manufacturers always like high prices. But that's
too naive: The price Schwinn cares about is the wholesale price, and it
controls that directly. A more plausible story is that bicycle shoppers like to
visit fancy showrooms with knowledgeable sales staffs but then buy from
discounters. Eventually, retailers recognize that there is no reward to
offering quality service, and the fancy showrooms disappear. Customers are made
worse off, and so is Schwinn, as there is now less reason to prefer a Schwinn
bicycle to others.

            By forbidding its dealers to compete with each other via
prices, Schwinn forces them to compete with each other via quality of service,
to the ultimate benefit of consumers. That was exactly the reasoning endorsed
by the Supreme Court in 1988, when it upheld the right of Sharp Electronics to
terminate the dealership of a chronic discounter.

            In its
Sharp decision, the court showed an admirable understanding and respect
for economic theory. Not so the New 
               York 
               Times , which
editorially called for legislation to overturn the ruling. The Times
asked for compromise legislation that would give manufacturers the right to
"set high standards for service and refuse to supply retailers who don't meet
them," while denying manufacturers the right to set prices.

            
But in the presence of competition among
dealers, there is no difference between setting a standard of service and
setting a retail price: For a given service standard, competition will lower
the price until it's commensurate with the service standard, and for a given
price, competition will raise the service standard until it's commensurate with
the price. The Times ' prescription is comparable to allowing people to
choose how much to sleep while forbidding them from choosing how much to stay
awake; the reality is that you can't choose one without choosing the other.

            So, as the Supreme Court
recognized, discounters can be clearly detrimental to both manufacturers and
consumers in the market for electronics or bicycles. But when it comes to
books, the analysis is a lot less clear-cut, and here's why: A discount bicycle
dealer offers nothing but low prices, whereas a Web-based discount book dealer
also offers special services you can't get from a bookstore--such as the
convenience of shopping from home. That's why bicycle and electronics firms
have been so keen to stop the discounters while publishers have laid out a
tentative welcome mat.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Is the President Impotent?

            The pragmatist's case
against President Clinton--as opposed to the moralist's--is premised on the
notion that he's powerless, so disgraced and mistrusted that his presidency is
finished politically if not chronologically. But a peculiar little side drama
on Capitol Hill suggests that this conclusion is not as certain as it seems. It
offers evidence that Clinton's Flytrap weakness can be, in at least one small
case, a perverse source of strength.

            The drama
concerns one of Washington, D.C.'s dreariest annual rituals, the appropriations
process. Every September, Congress squabbles over the 13 annual spending bills
needed to keep the government operating. Every year, House Republicans strip
funding from favorite Clinton programs and lard the bills with anti-abortion
and anti-environmental riders. As the end of each fiscal year looms with no
agreement between Congress and the president, conflict escalates, and the
president threatens vetoes. And every year, a last minute continuing resolution
prevents shutdown (or not, as in 1995-96), both sides make cosmetic
concessions, the bills move, and everyone goes home.

            Same story this September. The fiscal year ends in two
weeks. Only one of 13 bills has passed, and Clinton is threatening to veto
seven of the unfinished ones. He objects that the Republicans would defund
education, the International Monetary Fund, summer jobs, and literacy programs
and that they have attached unacceptable language about abortion, the census,
and the environment. Does this mean we are headed for another shutdown?

            No, and
the reasons reveal much about Flytrap game theory. At the mere mention of the
word "shutdown," the average Republican politician curls up in a ball on the
floor and blubbers. (One fretful GOP staffer I spoke to would refer only to
"the s-word.") The 1995-96 budget showdown and shutdown were, of course, a
nightmare for Republicans. Clinton demonized them, revived his own flagging
career, and guaranteed himself the 1996 presidential election. The memory still
traumatizes the GOP. (But Republicans may laugh last about that shutdown. It
was then, after all, that Clinton and Lewinsky began their affair.)

            
It is now an article of faith among
conservatives that Clinton wants another shutdown, that he will gin up a
spending fight to provoke one. Republicans fear that if he picks his issues
carefully--education or the environment, not the IMF (too foreign)--vetoes some
of the spending bills, and blocks a continuing resolution, he could galvanize
disaffected Democrats in Congress and distract voters from Flytrap. A
Washington Times op-ed piece last week called this Clinton's "domestic
... Wag the Dog strategy." Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House
Speaker Newt Gingrich have repeatedly hinted that Americans should not be
suckered by a Clinton-induced shutdown.

            
Republican worries are not far-fetched. Though a Democratic appropriations
committee spokeswoman and an Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman
dismiss the idea that Democrats want a shutdown, the White House and Hill
Democrats are clearly spoiling for a good fight. "Democrats want to talk about
anything besides Monica Lewinsky. They are looking forward to talking about
education," says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "Hill Democrats are urging
us to be tough," says a White House staffer. Democrats, who don't have much
else to campaign on, would welcome an appropriations riot. Tarring Republicans
as anti-education, anti-abortion polluters is a time-honored Democratic
election strategy.

            The Republicans' dilemma is that they are, as always,
fiercely divided. Red-meat conservatives, who willfully refuse to learn from
their 1995 mistakes, yearn to boot Clinton when he's down. They loathe him. The
weaker he gets, the less they are willing to concede in appropriations. Leading
conservative Rep. David McIntosh, R-Ind., told Roll Call last month that
the GOP would "win" a shutdown if Clinton forced one, because Americans would
realize he was trying to distract them from Lewinsky. (They thought they would
"win" the last shutdown, too.)

            Talk of
challenging Clinton alarms Republican leaders and moderates. Clinton is gushing
blood. Democratic congressional candidates are sinking. "Congressional
Republicans are judged in November. ... They are on a roll, and they don't need
to do anything that will jeopardize that roll," says congressional analyst Norm
Ornstein. And Flytrap makes other political jockeying especially foolhardy.
Republicans don't want to seem partisan or malicious now so they can
be partisan and malicious during the post-election Flytrap hearings.

            
So the result, weirdly, is a no-lose for
Clinton. If conservative Republicans are reckless enough to provoke an
appropriations showdown, Clinton will probably win the public relations war,
revive Democrats, and ward off Flytrap, exactly what Republicans fear most. If
the GOP doesn't provoke him, he'll be able to extract concessions in the
appropriations bills. The latter scenario is far more likely. Die-hard
conservatives are not numerous enough or suicidal enough to force a showdown.
Moderates and the leadership will prevail and give Clinton much of what he
wants. They will let the enfeebled president win now, the better to kill him
later. "They don't want to give us any chance to recover and distract from the
Starr report and unify us. So they'll cave," says a White House staffer. This,
I suppose, is politics: The GOP will happily concede the substance (money) to
win the symbolism.

            A backdoor appropriations
victory is not exactly the strong-arming triumph a chief executive is supposed
to win over Congress. But for the Flytrapped president, it's better than
nothing.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Secretary Albright, Meet Dr. No

            Last month, as the United
States was Tomahawking Osama Bin Laden, another little-noticed American foreign
policy drama was playing out in the Caribbean. On the tiny island nation of St.
Kitts, a cocaine smuggler named Charles "Little Nut" Miller threatened to
murder American veterinary students at the island's university unless the
United States dropped its efforts to extradite him. A former drug informant and
a dropout from the U.S. witness protection program, Miller has found a safe
haven on St. Kitts, where his bullying and his cash have won him enormous
political influence with the island's shaky government. At the news of Miller's
threat, the State Department flew diplomatic security advisers to St. Kitts to
reassure students; some of the young Americans fled home, and there were even
rumors of a Grenada-like military strike to capture Miller.

            The
Miller imbroglio and the assault on Bin Laden would appear to have nothing in
common, but they both illustrate a peculiar development in American foreign
policy: James Bondification.

            The United States, born and raised during the age of the
nation-state, is accustomed to thinking of the nation as the natural unit of
foreign policy. The United States negotiates with nations, trades with nations,
issues sanctions against nations, and makes war on nations. But the United
States has begun to realize that it lives in a very different kind of world,
one filling up with what policy types call "nonstate actors" and what
moviegoers recognize as "James Bond villains." The nonstate actors range from
10 cent thugs such as Miller, who has merely shanghaied a small island, to
world-class dastards such as Bin Laden, who runs a supranational organization,
has loyalty to no government, owns a vast fortune and an armory of high-tech
weapons, and is engaged in an elaborate conspiracy so secretive that we were
not aware of it till it smacked us in the head. Habituated to presidents and
prime ministers, we are now dealing with autonomous, mysterious characters
driven by motives that baffle us and who are unchecked by any government. Bin
Laden may not be quite as masterful as Blofeld, and Miller may not be quite as
sinister as Mr. Big, but they're closer to them than we might think.

            Nonstate
actors are not, of course, an invention of the '90s. The United States fought
its first war against the Barbary Pirates, who terrorized U.S. shipping in the
Mediterranean at the turn of the 19 th century. More recently, Yasser
Arafat's stateless Palestine Liberation Organization and terrorist groups such
as Hamas and Islamic Jihad built organizations that have shaken governments
around the world. But there is no doubt that the variety and power of nonstate
actors is greater now than it has been for centuries. Bin Laden's worldwide
terror network is currently dominating headlines, but other terrorist groups
are thriving as well. Colombian, Mexican, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian drug
lords have neutralized (or purchased) governments and recruited private armies.
Hong Kong triads have established themselves as autonomous powers in much of
Asia. What was Soviet Central Asia is now a free-fire zone: Drug, mineral, and
arms barons compete for power, while legitimate governments of the region are
patsies by comparison. Even corporations are getting into the Bond business.
Executive Outcomes, a South African mercenary business, recently invaded,
stabilized, and controlled Sierra Leone for a year--interrupting a long-waged
civil war--in order to protect that country's diamond mines.

            
One reason why this Bondification seems to be
proliferating is the decline of the nation-state. As Robert Kaplan chronicled
in The Ends of the Earth , environmental collapse, tribal conflicts,
overpopulation, and urbanization have undermined Third World governments. For
most of this century, colonial rulers or nationalist dictators dominated
countries, monopolizing power with mighty central governments. But central
authority has vanished in much of Africa and Asia, and nonstate actors have
filled the vacuum. Where anarchy reigns, dollars can buy a private empire. It's
no surprise that Bin Laden chose Sudan and Afghanistan as bases: Neither
country has had a functioning government for 20 years. Bin Laden paid the
Taliban a few million dollars a year and guaranteed himself cover. Drug
dealers, similarly, have purchased fiefs throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean. (The difference between yesterday and today is the difference
between Grenada and St. Kitts. Fifteen years ago, the United States invaded a
Caribbean island to get rid of a Communist government we didn't like.
Today, we could invade a Caribbean island to get rid of a drug dealer we
don't like. This is government privatization, twisted beyond recognition.)

            This
anarchy has so far limited itself to marginal countries--Afghanistan, Sudan,
Sierra Leone, etc.--but soon, warns Kaplan, a major nation like Pakistan will
collapse. And when that happens, who knows what nutters will emerge? "Pakistan
has 100 million people. So if it goes, there will be a lot of crazy lunatics
loose," says Kaplan.

            There is another, more artificial, reason why America is
increasingly challenged by Bond villains: We create them. The American public
generally yawns at the rest of the world. The tried and true method for ginning
up excitement about a foreign entanglement is to demonize, to focus on a single
foreign scoundrel. We battle Saddam Hussein, not Iraq; Muammar Qaddafi, not
Libya; Manuel Noriega, not Panama. Similarly, it's easier to pin America's drug
problem on Pablo Escobar or to blame global terrorism on a single nefarious
puppeteer such as Bin Laden. (It was astonishing how rapidly Bin Laden emerged
as America's most hated man. One day, a few State Department operatives knew
his name. The next day, we all did, and we were mad as hell at him.)

            Demonization creates a
dilemma for American foreign policy makers. The best way to generate popular
support is to personalize the fight. And yet U.S. policy forbids America from
actually trying to assassinate the chosen villain. Here is the heart of the
dilemma of Bondification. We know how James Bond neutralizes Bond villains, but
how does a great power do it? The cruise missile strike against Bin Laden
eerily mirrored the latest Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies , which opens
with a cruise missile strike against a terrorist gathering in Central Asia. But
you can't rely on Bond tactics forever. We bombed Bin Laden once. Can we keep
doing it? Is it acceptable to pluck "Little Nut" Miller off St. Kitts? Or does
that violate the island's sovereignty? These are questions to which we don't
know the answer.

            More worrisome is that the
rise of Bond villains encourages Americans to mistake the enemy for the issue.
American and Colombian drug warriors concentrated obsessively on destroying the
wicked Escobar and his Medellín cartel. But while they pursued Escobar, the
cocaine market opened for the Cali cartel. Enemy eliminated, but problem
intact. Bin Laden is a fearsome enemy of the United States, and the sooner he's
killed the better. But even if he dropped dead today, there would still be
millions of underemployed, undereducated, alienated men in the Middle East
ready to follow a charismatic, militant, anti-American leader. In a Bond movie,
when 007 kills the archenemy, the crisis disappears. In the real world, it may
not.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Flytrap Blame Game

            One of the few truths
universally acknowledged about Flytrap is that presidential secretary Betty
Currie deserves our sympathy: an honest, loyal civil servant dragooned into a
scandal she had nothing to do with.

            But does Currie deserve such
sanctification? After all, she knew Clinton's history when she took her job
then enabled Clinton's sleaziness anyway. She stood by while Clinton cuckolded
his wife and perhaps even helped him commit obstruction of justice. And did she
protest? Not as far as we have heard. Did she quit on principle? No. Currie may
not be Flytrap's chief malefactor, but nor is she the saintly innocent that the
American public believes her to be.

            The
Currie case suggests that Flytrap needs a moral recalibration.

            Monica Lewinsky, for example, has fantastically low
approval ratings, much lower than Clinton's. One poll I saw pegged her
favorability rating at 5 percent (even Newt Gingrich manages at least 25
percent). Now, Monica certainly isn't the heroine of Flytrap. She did seduce a
married man, damage the presidency for the sake of casual sex, lie frequently
and insouciantly, and blab her "secret" affair to anyone who'd listen. But she
was also sexually exploited by her older, sleazy boss; had her reputation
smeared by Clinton's lackeys; and was betrayed by her "friend" Linda Tripp. She
hardly deserves such universal contempt.

            Others besides Currie have
benefited from the public's excessive generosity. George Stephanopoulos has
become a white knight of Flytrap, the former Clinton aide who had the courage
to turn on his boss. And bravo to George for chastising Clinton! But it smacks
of hypocrisy for Stephanopoulos to "discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying,
womanizing dog. He has, after all known this since 1992. Back then
Stephanopoulos himself helped quell bimbo eruptions and parroted Clinton's
lying denials. He has never shouldered blame for those deceptions. (Mickey Kaus
first noted Stephanopoulos' unbearable sanctimony in this "Chatterbox" item in January.) And while loyalty isn't a universal
good, it was opportunistic for Stephanopoulos to betray Clinton just at the
moment Clinton's stock was about to plunge.

            
(Sometimes, of course, the public's rating is dead on target. Linda Tripp's
allies--a group that includes her lawyers, Kenneth Starr, the Goldberg family,
and absolutely no one else as far as I can tell--have tried repeatedly to
improve her sorry public image. Jonah Goldberg tried right here in Slate. No sale.)

            
Below is 
                  Slate
               's entire
scorecard, which ranks 31 of Flytrap's key players: The scale runs from -10 to
+10. Anything less than zero means the player is a net miscreant. Anything
above zero rates a sympathy card. (This is not, of course, an exact science.
How, for example, do we judge Ann Lewis compared to other last ditch Clinton
defenders? Lewis is said to be more outraged by Clinton's misbehavior than The
Guys in the White House. Yet Lewis didn't quit in disgust. Is her outrage a
plus or a minus if she doesn't act on it? You decide.)

            The
Scorecard

            
               Bill
Clinton (The public's rating: -6 )

            Minuses:

            To recapitulate

            a) Had an adulterous affair
with a young intern.

            b) Lied about it to
everyone .

            c) Probably perjured
himself.

            d) Perhaps obstructed
justice.

            e) Entangled allies and aides
in his web of deceit.

            f) Humiliated his wife and
daughter.

            g) Did not have the grace to
apologize to Lewinsky.

            h)Tried to shift the blame
for his failures onto his accusers.

            Pluses:

            a) Had his private life
exposed to the world in a way no one's should be.

            b) Has
been persecuted by enemies who won't be satisfied until he is destroyed.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating-- He never asked for our sympathy, and he doesn't deserve it:
-9
            

            
               Dick
Morris (The public's rating: -6 )

            Minuses:

            a) Encouraged Clinton's most
deplorable habits: lying and polling. (When Clinton revealed his adultery to
Morris, the political consultant immediately took a poll to see how America
would respond to a Clinton admission. When the results suggested Americans
would be angry if Clinton had perjured himself, Morris encouraged Clinton to
deny the affair.)

            b) Further sullied the
Clintons with a revolting comment suggesting that Clinton cheats because
Hillary is a lesbian.

            c) Not even loyal enough to
keep his mouth shut.

            Pluses: I cannot think of
any.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: -7
            

            
               Linda
Tripp (The public's rating: -7 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Betrayed her
"friend."

            b) Obsessively nosed into
the private lives of others.

            c) Tried to score a book
deal off sex gossip and other people's distress.

            d) Tattletale.

            Pluses:

            a) Whistleblower (see d
under Minuses): risked humiliation to expose something she believed was
wrong.

            b)
Smeared mercilessly by Clinton allies, the media.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -7
            

            
               James
Carville (The public's rating: -1 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Has known about Clinton's
woman problem since 1992.

            b) Happily parroted
Clinton's denial despite knowing that Clinton was a deceitful womanizer.

            c) Has not expressed the
slightest chagrin or disappointment since Clinton's apology.

            d) Has not retreated from
vicious attacks on Starr, despite evidence of Clinton's lies.

            Pluses:

            a) Perfectly loyal.

            b)
Consistent in attacks against Starr.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -5
            

            
               Bruce
Lindsey (The public's rating : To be determined )

            Minuses:

            a) Not yet known what he did
to protect Clinton from the Lewinsky affair. Early signs suggest he knew a lot
and helped clean it up.

            Pluses:

            a) Unquestionably loyal to
his boss.

            b)
Silent.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating-- Not enough information to make a clean guess: Approx -5
            

            
               Vernon
Jordan (The public's rating: +3 )

            Minuses:

            a) May have known and must
have suspected that Lewinsky was a mistress (given that he and Clinton are
confidants, it's hard to believe that Jordan was totally in the dark about
her).

            b) Protected too readily by
Washington establishment.

            Pluses:

            a) May
have helped Lewinsky simply because he's bighearted and generous not because
she was the president's lover.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: -4
            

            
               Sidney
Blumenthal (The public's rating: -3 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Spun the president's
denial for months without bothering to check if it was true.

            b) Pushed for Clinton to be
aggressive rather than contrite during his speech.

            c) Trumpeted Clinton's
denial but has not expressed chagrin now that Clinton has admitted his
lies.

            Pluses:

            a) Consistent in belief that
Starr is an ideologue and that the sex charges are political.

            b)
Loyal.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -3
            

            
               Lanny
Davis (The public's rating: -1 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Spun the president's
denial for months without bothering to check if it was true.

            b) Said for seven months
that we'd have to "wait and see." Then, when Clinton finally admitted his lies,
Davis was hardly embarrassed or critical of the president.

            Pluses:

            a)
Loyalty to old boss.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -3
            

            
               George
Stephanopoulos (The public's rating: +4 )

            Minuses:

            a) Hypocritical for him to
"discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying dog. After all, he knew that Clinton
was a lech in 1992 and helped cover it up. Yet he has never shouldered
responsibility for the lies Clinton told then.

            b) Disloyal to turn on old
boss as viciously as he has in past few weeks.

            Pluses:

            a) Had courage to turn on old
boss and criticize his moral lapses.

            b) Urged
Clinton to be fully contrite.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -2
            

            
               Betty
Currie (The public's rating: +8 )

            Minuses:

            a) Abetted adulterous
affair.

            b) May have abetted
obstruction of justice.

            c) Knew what she was getting
into when she took the job so can't be excused on grounds of naiveté.

            d) Did not quit on
principle.

            Pluses:

            a) Reputation for
honesty.

            b)
Probably dragooned into cover-up against her will.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: -2
            

            
               Paul
Begala (The public's rating: 0 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Spun the president's
denial for months without bothering to check if it was true.

            b) Did not quit on principle
after Clinton admitted lies.

            Pluses:

            a) Urged president to be
contrite and wrote excellent, sufficiently apologetic speech.

            b)
Loyal.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -2
            

            
               Rahm
Emanuel (The public's rating: -1 )

            Minuses and
Pluses:

            Same as
Begala (except Emanuel didn't write the speech).

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -2
            

            
               Ann
Lewis (The public's rating: -1 )

            Minuses and
Pluses:

            Same as
Emanuel, except Lewis seems more morally outraged with Clinton than other White
House aides.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -2
            

            
               Monica
Lewinsky (The public's rating: -9 )

            Minuses:

            a) Seduced a married man.

            b) Damaged and endangered the
presidency for the sake of casual sex.

            c) Has lied frequently.

            d) Is a capable adult,
not--as her advocates claim--a naive child, defenseless against the president's
wiles.

            e) Protected herself with
immunity when she needed to, even though her testimony would do enormous harm
to Clinton and the nation.

            f) Blabbed her "secret"
affair to lots of people. (So, while she was dragged into the scandal against
her will, it was her own loquaciousness that made the dragging possible.)

            Pluses:

            a) Sexually exploited by her
older boss.

            b) Had her reputation smeared
by Clintonistas and the media.

            c) Betrayed by Linda
Tripp.

            d) Dragged
into the scandal against her will.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -2
            

            
               Mike
McCurry (The public's rating: +2 )

            Minuses:

            a) Spun and spun and spun the
president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true.

            Pluses:

            a) Was clearly dismayed by
the entire scandal and his role in it.

            b) Is quitting the
administration (though not, apparently, on principle).

            c)
Loyal.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: -1
            

            
               David
Kendall (The public's rating: 0 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Relied on iffy legalisms
to help Clinton escape trouble.

            Pluses:

            a) Relying on iffy legalisms
to help Clinton escape trouble is his job. He's a lawyer.

            b)
Admirably reticent, compared to Robert Bennett.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -1
            

            
               The Rev.
Jesse Jackson (The public's rating: +2 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Revealed Clinton family
troubles immediately after his pastoral visit.

            b) Parlayed pastoral visit
into a week of self-promotion.

            Pluses:

            a) Graciously counseled a
political rival in time of need.

            b) Did
not demand any political compensation in exchange.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: -1
            

            
               Rep. Bob
Barr, R-Ga. (The public's rating: -5 )

            Minuses:

            a) Unapologetically vicious,
partisan, and unforgiving in his impeachment quest.

            Pluses:

            a)
Consistent throughout the scandal: He has been pushing impeachment since before
Monica materialized in January.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: 0
            

            
               Kenneth
Starr (The public's rating: -9 )

            Minuses:

            a) Seems merciless toward
Clinton.

            b) Has pursued investigation
into Clinton's private life with more zeal than seems appropriate.

            c) Is too willing to provoke
constitutional standoffs for the sake of his investigation, seems indifferent
to the dignity of the presidency.

            Pluses:

            a) Was right about Clinton
and Lewinsky.

            b) Is compelled by law to
investigate diligently and forcefully.

            c) Has
been patient with the stonewalling, deceiving Clinton.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +1
            

            
               Paula
Jones (The public's rating: -5 )

            Minuses:

            a) Brought a legally dubious,
gold-digging lawsuit.

            b) Resisted a settlement that
would have saved the nation much embarrassment.

            c) Happily became a tool for
Clinton's enemies.

            Pluses:

            a) Is vindicated because
Clinton probably did it.

            b) Forced Clinton's lechery
out in the open.

            c)
Persisted in the face of ridicule and humiliation.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: +1
            

            
               The
American People (The public's rating: +7 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Hypocritically claim to
despise scandal, follow it breathlessly, then blame the media for obsessing
over it.

            b) Are secretly fascinated
by the sleaziness of it.

            Pluses:

            a)
Magnanimous toward the president.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +1
            

            
               The
Media (The public's rating: -8 )

            
Minuses:

            a) No sense of
proportionality. Coverage is wretchedly excessive even when it shouldn't
be.

            b) Endlessly self-involved.
How many stories have you seen about the media and the scandal?

            c) Unforgiving. The media
want the scandal to continue, hence won't ever be satisfied that Clinton has
suffered enough.

            Pluses:

            a) Worked hard to break a
very important story and investigated the hell out of it.

            b)
Unfairly savaged by hypocritical American people (see above).

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +1
            

            
               Leon
Panetta (The public's rating: +1 )

            Minuses:

            a) Slightly disloyal to old
boss.

            b) May have known about
Clinton's extracurricular activities, yet turned a blind eye.

            c) On television too
much.

            Pluses:

            a) Urged Clinton early on to
come clean.

            b) Had
good sense to leave the White House before corrupting himself.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +1
            

            
               Hillary
Clinton (The public's rating: +4 )

            Minuses:

            a) Knew what a lech he was,
yet always protected him.

            b) May have always known
truth about Lewinsky, yet still lied to protect Bill.

            c) Chose aggressive,
political strategy over contrition.

            Pluses:

            a) Lied to, betrayed, and
cuckolded by husband.

            b) Personally humiliated.

            c) May
have disgraced her own good name by echoing his denials on the Today
show.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating-- She made a Faustian bargain, but you still feel sorry for Faust:
+2
            

            
               Al
Gore (The public's rating: +3 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Did not (apparently) urge
the president to come clean with American people.

            Pluses:

            a) Stayed loyal.

            b) Did
not take advantage of scandal to burnish his own image.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +2
            

            
               Kathleen
Willey (The public's rating: 0 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Was in it for the money
(told her story partly in order to land a book contract).

            Pluses:

            a) Seems to have told story
honestly and forthrightly.

            b) Reluctantly dragged into
scandal.

            c) Was
victimized by Clinton.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +2
            

            
               The
Clinton Cabinet (The public's rating: +2 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Spun his denials without
digging for the truth.

            b) Did not quit on
principle.

            Pluses:

            a) Were conscripted
unwillingly into scandal defense. (Unlike political aides such as Begala, who
are expected to do political dirty work, the Cabinet members are public
servants who should be kept away from such sleaze.)

            b) Were lied to by
Clinton.

            c)
Loyal.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +3
            

            
               Erskine
Bowles (The public's rating: Doesn't care )

            Minuses:

            a) Refused to involve himself
in the critical issue of the presidency.

            b) Stood aside while White
House was shanghaied by lawyers.

            Pluses:

            a) Stayed utterly silent
about the scandal, clearly disgusted by it all.

            b) Kept the rest of the
administration focused on policy, thus preventing total executive
paralysis.

            c) Did not
lie or spin for the president.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +4
            

            
               Rep.
Henry Hyde, R-Ill. (The public's rating: +4 )

            Minuses:

            There are none yet.

            Pluses:

            a)
(Mostly) kept his mouth shut and prevented the House Judiciary Committee from
jumping the gun on impeachment.

            

               
                  Slate
                rating: +4
            

            
               Secret
Service (The public's rating: +8 )

            
Minuses:

            a) Fought Starr subpoena too
hard because it considers itself the Praetorian Guard.

            Pluses:

            a) Dragged unwillingly into
scandal by Clinton (unlike Currie or his political aides, the Secret Service
agents have no choice about being near the president).

            b) Testified honestly but
unwillingly, as they should.

            c) Did
not leak.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +5
            

            
               Chelsea
Clinton (The public's rating: +10 )

            
Minuses:

            There are none.

            Pluses:

            a) Humiliated and
embarrassed by her father's misbehavior.

            b) Had family problems
paraded before the world in a way they should not be.

            c) Has been endlessly
psychologized by the media.

            d) Had
her summer vacation ruined.

            
               
                  Slate
               
rating: +10
            

            More Flytrap
...

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Republicans, Democrats, and China

            Human rights used to be a
Democratic concern. When Jimmy Carter tried to put the issue at the center of
his foreign policy, Republicans charged that he was being woolly minded and
naive. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who rose to fame as a critic of Carter's human
rights efforts, argued that pestering friendly regimes about their political
prisoners played into the hands of the Communists, whose human rights records
were invariably worse.

            Even the
Republican human rights concern about Communist regimes had one great
exception: China. Partly because of China's Cold War value as a rival of the
Soviet Union, partly because Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger started the
rapprochement, partly because the American business establishment has embraced
China so enthusiastically, and partly for reasons that remain mysterious, the
Republican Party has had a soft spot for the world's largest Communist regime
for almost three decades.

            These days, though, you're more likely to hear Republicans
complaining about the neglect of human rights in China by a Democratic
president. Such objections first arose in 1994, when the Clinton administration
made a sudden about-face, declaring it would "delink" Chinese trade policy from
human rights. In the last year, conservatives, including elements on the
evangelical and protectionist right, have gone so far as to make common cause
with the trendy left on the issue. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited
Washington last fall, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council was spotted
picketing alongside Bianca Jagger and Richard Gere.

            
Conservative nagging about human rights has intensified lately. In recent days,
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Majority Leader Dick Armey have
said they may oppose Clinton's latest effort to renew China's Most Favored
Nation trade status again. Doing their best to take advantage of the Chinese
money scandal, Republicans have called on Clinton to cancel his trip to China
scheduled for later this month, which will be the first U.S. presidential visit
since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. "We will reach the nadir of our
abandonment of human rights if Clinton appears at Tiananmen Square," Rep.
Christopher Cox, the California Republican directing the House investigation
into the transfer of satellite technology, was recently quoted as saying.

            
Have the tables turned? Yes, but not for the
first time--or even the second. The Republican call to put human rights ahead
of geopolitics in our relations with the Chinese is just the latest expression
of a bad habit that has existed in American politics since Nixon established
ties with them in 1972. Those out of power love to accuse those in power of
being overly solicitous toward Beijing on human rights and other issues. But
the critique is disingenuous. If and when they come to wield responsibility
themselves, these critics drop their objections and adopt the same policy. The
value of maintaining a cordial relationship with an emerging superpower
inevitably takes precedence over other concerns.

            Nixon
himself set the pattern. As a senator and presidential candidate, Nixon was a
leading China baiter. In the 1960 presidential debates, he blasted John F.
Kennedy for being ready to abandon Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny Taiwanese
islands. A decade or so later, of course, Nixon executed a daring flip-flop,
initiating diplomatic contact with China for the first time since 1949. Carter
followed essentially the same course Nixon did. As a candidate in 1976, he
criticized Gerald Ford for continuing Nixon's policy of Realpolitik at
the expense of human rights. But once ensconced in the White House, Carter
downgraded our relations with Taiwan and restored formal diplomatic ties with
the People's Republic of China in 1978. It was also Carter who granted MFN
trade status to China for the first time and invited Deng Xiaoping to visit the
United States.

            Conservative Republicans such as Ronald Reagan often
criticized Carter for selling out Taiwan in his pursuit of friendship with the
PRC. But once elected, Reagan, too, went squishy on China. In 1981, he
abandoned his plans to sell advanced fighter planes to Taiwan, a move that
would have offended the mainland Chinese. More importantly, Reagan never
switched back to a pre-Nixon two-China policy, as he had threatened. In 1984,
he visited China. The trip was a warm bath of conciliation. On the way home, he
said he didn't want to impose our system of government upon others.

            You might
think that George Bush, a lifelong Sinophile, would be the exception to this
rule, but he was not. In the late 1970s, as he prepared to run against Reagan
for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush opposed Carter's move to
establish formal diplomatic relations with the PRC, calling it "an abject
American retreat." "China needs us more than we need them," he wrote in a 1978
article in the Washington Post . "China ... has now seen just how easily
we can be pushed around." Bush blasted Carter for not obtaining stronger
guarantees on the security of Taiwan. In office, of course, Bush supported MFN
renewal even in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. His
National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft made a secret visit to Beijing just
five weeks after the massacre to reassure Chinese leaders of America's
friendship.

            
This led Bill Clinton to denounce Bush's China
policy during the 1992 campaign. In one speech, Clinton charged Bush with
"coddling aging rulers with undisguised contempt for democracy, for human
rights." In another speech, Clinton said, "There is no more striking example of
Mr. Bush's indifference toward democracy than his policy toward China." Clinton
said that, if elected, he'd withdraw all trade privileges from China "as long
as they're locking people up." Once elected, he decided that using trade policy
to leverage improvements in human rights was counterproductive. In supporting
MFN renewal in 1994, Clinton announced a new policy of what has alternately
been called "constructive engagement," "commercial engagement," and "pragmatic
engagement." Like its Republican predecessors, the administration now contends
that pushing for human rights improvements quietly and behind the scenes is
more effective.

            Some Republicans have tried
to imply that the Chinese purchased the Clinton administration's favor with
illegal campaign cash. At this stage, it is still far from proved that anyone
in the Clinton administration knew that the Democratic Party was getting money
from China or that money had an influence on its policies. But if the Chinese
did try to buy favor with the Democrats, it may have been because they already
owned the Republicans. Not having seen a Democratic administration in a dozen
years, they might well have been worried that the new one elected in 1992 would
actually follow through on its rhetoric about human rights and democracy. With
the Republicans, they understood there would be no deviation from Nixon's
policy of accommodation.

            The Chinese need not have
worried. Whether it is a process of being captured by the China hands at the
State Department or the sobering effects of real power, no American president
since Nixon has dared to lean hard on China. In 1996, Robert Dole, a longtime
supporter of MFN renewal, predictably accused Clinton of "weakness and
indecision, double-talk and incoherence" in his approach to Beijing. But had
Dole won the election, our policy would almost certainly have remained the
same. This is worth bearing in mind during the president's upcoming trip to
China. In politics, the yang predominates. In power, the yin reasserts
itself.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Brill, Mote, and Beam

            If Steven Brill's object is
to make the media look absurd, he got off to a roaring start. On the front page
of the New York Times last Sunday was a story that said the first issue
of Brill's Content would report that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr
had leaked information about his investigation to the press--including the
Times . Now if the question of whether Starr leaks to the Times is
important enough for the front page, you might wonder why the Times
needed Brill to raise the subject. And who knows better than the Times
whether Starr leaked to the Times ? Yet the Times cites Brill and
then cites its own Washington editor, Michael Oreskes, saying the Times
does not discuss its sources. And all this contortion was induced by Brill's
having leaked his own forthcoming article to the Times .

            But if
Brill's goal is to offer a socially useful critique of media misbehavior, he is
doing less well. There are two problems with Brill's Content . The first
is that though the editor seems to envision a magazine that will hold the press
accountable to a wider public, he has created one that is unlikely to interest
anyone outside the media. The second problem is that though Brill deserves a
Pulitzer for self-righteousness, he simply isn't a careful enough journalist
himself to be criticizing others.

            Let's start with the magazine. After hearing it disputed
for so many days, potential readers will be fooled into thinking something
scintillating is going on. In fact, what will strike most people when they
finally get their hands on Brill's Content is how boring it is. Dullness
is a problem for media magazines in general, the prototype being the ever
worthy, always soporific Columbia Journalism Review . CJR is
filled with articles you'd say only people in the business could possibly want
to read, except that they're too mundane even for people in the business. "New
Guild contract at the Milwaukee Sentinel " is the sort of thing
CJR does. You will find praise for that five-part series on
Pennsylvania's neglected infrastructure, and a spank for local TV news
directors who can't seem to put anything but crime on the air.

            Brill is hoping for an
audience beyond the industry, but most of his magazine--the first issue,
anyhow--amounts to little more than CJR on steroids. There's a long
feature lauding the New York Times for its fine reporting on
mismanagement at the Columbia/HCA health care conglomerate, and another rapping
60 Minutes for a flawed story--aired 10 years ago--on alleged
spontaneous acceleration in Audis. There's a "Heroes" column about the reporter
at Chicago magazine who exposed the Beardstown Ladies for inflating the
returns of their investment club. Seems he had to go in for sinus surgery the
day the Wall Street Journal picked up his scoop. Crazy ... If I were a
better person, perhaps I would read stories like this through to the end.

            What is pernicious is Brill's
attitude that he's the only guy in the world with the guts to point out other
people's mistakes. His maximum opus on the first three weeks of Monica Lewinsky
scandal coverage is intended to be a devastating case study of media
malpractice. This 24,000 word story charges reporters with just about every sin
in the book, and commits most of them itself. Here are 10 journalistic no-nos
that stand out in Brill's piece:

            
               1)
Overhyping to the Point of Dishonesty
            

            Brill
contends the press has allowed itself to be used by Starr to make Clinton look
guilty. But to prove that Starr has leaked grand jury information to the
media--which, by the way, Brill doesn't do--is not to demonstrate that
journalists have been irresponsible. By my reading, Brill does not document a
single error of fact made in the national publications he analyzes--the New
York Times , the Washington Post , Time , and
Newsweek --and he presents only a few cases in which any of them even
misplayed a story in a significant way. He ignores the tough coverage Starr has
received. To conclude, as Brill does, that the press is now "an institution
being corrupted to its core" wildly overreaches the evidence he presents.

            
               2)
Misquotation
            

            Susan
Schmidt, a Washington Post reporter, claims she did not tell Brill that
she "heard from Starr's office something about Vernon Jordan and coaching a
witness." The quote is damaging because it implies Schmidt revealed the
identity of an anonymous source. For another example from a nonjournalist who
claims plausibly to have been misquoted by Brill, see "Chatterbox." We cannot know for sure who is right, because Brill
did not tape-record his interviews.

            
               3)
Self-Contradiction
            

            Later in
the piece, Brill writes that Schmidt and another reporter "declined all comment
on their sources." Well, did she or didn't she?

            
               4)
Distortion
            

            Brill
accuses Newsweek of suppressing critical exculpatory information about
Clinton in its initial story published online. He cites a passage in the Linda
Tripp tapes in which Tripp asks Lewinsky if the president knows she is going to
lie in her upcoming deposition in the Paula Jones case. Lewinsky answers "No."
Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter whom Brill criticizes, notes,
first, that the full exchange is equivocal--Lewinsky also tells Tripp the
president doesn't think she is going to tell the truth. Second, the
Newsweek online story stated that the tapes offer "no clear evidence" to
support or undermine Tripp's allegations. And third, in the issue it published
the following Monday, Newsweek included the full excerpt--which is where
Brill found the out-of-context quote he claims Newsweek ignored.

            
               5)
Neglecting Contradictory Evidence
            

            In
building his case that much of the information could have come only from Starr,
Brill ignores a highly plausible alternative explanation: Most if not all could
have come from the lawyers of various witnesses sympathetic to the president.
Lawyers for the Clintons, Betty Currie, White House steward Bayani Nelvis, and
others are operating under what is called a "joint defense agreement." They
pool data about what their clients have told Starr's grand jury. This means
there are lots of lawyers with access to information about what various
witnesses said and a variety of motivations to leak that information. Noting
this possibility isn't just a matter of fairness--it's an issue of basic
intellectual honesty.

            
               6) Giving
Only One Side of an Argument
            

            Brill
asserts that leaks from Starr's office were obviously illegal. "There are court
decisions," he writes, "that have ruled explicitly that leaking information
about prospective witnesses who might testify at a grand jury, or about
expected testimony, or about negotiations regarding immunity for testimony, or
[about] the strategy of a grand jury proceeding all fall within the criminal
prohibition." Nowhere does he note court decisions that have ruled the
opposite, or acknowledge that the question is far from settled.

            
               7)
Faking Scoops
            

            Almost
all the criticism of the press in Brill's piece is familiar, much of it to the
point of cliché. Items about "witnesses" retracted by the Dallas Morning
News and the Wall Street Journal Web edition have been endlessly
hashed over. So have various nuances that Brill presents as revelatory. Both
the Washington Post and 
                  Slate
               , for instance, have reported
that the source for the erroneous Dallas Morning News item about a
Secret Service witness was Joseph DiGenova. Brill reinvents the wheel in this
way numerous times. And while we're at it, is it really a revelation that Starr
talks to reporters? At televised press conferences he has held in Little Rock,
he can be seen calling on journalists by their first names, suggesting that he
knows some of them pretty well and that he doesn't regard this as a secret.

            
               8)
Sabotage Through Blind Quotes
            

            Defending
the New York Times story on Currie, "one Times reporter" is
quoted by Brill as saying that "this was not some Sue Schmidt jam job." Schmidt
is the reporter covering the Whitewater-Lewinsky beat for the Washington
Post . To allow her competitors to snipe at her under cover of anonymity
seems exactly the sort of thing Brill started his magazine to nail other
journalists for doing. And what's a "jam job," anyway?

            
               9)
Conflict of Interest
            

            Howard Kurtz reports in the
Washington Post this week that Brill and his wife donated $2,000 to the
Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. Most publications forbid journalists from making
campaign contributions, certainly to people they're writing about. But whether
or not Brill thinks such a prohibition makes sense--I look forward to 20,000
words on the topic in a future issue of Brill's Content --he should have
disclosed this fact, as he acknowledged when busted.

            Don't get
me wrong. Reporters, especially TV reporters, have been far from blameless in
Flytrap. In the heat of competition, stories have run that shouldn't have. But
the best reporters covering the scandal have done an extremely good job in a
vexing and unfamiliar situation. At times, they have behaved almost heroically.
When first offered a chance to listen to the Tripp tapes, Isikoff refused,
passing up what might have been the scoop of the decade out of concern that
doing so would put him in an ethically compromised situation. Brill disparages
these compunctions, noting that Isikoff had to run off to "CNBC, where he was a
paid Clinton sex scandal pundit." Actually, Isikoff notes, it was MSNBC, where
he was under contract to discuss the campaign finance scandal. That makes
10) Errors of Fact . But more to the point, is there anybody who thinks
that Steve Brill, back before he was a press scold, would have passed up the
chance to hear those tapes?

            
               Steven Brill .
            

            
               If you
missed the link to Slate 's Chatterbox, where a nonjournalist claims he
was misquoted by Brill in the "Pressgate" piece, click here.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Flytrap's Trashy Books

            Scandals customarily
generate lots of quick, trashy literature; the kind of unedited, misspelled
garbage designed to sell scads of copies before people realize just how junky
it is. But Flytrap, until now, has been a publishing flop. The last few weeks
have finally brought the first crop of scandal books: William J. Bennett's
The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals ,
Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill
Clinton , and Jerome D. Levin's The Clinton Syndrome: The President and
the Self-Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction .

            None of
these books is Flytrap's All the President's Men (or should that be
Women ?). The books are, for the most part, shameless attempts to exploit
the nation's sorrow for money and fame. They are essentially clip jobs,
repackaging newspaper and TV reports with a gloss of new opinion. But there is
something interesting about them: the three distinct strains of Clinton
criticism they represent.

            

               1 Somber Moral Instruction:
            

            Unsurprisingly, Bennett's
project in The Death of Outrage is to stiffen America's backbone, to
persuade us to care about Clinton's misdeeds and to punish them. He writes,
"American citizens know better--and they will demonstrate that indeed they do
know better. Americans will realize they are being played for fools by the
president and his defenders."

            
               The Death of Outrage
suffers from the same surfeit of self-righteousness that plagues all Bennett's
ventures. It is jacketed with the sober brown paper that covered The Book of
Virtues , and it seems a calculating attempt by Bennett to secure his
franchise as America's scold in chief. Bennett's pose of nonpartisan moral
authority, annoying enough when he writes for kids, seems particularly forced
in The Death of Outrage . Click for a spectacular example.

            After reading Bennett,
however, I began to think that the consciousness-raising he preaches might
actually be possible. He is a fine rhetorician, and The Death of Outrage
makes the best case yet for public condemnation of Clinton. Bennett's arguments
are nothing you haven't read before on the New York Times editorial page
or in the Weekly Standard , but they're powerful nonetheless. Basic
premises: Clinton's reckless, repeated adultery weakens essential moral codes;
his betrayal of vows and his lies undermine public trust; his use of legal
chicanery to duck ethical responsibility is cowardly and grotesque; the
public's silence in the face of this is a capitulation, "moral disarmament";
and America, which has always believed that politicians' moral behavior
matters, must start judging Clinton's character.

            But the
inspiration of this book is its tone. Bennett is obviously obsessed, partisan,
and furious about Flytrap, yet he has managed to write a book without vitriol.
He refrains from gloating. He chastises others for their glee in savaging
Clinton. He takes Clinton's immorality so seriously that he can't even joke
about it. Like television, the book is a cool medium; Bennett's anger is
convincing because he holds it in check.

            

               2 Rage:
            

            I realized the effectiveness
of Bennett's restraint when I opened Coulter's High Crimes and
Misdemeanors , which represents the second strain of criticism. If Bennett
is superego, Coulter is id. Bennett says in measured tones what conservatives
ought to believe. MSNBC pundit Coulter screams what they really feel.

            
               High Crimes has two
principal aims: 1) to explain what, historically and legally, constitutes an
impeachable offense (summary: moral offenses, not just criminal ones) and 2) to
build an impeachment case against Clinton by summarizing his malfeasance in
everything from the Paula Jones case to campaign fund raising to Webb Hubbell's
job search to the White House Travel Office to Monica Lewinsky. But Coulter,
whose TV manner is that of a woman going stark raving mad, is the wrong person
to write a sober legal tract. High Crimes is supposed to show that
Clinton's enemies have a strong legal case against him. Instead, it suggests
Clinton's enemies are nutters.

            Coulter argues ad hominem:
Clinton's China satellite policy was "treason." He is "The Manchurian
Candidate" and a "horny hick." Clinton doesn't allow alcohol in the Oval Office
because "it might interfere with his potency." She says Newsweek 's
Eleanor Clift has gone "beyond the call of duty to earn [her] presidential
kneepads."

            
               High
Crimes is painfully shoddy, even for a book rushed to press. Misspellings
are commonplace. Quotes are muffed: Clinton's most famous comment, "I did not
have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," is rendered "I never had
sexual relations with that woman." Entire paragraphs are repeated, nearly word
for word, in different chapters of the book. Coulter claims to lay out the
facts against Clinton, but it's hard to trust her: In I happen to know
something about, she grossly misrepresents evidence to make Clinton look worse.
Coulter's legal scholarship is so repetitious and garbled that it's hard to
puzzle out her definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." It's as though the
book was not edited at all.

            

               3 Psychobabble:
            

            I did not think a book could
be any worse than High Crimes . Then I encountered Jerome
Levin's--whoops, I mean, Dr. Jerome Levin's-- The Clinton Syndrome .
Psychotherapist Levin's ostensible purpose is to use Clinton's problems to
bring attention to sex addiction. His underlying purpose seems more cynical: to
get his shoddy little book stocked in both the political and self-help
sections.

            To these ends Levin has
written a psychological profile of the president as sex addict. According to
Levin, the root of Flytrap is Clinton's "hang up." As the child of an "enabler"
and a "rageaholic," as well as an "ACOA (Adult Child of Alcoholics)," Clinton
became a chronic "musterbator," a boy who overachieved in order to win the
"unconditional love" that was missing at home. He sought it in power, in the
love of the crowd, and especially in casual sex. But all were poor substitutes
for true love and didn't vanquish his feelings of inadequacy and guilt. The
deaths of Ron Brown ("an older-brother figure" to Clinton), Yitzak Rabin ("an
important father figure"), and his mother (a mother figure?) made Clinton
vulnerable to Lewinsky.

            "The more I thought about
it," writes Levin, "the more I realized that Clinton had about as much chance
of leaving her alone as a cocaine addict has of passing up a line." Clinton
deserves sympathy and compassion, not vitriol, because he exercises no control
over his compulsive sexual behavior. Straight-faced conclusion: Clinton should
hold "SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous)" chapter meetings at the White House,
thus inspiring millions of other Americans to overcome their addictions.

            Never mind that the very
existence of sex addiction is questioned by most respectable shrinks. Never
mind that Levin's profile of Clinton is constructed from a papier-mâché of A.M.
Rosenthal columns and episodes of Charlie Rose . Never mind that The
Clinton Syndrome is filled with gobbledygook such as "Let us sum up Bill
Clinton's early childhood influences in terms of bio-psycho-social
determinants." (Let's not and say we did.) Never mind that it's even more badly
edited than High Crimes . Never mind that this flimflam is padded to book
length with 100 pages of irrelevant stories about other addicts. It doesn't
matter. This is Flytrap's moment. Arianna Huffington is touting Levin on the
air, and his book is stacked high by the register at my local Borders.

            
               The
sidebar on Bill Bennett's self-righteousness is . The sidebar on how Ann
Coulter misrepresents a Clinton story is .
            

            More Flytrap
...

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Sorry Excuse

            Bill Clinton has been
roundly denounced for his "apology tour" of Africa. House Majority Whip Rep.
Tom DeLay, R-Texas, implied the president's expressions of regret about slavery
were almost treasonous. "Here's a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly
what he did back in the '60s: He's apologizing for the actions of the United
States. ... It just offends me that the president of the United States is,
directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land." Pat
Buchanan wrote that Clinton had "groveled" in Africa. Robert Novak called the
apology for slavery "ridiculous." Others have charged that the president's
contrition regarding the U.S. failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was
cheap and hypocritical, since it was a considered decision, not (as he implied)
some kind of oversight, and there is no reason to suppose the United States
will decide differently if it happens again.

            Fair
points? Not really. Once again, loathing for Clinton is making it hard for
people to see straight. These objections conflate complaints about this
president's personal shortcomings with the question of how any president should
represent the United States abroad. Ought Clinton have gone to Africa and
simply not mentioned slavery? Should he have noted it but offered no view? Can
any world leader travel to Rwanda in 1998 and not discuss genocide? To do so
would be heartless and insulting. It's hard to believe that even a primitive
such as DeLay thinks the president should play emperor, never explaining or
apologizing for his country's actions. Then again, that was George Bush's
position. "I will never apologize for the United States of America, I don't
care what the facts are," he said during the 1988 campaign, after a U.S.
cruiser had mistakenly shot down an Iranian plane, killing 290 civilians.

            It's not just Clinton's sympathetic promiscuity that
accounts for the recent boom in the atonement. Apologies for national failings,
both domestic and foreign, are in fashion not just in the United States but
also in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere. One reason is that honesty has become
less costly since the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union no longer has an
enormous propaganda apparatus trained against us. Now the nations of the West
can admit wrongdoing without the fear that they are giving ammunition to the
enemies of freedom.

            But when
are national apologies sensible? Offered casually or indiscriminately, they can
look like sops to constituencies rather than expressions of genuine regret. No
nation should want to turn into David Brock. I don't think Clinton has reached
the point where saying he's sorry is an empty gesture, but he may be flirting
with it. Two of his apologies in Africa meet the test. A third one doesn't.

            
The best case for apology is a great and
indisputable national misdeed. Ronald Reagan's apology to World War II-era
Japanese internees falls into this category, as does the Vatican's apology to
victims of the Holocaust. So also do Clinton's comments in Uganda about
slavery. The objections--that Africans, too, dealt in slaves; that slaves came
from West Africa, not Uganda; that American blacks, not Africans deserve the
apology--are nit-picking. Here's what Clinton actually said: "Going back to the
time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of
the slave trade. And we were wrong in that." To say that white Americans
wrongly benefited from the slave trade doesn't imply that white Americans were
exclusively responsible.

            On the
other hand, an apology can be justified without being required or even
desirable. Clinton has decided, for a variety of reasons, that a domestic
apology for slavery isn't a good idea. This does not require him to observe a
taboo on the topic abroad.

            Somewhat more troubling was Clinton's apology for not
intervening to prevent the Rwandan genocide. Here's what he said:

            The international
community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of
responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after
the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe
havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their
rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do
everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of
hope. ... We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize
ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And
where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the
horror.

            This
apology seems insincere, because Clinton did not offer any realistic sense of
the obstacles to humanitarian military action involving the United States. At
first Clinton may have wished, at some level, to intervene in Rwanda, Bosnia,
and Haiti. But for practical and political reasons, he determined intervention
was possible only in Haiti, then later in Bosnia. This was after the debacle in
Somalia, remember, and at a time when his popularity was at low ebb. Clinton's
judgment that he was in no position to send troops to Rwanda may not have been
courageous. It may not even have been correct. But like a decision not to risk
saving someone from a burning building, it is not morally culpable.

            
So why apologize? I would defend Clinton's
apology as a statement of aspiration. He delineates specific actions that he
might plausibly have taken short of sending in the Marines. And there is reason
to think that with more political capital, no re-election looming, and a
heightened sense of horror, he would behave differently.

            What a
country should not apologize for is a basically sound foreign policy. And
Clinton unfortunately did that as well--though it drew less attention than his
other comments. In his Uganda speech, before the part about slavery, Clinton
said:

            In our
own time, during the Cold War, when we were so concerned about being in
competition with the Soviet Union, very often we dealt with countries in Africa
and in other parts of the world based more on how they stood in the struggle
between the United States and the Soviet Union than how they stood in the
struggle for their own people's aspirations to live up to the fullest of their
God-given abilities.

            The president speaks here as if the battle against
communism were an overheated World Cup match, rather than itself a struggle for
democracy and human rights. Even when Realpolitik led the United States
to side with dictators and oppressors, it was in the service of maximizing
democracy and human rights in the world at large--a goal we in fact achieved.
Every Cold War decision to put U.S. interests ahead of "people's aspirations"
in individual countries may not be defensible, but the general policy is one we
needn't apologize for. And by the way, the Cold War did not always define
American policy in Africa. Well before the fall of communism, Congress passed
comprehensive sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. We did
this even though the white South African government was a staunch U.S. ally in
the Cold War, while Nelson Mandela's African National Congress had extensive
Communist and Soviet ties.

            As it happens, that subject
came up during Clinton's stop in South Africa, when Mandela publicly refused to
apologize for the ANC's Realpolitik alliances. It is debatable whether
friendships with Libya and Cuba actually serve South Africa's interests today.
But Mandela is right not to apologize for having accepted help from various
malefactors, including the Soviet Union, during the liberation struggle--when
actual support from the United States came very late. Like the U.S. in the Cold
War, the ANC made reasonable choices under circumstances in which moral purity
wasn't an option.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Requiem for a Liberal

            This is my last "Strange
Bedfellow." When I return from vacation, I'm going to take a break from
politics and try my hand at a column about the arts. To ease the transition, I
thought it might be fitting to pay tribute to someone whose career spans these
two worlds. He is Sidney R. Yates, the Democratic congressman who represents my
birth-district on the North Side of Chicago. When Yates retires at the end of
this congressional term at 89, he will have served in the House, but for one
two-year interruption, since 1948. Leaving with him, I fear, will be not only a
chunk of postwar history but much of the enlightenment that remains in the
lower chamber.

            I'm far
from objective on this topic. Yates gave me my first paid job as a
congressional page many summers ago, and the first writing I ever did about
politics was answering constituent mail in his office. But my real gratitude is
for what Yates' example teaches: that politicians aren't required to preen and
pander or to speak only for the parochial interests of their districts. Yates
has held the esteem and affection of the people he has represented for half a
century by thinking about their good in a more elevated way. He is a liberal,
one of the nearly extinct Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson variety. But in
another way, I think of Sidney Yates as one of the only true conservatives
around. He has found his mission in preserving what matters in our culture, and
in standing in the way of attempts to coarsen and reduce it.

            Up on the Hill a few weeks ago, I stopped by his office in
the Rayburn Building for lunch. As ever, I was greeted by his chief aide, Mary
Bain, who is an extraordinary story of liberal longevity in her own right. Mary
came to Washington to work on the New Deal National Youth Administration in
1935 and has been with Yates since 1965. She and the boss were busy sorting 50
years' worth of files and packing them up for the Truman Library. On the table
were things they had found: a note from Eleanor Roosevelt expressing outrage
about some now obscure postal reorganization bill, and a yellowed copy of the
Chicago Sun-Times from July 15, 1965, the day after Adlai Stevenson
died.

            Sifting
through these relics left Yates in a more wistful mood than usual. Though he
can usually be counted on for a bit of patter from Gilbert and Sullivan, most
of which he knows by heart, he told me he felt it had been too long since he
reread Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in the classic translation by
Brian Hooker. He began reciting it for me from memory:

            I carry my adornments on
my soul.I do not dress up like a popinjay; But inwardly, I keep my
daintiness.

            The lines
apply to no one so well as the congressman from the 9 th District of
Chicago, who must be the only politician left in the House who avoids publicity
and whose style is to follow the dictates of his conscience without making a
spectacle of himself doing so.

            
As Yates recounted over soup and sandwiches, he
didn't go into politics to save the world. He did it because he was bored
working for his father-in-law's law firm. In 1939, he ran against the Chicago
Democratic machine for a seat on the City Council and not surprisingly lost.
Recognizing that the only way in was with the blessing of the regular
organization, he got it in 1948, when he was allowed to run for Congress as a
sacrificial lamb. According to the elaborate ethnic spoils system of those
days, the North Side House seat belonged to the Germans. But the German
candidate who'd been slated to run decided in the face of a looming Republican
sweep that he'd like to be postmaster, so Yates, who is Jewish, got his chance.
He ran on a Democratic ticket with Harry Truman for president, Stevenson for
governor, and Paul Douglas for senator. "I was the tail on the dog, and we all
won," he said.

            Almost as
soon as he was elected, Yates attempted self-immolation by voting against the
McCarran Act, which placed McCarthyite restrictions on visitors to the United
States. Colleagues told him that if he voted against it, he'd be a one term
congressman, and they were nearly right. His opponent in 1950 passed out pink
leaflets asking if the 9 th District wanted a congressman who voted
with the Communist Party. But Yates wrote a thoughtful letter to his
constituents--the first of several hundred to come--explaining why he thought
the bill was unconstitutional and eked out a narrow re-election. After
surviving another close call in 1952, he was regularly returned by lopsided
margins. In the House, he continued to get excited about injustices that
bothered hardly anyone else. Around the same time, he saved the career of Hyman
Rickover, the father of the nuclear fleet, when Rickover was passed over for
promotion to admiral in part because of anti-Semitism in the Navy.

            Though he had the endorsement of Mayor Richard J. Daley,
Yates was never a machine man. In 1962 he had become the leader of the Illinois
delegation by virtue of seniority, and Daley decided it was time for him to run
for the Senate, in a kamikaze challenge to the Republican incumbent, Everett
Dirksen. Yates lost, and a freshman named Daniel Rostenkowski assumed his place
as head of the delegation. After a stint working for Stevenson at the U.S.
Mission to the United Nations, Yates returned. But with his seniority erased,
he began to narrow his focus to the issues that truly motivated him: Israel,
the arts, and the environment.

            The year
he returned to Congress, 1965, the national endowments for the arts and
humanities were voted into existence. When Yates became chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on the Interior, the national endowment
budgets fell under his jurisdiction. In the 1970s, he was known as a
tough-minded supporter who could be counted on for a meticulous review of how
the endowments were spending their money. But after attempts to eliminate them
began under President Reagan, and intensified with the Mapplethorpe fiasco,
Yates' career became preoccupied with keeping them alive.

            
He has managed to do so, at times through sheer
force of will. Other representatives invite Hollywood celebrities to testify
before their committees; Yates invited Yo-Yo Ma to play a Bach suite before
his, soothing the savage breast of the NEA's opponents. After Democrats lost
the House, the NEA budget was cut in half. This year, Yates is battling to save
it once more. He now leaves that mission to two New Yorkers: Louise Slaughter,
a Democrat, and Amo Houghton, a patrician Republican. Whether his successors in
this role succeed or not, I suspect that Yates will one day be better
remembered for another accomplishment: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
which he and his wife, Addie, worked for years to bring into existence.

            As we finished lunch, I
asked whether I was right in assuming Yates thought term limits were a bad
idea. "To the contrary, Jacob," he declared. "Twenty-four terms is enough for
anyone."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            You're Another

            
               Steven Brill to last
week's "Strange Bedfellow" column on Brill's Content .
            

            Last week, the Wall
Street Journal editorial page accused Salon of shilling for
President Clinton. Please pay close attention as I try to explain the charge.
Salon has run a series of articles alleging that right-wing
philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife paid off David Hale, a Whitewater witness.
According to the Journal , the real motivation for these stories is
partisan. How so? One of Salon 's investors is Adobe Ventures. A partner
in Adobe Ventures is William Hambrecht. Hambrecht hosted a fund-raiser for
Clinton this year and has given several hundred thousand dollars to the
Democratic Party. In addition, the editorial notes that board members of Adobe
Systems, the software company that is the other partner in Adobe Ventures, have
contributed $130,000 to Democratic candidates over the past several years. The
editors of the Journal think this background discredits Salon 's
accusations against Scaife. What's more, the editorial suggests that Brill's
Content neglected to point out this bias in a story about Salon
because Clinton gave Steven Brill a plug in his speech at the White House
Correspondents' Dinner.

            Anybody
still with me? This editorial is noteworthy not just as a gleaning from
Flytrap's baroque phase, but as an example of cascading allegations of bad
faith that now envelop the Clinton scandals. If you follow this stuff
closely--not something I necessarily advise--what you have been hearing for the
past several weeks is mostly a volley of charges and countercharges about bias,
partisanship, and conflict of interest. Everyone who has anything to say about
Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, or the China connection, on either side of the
issue, has by now been accused not just of being wrong, not just of being
unfair, but also of essentially acting as a lackey for either Kenneth Starr or
Bill Clinton.

            The notion that actors in this drama are motivated by
loyalty to the president or his party is merely implausible in most cases. The
notion that anyone is moved to the point of bias by emotional ties to the
person of Starr or the Office of the Independent Counsel is simply bizarre. Yet
in Salon this week is a column by Joe Conason, one of those reporters
frequently accused of fronting for Clinton by folks on the right. Conason,
echoing Brill, argues that the Washington Post and the New York
Times have been "taking dictation from the independent counsel." Conason
says this bias doesn't come only from the press's hunger for a big story. "At
both papers," Conason writes, "there exists a feeling of indebtedness to Starr,
who helped the Times and the Post escape libel judgments in the
not-so-distant past."

            In a fight
saturated with spin, you might call this sort of accusation "topspin." It is an
attempt to trump the other side's facts and arguments by smearing them as a
shill for the man behind the curtain. Under the rules of the game, if you can
connect the teller to an interested party, you don't have to credit the tale.
This mode of discourse has thoroughly poisoned the atmosphere in which the
scandal is discussed. Of course, to say that a charge is disagreeable doesn't
mean it's unjustified. A toxic atmosphere can result from the release of poison
gas. In this case, however, the casual accusations that various journalists are
cutouts for the principal combatants are largely baseless.

            
This type of accusation is reminiscent of the
1930s, the days when fronting, fellow traveling, and agitprop were genuine
phenomena in American politics. But we now live in the least ideological period
in recent memory. Perhaps the ingestion of too much corporate PR has made us
all suspicious. Or perhaps an omnipresent air of "investigation" breeds
paranoia. But for whatever reason, the view that members of the media have a
special propensity for corruption has grown in intensity since Clinton ran for
president in 1992.

            Since the
Lewinsky scandal broke, and in particular since Brill happened upon the scene,
this culture of mistrust has gone radioactive. In his own much-discussed
article about press coverage of the scandal, Brill injected topspin by accusing
various reporters of being "lapdogs" for Starr. The conservative Weekly
Standard promptly hit back with a cover story that didn't just argue that
Brill was overstating his case but also accused him of being "Clinton's lapdog"
and a "White House mouthpiece." This is a vicious cycle. You accuse me of bad
faith, so I accuse you back.

            Let's return to the Journal 's article about
Salon . What's missing from it is any sense of how journalists
think--something you might think editorial writers at a large metropolitan
daily would have. If you ask why Salon would publish a story accusing
Scaife of tampering with a Whitewater witness, you could come up with a number
of plausible reasons. The chief one would probably be that journalists at
Salon believed the story was true, important, and interesting. A bit
more cynically, you might mention that these same editors and writers hoped the
scoop would bring them attention. Another reason would be that the story suits
their political views. The Salonistas pretty clearly think Scaife and
Starr are bad men. They might be right or wrong, but this motive would not make
their articles inherently corrupt or dishonest. (The ideologically fevered
writers of the Wall Street Journal editorials ought to be able to grasp
this point.)

            You could list lots of other
reasons why Salon would print such a story before reaching the financial
interests or ideological biases of some of its investors. Most newspapers have
elaborate church-state segregation to prevent even the suggestion of influence
from the corporate side. Smaller magazines sometimes do and sometimes don't.
Some (such as the New Republic and the National Review ) openly
reflect the views of their owners. Others (such as 
                  Slate
               ) do not.
But even in those cases where magazines speak openly for the owner's point of
view, it's not fair to assume that a third party with whom the owner
sympathizes calls the shots. What this kind of assumption misses is that
journalists are journalists. They take their independence seriously, and--to be
less noble about it--they love trouble. When there's a conflict between a great
story and some other factor, the great story almost always carries the day. For
example, the Starr-lovin' Matt Drudge showed no compunction about blowing up
the independent counsel's Lewinsky investigation by posting gossip about it on
the Web. I'm sure that if Salon got its mitts on the Linda Tripp tapes,
it would post them on the Web and take credit for the scoop, even if they
served to further humiliate Clinton and vindicate Starr.

            In this instance, the charge
of bad faith is even more absurd. To make its case about Salon , the
Journal ignores the fact that Adobe board members, like those of most
big corporations, give money to both parties. I think neglecting to mention
this shows that the Journal 's editorial page lacks intellectual
integrity. But I don't think that even the Journal 's editors, who come
as close to being propagandists as anyone in the mass media, should be accused
of trying to run interference for Starr. Like their counterparts on the left,
they seem fully capable of reducing a reasoned argument to a war of insults for
reasons of their own.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No Left Turn

            A regular feature of the
Clinton years has been the unfulfilled prophecy that the president is--any
second now--about to make a sharp turn to the left. Through most of 1993 and
'94, the refrain of disenchanted New Democrats was that although Clinton had
been elected on a centrist platform of welfare reform and deficit reduction,
his administration was being captured by old-school libs. In the '96 campaign,
Bob Dole warned voters that a re-elected Clinton would drop his guise of
moderation, "his liberalism unrestrained by the need to face the American
people in a second election," as Dole put it.

            These
predictions' failure appears to be no deterrent to their regular renewal. Only
the rationale for Clinton's rebirth as LBJ changes. The latest version is that
Clinton is finally showing his true color (pale pink) because of Monica
Lewinsky. "The politics of scandal is doing what mere policy hasn't done since
Republicans took Congress in 1994--forcing the Great Triangulator back into the
protective custody of his party's liberals," Paul Gigot wrote last week in the
Wall Street Journal .

            There are actually several versions of this theory.
Conservatives such as Gigot believe Clinton is a liberal at heart. They see him
lying in wait for an opportunity to expand government and raise taxes. A
variation on this casts the first lady as the closet liberal. Conservatives
point to Dick Morris' recent assertion that the scandal has given Hillary the
whip hand at the White House. There are also nonconservatives who think Clinton
may turn left for practical if not ideological reasons. "He's going to have to
keep an eye on his base--the very people who elected him," Richard Cohen wrote
in the Washington Post a few days ago. "Significantly, that means women,
especially feminists, and organized labor." The theory here is that if
threatened with impeachment, Clinton will need his Democratic die-hards for
protection.

            The
problem with these forecasts is that they are, once again, wrong. It is very
probable the sex scandal will have some effect on Clinton's politics. Though
it's hard to make out the precise effect at this point, the fear of a meltdown
in his popularity and the distant threat of impeachment are likely to make the
president more risk-averse. He's less liable to do anything dicey or bold. At a
moment in his presidency when Clinton might otherwise be thinking about how to
spend some of his accumulated political capital, that's a damned shame. Instead
of leading the way on entitlement reform, Clinton may return to the sort of
middle-class populism he expressed during his last campaign--with perhaps an
extra dollop of pandering. An embattled Clinton is prone not just to play the
demagogue on Medicare but also to promote dubious IRS reforms and climb aboard
a new Communications Decency Act.

            
Much of the new suspicion about Clinton
lurching left stems from the surprising entente between Clinton and
congressional Democrats who are more liberal than he is. After quarreling for
the better part of five years, they now seem to be getting along. But there's
an explanation for this, which has nothing to do with the scandal. After the
House voted not to renew the administration's fast-track trade negotiating
authority last fall, the White House became preoccupied with fostering a more
productive relationship with Hill Democrats, according to White House
officials. Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles authorized three senior
officials--John Podesta, Rahm Emanuel, and Doug Sosnik--to try to draw up a
common agenda with the House and Senate minority leaders, Dick Gephardt and Tom
Daschle.

            Clinton
first revealed the fruits of these negotiations in remarks at a "Democratic
Unity" rally Jan. 14. The main items he focused on in that speech were making
people as young as 55 eligible to buy Medicare coverage and regulating managed
care with a "Patients Bill of Rights." Clinton revealed two other proposals
jointly supported by the congressional Dems in his State of the Union address,
which was delivered after the scandal broke: reserving future budget surpluses
until some fix has been found for Social Security, and raising the minimum
wage. These are hardly radical proposals--old-style liberals would prefer to
spend a budget surplus on social programs, and they want to increase the
minimum wage by more than the $1 Clinton has offered. But in any case, the
common platform was negotiated long before anyone had heard of Monica
Lewinsky.

            In embracing Clinton's agenda, congressional Democrats have
moved toward the center more than Clinton has moved left. Liberals who used to
spend most of their time being annoyed at Clinton have rallied around him in
the face of a common enemy, realizing that a crumbling presidency would leave
them in the worst possible shape to face the 1998 election. Is it possible that
the threat of impeachment will force Clinton deeper into the embrace of liberal
interest groups? This is largely uncharted terrain, but there's little reason
to think so. Looking to the only comparisons available, Watergate and
Iran-Contra didn't make Nixon or Reagan more ideological. They just took the
wind out of their sails and undermined the possibility of any second term
agenda.

            Conservatives continue to
fall prey to the fallacy of an impending left turn because they misunderstand
Clinton. They think that because his political consciousness was formed during
the '60s, he must be a secret liberal. But Clinton is above all a pragmatist.
One lesson he has learned is that being too far to the left is a political
hazard. Clinton lost his job as governor of Arkansas in 1980 as a result of
liberal crusading during his first term. He regained it in 1982 by
repositioning himself as a moderate. The same thing happened again after he
became president. Clinton thought he was safe supporting universal health care
if he rejected the single-payer system supported by old liberals. But even his
hybrid scheme was too much for a public mistrustful of expanding government.
Clinton regained his footing and won re-election in 1996 through a calculated
centrism that is likely to remain his approach to politics for what remains of
his elective career.

            Of course, it doesn't take
much to make someone a lefty these days. Liberals used to call for cutbacks in
defense spending, higher welfare benefits, and a federal full employment
program. Now they want a tiny bit more social spending within the context of a
balanced budget. To conservatives, a liberal these days is someone who doesn't
support cutting taxes. They should give Clinton a few more months. If things
get hot enough, he may come out for a tax cut too.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            In Search of Cronygate 

            You probably haven't heard
about the latest scandal to rock Britain. The American media have ignored it.
And that is part of the story.

            The
British press has named it Cronygate. The gist of Cronygate is this: A reporter
for the Observer newspaper, posing as a representative of U.S.
businesses, approached lobbyists with close ties to Tony Blair's government to
see what they were peddling. One of the lobbyists was a callow and garrulous
young man named Derek Draper who had been a close aide to Blair and his
deputies. Draper boasted that, in exchange for an extortionate fee, he could:
arrange lunches at 10 Downing St. and meetings with top ministers, help the
client get appointed to a government advisory board, and obtain early drafts of
parliamentary reports related to the client's industry.

            The press was apoplectic. For a week, the major dailies
bannered Cronygate: It marked the Blair government's "fall from grace"; it
marked "Blair's worst week." Tory leader William Hague flayed Blair in the
House of Commons. Blair declared that "we must be pure," and Labor leaders
floated a proposal to ban contact between lobbyists and top government
officials. Cronygate overshadowed not only the violence in Northern Ireland but
also the long-awaited meeting between Prince William and Camilla Parker
Bowles.

            As a
scandal, Cronygate is inadequate in several ways. First, if you start from the
premise that there are lobbyists, it is unsurprising to discover that what they
do is lobby. (A famous actress caught working as a prostitute is news. A
prostitute caught working as a prostitute is a tautology.) Second, unless young
Draper is unlike any other lobbyist in history, he was exaggerating his ability
to infiltrate the government. Third, what Derek Draper promised is nothing that
former Republican Chairman Haley Barbour doesn't do a dozen times before lunch
(for Microsoft, among other clients). And it is nothing that would tax Clinton
pal Vernon Jordan's youngest associate.

            
The American press has ignored Cronygate, in
other words, because to Americans the behavior is not scandalous. It's not that
many Americans would actually approve of what amounts to trading money for
influence (or access or whatever you call it) with the government. It's that
we've decided to live with it. We don't get shocked by it, and we don't have
laws against it.

            In part,
the overwrought reaction of the British media reflects their irritation with
the holier-than-thou Blair and their impatience, more than a year into his
premiership, to catch him out at something . They have longed to show
that Blair's New Laborites are as scheming and money-grubbing as the Old Tories
were. But much of the fuss reflects genuine surprise and offense. Lobbying is a
smaller and less familiar industry in Britain than it is in the United States.
The capacity for outrage hasn't (yet) withered.

            But wait. The lesson is not that Americans are more cynical
and apathetic than the Brits about influence peddling (how marvelous it is that
they still rage at the rent-seeking and small-bore sleaziness we take for
granted ...). It's not that simple. One reason the lobbying culture is bigger
in Washington than in London is the American separation of powers. A company
wishing to influence the government must work the executive branch and butter
up both the majority and minority parties in the House and the Senate.
In Britain's elected dictatorship, lobbying is limited because virtually all
power resides in a very few people at the top of the majority party.

            And the British are not so
pure. For example, the American press can manage to generate a fair amount of
resentment over members of Congress accepting campaign contributions from
corporations--though not enough resentment, apparently, to reform the system.
But in Britain, it is actually legal and accepted for Members of Parliament
themselves to be paid lobbyists. There are explanations: MPs are poorly paid,
and those without additional government posts have almost no power anyway. But
the fact remains: The British people's elected representatives can be paid
specifically to influence legislation--and no one cares.

            Another
example: In Britain there are no limits on the size of political contributions
and no requirements that contributions be made public. And corporations and
unions may make political contributions directly out of their treasuries (as
opposed to raising the money from employees and members). In the post-Watergate
United States, it is unthinkable that people would shrug off large secret
contributions by corporations to the ruling party. The British probably don't
care for it either, to the extent they think about it. But they don't make a
scandal of it.

            
So which society is more cynical and decadent
and which more idealistic and pure? No, that's not the point. The point is that
what becomes a scandal--and what a society chooses to outlaw--is a bit random.
It may depend more on morally neutral cultural factors, or historical
accidents, than on any moral or practical calculus about different types of
behavior.

            This column, as my first in
the Strange Bed, is free of history. It is also, needless to say, free of any
taint of bias or corruption. Young and pure, it can still aspire to moral
clarity. Also modest, it will not attempt to solve all the problems relating to
campaign finance, lobbying, and other activities that allow money to buy
influence in politics. What it can do is suggest some general principles.

            Principle No. 1 is the
easy-to-forget point that money shouldn't be able to buy influence with
a democratic government. It's wrong. The world would be a better place if
government decisions were made without reference to who has written a check or
who has hired a politician's former aide. The people who profit from these
arrangements should find another way to make a living.

            But you don't outlaw every
activity of which you morally disapprove. Trying to prevent all exchanges of
money for political influence would be costly (in terms of liberty as well as
of more mundane considerations) and futile. Half measures are inevitable. You
can, though, aspire to half measures that do two things. First, they should
deliver maximum moral benefit at minimum practical cost. And second, you want
your half measures to be reasonably consistent on an absolute scale of
morality. This notion of consistency is what's violated by Britain's outrage
about lobbying and indifference about campaign contributions and America's
opposite treatment of both.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Secret Service's Real Secret

            Last week, the federal
courts accomplished something no president, congressional committee, government
agency, or private organization has been able to: They said "no" to the Secret
Service.

            The fight
over the "protective function privilege" has raised complicated, delicate, and
important questions about presidential privacy and the obligations of the
Secret Service. Is the Secret Service a Praetorian Guard that can abet an
imperial president in sleaze and coverup? How do we reconcile the president's
privacy with law enforcement's demands? While the courts have settled the legal
issue (for the moment), pundits continue to masticate these questions
dutifully.

            But something is being overlooked in the privilege
squabble: other complicated, delicate, and even more important questions about
the Secret Service. Notably: Are there any limits on the amount of money we
will spend to protect the president? Is it healthy for a democracy to surround
its president with a bloated paramilitary security apparatus?

            The real
worry about the Secret Service is not, as the privilege spat suggests, that the
president has too much control over it. The real worry is that no one
has control over it. The Secret Service's rise is one of the most remarkable
and unremarked stories of government in the last 40 years. In an age of open
and (ostensibly) frugal public administration, the Secret Service is an
anomaly, an agency that operates with nearly as much secrecy as the CIA and
spends almost as freely as its heart desires. How has this happened?

            
As David Greenberg chronicles in

                  Slate
               's "Backstory," the Secret Service was established in 1865 to fight
counterfeiting. It began guarding the president regularly in 1901, after the
assassination of President William McKinley, but remained a modest enterprise
until John F. Kennedy's murder.

            Since
then, the Secret Service has experienced the kind of growth that, well, only
stockholders in software companies have come to expect. In 1957, it spent $3.5
million and employed 450. This year, the Secret Service costs taxpayers about
$590 million and employs more than 4,600 people--including 2,000 special agents
(whose responsibilities include presidential protection) and 1,200 officers in
the Uniformed Division. (Click for more details about its proliferation.)

            The Secret Service is evidence of the Iron Law of
Bureaucratic Growth: An agency unchecked by outside forces expands. The service
asks, and it is given. For fiscal 1999, it requested $594,657,000 in federal
funding (an increase of more than 5 percent over its $564 million base--it
receives about $30 million more in other appropriations). The House just passed
the Secret Service appropriations bill, and how much did the agency get?
Exactly $594,657,000.

            Congress
stiffs other federal programs, but all the Secret Service's desires are
fulfilled: $6 million for four armor-plated limousines, $3 million for Y2K
conversion, millions to pay for extra travel expenses, $62 million to beef up
White House security, including new bulletproof windows, air defenses, and 27
extra security staffers. (Not that the public can find out much about how the
Secret Service spends its money: Details about how the president is protected
are classified. The agency has even removed White House floor plans from the
Library of Congress.)

            
The Secret Service is untouchable. Congress is
terrified of scrimping on it. "No one ever wants to not fully fund it," says a
congressional appropriations staffer. "No one ever wants to be the one who is
responsible for risk or danger to the president." Another staffer asks, "If
they say it's necessary for the safety of the president, who is going to say
no?" The media, too, are reluctant to criticize: The last major story to
question the Secret Service appeared in the New Republic in January
1981. (Two months later, Reagan was shot.) When the Secret Service does attract
notice, it tends to receive coverage best described as Protection Porn. (Click
for an explanation.)

            The
Secret Service does not hesitate to exploit its Dead President advantage,
practicing an elegant variation of "Fireman First" (a classic bureaucratic
defense mechanism--when your budget is threatened, propose cutting the fire
department). On the rare occasions the service is queried, it invokes the Dead
President. A month after the Oklahoma City bombing, and without a hearing, the
Secret Service shut Pennsylvania Avenue and surrounding streets to traffic.
Washingtonians complained. The service declared it was necessary for the safety
of the White House and the president. The avenue stays closed.

            The privilege squabble, in fact, marks the first time the
Dead President defense has failed. In Justice Department briefs and in private
meetings, the Secret Service insisted that the failure to recognize the
privilege: would result in "profound and predictable peril" to the president,
"could mean the difference between life or death," would endanger "the
integrity of our national security," etc. The appeals court rapped the agency
for its scare tactics, saying it must base its conclusions "on solid facts and
a realistic appraisal of the danger rather than on vague fears extrapolated
beyond any foreseeable threat."

            The Secret
Service is not incompetent or corrupt, or even especially greedy. In fact, it
is almost universally admired for its professionalism and efficiency. Even so,
its ascendancy is troublesome. It has made standard--even admired--measures
that ought to be intolerable in a democracy. A half-century ago, a president
could drive through city streets in a normal car with a few bodyguards, and
anyone could stroll up to the front door of the White House. Of course, ours is
a different and more dangerous age: There are undoubtedly more and more
sophisticated threats to the president than we can imagine.

            
But the expansion of the Secret Service has
normalized a paramilitary presidency. No one blinks at: 40-car motorcades that
shut down interstates and gridlock traffic, the 200-plus-strong Secret Service
delegation that accompanies the president abroad, the transformation of the
open White House into an impenetrable fortress. During public events, it is
perfectly acceptable for Secret Service agents to approach crowd members and
yank their hands out of their pockets to confirm they are not hiding weapons.
It is unquestioned that the president should be chauffeured in a car that costs
$1.5 million . It has become a deep inconvenience for average citizens to
see their president, and a deep inconvenience for the president to see average
citizens. There is something unseemly about this excessive security, and
something undemocratic.

            Sen.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., perhaps the only lawmaker who ever criticized
the Secret Service before the privilege flap, said in a 1992 Senate speech that
the agency has made the "insufferable" routine. "I don't know if the agency
itself is aware of how arrogant and presumptuous it has become." Two years ago,
Moynihan remarked that soon, the service will "have a billion-dollar budget.
And still just one president, one vice president."

            It isn't that the Secret Service's precautions are
definitively unnecessary. It's that no one knows whether they are necessary and
no one is willing to ask. Perfection is impossible in presidential security. No
matter how much we spend, the goal will always recede. A determined assassin
will be able to find a way to kill the president. And the Secret Service will
be able to find a way to spend more money to prevent it. (In fact, the agency
seems to have found most of those ways already.)

            No one
wants the president assassinated. But should it be forbidden to ask if we could
spend less and do less to protect him?

            
               If you
missed the link to the Backstory on the Secret Service, here it is again.
Here's the , and here's the one on .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tangled Wires

            So Girl Scouts can sing
again. ASCAP, an association of music copyright owners, has stopped trying to
collect royalties on campfire renditions of "This Land Is Your Land." The girls
have a new place to camp, too--a vast stretch of land in Utah that President
Clinton recently declared a "National Monument." Mining's forbidden now. Too
bad for Andalex, which owned the rights to dig for coal.

            Woody Guthrie, who wrote
"This Land Is Your Land," was a Communist. It's your land, but it's my land
too. From California to the New York Island, and probably Utah as well. I'd
quote more, but I'd need permission. Guthrie copyrighted the song in 1956. It
remains the private property of his heirs until 2031. As I said, Guthrie was a
capitalist.

            Most of
us are equally two-faced about property. My property is mine; yours is for
sharing. Put any two toddlers in a room with toys, and you get four political
theorists. End-of-Property stories appeal to some grown-ups too. Karl Marx
finished one in 1894: A tidal wave of workers was going to sweep aside the
obstructive nuisance of private ownership. The 1990s version merely announces
the end of all intellectual property--ownership rights in words, music,
and so on--obliterated this time by a tsunami of new technology. Copying and
transmitting data is becoming too easy for the law to protect anyone's private
ownership. The ribbon of digital highway is for roamin' and ramblin'. Copyright
is dead. Digital content just "wants to be free." See John Perry Barlow, Esther
Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte, Wired ....

            There's an obvious technological rejoinder. Digital content
can be shuffled as easily as it can be transmitted. Encryption puts viscosity
right back into the fluid digital pipeline. Curiously, most of the property
abolitionists seem to like this home-brew form of copyright. There's a strong
economic rejoinder too, as Bob Wright pointed out on these screens not long ago. Most
people won't steal digital content if buying actually remains cheaper and
easier, as it probably will. But the "free the bits" view of things isn't just
inconsistent or unfinished. It's an analysis that hasn't progressed beyond the
Pampers stage of political theory.

            Twenty
years ago, the Supreme Court announced that lawmakers couldn't ban abortions in
the first trimester of pregnancy, but could ban them in the third. A
constitutional line is crossed, Justice Blackmun reasoned, when a fetus becomes
"viable" outside the womb. By that logic, the constitutional right retreats
with every advance in neonatal medicine. When medics learn how to incubate a
test-tube baby for the whole nine months, the abortion right ought logically to
disappear. Except that it won't. Logical consistency has nothing to do with
it.

            
It's a safe political prediction that the legal
rights in intellectual property aren't going to be abolished, however badly
bits may want to be free. Even Hollywood's softie-lefties go all hard and
capitalist when it comes to intellectual property. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's
lead flack in Washington, spent the early '80s trying to kill the new video
cassette recorder, which he was sure would be used mostly to pirate his
clients' movies. Valenti didn't succeed, but only because the VCR ended up
delivering huge profits to the movie moguls. Far more people use VCRs to rent
movies than to steal them.

            But people could
steal movies if they felt like it. The end-of-property cybersages argue that
the law may say what it likes, but the law doesn't matter any more.
Technological might makes right. People with the machines will copy if they
please, and lawyers shouldn't try to stop them. (Unless, of course, those
lawyers work for Wired , which is very actively defending its own
trademark.)

            But this
premise is also wrong. The first point to recognize is that copyright is just a
commercial form of privacy law. Indeed for some, it's the only kind of privacy
they still own. Madonna can no longer stop you from gazing at her breasts.
Copyright at least makes you pay for the pleasure.

            So we've done breasts and we've done abortion; let's move
on to the rest of your private life. Lexis-Nexis recently caused an uproar when
it offered to help personal biographical stuff on its way to freedom, through a
database (P-Trak) accessible at $82 a pop. The Social Security numbers in the
database were removed 11 days after its introduction: technology trumped by
popular protest.

            
Information wanting to be free doesn't seem so appealing when it includes
details about all your own flesh and frailties--credit history, shopping
habits, records of where you've been, what you asked for, and what you took.
Your modem doesn't know the difference between information called "property"
and information called "privacy." And privacy--cloak of night, stocking mask,
and any digital equivalent--is all that separates the thief from the law. The
harder it is to maintain privacy, the easier it is to catch thieves. It's no
use responding that the law itself protects privacy better than copyright
protects a Spielberg movie. If you're a technological determinist, there is no
privacy law, not in cyberspace.

            
Which means that the easier it gets to steal
from Spielberg, the easier it gets for his lawyers to come after you. True,
technology empowers millions of potential copyright violators. But Spielberg
doesn't have to catch them all. Spot enforcement, well-publicized with blue
flashing lights, is what maintains speed limits on the highway.

            If you're
enough of a pirate to be worth bothering about, Spielberg's lawyers will get
you. And the law will then seize your property, like your Pentium Pro, your
ISDN card, and your Jaz drive. That is what has got the
cyberlibertarians so agitated. Do you see the irony? They aren't really
property anarchists--quite the opposite, in fact. They reject the new property
because it threatens their absolute control of the old. My high-speed modem is
mine, so your intellectual property must be mine too. If I really own my modem,
then I must have an unqualified right to dial up anywhere, any time, and suck
in whatever is out there to be sucked. Copyright law in cyberspace offends
because it limits what I can do in physical space. Encryption is OK because its
authority is created in my very own machine.

            From Marx to Lennon ("Imagine no possessions"),
anti-property zealots all miss the most fundamental point. Property is
politically neutral. Sure, property is the capitalist's tool. But the
feminist's, too. And the libertarian's. The woman who wants an abortion says
it's her uterus, not Pat Robertson's. The rancher says it's his
land, not the government-protected wolf's. Your supposed constitutional right
to get an abortion, or smoke dope, or ride a Harley without a helmet, all
emerged from the Fourth Amendment--written originally to protect "houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Whether
you're talking about land, abortion, or environmental protection, you
inevitably drift into the rhetoric of property.

            Property is an endless
succession of bubbles in space, or cyberspace, with different people claiming
an endless variety of interests in them. Property is a bottle of champagne, or
the name of the label, or the whole concept of effervescent wine, or perhaps
just wine in your bloodstream while you drive home in your Buick. Control of
each little bit of turf, physical or virtual, can always be made a bit more--or
a bit less--personal and private. Politicians, prosecutors, judges, and
litigators decide, often one case at a time. The deciding never ends, because
people, and the things they value, change. Technology will never end the tug of
war.

            The only prognosis that's
certainly wrong is that all boundary-setting law will just somehow disappear,
because the Workers of the World have united, or because information wants to
be free.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Goose-Step Guide to Dating

            "We've just been sent a memo
telling us we're not supposed to talk to the media," said the young male clerk
at Barnes & Noble when I asked if he was selling a lot of copies of The
Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right , the
slender, much-publicized manual of retro dating strategy for women. "But
yes"--eyeball roll, sigh, grimace--"it's flying out of here." There went my
theory that the book's sales (advertised as 800,000) reflected warehouse-size
orders from the same cabal that inflated the numbers for Ancient
Evenings , The Closing of the American Mind , A Brief History of
Time , and many other supposed huge sellers that you've never actually seen
outside a bookstore. Choosing my copy from a miniwall of identical pink
paperbacks, I figured I should probably abandon my fallback theory too, which
is that the only people who take the Rules seriously are journalists assigned
to write about them. Certainly the B & N clerk, a dating man if I ever saw
one, took them seriously. "It's all about mind games," he volunteered
scornfully. "I hate that book."

            "Mind
games" is right. The thesis of Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's book is that
for women who want to marry, lunacy is the best policy. Women who take the
initiative--a broad category of behavior that includes most signs of life, not
to mention common politeness--"destroy male ambition and animal drive. Men are
born to respond to challenge. Take away challenge and their interest wanes."
So, become a Rules Girl. Having first transformed yourself (Rule 1) into
"a creature unlike any other"--radiant, confident, fashionable, mysterious,
elusive, quiet, and, if necessary, nose-jobbed--don't talk to a man first (2)
or too much (3), don't go Dutch (4) or sleep with him on the first date (14),
don't call him and rarely return his calls (5), always end phone calls (6) and
dates (11) first, and never accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday (7).
As you might expect from a book that mingles pop Darwinism with the
Weltanschauung of Cosmopolitan , the Rules can be a bit mysterious
and elusive themselves--you can't introduce yourself to your neighbor, but
taking out a personal ad is OK, and how's a girl to square the whole project of
"conditioning" the marriage-averse man with Rules 17 (Let Him Take the Lead)
and 18 (Don't Expect a Man to Change or Try to Change Him)?

            You could see The Rules as a weird fantasia on the
theme of, "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?" But what sets it
apart from, say, "Dear Abby," is the demented, quasi-military precision of the
Rules. Buy a timer and set it for 10 minutes when he calls. Practice the rules
on the doorman and the butcher--let them say "hello" first to
you . If your beau fails to come across with a "romantic gift" for your
birthday and Valentine's Day, he obviously doesn't love you; so show him the
door! Don't just read the Rules--memorize them. By the end of the book, when
you're being advised to join a support group to help you resist the urge to
have a normal conversation with your boyfriend, the whole enterprise has a
distinctly cultish flavor. (Rule 31: Don't Discuss The Rules with Your
Therapist.)

            
               The
Rules isn't just about manipulating men; it's about manipulating the reader
too. The eerie assurance with which the authors insist that the Rules always
work and that any deviation brings disaster is strangely nervous-making, like
one of those chain letters that alludes darkly to people who dropped dead after
failing to pass it on. Could it possibly be that my 13-year-long marriage was
jinxed from Day One because I called my future husband first and suggested
coffee--in his neighborhood, yet, instead of my own? Actually, no. Life's much
more complicated. Sure, men like a challenge--but so do women. And nobody likes
to be challenged all the time. I know plenty of long-standing happy couples who
slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down
the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding. The notion that
female initiative is useless because men know what they want is particularly
odd--most people don't even know what they want for dinner. Even odder is the
notion that what men want is a woman who's always on her way out the door.

            Since The Rules do not reflect reality, what is
their appeal--and to whom? Undoubtedly, the book owes much of its visibility to
the general mood of anti-feminism and family-values conservatism. But to see
its popularity as evidence of rejection of feminism by "women" is much too
vague. In the pages of The 
               Rules , men are a barely individualized
collection of amiable dolts, but the Rules Girl is a particular social
type--and it isn't the choosy free spirit lectured in such anti-feminist
self-help books as Smart Women, Foolish Choices . The woman depicted as
in need of the Rules is a voracious doormat, the sort of woman who sends men
Hallmark greeting cards or long letters after a single date, who rummages in
men's drawers and pockets, suggests couples therapy when brief relationships
start to crumble, throws away a new boyfriend's old clothes, cleans (and
redecorates) his apartment without asking, and refuses to see the most obvious
signs of disengagement. Her problem isn't too much liberation; it's incredibly
low self-esteem. For women like this, The Rules might seem like a way of
setting boundaries on a personality that has none, of giving a sense of purpose
and structure to a life that seems "empty" (a recurrent word), of offering
women who fear they are worthless a way of acting as if they were precious--"a
creature unlike any other"--in the hope that the pose may become reality. Of
course, this is unlikely--a motormouth cannot be "quiet and mysterious"
forever, timer or no timer, and The 
               Rules ' blithe assurance that
Mr. Right, reeled in by your "friendly, light, and breezy" persona, will accept
your edgy, insecure, and engulfing true self is, perhaps, the cruelest fantasy
in the book.

            Although the Rules Girl is anything but Everywoman,
the world depicted in the book is unfortunately the one in which millions of
single men and women live: a corporatized and highly competitive world of
office jobs and aerobics classes, personal ads, nose jobs and diets, singles
dances, self-help seminars, and spiritual fads. It's not a very warm or kind
world, or one with much room for originality or playfulness or waywardness or
even what I would call "romance." Friends matter because you need someone to
rent a beach house or go to a singles dance with. Politics and volunteer work
and books are just ways to keep busy between dates.

            The Darwinian theme prominent
in much of the discussion about dating just now reflects this world well: men
and women, different by nature and with innately opposed interests, each trying
to exploit the other first. You don't have to like the other sex--you don't
even have to like your lover. You just have to need him or her--for sex,
babies, "romantic gifts," attention, money, acceptability in a society
organized around the couple. Indeed, the subtext of The 
               Rules is
resentment toward men: As the authors put it in their inimitable fashion,
"[T]he man is the adversary (if he's someone you really like)." Why? "He has
the power to hurt you ... he runs the show."

            When feminists suggest that
men run the show--any show--they get labeled man-haters and whiners. But then,
feminists want to change the rules, not memorize them.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Can Cutting Taxes Speed up Growth?

            For most Americans, taxes
are their most visible and least pleasant contact with the federal government.
Naturally, taxes are almost always near the top of the national policy agenda,
and 1996 is no exception. This year, as in many recent years, the focus is
likely to be on what is called the "supply-side" aspect of tax policy. Can tax
reduction speed up the growth of the nation's output and the incomes of the
population by increasing saving, investment, work, education, enterprise,
research, and other factors that determine our capacity to produce? When Bob
Dole is urged to put economic growth at the center of his election campaign, it
is mainly the promise of tax reduction to achieve such effects that people have
in mind. There are, of course, other considerations to be weighed in decisions
about tax policy--fairness, and costs of compliance, for example--but the
growth question dominates current discussion, and we shall mainly concentrate
on that in this week's panel.

            Nothing very significant
can be said about taxes in general, except that hardly anyone likes them. The
effects of tax reduction on economic growth will depend on whether the
reduction is an across-the-board cut of income-tax rates, a reduction of
corporate-tax rates, a reduction of the tax on capital gains, a reduction of
the tax on saved income, or one of a long list of other possibilities.

            The effects will depend
also on the budgetary context in which the tax cuts are to occur. Would the
proposed cut of some taxes be accompanied by increases of other taxes, and if
so, which? For example, the "flat tax" that some people propose involves both a
reduction of rates and an increase in the income subject to tax because of the
elimination of various deductions. Would a proposed tax cut be accompanied by
expenditure cuts, and if so, which? In our discussion, we shall try to examine
the growth effects of various possible tax programs in their possible budgetary
contexts.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Jews in Second Place

            Remember the scene in
Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint where the newly teen-aged Alex Portnoy
goes to a frozen pond in his hometown of Newark to gaze upon gentile girls
ice-skating?

             

            
               So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the
puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange
shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing . It is almost
more than an angry thirteen-year-old little Jewish Momma's Boy can bear.
Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my
life I'm talking about--I learn the meaning of the word longing , I learn
the meaning of the word pang .
            

            This scene often involuntarily flitted across my mind
during the past winter, when I spent a lot of time watching people glide across
expanses of ice on skates. The reason is that my 11-year-old son, also an Alex,
was playing in a hockey league. Having grown up in the Deep South, I was
entirely innocent of ice matters when I first got into this. At my inaugural
hockey-parents' meeting, I realized that I had wandered into a vast and
all-encompassing subculture. Two, three, four times a week, we had to drive our
children 30, 60, 80 miles to some unheated structure for a practice or a game.
Often these were held at 6 o'clock in the morning. South Kent, Conn. West
Point, N.Y. Morristown, N.J. We parents would stand at the edge of the rink in
a daze drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee and griping that they weren't hustling
enough out there.

            For
Alex Portnoy, athleticism was something alien. It was part of a total package
that included not only the golden shiksas but their brothers ("engaging,
good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks"), their fathers
("men with white hair and deep voices"), their mothers who never whined or
hectored, their curtained, fireplaced houses, their small noses, their lack of
constant nagging worry--in short, the normalcy and confidence that go along
with belonging, with being on the inside.

            In the Portnoy household nobody played sports--bodies
existed only to generate suffering--and there was only one thing that really
went well. That, needless to say, was Alex's performance in school. "Albert
Einstein the Second," his mother called him, and thought it may have been
embarrassing, he didn't really disagree. By the time Portnoy's Complaint
came out, in 1969, it was clear--and this was part of the joke of the
ice-skating scene--that people like awkward Alex were going to wind up ahead of
the gliding shiksas and their halfback brothers, because they were more
book-smart. The goyim were wasting their time with all those sports.
What the Jews had was the real ticket. Alex's overwhelming insecurity wouldn't
have been so funny if it hadn't been unjustified.

            In my
many hours standing next to hockey rinks last winter, I sometimes engaged in
one of the Jews' secret vices: Jew-counting. All over the ice were little
Cohens, little Levys, their names sewed in block letters on the backs of their
jerseys. It was amazing how many there were. Occasionally, an entire front line
would be Jewish, or even the front line and the defensemen. (Green--is
he one? Marks?) The chosen people were tough competitors, too.

            In fact, a Portnoy of the present, a kid with his nose
pressed up against the window (to borrow the self-description of another
ghetto-bred Jewish writer, Theodore H. White) would surely regard these
stick-wielding, puck-handling lads as representing full, totally secure
membership in the comfortable classes of American society. Some Lysenkoist
suburban biological deviation, or else intermarriage, has even given many of
the hockey-playing Jewish boys blond hair and even blue eyes.

            More to the point, these
Jewish kids and their parents have decided to devote endless hours of childhood
to an activity with no career payoff. Do you think they're going to 6 a.m.
practices for a shot at the National Hockey League? Of course not. They're
doing it--mastering hockey, and every conceivable other sport--to promote
"growth," "teamwork," "physical fitness," "well-roundedness," "character," and
other qualities that may be desirable in a doctor but don't, as a practical
matter, help you get into medical school.

            What
all the hockey-playing Jewish kids in America are not doing, during their
hundreds of hours hustling to, on, and from the ice rink, is studying. It's not
that they don't study at all, because they do. It's that they don't study with
the ferociousness and all-out commitment of people who realize (or who have
parents who realize) that outstanding school performance is their one shot at
big-time opportunity in America.

            Meanwhile, there is another ethnic group in America whose
children devote their free time not to hockey but to extra study. In this
group, it's common for moms to march into school at the beginning of the year
and obtain several months' worth of assignments in advance so their children
can get a head start. These parents pressure school systems to be more rigorous
and give more homework. This group is Asian-Americans.

            At the
front end of the American meritocratic machine, Asians are replacing Jews as
the No. 1 group. They are winning the science prizes and scholarships. Jews,
meanwhile, at our moment of maximum triumph at the back end of the meritocracy,
the midlife, top-job end, are discovering sports and the virtues of being
well-rounded. Which is cause and which is effect here is an open question. But
as Asians become America's new Jews, Jews are becoming ... Episcopalians.

            The one extracurricular venue where I run into a lot of
Asian-Americans is a Very Serious music school in Scarsdale, the suburban town
in the New York area that (because of its famous school system) has the most
name-brand appeal for transferred Japanese executives. Music is a form of
extracurricular activity that Mrs. Portnoys approve of, and the atmosphere at
this school would be familiar to earlier generations of American Jews. In the
lobby, children waiting for music lessons bend over their homework, mom perched
at their shoulder. Musical exercises drift through the air, along with snatches
of conversation about AP courses, recommendations, test prep, tracking, and
nursery-school admissions.

            The
hockey ethos is to be elaborately casual and gruff about competitive
achievement: Outstanding performance gets you a little slap on the helmet, a
good-natured insult. At the music school they take the straightforward
approach. At my younger son's first piano lesson, his teacher, Mrs. Sun,
explained the rules. "Every week, Theo, at the end of the lesson, I give you
stamps," she said. "If you're a good boy, I give you one stamp. If you're a
very good boy, I give you two stamps. And if you're a very, very good
boy, I give you three stamps! Then, every time you get 25 stamps, I give you a
statue of a great composer." Watching 7-year-old Theo take this in, I could see
that he was hooked. Ancient imperatives had kicked in. When he hit 25 stamps
for the first time, Mrs. Sun gave him a plastic statuette of Mozart. "Do you
know how old he was when he composed his first piece of music, Theo?" A look of
rapt anticipation from Theo. "Four years old! Three years younger than you."
Theo, get to work .

            My mother grew up in New Jersey, not too far from Philip
Roth. I was raised on the story of her crushing disappointment over being only
the salutatorian of her class at Perth Amboy High School, when she had been
valedictorian of her junior high school class. Her father, a small-town
pediatrician, had somehow gone to medical school without having gone to
college, or possibly even (here we begin to slip into the realm of Marquez-like
fable) finishing high school. Every relative in my grandparents' generation
seems to have graduated from high school at some improbable age like 14 or 12.
Then, for the most part, at least as the story was received by the young me,
life turned disappointing. Why? Because school is the only part of American
society that's fair. Afterward, a vast, subtle conspiracy arranges to hold you
back in favor of those more advantaged by birth.

            Even by my school days,
the academic hunger had begun to wane. By now, it is barely producing a pulse,
except among Jews who are within one generation of the immigration cycle. Jews
have not become notable as academic underachievers. But something is gone: That
old intense and generalized academic commitment, linked to sociological
ambition, is no longer a defining cultural characteristic of the group.

            What
has replaced it is a cultural insider's sort of academic preoccupation: a
task-specific, in-the-know concern with successfully negotiating the key
junctures--mainly, college admission. Jews are now successful people who want
to move the levers of the system (levers whose location we're quite familiar
with) so as to ensure that our children will be as successful as we are. This
is quite different from being yearning, not-successful-enough people who hope,
rather than know for sure, that study will generate dramatic upward mobility
for our children.

            Jews' new second-place status in the strivers' hierarchy is
most noticeable in places with good public school systems like Westchester
County, N.Y., (where I live) and the San Gabriel Valley, outside of Los
Angeles. The same is true of super-meritocratic public educational institutions
like Lowell High School in San Francisco, the University of California at
Berkeley, and Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New
York, which are all now Asian-plurality.

            By contrast, the Asian
presence is noticeably less, and the Jewish presence noticeably more, in
private schools. In these, no matter how great the meritocratic pretenses, the
contest is always less completely open than it is in public institutions. Just
at the moment when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have presidents named
Rudenstine, Levin, and Shapiro, those institutions are widely suspected of
having informal ceilings on Asian admissions, of the kind that were imposed on
Jews two generations ago.

            Asian
achievement is highest in areas like science and classical music, where there
is no advantage from familiarity with the culture. This also once was true of
Jews (why do you think my grandfather become a doctor?) but isn't any more.
Several years ago, Asian-American groups in California successfully lobbied to
keep an essay section out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It's impossible to
imagine organized Jewry caring.

            In his famous 1958 book, The Rise of the
Meritocracy , British sociologist Michael Young proposed the following
formula: IQ plus effort equals merit. Young, like many theorists of
meritocracy, assumed that ethnicity would become a nonissue (should be
nonissue) under such a system. Instead, it's an overwhelming issue. Accounting
for ethnicity, you might amend Young this way (to the extent that "merit" and
academic performance are the same thing): an ethnic group's long-term cultural
orientation to education, plus its level of sociological ambition in American
society at the moment, will equal its members' merit. The cultural connection
seems so obvious that it amazes me how often ethnic differences in the
meritocracy are explained in terms of genes.

            By these standards,
Asian-Americans today have two advantages over Jews. They have a lower average
income, and so are more motivated. And most back-home Asian cultures rival or
surpass Jewish culture in their reverence for study. Therefore Jews are going
to have to get used to being No. 2.

            In the past, when this
fate has befallen the reigning ethnic group in American society, the group's
standard response has been to redefine merit. It's not academic performance (or
whatever the prevailing measure of the moment was) after all! It's something
else, which we happen to possess in greater measure than the upstart group.
Jews know all too well what the alternate form of merit that we didn't have
used to be: a certain ease, refinement, and grace. This may be what has led
today's generation of Jewish parents to athleticize our children. We want them
to have what Alex Portnoy longed for: a deeper sort of American comfort
and success than SAT scores and music lessons can provide.

            But Jews are not alone in
having this thought. Recently, I've been interviewing Asian-Americans for a
book on meritocracy in America. A sentiment that emerges consistently is that
meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall
behind because they don't have quite the right cultural style for getting
ahead: too passive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough. So, in many of the
Asian-American families I met, a certain Saturday ritual has developed. After
breakfast, mom takes the children off to the juku for the day, and dad goes to
his golf lesson.

            The final irony is that
golf and tennis are perceived by the Asian-Americans not as aspects of an ethos
adapted from the British landowning classes (which is the way Jews used to
perceive them), but as stuff that Jews know how to do. The sense of power and
ease and comfort that the playing field symbolizes is now, to non-Jews, a
Jewish trait. The wheel of assimilation turns inexorably: Scratching out an
existence is phase one, maniacal studying is phase two, sports is phase three.
Watch out for Asian-American hockey players in about 20 years.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Labor's Cheap Thrill

            Until John Sweeney took over
the AFL-CIO last year, Republicans for years had barely mentioned the labor
movement. They didn't have to. The rich got richer. The median wage fell. In
the third quarter of 1996, after a brief reversal, it went back to falling
again. No one has the nerve to ask for a raise. For years, labor, or what was
left of it, did nothing at all. Then last winter the AFL-CIO voted to spend $35
million for "voter education." Not contributions to candidates: i.e., hard
money. But just telling people about politicians' voting records: soft money.
And suddenly denunciation of "labor bosses" is on every Republican lip.

            Now, it's a pittance, right?
$35 million? Business vastly outspends labor on political contributions--seven
to one, according to the New York Times the other day. So why does the
GOP worry? Why is $35 million, against business's hundreds of millions, such a
crisis? Why is Republican control of Congress now at stake, with such a
laughable amount? Because the GOP has big, big trouble if there's even a
whisper that:

            Your real wage has
fallen.

            Inequality is spreading like
a plague.

            Medicare and student loans
are now "in play."

            With only
$35 million, hey, word could leak out. Maybe business can outspend labor by
nine to one, or 90 to one, but it can never spend enough to cancel the message
out.

            But isn't it unfair for union members to have to pay for
this, from "compulsory" dues, when many vote Republican? No, it is not unfair.
First, members can opt out, or object. Typically, members every year get cards:
"Remember, you can opt out of paying dues for extra political work."
Conservatives have sued unions over this for years. Unions must have major
audits, segregate money. There is notice, hearing, rebate procedure. (The kind
of due process liberals dream of for the poor but never get.)

            Compare this machinery with
your rights as a company stockholder. Can you opt out of the company's
soft-money political spending? No. Do you even know what they're doing? No.
With millions of us in mutual funds, who has any idea what political messages
we're paying for?

            But back to unions. Do
members in fact opt out, with all their legal rights to do so? No. The highest
opt-out union right now is the Communications Workers of America, which until
recently was an "open shop," meaning that many members never paid dues at all.
Out of 600,000 CWA members, there are currently about 2,000 objectors. In other
unions, the opt-out rate is much, much lower.

            So if union members do vote
Republican, why don't more of them opt out of soft-money spending on ads that,
implicitly at least, criticize Republican candidates? Maybe members want to
cast their own votes, but they still like to hear what their union says.
Because of abortion or gun control or the Cold War, I may decide I want to vote
for the GOP. But don't I want to hear my union's voice on issues where the
union has some expertise? That's why labor is making fewer endorsements. Just
provide the consumer advice. On wages, Social Security, Medicare. Let people
make up their own minds.

            The notion
that millions of union members are being forced against their will to help
finance this union campaign is simply a Republican fantasy.

            
When labor gets involved in politics, this is
not a detour from its "real" job of negotiating wages and hours. Soft money for
voter education. That is labor's real job, the very core purpose of a
union. Ever since the Supreme Court decision that required the "opt out," the
court has drawn a wobbly line: Negotiating wages? OK. Discussing politics? Oh,
that's an "extracurricular," unrelated to the union's "real" work.

            But as Felix Frankfurter
wrote in dissent, this distinction is silly. After all, what is Social Security
but a job benefit? Either the union gets the pension directly at the bargaining
table ... or indirectly in Congress. Or what about Clinton's poster child,
"family leave"? Crawl off in a corner and give birth, without pay? Still, it's
something. Either labor can get it directly from the boss, or labor can get it
from the boss via Congress. What's the difference, except in the latter case
all of us benefit?

            At least Frankfurter, a New
Dealer, understood--as we no longer can--what a union is supposed to do. In
Europe the labor movement often began first as a "labor party." The parliament
was the bargaining table.

            But when labor defends
Medicare, isn't it still being a special interest? No. What's unique about
labor is: It's not a special interest or a single issue. Special interest? It's
not like R.J. Reynolds looking for a tax break. The AFL-CIO is never, or
rarely, looking for something that helps the AFL-CIO purely as an institution.
"Look at the last session," an AFL-CIO lawyer friend said to me recently, "What
was labor fighting for? Stop Medicare cuts. Raise minimum wage." These
"soft-money" fights mostly help ... not union chiefs, or even members, but the
nonunion masses: the private-sector 90 percent who have no union at all.

            Who benefits, then? You. Me.
Aren't we nonunion types the freeloaders? Why do the 10 percent in unions have
to pay for our battles? That is the real unfairness of soft money.

            Of late, business groups
have begun running "counter ads." Sure. But what can they "counter" with? "You
don't need a minimum wage"? "Let's cut back Social Security"? "Isn't your
standard of living getting too high"? No, Business can't counter the ads. It
has to change the subject. Thus: "Labor bosses!" (But what about business
bosses?)

            "Union corruption!" (That's
been true, sometimes, but who pays the money to corrupt unions?)

            The frightening thing about
labor soft money is that on the merits of the issues, the GOP is defenseless.
What do you say to people who want the standard of living to rise? For 20 years
the median wage has dropped, while the two parties have hauled in hundreds of
millions from business groups.

            Isn't labor, with its soft
money, seeking to raise the standard of living for those of us with W-2s, the
closest thing we have now to a citizens' party?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Waiting for Nov. 5

            L>ast week in Slate , Jodie T. Allen and Bill
Barnes proposed using advanced Microsoft software to condense the
transcripts of the presidential debates. Compression is the right approach, but
more of a human touch is needed. Rather than reduce political dialogue to
straightforward facts and proposals, perhaps we should try to bring out the
singular aesthetic vision that wells up in even our most robotically
pre-programmed politicians. Too many facts, too much information: We need to
make politics more beautiful, melancholy, strange. The vast audience that
attends the plays of Samuel Beckett or reads the poetry of John Ashbery is
sadly neglected in our political process. Here is a compressed transcript of
the debates. All the words were actually spoken. They are presented completely
out of context, but in perfect accord with what the transcriber believes to be
the inward poetic essence of each candidate.
            

            [Note:
Bob Dole's remarks required less editing than the others'.]

            

               Act I
            

            
               Hartford,
Conn.
            

            

               Clinton ( from a high rocky outcrop ): I want. I will try. I ran. I
wanted, you took me. Let's keep it going. We cut, let's balance. We cut, let's
pass. We passed, let's expand. We passed, let's keep going. We passed, let's
make. We can build. I look forward. We're going. I believe, I have worked. I
supported, I felt. I've worked, I supported. I supported, I differed, I
believe.

            
               Dole ( standing in a
trash can ): Thirty-five to 50 new bureaucracies. I carry a little card
around in my pocket. He noted a few, but there are others.

            
               Clinton
( descending ): I do think. I do believe.

            
               Dole : That's not true
in Connecticut.

            
               Clinton : Best shape,
biggest drop, all groups of people.

            
               Dole ( gesturing
darkly ): Scaring seniors and tearing me apart. He twisted arms. I
don't--you know.

            
               Clinton
( sorrowfully ): It wasn't me.

            
               Dole : We ought to
agree that somebody else should do it.

            
               Clinton : I will
continue. Because we need it badly.

            
               Dole : If they started
they ought to stop.

            
               Clinton : We need to do
this together and we can.

            
               Dole : Look at Haiti.
Bosnia, Northern Ireland. I failed to mention North Korea and Cuba.

            
               Clinton : Every single
country but Cuba.

            
               Dole : Food.

            
               Moderator : Food.

            ( A long silence. )

            
               Dole : And so it seems
that we can talk about what we call Kenny the great exaggerator because he just
liked to exag--

            
               Clinton : I think my
ideas are better.

            
               Dole : I have my own
little foundation. Just did. I haven't before.

            
               Clinton : I support
school choice. I support school choice.

            
               Dole : I like young
people. I like teachers.

            
               Clinton : The results
are highly ambiguous.

            
               Dole : George McGovern
is a friend of mine.

            
               Clinton : Our plan is
better.

            
               Dole : I've never
discussed Whitewater. I'm discussing Whitewater now. We've had that discussion.
I know Senator D'Amato, I think. He's a friend of mine. Senator Kennedy is a
friend of yours.

            
               Clinton : No
comment.

            
               Dole : What's the
subject matter?

            ( Music and
dancing. )

            

               Act II
            

            
               St.
Petersburg, Fla.
            

            
               Kemp
( on an enormous bicycle ): This is the greatest democracy in the world.
Bob Dole is one of those men who's served in the United States Senate. Clearly,
Abraham Lincoln put it best.

            
               Gore ( on a
hovering cube ): We have a plan. I'm excited.

            
               Kemp : Ambivalent,
confusing.

            
               Gore : We have a
positive plan. Here's how we plan. We have a balanced-budget plan. Our
plan.

            
               Kemp : Clearly.
Frankly. Ask Van Woods, a young entrepreneur.

            
               Gore : Risky $550
billion tax scheme.

            
               Kemp : All wealth is
created. 25 to 26 percent. 7.5 million words.

            
               Gore : Risky tax
scheme. We have a plan.

            
               Kemp : And clearly.
And frankly. And that's what Abraham Lincoln believed.

            
               Gore : Let me tell you
a story about Joann Crowder in Detroit.

            
               Kemp : We will
greenline every city in the United States. Dana Crist of Lancaster.

            ( Van Woods, Joann
Crowder, and Dana Crist slowly and silently walk across the stage, accompanied
by amplified radiator noises. )

            
               Gore : It is a risky
$550 billion tax scheme.

            
               Kemp : $50 trillion.
$550 billion. $50 trillion.

            
               Gore : Risky $550
billion tax scheme.

            
               Kemp : $8 billion, $23
billion. Bob Dole suggested a commission.

            
               Gore : Our plan.

            
               Kemp : $6- or
$7-trillion economy. $6 trillion in 15 years.

            
               Gore : A
balanced-budget plan.

            
               Kemp : I will answer
the question. There is no consensus. Haiti is very ambiguous at best.

            
               Gore : It was a tense
moment. And this is helping.

            
               Kemp : We need more
chairs. We need a bigger table.

            
               Gore : These are parts
of the plan. Our plan.

            
               Kemp : Strong
community, strong family. Strong economy, strong communities, strong families.
The word "family." As strong as a family, a strong job. Strong community,
strong schools.

            
               Gore : I don't agree
with their plan. We have a plan. We also have a plan. We also have a plan. Our
plan. This plan. Risky scheme. Our plan.

            ( Dance impressions of
the Plan and the Scheme in terrible combat. )

            

               Act III
            

            
               San
Diego, Calif.
            

            
               Dole ( as
before ): I got lots of relatives.

            
               Clinton ( as
before ): What really matters is what happens. We stand on the brink. What
really matters is what we can do. We have to go on. If we can do those things,
we can build that bridge.

            
               Dole : I have a little
foundation. We don't talk about it.

            
               Voter : I have an Amway
business.

            
               Clinton : Good for
you.

            
               Voter : My name's Jack
Flack. I'm a retired Air Force pilot.

            
               Clinton : Two different
things. Let's talk about them separately.

            
               Dole : This is
America.

            
               Clinton : I still
remember a woman I met 10 years ago. I met that woman again. I want to make
more people like that woman.

            
               Dole : This is about
America.

            
               Clinton : My whole
administration is about your future.

            
               Voter : I'm a martial
arts instructor and a father.

            
               Clinton : I never go
anywhere, it seems like, where I don't meet somebody. In Longview, Texas, the
other day, I met a woman who was almost in tears.

            
               Dole : I see my friend,
Senator Mitchell.

            
               Clinton : I met a lady
in Colorado Springs about seven weeks ago now. I visited a Chrysler dealership
in Japan.

            
               Dole : I don't think
so.

            
               Voter : I'm a travel
agent.

            
               Clinton : I'm for
it.

            
               Dole : After midnight
one morning, in the dark of night--he proposed it.

            
               Voter : I am Verda
Strategus. I think it's a real problem.

            
               Clinton : How many of
you like it?

            
               Dole : The L.A.
Times discovers it.

            
               Clinton : It's going to
help everybody.

            
               Dole : I'm not
suggesting it be done, but at least we ought to look at it.

            ( It does not
appear. )

            
               Clinton
( wearily ): I visited a Chrysler dealership in Tokyo.

            
               Dole ( darkly ):
No doubt about it.

            ( Dole and Clinton turn
together and look ahead. Suddenly--it appears. )

            
               Clinton : That's the
kind of thing we need to do!

            
               Dole : That's the way
it's always been! And that's the way it will always be!

            
               Clinton : That's the
way the system works!

            
               Dole : This is
America!

            
               Clinton : That's all we
need to know!

            
               Dole : This is what
it's all about!

            
               Clinton : If you don't
leave this room with anything else--

            ( Curtain. )

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Patrick O'Brien's <I>The Last Campaign</I>

            ... hard upon forging
their unexpected alliance amid the quadrennial panoply of the Grand Old Party's
nominating convention, our protagonists, acting in unavoidable response to the
exigencies of a contest dominated by the incumbent's strategy and tactics, set
out for the heartland in a manner similar to his, where, beneath storm-riven
skies suggestive of incunabular Turners, the desperate reality of their task
began to reveal itself, rising like a black basalt orogeny from the soft soils
of internecine enthusiasm.

            Chapter 5

            ... the locomotive, a diesel-burning Class 2900
Santa Fe 4-8-4 that had been constructed in 1943 but had survived the decades
most admirably and now gleamed like a Secret Service agent's lapel pin, was
gaining speed swiftly, its one hundred and five tons departing another
whistle-stop in another anonymous town whose inhabitants clustered where the
rails seemed to converge, their fluttering hands and smiling faces congealed
into a tuberous mirage that already was beginning to deliquesce, its bipedal
spores gamboling away from the station where, only moments before, the
candidates had stood to receive the traditional accolade from the traditional
close-packed crowd.

            The last car, with its
funereal platform and tufts of bunting, gave off a flapping chorus that
enveloped Dole and Kemp as they looked backward down the rails. Around them
edged subalterns, each plucking away like a blue-suited migrant worker the
decorations that went up before each stop. The crew had to work quickly, lest
momentum send the froufrou and gewgaws drifting onto the roadbed. In a minute
the removal had been accomplished, and the two men on whose behalf this
excursion had been undertaken again had the expanded-steel protuberance to
themselves. Even Glassner, for dog's years Dole's body man and coat carrier,
had retired to the common area, where the staff would be attempting its usual
stab at gaiety. They believed in Bob Dole; they had to believe in him, even as
his brooding presence infected the farthest corners of the campaign with an
acidity specific to him. His people would never admit what he was admitting:
that the prize he had chased almost all his adult life was bound to elude him
in the most humiliating manner.

            His capacity for gloom had ever equalled his capacity for
work, but he could never have foreseen his worst musings out-galloped by the
campaign of 1996, a broken-backed stumble in which no error was too small to
convert into an enormous problem. He had, in his wretched twenties, dangling by
a wrecked arm on a homemade exercise gibbet, accepted, no, hugged to himself
the knowledge that life was hard and then you died. It was damnably unnatural,
this state to which he had most ironically ascended. When things were in their
proper order, a buoyant spirit led, not a mordant one, and what was he if not
the most mordant man in America? It was a cruel fate to replay in parallax the
role he had taken decades back with the affable Ford, a man who, like Kemp,
could be counted on to float above any malaise like an empty water cask. It was
as if he had been struck by a hail of red Kryptonite and instantly become the
Bizarro candidate, immensely strong, yet unable to prevail against the
backward-beating current.

            Dole, who at the rally had projected a steely
excitement, the contained enthusiasm of a veteran politician in firm grip of
his emotions but willing to share with his supporters what bits of them he
must, sank back into himself, simmering in a glumness he wished he could
contain but knew he could not. Terrible things had always happened to him, and
always would; this was only the latest of them, but it was a terrible thing of
a specifically galling nature. He was the most prestigious passenger on a
hell-bound train, a shining doomed conveyance hurtling down a narrow and fatal
track. Through all his trials, darkness had always been his strength, an
obsidian girder holding him to the path; now it stood to crush him and, perhaps
not coincidentally, the entire Republican ticket, which his opponent's
ever-clever propagandists had labeled as "Dole-Gingrich," as if he and the
pumpkin-headed speaker had conspired like Jesuits to ruin the nation.

            Kemp leaned closer,
speaking more loudly than was necessary, perhaps to compensate for the rush of
air around them and the clatter of steel wheels beneath and behind. "Something
preoccupies you, Bob," Kemp said. "I thought that was really neat back there,
didn't you?"

            It was Kemp's habit to voice such banalities in an utterly
unironical manner, a gift of naiveté withheld from Dole since birth and made
even more distant by life. Why could he not have been born a Kemp, blessed by
luck and genes with the smiling disposition of a boy who is shown a stable full
of ordure and instantly concludes that there must be a pony in there somewhere?
Dole was sentenced to always know better than what he wanted to believe.

            "Yes, most assuredly," he replied, struggling not to
answer with a grunt. "I sense we might profit from a few minutes out of the
weather." Of course, there was no "weather" to speak of; but he had learned a
thousand years ago that sometimes, he had to say something.

            "Certainly," his running mate said, stepping aside
so the older man could enter the rail car. He did so with surety, using the
elbow of his bad arm to steady himself at the threshold, then raising both
fists in a stretch. At the far door, a steward stood.

            "Your pleasure, gentlemen."

            "A Diet Coke, if you will, please," Kemp chirped.
"Caffeine free."

            "None for me right the
moment, thanks."

            Dole pulled off his suit jacket and assumed his usual
position in an overstuffed chair on the starboard side of the car. He loosened
his tie. Kemp, still wearing his jacket, did likewise.

            "What troubles you, my friend?" he asked again. "Is
it the poll numbers? The back-bounce? We have as yet seven weeks to do the
things we must. Do not despair."

            "As you know, 'despair' is not in my vocabulary,"
Dole said, leaning suddenly so that he was looking Kemp in the eye. He wanted
to bark out the syllable that had become his hated signature, but did not. Damn
the myopic but all-seeing eyes of that news-ferret Cramer for having the cruel
wit to reduce him to an onomatopoeia. No longer could he essay an "Aaargh" in
public or private without apprehending in his marrow that he had become what he
was described as being.

            "No, what is on my mind is the damnable situation
into which we have been thrust by this contest," Dole continued, rising to his
feet. "Clinton and his railroad trick have forced us into a like strategy. I
would vastly prefer to travel by aeroplane--there is no substitute for the
swiftness, the ease, the comfort--but here we are, bumping along the ground
like a crippled millipede, waging a campaign that could have been waged in the
latter days of the last century."

            "But surely, Bob, you must acknowledge the romantic
appeal of the tactic," Kemp said. "At Nixon's grave, remember, it was you who
invoked the whistle in the night, the long rumbling procession of cars carrying
someone else somewhere else."

            "Yes, yes, I recall my eloquence all too well,"
Dole said, exasperated at having been caught in the web of his own rhetoric.
"But I was not running for president then."

            Kemp grinned impishly. "Bob, you have been running
for president since 1976," he said. "What would you say to a little game,
something to take our minds away from the press of combat?"

            The suggestion relaxed Dole. "Excellent," he said.
"Let us commence with a session. I will wait on the platform while you make
ready."

            Kemp, velellidous mop
shining like the crest of a blow-dried raptor, reached for their instruments.
Upon joining the ticket, he had instantly made it his habit to maintain the
equipment.

            Amid the clotted air on the platform, Dole let his eyes
ease into the night. "Bob, my friend!" Kemp called from the center of the
railway car. He was holding up a pair of grey rectangles, linked by a black
umbilicus and each winking a single garnet eye. "Excellent news! I have found
the Game Boys. The batteries are as fresh as new flounder. Lose not a
minute."

            Dole could never have predicted that in this, his
grimmest hour, after all these years of morosely pursuing the presidency, he
would come to enjoy as his particular friend a chronically cheery former
footballer who could broadcast an enthusiasm for gimcrack economic theory in
such a way that one could not tell if he was embracing it or mocking it. Now,
as he squinted at the red lights in Kemp's fists and felt his companion's boon
personality radiating in his direction, he also faced the knowledge that life
was more durable than pain, more difficult than you could have imagined, and
yet still you lived, as he now lived, seeing that his last campaign, the battle
to the candidacy, would be his last success. He stepped inside and closed the
door on the wind.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Culture of Impotence

            Penile injections are the
most frequently prescribed antidote for male impotence. According to the
medical literature, the FDA-approved medication works like this:

            The
impotent excuses himself from foreplay with his partner and enters the
bathroom. Here, he fills a syringe with the muscle-relaxant prostaglandin and
swabs a spot near the base of his penis with rubbing alcohol. Next, clasping
the head of his penis with one hand, the impotent inserts the needle about two
centimeters into the shaft. The needle must penetrate to the corpora
cavernosa--the rods of spongy tissue in the penis core. The user plunges the
syringe and almost immediately the prostaglandin loosens the muscles that
control circulation to the penis. The sting passes quickly and blood rushes
in--even a penis that has been limp for decades will spring to erection. To
prevent the puncture from turning black and blue, the impotent applies pressure
to the spot for the next 30 seconds.

            Finally, after five minutes or so, the impotent emerges
from the bathroom sporting a dandy hard-on, not to mention the confidence that
his coach won't turn into a pumpkin for half an hour, regardless of how many
times he orgasms.

            Thanks to prostaglandin, an
economy, even a culture, of impotence now flourishes in America. Extrapolating
from local studies, urologists estimate that more than 200,000 men injected the
drug into their sex organ last year (at about $20 a pop), and a total of
650,000 men sought treatments for impotence, up 43 percent from 1994.

            According
to Business Week , U.S. men spent an estimated $665 million in pursuit of
erection last year. Clinics that diagnose impotence and teach the afflicted how
to inject themselves have set up shop in most major American cities. Doing
business under academic-sounding names like "Integrated Medical Resources,"
these clinics advertise their services on all-sports radio stations, cable TV
channels, and mass transit. (The bus ads give impotence treatment a friendly
face, usually depicting a balding, pocket-protector-wearing doctor.) Impotence
doctors have also helped found 55 chapters of Impotents Anonymous, and dozens
of telephone hot lines, to help the unarousable cope and steer them to medical
treatment. Plus, pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop simpler ways to
deliver the drug than injections. A tiny tablet cooked up by Pfizer, awaiting
FDA approval, allows men to stuff a drug similar to prostaglandin straight into
their urethra.

            
When urologists pitch impotence cures,
investment bankers and venture capitalists swoon--and for good reason. Between
10 and 30 million American men suffer from impotence, most of them around the
age of 60. Not only do most of these men have the time to fret over their
fading virility, most have the disposable income to indulge their anxieties.
And the demographic is burgeoning, giving a new meaning to the phrase "baby
boom."

            But the culture of impotence
cannot be reduced to money-grubbing doctors and Wall Street shysters exploiting
the worst fears of the graying guys on the golf course. The conventional wisdom
about impotence has changed: What was once considered a normal part of the
aging process is now considered a treatable medical condition. "If a man has a
penis he can get an erection," says Irwin Goldstein, author of The Potent
Male and a urologist at Boston University. "[Prostaglandin] is literally a
magic potion that powerfully restores--safely, without any side effects--what
was once lost," says the Web site of Uri Peles, a Los Angeles urologist. New
York urologist Edward Moses employs the same overheated rhetoric on his Web
site: "For many men, life without sex can be likened to a watercolor painting
that should possess all of the vibrant colors of life, but which has been
reduced to sterile black and white."

            Attribute
some of the doctors' enthusiasm to the novelty of their powers. A decade
ago--before penile injections--doctors thought of impotence as a psychological
problem or an unavoidable consequence of aging. (As the circulatory system
goes, so goes the reliability of erections. According to a National Institutes
of Health report, 70 percent of impotence cases among older men can be traced
to cardiovascular problems.) With the advent of the new medication, the doctors
now had a cure in their bag, allowing them to shelve the psychological
explanations trumpeted by venerable sex gurus like Masters and Johnson and
Alfred Kinsey, as well as the ancient belief that growing old means growing
soft. Goldstein epitomizes the new conventional wisdom: "[I]mpotence is
basically a plumbing problem," he says. To fix it, a doctor needs to get under
the sink with drugs, not into the head with talk.

            Yet, in their haste and fervor to cure, urologists may have
debunked too many old assumptions about impotence and invested too much faith
in their new power to make men hard.

            Indeed, many impotents do
suffer from an exclusively medical problem. Diabetes, cardiovascular problems,
and penile injuries (more than 100,000 whacked in bike accidents have been
permanently deflated, according to the medical literature) all prevent men from
mustering a swelling. No amount of chat will ever restore their virility. A
stiff dose of prostaglandin for them, please.

            Still, the prostaglandin is
an inadequate fix for almost half of its users. Caverject, the prostaglandin
injection sold by Upjohn, gets a rouse in nine men out of 10, but 40 percent of
those who use it abandon the drug within months of beginning their therapy.
According to Upjohn, the leading explanation offered by the quitters is that
the drug doesn't restore the sexual desire or the pleasure they once derived
from sex. In fact, some impotence researchers assert that the success rates of
prostaglandin may not be much better than the success rates of placebos.

            What this indicates is that
erections--satisfying erections--don't reside solely in the groin. Natural
erections are elicited by the neural signaling of nitric acid, which in turn is
triggered by some desire, or thought, or external stimuli. You can
short-circuit the biology of erection, but that doesn't "fix" the nonbiological
problems that exacerbate and sometimes even trigger impotence.

            The marginal efficacy of
prostaglandin isn't likely to keep the baby boomers from buying the urological
spin. After all, their cult of youth has successfully preached that aging can
be staved off by medical intervention: hair implants, skin peels, and
liposuction. And by drugs, which have been their remedy for every psychological
malady: LSD to shatter hang-ups; cocaine to alleviate chronic boredom; Prozac
to lift depression. Look for prostaglandin to become a sacrament that allows
boomers to rut until death. The generation that still listens to rock 'n' roll
will consider it their right to keep getting their rocks off.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Unplug the DOE!

            George Washington had only
four Cabinet departments. Since his time, 13 new departments have been created
and only two eliminated (the Navy Department was absorbed into the Department
of Defense in 1949, and the Post Office was spun off as a federal corporation
in 1971). Ronald Reagan promised to close down two (Energy and Education).
Instead, he added one (Veterans Affairs). George Bush proposed adding another
(Environment), but didn't get to do so. The Republican "revolutionaries" who
took over Congress in 1994 pledged to abolish three departments (Energy,
Education, Commerce), but quickly retreated.

            If
President Clinton is looking for an easy symbolic way to cement his reputation
as a "small government" Democrat--and, if we know Clinton, he surely is--the
answer is clear: Be one-up on the Republicans, and actually abolish a Cabinet
department.

            But which one? The corporate-welfare-dispensing Department
of Commerce is an obvious candidate, since it mostly serves a big-business
constituency with an array of subsidies and favors. By punting Commerce,
Clinton could portray himself as a more principled defender of the free market
than Republicans, who tolerate the corporations that are chronically dependent
on the federal government.

            What's the
downside? Taking on corporate welfare might backfire, casting Clinton in the
discredited role of Democratic scourge of business. Also, using Commerce to
promote U.S. business abroad has shielded Clinton against critics on the left
who say he's helplessly infatuated with free trade.

            
Another option is Education, created by Jimmy
Carter--mostly as a favor to the National Education Association, which gave him
its first presidential endorsement. Federal spending on elementary and
secondary education remains small in aggregate, amounting to just 7 percent of
total public spending on schools. Most of the department's popular programs,
like college student aid and Title I, which provides money for educating poor
children, existed before the department was born. Another sacrosanct federal
education effort, Head Start, is not even under the Ed Department's
jurisdiction. Education does finance science and math instruction, but so do
other agencies.

            Junking
Education probably isn't politically feasible, though. For one thing, it would
anger the teachers' unions, a powerful constituency in the Democratic Party: A
full 525 of the 4,293 delegates at the party's Chicago convention belonged to
either the NEA or the American Federation of Teachers. And, having already
vilified the Republicans as enemies of learning for their proposed cuts in
federal education outlays, Clinton and the Democrats would appear hypocritical
if they abolished the Department of Education. Can't have that.

            That leaves Energy, which is perfectly suited to abolition
on practical as well as political grounds. Aside from the environmentalists,
who are fixated on renewable fuels, few Democrats care much about the
Department of Energy anymore. The chief motive for creating the department in
1977 was to regulate oil prices, which only exacerbated the "energy crisis."
Reagan's decontrol of energy has resulted in the steady decline of gasoline
prices (in absolute terms), and has removed the issue from the table. Even
during last spring's spike in prices, no Democrat advocated price controls or
punitive taxes on Big Oil.

            For the
most part, the DOE is an anachronism whose main function under Clinton has been
to generate embarrassing news stories about Secretary Hazel O'Leary's expensive
globe-trotting. Two-thirds of the DOE's budget pays for programs unrelated to
energy: nuclear-weapons production, maintenance, and cleanup. Those tasks can't
be eliminated; but they can, logically, be transferred to the Pentagon. Many of
the DOE's functions, like owning oil (the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) and oil
fields (the Naval Petroleum Reserve), can be privatized. (Clinton has already
proposed selling off the petroleum reserve.) Subsidies for solar power and
energy conservation likewise deserve the ax (energy taxes would do the job far
more efficiently, if the job needs doing); or, they could migrate to Interior.
Funding for science research at 28 national laboratories may be more
defensible, but even a DOE task force recommended an end to government
ownership of the labs. Much of their research is in commercial applications,
which belongs in the private sector.

            
Skeptics will carp that it is not critical
whether the department survives, but whether its programs do. It's true that if
the programs aren't winnowed down, not much changes apart from the stationery.
But, even if Clinton were to parcel the existing programs out to other
departments without appreciably reducing their cost, it would still make
political sense to dump DOE. Nobody will bother to compare the before-and-after
budgetary authority, but few will fail to notice that a department has
vanished.

            After shuttering the DOE,
Clinton could depict himself as a crusader against waste and bureaucracy who
succeeded where even Reagan failed. Like his agreement last year to a
seven-year plan to balance the budget, this step would change the terms of the
debate with Republicans. Before the balanced-budget accord, the GOP framed all
opposition to its budget cuts as fiscally irresponsible conduct by people
committed to everlasting deficits. Afterward, the Republicans were obliged to
defend the proposed cuts on their individual merits, an argument which the
Democrats generally carried.

            Democrats have done
themselves a lot of harm by refusing to discriminate between those programs
that are vital and those that are not. For Clinton to abolish the DOE would be
a bracing lesson in how to do just that. The question is whether Clinton has
the nerve. Republicans have long demanded smaller government. They should pray
Clinton doesn't give it to them.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Party of One

            I wish we
could sit around my kitchen table--just Bill, Bob, Hillary, Liddy, and me.
Actually, I might be pressed for time, so it would work better if we could
stand around my kitchen table while I chug half a pint of takeout
Szechwan shrimp, no MSG, before I run out to meet a friend who has also come
home late from work to gulp something before we connect for a concert and
dinner.

            But in my
spare 10 minutes, while I have all the major presidential candidates and their
significant but loving spouses gathered, I'd tackle what the first lady told
the Democratic National Convention "matters most in our lives and in our
nation--children and families." Because the Democrats were mostly
"triangulating" their children and families message to duel with the similar
message that came out of the Republican National Convention a few weeks before,
I'd tackle Sen. Dole next. Dole imagines himself a bridge "to a time of
tranquillity, faith, and confidence," so I'd ask him to what village or America
his bridge will carry folks like me--seeing as folks like me don't have
children or traditional families. "Soccer Moms" are desirable voters this
election year, but single women are off the charts--just a rung below
homosexual men who are contemplating, but denied, marriage.

            At our kitchen confab (which would probably, I'm sorry to
say, take place not around the table--since many single people live in
apartments where the kitchen is the size of a linen closet--but around the
counter), I might suggest that the first lady ask Janet Reno or Donna Shalala
if they ever feel stressed out or over-committed, even though they aren't
"packing lunches, dropping the kids off at school, and going to work." The
first lady, who detailed so eloquently the pressures faced by working mothers,
might be surprised to know that the current attorney general and the secretary
of the Department of Health and Human Services--working singles--also make
dinner, pay the bills, and feel a little tired when, on top of all their other
responsibilities, they have to take the dog to the vet.

            American
politics were a little more inclusive when campaign rhetoric revolved around
"it's the economy, stupid." Yes, Americans must feed their children, but
Americans--married and single--must feed themselves, too. But once the
Republicans and Democrats decided that the goal of all Americans must be family
and child rearing, an unpremeditated exclusionary process began.

            
At the Republican Convention, Dole urged us to
practice "right conduct" every day. Well, it's pretty hard to practice "right
conduct" when the very fabric of your personal life is judged to be
second-rate. But it's not too late to redeem single nonparents. We could change
the tax code to deter their behavior (and balance the budget) by slapping a 15
percent tax hike on every American who has not procreated and married.
(Are you listening, Mr. Dole? You could even punish the teachers' unions for
their sinful ways with a 15 percent tax hike of their own. Single nonparent
members of these unions could be slapped with a 30 percent tax hike.)

            Why are
single people are so vilified? Many of them have more time than the
married-with-children crowd to contribute to the community: I wonder how many
from each group volunteer for the Republican and Democratic campaigns, and how
the figures compare. Does Dick Morris know? Mr. Morris, architect of
triangulation as well as of the vice president's and first lady's family-values
speeches, might have consulted his companion, Miss Rowlands, during his "off"
hours at the Jefferson Hotel about whether she felt included in the Democrats'
agenda.

            It is precisely our current president's generation, the
"me-boomers" who, in unprecedented numbers, opened the doors for gay and
women's rights and, therefore, postponed or rejected traditional family values.
It seems disloyal, even a sign of self-loathing, for this president's campaign
strategy to work overtime to gain the admiration and respect of the center
while ignoring his own backyard. If Mr. Dole insists on playing footsie with
the religious right, shouldn't Mr. Clinton acknowledge his lifestyle left?

            Perhaps it's time for both
parties to consider "rectangularization"--to include in their focus groups
voters who care about health care and education but not necessarily about
getting married or having children. At the Republican Convention, Bob Dole
commended as right conduct "any screenwriter who refuses to contribute to the
mountains of trash." Well, I'm one writer who would promise Bill, Bob, Hillary,
and Liddy personally, at my kitchen table (well, kitchen counter), not to
contribute further to the trash this year. But on one condition: Both parties
must return to a genuine debate and stop bickering over who can present a
better image of wistful middle-American family life. It's irritating to be
ignored. But it's painful to be living a life which both political spectrums
deem as virtually un-American.

            It takes a citizen to make a
village. Not just a parent.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            

            

               Moderator: Herbert Stein
            

            Herbert
Stein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He is a member of the board
of contributors at the Wall Street Journal .

            
               Francis
Fukuyama
            

            Francis
Fukuyama is the Hirst professor of public policy at the Institute of Public
Policy at George Mason University. He is author of The End of History and
the Last Man and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of
Prosperity .

            
               George
Modelski
            

            George
Modelski is professor emeritus of political science at the University of
Washington. He is co-author, with William R. Thompson, of Leading Sectors
and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics and
author of Long Cycles in World Politics .

            
               Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.
            

            Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. is a historian, writer, and former special assistant to
President Kennedy. A new edition of his book, The Vital Center , will be
published later this year.

            
               William
Strauss and Neil Howe
            

            William
Strauss and Neil Howe are co-authors of The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. Strauss is a
generational historian and co-founder and director of the , a political satire
troupe. Neil Howe, a historian and economist, is a senior advisor for the
Concord Coalition.

            
               Herbert
Stein
            

            Perhaps because we are
nearing the end of a millennium, there seems to be a renewal of interest in
theories of history. We seek regularities in the long movements of history,
trying to find our place in a bigger picture than the evening news and hoping
to see what is coming next.

            Three kinds of theories of
history have been prominent in recent discussion--ending theories, wave
theories, and cycle theories.

            The ending theories identify
ages with distinguishing features that have come to an end or will come to an
end and will not recur. The distinguishing features may be dominance by one
nation, the prevalence of a particular social system, or the pervasiveness of a
certain technology. The Roman Empire came to an end, feudalism came to an end,
and some say that the Industrial Age is coming to an end. These periods will
not come back. There may or may not be common features that bring ages to an
end. There may or may not be a predictable sequence of ages, as in the Marxist
theory that feudalism leads to capitalism and capitalism leads to socialism--a
theory that, so far, seems to have been erroneous.

            The most ambitious of the
recent ending theories is the theory of the end of history, advanced by Francis
Fukuyama, a member of this week's panel.

            Wave theories postulate the
recurrence of phases with similar characteristics. Thus, History goes A-B, A-B
or A-B-C, A-B-C. All the As have similar features that distinguish them from
the Bs or Cs. But the As may be of quite different lengths from each other, and
so may the Bs and Cs, and they may have their distinguishing features to
different degrees. A recent wave theory is that propounded by David Hackett
Fisher. He finds in history long waves of inflation, each followed by a crisis
followed by a period of equilibrium followed by another wave of inflation, and
so on.

            Cycle theories, unlike wave
theories, suggest that the phases of history are of roughly similar duration.
That permits prediction of the remaining duration of the present phase and the
coming of the next phase. A simple historical cycle consists of alternating
phases of political activism followed by political passivity. Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., a member of our panel, is the leading exponent of this idea,
which was first put forward by his father.

            A more complex cycle is
described by co-authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, two of our panelists.
They visualize a four-phase cycle. These phases are 1) an era of strengthening
institutions, 2) an era of spiritual awakening, 3) an era of weakening
institutions, and 4) an era of crisis. The entire four-phase cycle is believed
to last about 80 years.

            Our panel to discuss the
validity and implications of these and other theories of history will consist
of the aforementioned Messrs. Fukuyama, Schlesinger, Strauss, and Howe; and
Professor George Modelski, of the University of Washington.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Gimme Some Skin

            
               Cruella
De Vil, Cruella De Vil,If she doesn't scare you,No evil thing will.
            

            If your multiplex is like my
multiplex (and whose multiplex isn't?), when you go to a screening of 101
Dalmatians , you will see six previews. Here is what Hollywood is preparing
for America's children: a cat movie, another cat movie, an ape movie, another
ape movie, a dog movie, and another dog movie. In the second dog movie, the dog
shares top billing with a dolphin.

            The coming plague of animal
films is nothing new. The last few years have witnessed Babe
(animatronic pigs, dogs, sheep), several Homeward Bound s (dog and cat),
a couple of Free Willy s (whale), and countless others I have,
mercifully, been able to forget. Everywhere you turn, some movie is preaching
interspecies comity and rhapsodizing about animals' superhuman intelligence.
Any day now I expect my cat to strike up a conversation with me, probably about
his three-picture deal with Castle Rock.

            No movie embraces animal
propaganda with as much enthusiasm as the new 101 Dalmatians , Disney's
live-action version of its old animated feature. It is the heartwarming animal
movie distilled into its purest form. The cuddliest animals (Dalmatian puppies)
are threatened with the most horrible fate (clubbing, skinning, being turned
into fur coats) at the hands of the most villainous villainess, Cruella De Vil.
(Strangely, we are supposed to revile Cruella for designing fur coats, yet root
for the hero, Roger, who designs violent, mind-numbing, soul-destroying video
games.)

            
Naturally, Cruella gets her comeuppance--a variety of Home Alone- style
agonies inflicted by farm animals . This teaches the requisite moral
lesson: It is far better to torture a human being than to allow a single puppy
to come to harm. In the end, the Dalmatians and their human masters live
happily ever after. Children cheer. Animal-rights groups coo. Parents drive to
the Pet Pantry to buy Dalmatian pups for Christmas.

            After watching 101 Dalmatians , I too wanted to drive
to Pet Pantry to buy Dalmatian pups ... and skin 'em. After 103 hectoring
minutes of the movie, I wondered: What's wrong with Cruella De Vil? What's
wrong with a Dalmatian fur coat? And where can I buy one? How much is that
doggie in the window? While the ASPCA and PETA chapters compose their indignant
letters to the editor and heat their vats of oil to a rolling boil, let me
explain.

            There's nothing wrong with
Dalmatians that a good furrier couldn't fix. The movie 101 Dalmatians
promises dogs that are good-natured, healthy, intelligent, resourceful,
gorgeous. Except for the last part, this is a lie. Dalmatians are high-strung.
They're hyperactive. They bark too much. They're bad with children. They shed
constantly. They're hard to train. (The Dalmatians don't even perform tricks in
101 Dalmatians . An Airedale does the tough stunts; the Dalmatians merely
bark on cue.) They're ill-suited to living indoors. Many of them are deaf, and
all of them are dumb. They are, in short, lousy pets.

            This
inspires an equation: Beauty plus difficult temperament equals fur. We do it to
minks. We do it to foxes. Why not to Dalmatians? Cruella has it right. A fur
coat preserves what is desirable about Dalmatians--their beauty--and eliminates
what is undesirable--everything else.

            
There are two main objections to Dalmatian fur
coats. The first is principled: Fur is wrong. It barbarically exploits animals,
it's unnecessary, and so on. To this, I offer only the standard fur-industry
reply: Fur farming doesn't have to be cruel. Minks live longer on fur farms
than they do in the wild. Dalmatians, one imagines, could roam more freely on a
large farm than in a cramped urban apartment. And Dalmatian farmers would not
simply kill Dalmatians for their fur. Dog meat is prized in other parts of the
world. (It used to be in the United States, too; on his Western expedition with
Clark, Meriwether Lewis raved about it.) Dalmatian farmers can set up shop in
places where dog meat is eaten. Maybe Dalmatian burger is an ecologically
efficient substitute for beef (though it might dampen enthusiasm for McDonald's
current 101 Dalmatians promotional campaign).

            The
second objection to Dalmatian farming is visceral. The mere thought of farming
dogs for fur nauseates you. With this objection, I sympathize. Dogs are
charming. People love their dogs, even their Dalmatians. They see something
grotesque in the idea of making them into winter outerwear. It offends common
decency.

            Yet, we do cruel things to animals--smart animals,
affectionate animals, cute animals--all the time. People raised on farms
understand this. Pigs are sociable, loving, and a hell of a lot brighter than
Dalmatians. Have you seen what gets done to them ? Do farmers weep about
it? Calves are adorable. But veal is delicious.

            Of course, it is argued, the
dog--man's best friend, the family pet--is different. So says modern bourgeois
America, which has turned the pet into a full-fledged member of the nuclear
family, even more sacred than other human beings (such as curmudgeonly aunts).
Disney, by anthropomorphizing its critters, exploits this American
mushy-mindedness, and makes us forget that pets are, in the end, just animals.
But God gave man dominion over the beasts of the earth: If an animal has
economic utility, we should farm it.

            In 1991, when Disney
re-released the animated 101 Dalmatians , demand for Dalmatians soared.
Here is a prediction. This December, it will happen again: Tens of thousands of
children will hound their parents into buying charming Dalmatian pups for
Christmas. As before, many of those charming pups will, in two years, grow up
into charmless dogs. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, will be abandoned or
dropped at the pound. They will be shut up in cages. Later, they will be
euthanized.

            Now why is that better than
becoming a fur coat?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The ABCs of Communitarianism

            Sometime over the last two
years, someone somewhere must have decreed that the intellectual buzzword of
the '90s was to be "communitarianism." Only five years ago, communitarianism
was an obscure school of philosophy discussed in faculty seminars; today, its
ideas are splashed across People magazine and on network TV. "Community"
and "civil society," the two mantras of the movement, are part of everyday
political discourse.

            
Curiously, in a climate of polarized political discourse, everyone is a
communitarian. The movement's cheerleaders can be found across the political
spectrum, from Hillary Clinton to Barbra Streisand to Pat Buchanan. On the
left, large liberal foundations like Ford and Carnegie, the bellwethers of
political correctness, throw millions of dollars into projects relating to
these ideas. (The result, predictably, is that the magic words "community" and
"civil society" are sprinkled liberally now in all proposals for research
grants, as in "The East Asian Balance of Power--The Neglected Role of Civil
Society.") On the right, Policy Review , the journal of the resolutely
conservative Heritage Foundation, announced last year that it was reorienting
itself to focus on civil society.

            What is communitarianism? Where did it come from? How come
everyone seems to agree it is good? It's actually all quite simple. You just
need to remember your ABCs.

            *************

            
               A Is for Aristotle.
He is probably started it all. In his treatise on government, The
Politics , he famously wrote that "man is by nature a political animal,"
meaning that human beings can best fulfill themselves as part of social and
political groups, not as isolated individuals sitting at home watching TV
(well, the fourth century B.C. equivalent). Usually regarded as the original
conservative philosopher, Aristotle is popular now with "troubled liberals" who
worry that modern societies, organized around an individualistic, rights-based
creed, leave human beings feeling "hollow at the core."

            Of
these troubled types, Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel
is perhaps mostly closely identified with communitarianism. Along with serious
scholars like Michael Walzer and unserious publicists like Amitai Etzioni,
Sandel criticizes "minimalist liberalism"--the tradition made most famous by
John Stuart Mill--for too easily celebrating individualism and materialism at
the expense of social and moral issues. In his new book, Democracy's
Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy , Sandel tries to
revive an alternative American path, the Republican tradition, which, he says,
focused on character-building and citizenship. While their critique of
liberalism's reluctance to introduce morality into politics is trenchant,
left-wing communitarians like Sandel themselves are reluctant to advocate
strong remedies--say prayer in public schools or laws against divorce--and rely
instead on vague statements about the value of community life and
neighborhoods.

            Conservatives have few such inhibitions. Former Reagan
official and intellectual firebrand William Bennett agrees with everything that
troubled liberals say is wrong with modern society. His answer, however, is not
to talk about nice neighborhoods, but instead, to talk about Virtue. Actually,
he writes about it, and since his Books of Virtues , collections of
morally instructive tales from all over the world, are relentless best sellers,
one has to assume someone is reading them.

            The advantage that Bennett
and others, like neo-conservative writer Ben Wattenberg and Christian Coalition
spokesman Ralph Reed, have is that while liberals spend a great deal of time
analyzing the problem--liberalism's value-free politics--they are wary of
actually filling the vacuum with any kind of absolutist morality. They are,
after all, liberals. By contrast, conservative communitarians have solutions.
Both groups talk up abstract virtues like honor, commitment, and thrift, but
conservatives then propose specific policies that put into law their moral and
religious preferences in order to deal with all sorts of issues: unwed mothers,
absent fathers, unruly schoolchildren, gay lovers, and so on. It's a game
liberals can't win.

            
*************

            
               B Is for Bowling. One of the most important debates
among academics and policy wonks over the last two years has been, is it better
is bowl together or alone? In "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social
Capital," a now-legendary article written in 1995, Harvard's Robert Putnam
pointed out that league bowling in America has been declining for decades,
while individual bowling is on the rise. This, he contends, is a symbol of the
decline of community spirit and the rise of atomistic individualism.

            Part of the reason that
Putnam's article resonated so strongly outside elite circles-- People
magazine profiled him in a bowling alley--is that in using the example of
bowling, that staple of 1950s, Putnam touched on a powerful chord of nostalgia
for the America of that golden decade. A new book by Alan Ehrenhalt, The
Lost City , is subtitled Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community
in the Chicago of the 1950s .

            Ehrenhalt's book may be
the best of the new literature on community, because rather than waxing poetic
about community in the abstract, he describes actual communities. The result is
a vivid picture showing that the strong bonds that developed in those fabled
neighborhoods of yore were kindled by conditions that we might find
discomforting today--fear of authority, lack of choice, and poverty. People
stayed in neighborhoods, for example, because they could not afford to move,
and because other neighborhoods would not accept them easily. They attended
church services and neighborhood social events because small banks, schools,
and other community institutions were run by a local elite that enforced a
certain kind of conformity. Porches and stoops, those symbols of a vibrant
social life, stopped being used as gathering places for a rather practical
reason--air conditioning. Ehrenhalt himself advocates a return to the
choice-free, obedient life of the 1950s, but while seductive in the abstract,
it sounds more and more confining on close examination. Imagine having to go to
parties with your local bank manager so that you could get a mortgage.

            Hard-core left-wingers are
horrified by this rise in nostalgia about the 1950s, a decade that was seen,
not so long ago, as a grim period of pre-enlightenment, racist, sexist,
capitalist boredom. The Nation 's Katha Pollitt takes Putnam's very
example, the shift from league bowling to ad hoc bowling, and suggests that
"[that] story could be told as one of happy progress from a drink-sodden night
of spouse-avoidance with the same old faces from work to temperate and
spontaneous fun with one's intimate friends and family." Hmm. "Temperate and
spontaneous fun" sounds like something one might have to do in a work camp. And
the occasional "drink-sodden night of spouse-avoidance"--for both sexes--is
probably key to enduring marriages.

            B, by the way, could also
be for "baseball," but it turns out that baseball leagues have been growing
steadily over the last decades. And the number of soccer clubs has been rising
meteorically as well. The simplest explanation for this rise might be the
desire for a little exercise.

            
***************

            
               C Is for Civil Society. Civil Society has nothing to do
with Emily Post. It's a term used to describe that part of society that exists
between the family and the state--voluntary organizations, choral groups,
Rotary clubs, etc.

            Alexis de Tocqueville
noticed in the 1830s that America was brimming with them, and argued that they
were good for democracy. This celebrated hypothesis has by now become a
theological certitude in the minds of most American intellectuals. It recently
received powerful empirical support from Robert Putnam, whose 1993 book,
Making Democracy Work , documented that northern Italy is civil-society
rich and southern Italy, civil-society poor. Certainly the north has been
better governed than the south for centuries, but that is not to say that is
has been a better democracy. After all, Italy has not been a democracy for that
long. There was that fellow, Mussolini, and before him, the emperor. Perhaps
civil society is good for efficient government rather than democratic
government. Memo to Lee Kuan Yew ...

            Of
course, civil society could also be the Mafia, the Michigan militia, Hamas, the
Nation of Islam and other such groups involved in communal projects. But when
most civil-society boosters talk about the concept, they use it to
mean--arbitrarily--those groups that they like. So the left points inevitably
to nonprofit do-good organizations, and the right talks about church
groups.

            Consider the difference between the conservative writer
Francis Fukuyama and left winger Benjamin Barber, who, in their recent books,
praise civil society extravagantly. In Fukuyama's Trust , he argues that
private companies are an important part of civil society and that nonfamily
business activity is a key indicator of a politically and economically healthy
society. But for Barber, the author of Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is
Both Falling Apart and Coming Together--and What This Means for
Democracy-- a book President Clinton has read and praised--business, far
from being part of civil society, leads the assault on civil society. "Who will
get business off the backs of civil society?" Barber asks. Now it isn't clear
why firms don't fulfill most of the functions of civil society. Indeed the term
"civil society" originated with writers like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and
David Hume in England and Scotland in the 18th century as a way to describe
private business activity. On the other hand, you don't hear many conservatives
proclaiming the virtues of Greenpeace.

            Communitarianism was
supposed to be a third way, neither liberal nor conservative, that charted a
new course for philosophy and politics. But as this primer suggests, it has
become a collection of meaningless terms, used as new bottles into which the
old wine of liberalism and conservatism is poured. Community means one thing if
you are a conservative and another if you are a liberal--the same with civil
society, and even bowling. Call it politics as usual.

            
               Illustrations by Robert
Neubecker
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Mother's Little Tax Break

            Signing the
minimum-wage-hike bill last month, President Clinton hailed its passage as a
big victory for the working poor and the Democratic Party. But buried in a tax
package attached to the wage law--and completely missing from most news
coverage--was a small triumph for Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Her sweetener, the so-called Homemaker IRA, would increase the sum that
homemakers are allowed to put away in tax-free Individual Retirement Accounts
from the current $250 to $2,000 a year, raising their IRA savings limit to
match that of their working spouses.

            Hutchison originally
sponsored the bill in 1993; by 1996, over half the Senate had leapt onto the
bandwagon. Endorsements included every group from the Christian Coalition (it
promotes family values) to feminist groups (women would be the prime
beneficiaries). Bob Dole is still endorsing its enactment--even though the plan
is now law. (Dole included Hutchison's proposal in the economic package he
introduced after the minimum-wage bill had sailed through Congress on its way
to a sure presidential signature.)

            With so
broad a constituency behind it, why would anyone oppose the provision? Because
IRAs cost the Treasury money--which must ultimately be made up either by
raising other people's taxes or cutting their benefits. According to an
estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the IRA expansion would cost $267
million in lost revenue over a five-year period, which makes the merits of the
case worth a closer look.

            Supporters of the Homemaker IRA argue that the new benefit
is needed because the current tax code discriminates against single-earner
households. Families with two incomes can put away $2,000 for each spouse,
while one-income households can save only $2,000 for working spouses and $250
for homemakers. It's "another marriage penalty," Hutchison contends.

            By the
"marriage penalty," Hutchison means the quirk in the tax code that pushes
married people into higher tax brackets than their unmarried counterparts. That
penalty, however, is paid only when both spouses work. When only one spouse
works, married people are charged at a lower rate than the working spouse would
be if he or she were single. The benefit of the Homemaker IRA will go to those
who already enjoy this marriage bonus ; those who bear the marriage
penalty won't be affected.

            
And that tax bonus is not the only perk of
Partridge Familydom. Almost every tax law pertaining to marriage gives
single-income families more bang for their buck than any other category of
taxpayer. Social Security and Medicare are prime examples. Employees and
employers are each required to pay 7.65 percent of an employee's income in
Social Security taxes and 1.45 percent in Medicare taxes. (The self-employed
must contribute 15.3 percent in Social Security taxes and 2.9 percent in
Medicare taxes.) Social Security benefits are based on individuals' earnings
during their careers.

            Single
people and two-income families pay in when they are young and cash out when
they retire. However, nonworking spouses (who never paid Social Security taxes
because they didn't have an income to be taxed) are entitled to Social Security
benefits and Medicare based on the contribution of their spouses. Retired
workers collect Social Security benefits, and their nonsalaried spouses receive
half. (Working spouses must choose between their own earned benefit or half of
their spouse's.) After primary beneficiaries' deaths, their spouses collect 100
percent of the benefit earned by the deceased. The spouse also continues to
collect the full Medicare benefit. So single-income families collect 1½ times
the Social Security benefit and twice the Medicare entitlement a single person
with the same income receives.

            

               Health care is another part of the
homemaker bonus package. Most public and private employers that offer
health-care benefits to employees provide coverage to the spouses and
dependents of workers without a commensurate increase in employee
contributions. As a result, single-income families (and families with children)
typically get coverage for more people than do single people and partners in
dual-income households.

            Supporters
of the Homemaker IRA also make a feminist/fairness argument. Homemakers
don't get the IRA, they argue, because their contributions to the family and
the economy aren't counted as income. As Hutchison and Sen. Barbara Mikulski,
D-Md., wrote in a Washington 
               Times op-ed, "Failure to address the
IRA fairness issue tells homemakers: If your hard work doesn't produce taxable
revenue, it doesn't count." Because the overwhelming majority of homemakers are
women, Gloria Steinem and other feminists have long argued that their work
should be counted as part of national production.

            
But the basic premise of the IRA rules is that
people with income are taxed on their earnings. IRA accounts allow
income-earners to duck some taxation on that income if they promise to save it
until they're old. (Interest on IRA savings is not taxed until an individual
withdraws it. Furthermore, money put in IRA accounts is tax deductible when
family income is less than $40,000.)

            And while it may be unfair
that homemakers are not paid for the work they do, the upside to the deal is
that they are not taxed on it, either. Tax purists would argue that the value
of the homemakers' hard work--and the intrafamily benefits they presumably
receive in return for it--should, in fact, be treated as income and taxed, just
like the wages paid to outside service providers such as baby sitters and
housekeepers. But you won't find many in either the feminist or family-values
camps promoting that idea. As long as unpaid spouses do not pay taxes, the
whole notion of offering them tax reprieves is questionable.

            So is the
disparity between the value that Hutchison and her supporters apparently put on
at-home work done by middle- and upper-class spouses and the contributions of
women farther down the income scale. "Work is work, whether it is done inside
the home or outside the home," Hutchison argues. But you have to have money to
save it, and not many couples with young children have the luxury of tucking
away $2,000 apiece annually for their Golden Years. Moreover, tax breaks are
worth most to those whose high-bracket positions mean they need them least.

            By contrast, when it came time for Hutchison to weigh in on
the welfare debate , she supported a bill that would force single parents
on welfare to get a paid job after two years as long as their children are over
age five. Her mixed priorities when it comes to women were also revealed by the
fact that she voted "nay" on the minimum-wage bill even though it included her
own IRA proposal--and despite the fact that, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 60 percent of people working at minimum wage are women.

            Hutchison is careful to
explain she only intends to assist spouses who "choose" to stay home--not to
discourage those who work. But here's the rationale: "We are seeing, every time
we talk about crime in this country, that it does come back to poor family and
the values that some people learn at home," she says. "Anything we can do to
encourage the family unit and encourage spouses who are able to stay at home
with their children, if that is their desire, we should do it." In other words,
Hutchison is offering a reward for making the "right choice" to those who can
already afford to make it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Clinton and Blair: What's Left?

            America's next president has
much in common with Britain's next prime minister. Both Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair are comparatively young (and make a lot of it); suffused with energy and
conviction; and superbly effective on television, in front of a crowd, or face
to face. The likeness goes deeper. Clinton and Blair proclaim essentially the
same political philosophy, in essentially the same terms. They are champions of
a "new" left: reconciled to the central role of markets in the modern economy,
committed nonetheless to an active role for government, keen to foster new
forms of social cooperation. The closeness is no accident. Blair, much the most
effective of Labor's recent modernizers, has modeled his electoral strategy, in
substance and in style, on Clinton's.

            Something else they have in
common is a reluctance to admit what this strategy implies. Both seem unaware
of the price they have paid for their electoral strength--namely that, far from
reviving the left, they have realigned it out of any meaningful existence. For
modern anti-conservatives, the price of success has been moral and intellectual
evisceration. In both the United States and Britain, where there was once a
coherent (albeit often unpopular) alternative to conservatism, there is now
merely a tepid version of the same, with added self-righteousness.

            
Evidently, this is exactly what many voters want. A Clinton campaign button
puts it nicely: "At least he cares." In Britain, likewise, those who vote for
New Labor in the forthcoming election may expect little to change when Blair
and his team come to power. The party's program consists largely of assurances
to that effect. But to say this misses the point. What matters is that the
Tories seem a callous lot, and Tony Blair is a really nice chap.

            Clinton and Blair don't appear to be faking it. What makes
them such exceptionally effective politicians is that they really do care. It
would be wrong to say they have cynically repackaged what they affect to
deplore. They radiate genuine conviction. If Clinton and Blair seem
unaware of where their success leaves "liberalism" in the United States or
"socialism" in Britain, it is not because they are hiding something but because
they really are unaware. They are moderate conservatives deluding themselves
that they are something else.

            In 1992,
Clinton would have been harder to dismiss as a conservative in denial. In his
first presidential campaign he promised a lot, not the least of which was
radical reform of welfare and health care. Nothing came of it. The health-care
reform fell apart, and Clinton recently signed a welfare-reform law that,
measured against what he first hoped to do, was a step in the wrong direction.
Despite these failures, Clinton's presidency has been pretty successful. But
the main successes--curbing the budget deficit, presiding over steady growth
with low inflation, shrinking the government work force, passing the North
American Free-Trade Agreement--are achievements of which any moderate
conservative could be proud. Unlike his failures, there is nothing very liberal
about Clinton's successes.

            
Clinton has learned on the job. This time, his
campaign agenda is more modest, defined less by what he stands for than by what
he stands against (immoderate republicanism). Blair's strategy is the same,
only more so. New Labor defines itself in opposition to two enemies: old Labor
and the Tories. Given the Tory government's unpopularity, the attack on old
Labor matters more. Blair therefore renounces the policies that he and his
parliamentary colleagues supported until recently. New Labor will not increase
taxes, will not increase public spending, will not renationalize the companies
privatized by the Tories, will not restore trade-union power, and so on.

            Now that Labor's policies,
as far as one can tell, are all but identical to the Tories', Blair's attack on
the second enemy, the Tories themselves, has to be handled with care. There is
a strand of Gingrich extremism in British conservatism, but it is not yet
dominant, so assaulting it as Clinton has done in America would serve little
electoral purpose. (This may change once the Tories have lost the election.)
Blair cannot attack the substance of Tory policies without attacking his own,
so he must attack the government's rhetoric instead. New Labor deplores the
Tories' introduction of market forces within the National Health Service, for
instance. Judging by their various policy documents, however, Labor will not
reverse the Tory reforms. Instead, where the Tories talk of an "internal
market" (so conservative), Labor promises "proper accountability to patients"
(absolutely New Labor). On education, labor laws, and many other matters, Labor
seeks far-reaching reform of vocabulary, while leaving policies by and large
unchanged.

            It's
worth noting that the Tories' "market" reforms (successfully portrayed by
critics as capitalism-run-rampant) leave Britain's health-care system far more
nationalized than America's would have been under Clinton's plan (successfully
portrayed by critics as a "government takeover"). In other words, the political
spectrums of the two countries are, to some extent, different. But Clinton's
and Blair's political journeys remain similar. In particular, to make good the
lack of new left-of-center policies (which voters appear not to want), Clinton
and Blair have pumped up the consoling left-of-center symbolism (which is still
much in demand). In both cases, this comes in two main forms:

            First is the apologetic mode. As decent left-of-center
types, Clinton and Blair implicitly say, "We would love to do all the things
that left-of-center parties used to do--but we can't, because the world has
changed." Capital markets, globalization, information superhighways, and
whatnot compel us to modernize our policies, keep taxes and public spending
low, pay attention to the needs of business, and so on.

            Then comes
the bright, forward-looking, seizing-of-opportunities mode. Clinton's campaign
proclaims a new "Age of Possibility" for America. Blair has just published a
volume of speeches and articles titled New 
               Britain : My

               Vision 
               of a Young 
               Country . As men of the future, Clinton
and Blair say they transcend traditional left-right categories. Old labels and
the conflicts they represent have become hopelessly outmoded. The tensions
between, say, competition and compassion, or efficiency and equity, which
blighted politics for so long, are sterile quarrels of yesteryear.

            
There is little substance in any of this. Yes,
the world has changed. It keeps doing that. But only in small respects have
developments in technology and the global economy narrowed choices over policy.
What really has changed is that many voters in many countries have decided that
traditional left-of-center policies (e.g., higher taxes, more generous
provisions for the poor) are not what they want. Many also wish to be spared
any guilt that might arise on that account--which is why Clinton and Blair are
on to such a good thing with, "We'd love to do that, but it's no longer
feasible." What about new politics, transcended categories, and all that? In
the future, Clinton and Blair say, false oppositions between competition and
compassion, efficiency and equity, will be resolved. That would be good, but
how is it to be done? Simply by saying, again and again, "We must have
competition with compassion, efficiency with equity." If only this had been
understood before, we could all have become conservatives much sooner.

            The
clearest proof of the new left's poverty is what Clinton and Blair have to say
about the "middle class." In both Britain and America, the term covers nearly
everybody. In the age of possibility that beckons, one thing that apparently
will not be possible is a policy that imposes a fiscal burden on this group.
Not content to rule out policies (however worthy) that impose a cost on most
taxpayers, Clinton and Blair often go further, saying that their main fiscal
goal is to improve the position of the middle class. Since "the rich" are a
tiny proportion of taxpayers, the only thing this could mean in practice would
be an improvement relative to the position of the poor--an extraordinary idea
for supposedly left-of-center leaders, however modern or forward-looking, to
adopt.

            Any party expecting its program to be taken seriously as a
left-of-center alternative to conservatism must surely propose one of two
things: Either it must promise to increase in the aggregate the quantity and
quality of public services (and the taxes needed to pay for them), or else it
must promise, within an unchanged total of taxes and spending, to redirect the
flow of resources so that the less well-off get more. In either case, stripped
to its essentials, a left-of-center program seeks to help the less prosperous
at the expense of everybody else (i.e., at the expense of the middle
class).

            It may well be, as
conservatives would argue, that policies of this kind are a bad idea for one
reason or another. Perhaps they would fail. Conceivably, they would fail so
badly that they would even make the intended beneficiaries worse off. This is
exactly the argument that the left should be having with the right, just as in
the old days. For the moment, most strikingly in America and Britain, the left
has simply capitulated. In order to win power, it promises to make no
difference. Clinton and Blair won't do anything a conservative wouldn't. But at
least they care.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Diamonds in the Rough

            Fourscore and seven years
ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business.
Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was
one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the
golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park,
and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed.

            
Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire
safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were
vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities
designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these
concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic
parks.

            Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991,
attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern
facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it
replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the
modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster,
and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban
neighborhood.

            A year
later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom.
Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily
asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark.
"Once this opens," predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, "everyone
will want one like it." And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in
Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee,
Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual
breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami,
and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost
as though a disembodied voice intoned, "If you build it, they will copy."

            While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally
praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that
all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place
than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective
perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the
test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The
exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new
parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.

            For the new parks' charms,
we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate.
All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially
for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury
suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks
are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for
instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on
13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that
opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn
Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)

            Or
compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old
Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an
indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are
farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row,
upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to
125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats.

            Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the
game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.

            In the old parks, the
structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats
closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of
some fans. Today's architects "remedy" the problem by placing the columns
behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It
should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no
impaired-view seats is an overstatement.)

            Added
tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away
from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can
be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden
Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about
eight rows closer than Arlington's.

            Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one
parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied
pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises
occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively
remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon.

            One of the classic parks'
merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for
stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the
games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered
most or all of the costs of stadium building.

            The San
Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium,
assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay
for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are
rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate
public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs:
If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in
the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is
contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000
tickets.

            You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps
affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats
in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for
instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the
present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.

            So too is the dramatic
increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the
ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that
lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A
comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating.
These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer
the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare.

            The gilding doesn't end
there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars
and restaurants.

            
Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life
better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow
them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to
allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and
convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these
measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and
Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state
governments directly for the money.

            Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land
and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome,
Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are
budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money,
they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner
management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest
weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is
cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park
warmer or totally free of wind.

            Lately, the cost of
stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose
stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively
carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs,
and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point,
the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845
million, and that's not counting the value of the land.

            The
good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All
Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a "35,000-to-37,000-seat park
with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles." Though his attitude is
commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps
an equal amount in interest.

            Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't
produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average
admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent
when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not
hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional
economic growth.

            But one compelling
argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when
properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location
where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can
walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting
to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience.
This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and
the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.

            "If you
put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money," says the planning
director of the city of Cleveland. "But if you put them in the right place, the
benefits are phenomenal,"

            Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate
much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations.
There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have "legs,"
retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams
deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking
revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the
White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee
Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most
remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.

            Modern conveniences aside,
the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast
interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too
many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are
hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best,
they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them.

            The decision-making
process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become
predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is
far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer
view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that
better unite traditional character with modern convenience.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Give This Subsidy a D-

            Before Bill Clinton starts
looking for ways to pay for the new aid to college-bound students he's
proposing--or Congress returns to its budget-cutting fervor--both ought to take
a refresher course in the perversities and absurdities that abound in our
current student-subsidy programs. There's big money to be saved. Just two
programs--Pell Grants and subsidized student loans--made up $22 billion of the
Department of Education budget (about two-thirds), and a lot of that money is
spent in dubious ways.

            About 10 percent of that $22
billion goes down the rat hole to students who, either because they lie about
their qualifications or because the government makes a mistake, don't, in fact,
qualify. Another few billion goes to students whose major qualification is that
their parents are divorced. Billions more send middle- and upper-class kids to
expensive private schools. Still more millions subsidize such odd groups as
single mothers with rich parents.

            To be
fair, Clinton inherited this mess. But he also made a big deal out of reforming
it. His accomplishment? He's stopped banks from taking advantage of the system
to skim a few hundred dollars off the top of each new student loan. Meanwhile,
the system's other, much bigger abuses (some created on Clinton's watch)
continue unabated.

            
               Silly Social
Incentives
            

            The Department of Education has the common-sense idea that
if parents have the means, they ought to help their kids with their college
costs before taxpayers are asked to assist. But Congress has created a handful
of handy ways to ditch rich parents. Follow these rules to become an
independent student, and no matter how much your parents make, the government
will consider you poor and in need of aid.

            Tie the knot: Suddenly
parents' income and assets no longer count toward determining whether or not a
student is poor. Of course, young marriage is the most likely to end in
divorce.

            Do nothing: If a kid sits
around till he's 23, he becomes an independent student, too, not because his
parents kicked him out of the house, but because, well, just because. And, for
the kid who can't quite get his or her act together, the government is willing
to pay for up to six years of undergraduate education. Has this subsidy
contributed to an increase in the number of years it takes to graduate? Today,
fewer than 40 percent of college students graduate in four years; a quarter
century ago the number was 50 percent.

            Have an illegitimate child:
This special qualifying factor, added by Clinton and the 103 rd
Congress, is solely for the benefit of upper- and middle-class single mothers,
who are now allowed to disregard their parents' income in applying for loans
and grants. Remember, getting married already separates college students from
their parents in Washington's eyes, and poor kids are already eligible for Pell
Grants and subsidized loans. As a result of these and other ways to make
students legally independent of their parents, the number of independent
students has skyrocketed--in the '70s, fewer than 20 percent of undergrads were
independent; today more than half are.

            Dump dad:
The granddaddy of all the stupid social incentives isn't for kids, it's for
dads. If you're a middle-class dad who can't afford to send your child to
college, divorce your wife. The taxpayer will end up sending your kid to school
because divorced fathers' income isn't counted under current rules. (Even
though married dads aren't legally required to pay for their kids' college
either, their income is always counted by the feds.) This policy helps explain
why there are 50 percent more kids with divorced parents among student-aid
recipients (more than a million in total) than among the general student
population, according to the Center for Education Statistics. Private schools
count the father's income in determining if his kids are in need--Uncle Sam
should, too.

            
               Waste
            

            
In 1993, a National Research Council study
found that more than 10 percent of all federal financial aid was awarded in
error. This was the 10 th study since 1975--and all studies showed
similar problems. A 1993 General Accounting Office report showed the breadth of
incompetence in financial-aid administration--between 1982 and 1992, 43,519
ineligible students received subsidized loans. Between 1989 and 1993, 48,000
students received Pell Grant overpayments; 35,000 received Pell Grants from two
separate schools simultaneously; and 101,000 students, ineligible for Pell
Grants because they had defaulted on federally guaranteed loans, received them
anyway.

            Consider
just the Pell Grants for students who have already defaulted on past loans:
That one mistake cost $210 million.

            
               Money Games
            

            When is a dollar not a dollar? Well, that's complicated--in
terms of being in need, here's the list of dollars that don't count as
dollars:

            If parents made less than
$50,000 last year, none of their assets count as available to help pay for
college.

            Dollars invested in a
house--even a $5 million house--don't count (this also brought to you by
Clinton in 1993).

            Dollars in retirement
accounts, including deferred salary, 401K plans, and IRAs don't count.

            Dollars put in the names of
other kids in the same family don't count.

            What
difference do all these rules make? People who know how to use them (usually
not the poor) can makes themselves look awfully pitiable. About 15 percent of
undergraduates whose parents have incomes in excess of $50,000 get federal
grants and subsidized loans, costing the government, on average, $4,000--which
is several hundred dollars more than is spent for those whose parents earn less
than $50,000.

            
               Money Games: Take
Two
            

            
Need doesn't depend only on how parents arrange
their income and assets. It also depends on where students want to go to
school. If Bobby Middle-class decides to go to State U., the feds will offer no
help. But, if he wants to go to Harvard, well that's a different story. What
the Department of Education really measures with its financial-aid programs is
relative need. If the same rules were applied to food stamps, here's how it
would work: Take the food stamps into a store and pick out hamburger and canned
green beans, the stamps are worth a dollar. Pick out lobster and truffles, and
the food stamps are worth $20.

            The Department of
Education's statistics speak for themselves: At two-year public colleges, which
Clinton says all Americans should be able to afford, 20 percent get financial
aid. At private four-year colleges, 45 percent get help from the taxpayer.

            This strategy is even more
costly to nonsubsidized students than to taxpayers. Consider the incentive the
financial-aid system sends even low-cost colleges--the more you charge, the
more aid your "needy" students will get and, since "need" is determined
relative to cost, the more "needy" students you will have. It's hard to find an
economist who doesn't believe this is a recipe for inflation. And indeed, since
the mid-'70s, the cost of attending college has more than quadrupled in real
terms.

            So here's today's lesson for
both Congress and the president: Whether you want to save money on federal
education aid or add benefits for more needy students, the way to come up with
the needed dollars is to stop subsidizing a stupid system.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Norplant Option

            Now that Congress and
President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade
poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to
revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same
objective.

            This idea surfaced briefly
and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in
an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be "offered an increased
benefit" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically,
to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five
years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.

            An uproar
followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to
reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many
Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of
"genocide." They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are
suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and
from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy
is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a "misguided and
wrongheaded editorial opinion." And ever since, the whole subject has been
taboo.

            
But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and
women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to
poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and
self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or
self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and
themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.

            The only
realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare
dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at
least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting
enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas
for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve
brand of social Darwinism.

            
Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare
mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of
these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become
self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the
prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare
mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be
essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs
programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.

            And under the harsh new
welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that
millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get
or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they
can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery
the taxpayers are willing to tolerate.

            Given the
stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness
and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea
has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year.

            
In a small effort to reopen discussion of this
option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in
which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash
payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or
another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be
free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with
additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it.

            The
category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of
welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are
competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program
could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For
example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be
restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually
active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.

            
Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing
effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after
some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the
government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't
strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy.

            How much
good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would
do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left
and right:

            
B ribing poor women and girls to implant
Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their
rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced
abortions in China.
            

            To the contrary, a government
offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes
on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining
Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented
from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence
reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free
contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid
funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a
crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication
(premarital sex), and adultery.

            In its groveling 1990
editorial apology, the Inquirer said: "Our critics countered that to
dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is
tantamount to coercion. They're right." No, they were wrong, and the
Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that
women would be free to "change their minds at any point and become fertile
again."

            "Many
people," David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a
subsequent commentary, "saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white
conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America."

            This is
pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original
Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its
Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the
nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that
race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most
of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from
having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and
children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from
any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they
are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children.

            
G irls and women on Norplant may be at
greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less
likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.
            

            A 1994
study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that
Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit
doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any
Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to
use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much
more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid
the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect.

            
N orplant itself may be unhealthy.
            

            The
possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new
contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of
course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive
is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in
pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks
inherent in Norplant.

            Plaintiffs' tort lawyers
have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a
torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include
many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the
apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the
Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and
effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects,
such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported.

            There
have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or
scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate
training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal
procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the
product.

            
I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception
only upon women.
            

            Sexism has nothing to do with
it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who
don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for
men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000
payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their
use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be
reversed.

            
               Giving teen-agers
contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will
encourage it even more.
            

            The weight
of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in
sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them
contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get
contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction
(although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to
limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least,
sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of
abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard.

            
T een-agers should learn about sex and
contraception from their parents, not the government.
            

            A parental-consent
requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a
requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents
have little or no constructive communication with their children about such
matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would
consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually
active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they
have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.

            Would a
Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually
want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about
3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which
end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will
be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of
pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or
so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty
of takers.

            
And even if such a program only delayed
pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds
would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their
own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.

            Norplant is no panacea for
poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might
do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the
cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will
be tiny. And it just might help.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Speech and Spillover

            
               The Supreme Court
probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues
are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest.
            

            
               By Eugene
Volokh
            

            
               (1,777 words; posted
Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25)
            

            One of the great recurring
problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has
held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value
that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are
obvious examples. There's no right to say, "Your money or your life" to a
stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods
about your product or your enemy's character.

            The Supreme Court likewise
has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually
explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have
no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers
can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled.

            But
it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying
them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters,
muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow
public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it
available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating
children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the
restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills
over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges,
should be restricted.

            This spillover problem is a recurring question in First
Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the
same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover
problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an
attempt to stop "indecency" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was
probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions
don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions
of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in
favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price
worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront
honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process.

            The most controversial
part of the CDA prohibits anyone from

            "us[ing]
an interactive computer service"

            "to
display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age"

            "any
comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication"

            "that, in
context, depicts or describes,"

            "in terms
patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,"

            "sexual or excretory
activities or organs."

            Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of
cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas,
including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms,
and bulletin boards.

            And
"patently offensive" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be
considered "patently offensive" descriptions of "sexual or excretory activities
or organs," especially under the standards of some conservative communities.
Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term
"patently offensive" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise
user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court
decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act
unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed
make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.

            The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children,
clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to
see material that's "patently offensive." There are two exceptions to this:
child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and
"obscenity"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's "indecency."
May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online
choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order
to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield
children?

            The
Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs.
Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be
unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was
unconstitutional. The law, it said, "reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan
to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house
to roast the pig." The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of
such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't
work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some
perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.

            But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different
approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica
Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on
"indecency"--George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" monologue--on radio and
television broadcasts "when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in
the audience." The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to
certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours.
But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to
speech in order to shield children.

            

               Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting
that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable
indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices
were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as
over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before
Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some
lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material
that's not technically "obscene" on the grounds that the law may shield
children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to
adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.

            Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is
Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a
ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect
children. But the court pointed out that there might be "less restrictive
alternatives" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium.
For example, the court said, the government could require services to take
credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block
area-code-900 phone calls.

            Still, the court was
willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it
suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might
even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate.
Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a
restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives
available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if
it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.

            

               Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't
tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough
question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening
adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must
be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium
suggest that the speech may be restricted.

            On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without
restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular
brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of
"dirty" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software
designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction
of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could
this be the "less restrictive alternative" that the government could use
instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children
you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software
designers' ability to keep up with the latest "dirty" places. Dozens of Web
sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow
even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be
missed.

            The purely technological
fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The
CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in
other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological
fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does
this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't
answer this.

            There's
a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and
thus more likely to be the sort of "less restrictive alternative" that would
make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be
rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked "dirty"
in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their
children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the
software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled "clean," with
the law making it illegal to falsely mark "clean" a page that's actually
dirty.

            Many people, of course, might misrate their
material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or
accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more
effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the
rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing
their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't
have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will
happen.

            The CDA is now in the
hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that
sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up
to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably
including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material
is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological
alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and
that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be
hard to prove.

            Ultimately, then, the
justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children
in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by
grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of
the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden
that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's
a closer question than many might think.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What's Wrong With

            This year of elections is
almost enough to make one give up on democracy--or at least on the idea that
democracies are inherently more committed to peace than other forms of
government.

            The
Israeli chief of state, who was totally committed to the peace process, was
defeated by a candidate who openly played on Israeli fears of Palestinians. The
victor's idea of peace-through-strength may make peace highly problematic.

            In
Russia, a majority of the electorate voted for openly nationalistic--even
imperialistic--candidates in the first round. Boris Yeltsin won the second
round only by recruiting Alexander Lebed, a retired general with frightful
views on Jews and other religious minorities.

            And in
Bosnia, the mere discussion of elections has exacerbated ethnic tensions,
allowing the most virulent nationalists to gain support, and led to predictions
that this democratic procedure could finish the country.

            What is
going on? Why is this most cherished belief not being borne out by events?
Could it even be that under certain circumstances, democracies might be
more warlike than other states? If so, what does that portend for us and
our search for a more peaceful world?

            The idea that democracies are the most peaceful political
systems is attractive and plausible, but there is little evidence to support
the notion: Fewer than a dozen countries have been continuously democratic over
the past century--not an especially large sample--and only two of them, Canada
and the United States, share a common border. Many of these democracies have
gone to war, and not always in response to attack.

            Still worse,
democracies--or at least the electoral systems at their core--have produced
monsters, some of them committed to waging war. One thinks of Hitler's
exploitation of the electoral system in Germany, but one can see similar, if
smaller, figures in Serbia and elsewhere.

            In the
countries emerging from the former Soviet Union, aggressive nationalism has
been a winning formula for leaders who can deliver little else to their
populations--not just Lebed, but Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic,
Armenia's Levon Ter-Petrosyan, and others as well.

            It's tempting to view these examples as transitional. Both
the Soviet and Yugoslav systems were based on the cynical exploitation of
ethnicity, so it's only natural that succeeding systems continue the tradition.
One could argue that the cure for despotism is democracy itself. But that begs
the question of why democracies, and often more established ones, have been
less than peaceful.

            The West's belief in
"peaceful democracy" endures, in part, because it celebrates us, because we
think that the spread of democracy will usher in a period of peace that will
allow us to concentrate on our own needs and ignore those of others. Our
conviction reflects a widespread belief that the people are basically good and
pacific, while governments are fundamentally suspect and aggressive.

            If our
cherished belief isn't correct, the reverse may be true--that under certain
conditions, democracies might be even more given to warlike behavior than other
forms of government. Totalitarianism kept ethnic hatreds in check in many
places, especially Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Now that the
Communist totalitarians have been replaced by nominal democrats, murderous
hatreds and regional conflicts have re-emerged.

            While it's probably true that democracies are unlikely to
go to war unless they're attacked, sometimes they are the first to take the
offensive. And once involved in a conflict, democracies may actually be less
willing than authoritarian regimes to end it short of "total victory." These
views may make conflicts longer and more bloody than they would otherwise
be.

            While authoritarian
regimes can make war without the consent of the governed--as any number of
democratic enthusiasts have pointed out--they can also make peace without
consulting the voters. Indeed, democracies that take too many risks for peace
may not win popular support, as the Israeli elections show.

            Nor
does democratization change the underlying reality of international relations:
geography. With the possible exception of Poland, countries do not move around
very much, and thus their geopolitical concerns and the conflicts arising from
them do not change very much. The last decade has seen the triumphant return of
geography in international relations and the enshrinement on the world scene of
the old American political principle that "where you stand depends on where you
sit."

            Russia's interest in gaining access to warm-water ports did
not arise under communism--nor has it now disappeared. We can hope that Moscow
will seek different means of advancing its interests differently than it has in
the past, but democracy by itself won't repeal these pressures. In fact, the
disintegration of the Soviet empire has recreated the geographic relationship
between Berlin and Moscow that was the seedbed of World War I and World War
II.

            These
observations don't mean that we should withdraw our support for democracy in
the former Soviet bloc. Democracy has done a great deal for all those who have
experienced it, but democracy alone is not enough. Transforming those nations
into peaceful members of the international system will require more than just a
few elections and economic reform. As the American Founders knew, the rule of
the people can be dangerous unless constrained by representative institutions
and constitutionalism. Only if these additional arrangements exist can these
countries--or our own--avoid disaster.

            We seem to have lost sight of the fact that democracy is as
much about procedures as about preferred outcomes, excusing Boris Yeltsin's use
of tanks against his own Parliament and his dispatch of troops to Chechnya a
year later. This has made many people in the region, who are still learning
about democracy, cynical about what the system means. And it has undercut our
authority as democracy's backers.

            Democracy by itself won't
solve all international problems; it won't relieve us--in Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's phrase--"of having to worry about defending ourselves." Instead,
we must work even harder to integrate these countries into the West and into
the values that have brought peace, prosperity, and freedom to so many people
here.

            That won't be easy. Many
will grow discouraged, especially in the short term, as more open politics in
the former Soviet bloc lead not to peace, but to more conflicts. But we
shouldn't blame democracy; we should only understand what it can and can't
do.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            We Are Pragmatic

            Let us pause, during the
New York Times' year-long celebration of its 100-year march to
journalistic dominance, to glance at the newspaper that may dominate the next
century of print journalism (if there is one): USA Today , a newspaper
that scarcely needs a Web site (though, of course, it has one), because its
front is a home page in print.

            For all
its obvious yearning for marketability and user-friendliness, USA Today
built its circulation without resorting to tabloid sensationalism. From the law
courts to the tennis courts, it covers the news straightforwardly. But what
does McPaper stand for? What is the philosophy of USA Today ?

            Large-circulation American newspapers, to be sure, don't
market philosophy, except sideways. A major newspaper is supposed to be a team
effort, a nonideological pursuit of the objective truth. Asking for its
official philosophy is like demanding the creed of the Chicago Bulls. The
likeliest payoff is a slogan on the order of "Get it Over." With a newspaper,
"Get it Out" is about the best you can hope for. But USA Today is the
lengthened byline of one man, former Gannett CEO Al Neuharth--and the
flamboyant South Dakotan spent years preaching the philosophy of his paper,
both before and after its September 1982 launch.

            
Neuharth, it turns out, is a more important 20th-century philosopher than
anyone expected. ("We Find Al Philosophical," the in-house headline might
read.) His struggle through the start-up and red ink of USA Today
succeeded in bending daily journalism to the principles of classical American
pragmatism.

            For years, media critics pounded USA Today : An
"explosion in a paint factory," the "flashdance of editing," the "junk food of
journalism." Asked early on if USA Today could qualify as a top
newspaper, the Washington Post 's Ben Bradlee replied, "If it can, then
I'm in the wrong business." Post literary critic Jonathan Yardley
condemned USA Today for giving its readers "only what they want. No
spinach, no bran, no liver." Critics cast Neuharth as the disreputable heir of
William Randolph Hearst. But try a different succession: William James; John
Dewey; Al Neuharth.

            No,
William James didn't take off on "Buscapades." And John Dewey didn't festoon
the Columbia philosophy department with the white onyx and black marble of
USA Today 's Rosslyn, Va., headquarters. But what, after all, were the
beliefs of the "pragmatists," those American heroes whose comeback in the
intellectual world (through present-day scions like Richard Rorty and Donald
Davidson) now makes them founts of wisdom to philosophers around the world?
James urged us to think of true beliefs as those that point to successful
actions, most of which result (in the sense of pragmatism's coiner, Charles
Sander Peirce) from a convergence of belief among our "community of inquirers."
James didn't mind if our beliefs occasionally took us a bit ahead of the
evidence (see his "Will to Believe"), particularly if that passionate,
optimistic confidence stirred us to make the world better than it is.

            Such sentiments are practically the anthem of USA
Today , which brings together the USA's "community of inquirers" faster than
Jerry Springer unites addled families. Some may see a latent liberalism (in
today's sense) in USA Today 's editorial line: its espousal of gun
control or publicly financed elections (to name to editorial positions taken by
the paper in recent weeks). But the argument on these topics is no less
practical in tone and substance than its more "conservative" recent stands in
favor of public shaming as judicial punishment or its endorsement of hunting.
Policies are to be preferred if, in proven practice, they save lives--or
dollars. On the contentious issue of gerrymandering, racial or otherwise: The
practice is to be deplored not on grounds of high principle, but because, by
creating safe seats for one or another party or interest group, it makes
"elections meaningless." Moreover, in pursuing racial fairness, there are
better alternatives available.

            James declared: "There can
be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference
elsewhere." What paper better embodies that belief than USA Today , which
recently ran a graph on "Rain and Drizzle: The Difference"? ("The difference is
the size of the drops, with drizzle drops less than 0.02 inches in diameter,
falling close together, and rains drops larger than 0.02 inches in diameter,
widely separated.")

            As for Dewey, he threw out
the false distinction between theoretical inquiry and practical
decision-making, proclaiming that all thinking amounts to problem-solving. For
the author of Experience and Nature and A Common Faith, the
smartest way to educate people was to give them the information and skills
necessary to solve their problems--not to point them to an authority who'd tell
them what to think or solve their problems for them. Which would be the paper
of choice for a man with such a mind-set: the New York Times or USA
Today ?

            Dewey
himself liked Peirce's definition of truth as the "opinion" on which all
investigators are "fated to be agreed." More than most papers, USA Today
steps aside and delivers the experience that Dewey considered necessary to that
convergence on solutions: statistics, direct lengthy quotations, complete box
scores. Why, it even runs pages entitled "Solutions." ("Trucks: What Needs to
Be Done."). Mindful of the fragility of "truth," and trustful of how a better
"truth" might emerge from experimentation and debate, Dewey thought we might
well drop the whole concept of "truth" and speak more usefully of "warranted
assertibility." Does any editorial page so clearly reflect that belief as
USA Today 's, with its regular "Opposing Opinion" and cross section of
positions?

            One of Neuharth's first articulations of his metaphysics
came in October 1983, in a speech to the Overseas Press Club in New York. As
recalled by Peter Prichard in his book, The Making of McPaper , Neuharth
condemned the "old journalism of despair," a "derisive technique of leaving
readers discouraged, or mad, or indignant." In its place, Neuharth declared,
USA Today delivered a "journalism of hope"--an enterprise one can
imagine James franchising under his "Will to Believe." It offered reportage
that "chronicles the good, the bad, and the otherwise, and leaves readers fully
informed and equipped to judge what deserves their attention and support."

            
Neuharth imposed his philosophy on the newsroom. Stories deliver facts and
information with minimal interference from reporters eager to be literary. As a
result, sentences are short and clear, often brilliantly compressed. "USA
Snapshots" and other regular graphs abound. Lengthy quotations from transcribed
interviews let readers hear newsmakers directly. USA Today 's modular
layout and bold type anticipated the typical multidimensional Web page, almost
inviting the finger to point and click, to follow Christine Royal through the
process of her cosmetic surgery, to jump to the daily profiles of Olympic
athletes, to explore the depths of the Bosnia power struggle. [See displayed
picture of July 1,1996, front page.] Headlines are supposed to emphasize the
positive. About the crash of a charter plane in Malaga, Spain: "Miracle: 327
survive, 55 die." Neuharth criticized a headline about a health study that
read, "Death Rate Drops," saying it should have read, "We're Living
Longer."

            
Other devices ensure that USA Today 's
editors keep the focus on the exact community the paper covered: the USA To
Neuharth, that meant the USA, not "America." In a 1985 memo, Neuharth
threatened to transfer out of the country any editors who sloppily allowed
"America" or "Americans" into the paper when they meant citizens and residents
of the United States. Personal pronouns anchor the headlines as they drive home
an idea James and Dewey would have welcomed--the USA as one big
first-person-plural community. Classics included "We Move Less Often" and
"We're in the Mood to Buy." If the New York Post 's candidate for
immortality was "Headless Body in Topless Bar," USA Today `s might have
been "USA is Eating its Vegetables."

            Yet, even in USA Today 's recent in-the-black years,
the paper has been a magnet for negative media-critic boilerplate. In Read
All About It! (1995), an attack on newfangled newspapering by ousted
Chicago Tribune editor James Squires, the poppin' mad former honcho
railed that USA Today "adopted an editorial philosophy designed to avoid
all controversy." In Who Stole the News (1995), veteran AP correspondent
Mort Rosenblum recycled the standard yuck that USA Today "is for people
who find television too difficult."

            "Balderdash!" a
turn-of-the century Deweyean might have replied. Is USA Today
uncontroversial because it opens up its agora, presuming truth will rise from a
clash of diverse debaters from all regions and classes of the national polis?
Can it be more simplistic than television when its front page alone regularly
presents or capsulizes more than 30 different news matters--far more than
you'll hear about on one edition of World News Tonight ?

            
               USA
Today 's journalism fulfills the political philosophy of the Framers,
themselves heavily influenced by the ancient rhetoricians (see Carl J.
Richard's The Founders and the Classics ). Both groups favored the
Isocratic notion of a truth emerging from ongoing debate over the
Socratic notion of The Truth emerging from an old kibitzer's endless
dialectical probing. USA Today weds that impulse to the pragmatist
program: If you give the people facts, if they identify an authentic
problematic situation in their environment, if you permit them to hear multiple
views, they'll converge on a truth that works.

            And so it happens every day in USA Today , as much as
it can in a paint-factory explosion. Big and small explanatory facts (how
airport security works, the percentage of people who screen each phone call,
why women reject technology jobs), and problematic issues (animal rights,
standards for criminal punishment) come together in a virtual Journal of
Pragmatism. You say the New York Times is a century old, and we
ought to join its celebration? Nah--too Cartesian.

            Back in his early Chicago
days, John Dewey tried to start a newspaper. He failed. Al Neuharth hasn't. He,
like James, knows the meaning of cash value. If James and Dewey lived today,
they'd be reading "Snapshots," absorbing the blooming, buzzing confusion of
"Across the USA," and probably arranging for Al Neuharth to give a few lectures
at Columbia and Harvard.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The logistics of presidential adultery.

             

            The Washington Times
could hardly contain its excitement: "A former FBI agent assigned to the White
House describes in a new book how President Clinton slips past his Secret
Service detail in the dead of night, hides under a blanket in the back of a
dark-colored sedan, and trysts with a woman, possibly a celebrity, at the JW
Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington." For Clinton-haters, Gary Aldrich's tale
sounded too good to be true.

            And it was. The
not-so-Secret-Service agent's "source" turned out to be a thirdhand rumor
passed on by Clinton scandalmonger David Brock. Those who know about White
House security--Clinton staffers, the Secret Service, former aides to
Presidents Reagan and Bush--demolished Aldrich's claims. Clinton couldn't give
his Secret Service agents the slip (they shadow him when he walks around the
White House), couldn't arrange a private visit without tipping off hotel staff,
and couldn't re-enter the White House without getting nabbed. (Guards check all
cars at the gate--especially those that arrive at 4 a.m.)

            Even so,
the image resonates. For some Americans, it is an article of faith: Bill
Clinton cheated on his wife when he was governor, and he cheats on her as
president. But can he? Is it possible for the president of the United States to
commit adultery and get away with it? Maybe, but it's tougher than you
think.

            Historically, presidential adultery is common. Warren
Harding cavorted with Nan Britton and Carrie Phillips. Franklin Roosevelt
"entertained" Lucy Rutherford at the White House when Eleanor was away. America
was none the wiser, even if White House reporters were.

            Those who
know Clinton is cheating often point to the model of John F. Kennedy,
who turned presidential hanky-panky into a science. Kennedy invited mistresses
to the White House for afternoon (and evening, and overnight) liaisons. Kennedy
seduced women on the White House staff (including, it seems, Jackie's own press
secretary). Kennedy made assignations outside the White House, then escaped his
Secret Service detail by scaling walls and ducking out back doors. If Kennedy
did it, so can Clinton.

            
Well, no. Though Clinton slavishly emulates JFK
in every other way, he'd be a fool to steal Kennedy's MO d'amour . Here's
why:

            
               1) Too many people would
know. Kennedy hardly bothered to hide his conquests. According to Kennedy
mistress (and mob moll) Judith Campbell's autobiography, those who knew about
their affair included: Kennedy's personal aides and secretary (who pandered for
him), White House drivers, White House gate guards, White House Secret Service
agents, White House domestic staff, most of Campbell's friends, a lot of
Kennedy's friends, and several Kennedy family members. Such broad circulation
would be disastrous today because:

            
               2) The press would report
it. Kennedy conducted his affairs brazenly because he trusted reporters not
to write about them. White House journalists knew about, or at least strongly
suspected, Kennedy's infidelity, but never published a story about it. Ask Gary
Hart if reporters would exercise the same restraint today. Clinton must worry
about this more than most presidents. Not only are newspapers and magazines
willing to publish an adultery story about him, but many are pursuing
it.

            For the same reason, Clinton
would find it difficult to hire a mistress. A lovely young secretary would set
off alarm bells in any reporter investigating presidential misbehavior. Says a
former Clinton aide, "There has been a real tendency to have no good-looking
women on the staff in order to protect him."

            
               3)
Clinton cannot avoid Secret Service protection. During the Kennedy era, the
Secret Service employed fewer than 500 people and had an annual budget of about
$4 million. Then came Lee Harvey Oswald, Squeaky Fromme, and John Hinckley. Now
the Secret Service payroll tops 4,500 (most of them agents), and the annual
budget exceeds $500 million (up 300 percent just since 1980). At any given
time, more than 100 agents guard the president in the White House. Top aides
from recent administrations are adamant: The Secret Service never lets
the president escape its protection.

            So what's a randy president to do? Any modern presidential
affair would need to meet stringent demands. Only a tiny number of trusted
aides and Secret Service agents could know of it. They would need to maintain
complete silence about it. And no reporters could catch wind of it. Such an
affair is improbable, but--take heart, Clinton-haters--it's not impossible.
Based on scuttlebutt and speculation from insiders at the Clinton, Bush,
Reagan, and Ford White Houses, here are the four likeliest scenarios for
presidential adultery.

            
               1) The White House
Sneak. This is a discreet variation of the old Kennedy/Campbell liaison.
It's late at night. The president's personal aides have gone home. The family
is away. He is alone in the private quarters. The private quarters, a k a "the
residence," occupy the second and third floors of the White House. Secret
Service agents guard the residence's entrances on the first floor and ground
floors, but the first family has privacy in the quarters themselves. Maids and
butlers serve the family there, but the president and first lady ask them to
leave when they want to be alone.

            The president dials a
"friend" on his private line. (Most presidents placed all their calls
through the White House operators, who kept a record of each one; the Clintons
installed a direct-dial line in the private quarters.) The president invites
the friend over for a cozy evening at the White House. After he hangs up with
the friend, he phones the guard at the East Executive Avenue gate and tells him
to admit a visitor. He also notifies the Secret Service agent and the usher on
duty downstairs that they should send her up to the residence.

            A taxi
drops the woman near the East gate. She identifies herself to the guard, who
examines her ID, runs her name through a computer (to check for outstanding
warrants), and logs her in a database. A White House usher escorts her into the
East Wing of the White House. They walk through the East Wing and pass the
Secret Service guard post by the White House movie theater. The agent on duty
waves them on. The usher takes her to the private elevator, where another
Secret Service agent is posted. She takes the elevator to the second floor. The
president opens the door and welcomes her. Under no circumstances could
she enter the living quarters without first encountering Secret Service
agents.

            
Let us pause for a moment to demolish two of
the splashier rumors about White House fornication. First, the residence is the
only place in the White House where the president can have safe (i.e.
uninterrupted) sex. He can be intruded upon or observed everywhere
else--except, perhaps, the Oval Office bathroom. Unless the president is an
exhibitionist or a lunatic, liaisons in the Oval Office, bowling alley, or East
Wing are unimaginable. Second, the much-touted tunnel between the White House
and the Treasury Department is all-but-useless to the presidential adulterer.
It is too well-guarded. The president could smuggle a mistress through it, but
it would attract far more attention from White House staff than a
straightforward gate entry would.

            
Meanwhile, back in the private quarters, the president and friend get
comfortable in one of the 14 bedrooms (or, perhaps, the billiard room). After a
pleasant 15 minutes (or two hours?), she says goodbye. Depending on how long
she stays, she may pass a different shift of Secret Service agents as she
departs. She exits the White House grounds, unescorted and unbothered, at the
East gate. The Risks : A gate guard, an usher, and a handful of Secret
Service agents see her. All of them have a very good idea of why she was there.
The White House maid who changes the sheets sees other suspicious evidence. And
the woman's--real--name is entered in a Secret Service computer. None of this
endangers the president too much. The computer record of her visit is private,
at least for several decades after he leaves office. No personal aides know
about the visit. Unless they were staking out the East gate, no journalists do
either. The Secret Service agents, the guard, the steward, and the maid owe
their jobs to their discretion. Leaks get them fired.

            That said, the current president has every reason
not to trust his Secret Service detail. No one seriously compares Secret
Service agents (who are pros) to Arkansas state troopers (who aren't). But
Clinton might not trust any security guards after the beating he took from his
Arkansas posse. Also, if other Secret Service agents are anything like Aldrich,
they may dislike this president. One Secret Service leak--the lamp-throwing
story--already damaged Clinton. Agents could tattle again.

            
               2) The "Off-the-Record"
Visit. Late at night, after his personal aides and the press have gone
home, the president tells his Secret Service detail that he needs to take an
"off-the-record" trip. He wants to leave the White House without his motorcade
and without informing the press. He requests two agents and an unobtrusive
sedan. The Secret Service shift leader grumbles, but accepts the conditions.
Theoretically, the president could refuse all Secret Service protection, but it
would be far more trouble than it's worth. He would have to inform the head of
the Secret Service and the secretary of the Treasury. The president and the two
agents drive the unmarked car to a woman friend's house. Ideally, she has a
covered garage. (An apartment building or a hotel would raise considerably the
risk of getting caught.) The agents guard the outside of the house while the
president and his friend do their thing. Then the agents chauffeur the
president back to the White House, re-entering through the Southwest or
Southeast gate, away from the press station. The Risks : Only two Secret
Service agents and their immediate supervisor know about the visit. It is
recorded in the Secret Service log, which is not made public during the
administration's tenure. Gate guards may suspect something fishy when they see
the car. A reporter or passer-by could spy the president--even through tinted
windows--as the car enters and exits the White House. The friend's neighbors
might spot him, or they might notice the agents lurking outside her house. A
neighbor might call the police to report the suspicious visitors. All in all, a
risky, though not unthinkable, venture.

            
               3. The Camp David
Assignation. A bucolic, safer version of the White House Sneak. The
president invites a group of friends and staffers--including his paramour but
not his wife--to spend the weekend at Camp David. The girlfriend is assigned
the cabin next to the president's lodge. Late at night, after the Hearts game
has ended and everyone has retired to their cabins, she strolls next door.
There is a Secret Service command post outside the cabin. The agents on duty
(probably three of them) let her enter. A few hours later, she slips back to
her own cabin. The Risks : Only a few Secret Service agents know about
the liaison. Even though the guest list is not public, all the Navy and Marine
personnel at Camp David, as well as the other guests, would know that the
presidential entourage included an attractive woman, but not the first lady.
That would raise eyebrows if it got back to the White House press room.

            
               4. The Hotel Shuffle.
The cleverest strategy, and the only one that cuts out the Secret Service. The
president is traveling without his family. The Secret Service secures an entire
hotel floor, reserving elevators and guarding the entrance to the president's
suite. The president's personal aide (a man in his late 20s) takes the room
adjoining the president's. An internal door connects the two rooms, so the aide
can enter the president's room without alerting the agents in the hall. This is
standard practice.

            Late in the evening, the aide
escorts a comely young woman back to the hotel. The Secret Service checks her,
then waves her into the aide's room. She emerges three hours later, slightly
disheveled. She kisses the aide in the hall as she leaves. Someone got
lucky--but who? The Risks : The posted Secret Service agents might see
through the charade. More awkwardly, the aide would be forced to play the seamy
role of procurer. (He would probably do it. Kennedy's assistants performed this
task dutifully.)

            In short, presidential
adultery is just barely possible in 1996. But it would be extremely
inconvenient, extremely risky, and potentially disastrous. It seems, in fact, a
lot more trouble than it's worth. A president these days might be wiser to
imitate Jimmy Carter, not Jack Kennedy, and only lust in his heart.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Beasts on the Bus

            Run for your life! Now the
press is actually hitting people. Even saintly C-SPAN has turned
violent.

            
               By Roger Simon
            

            
               (1477 words)
            

            Joan Egland, age 68, came
to a Bob Dole rally in Ames, Iowa, aware that politics is rough-and-tumble. But
she was unaware that it had become a contact sport, until a videocamera smacked
her in the head. "I'm sorry ," she said to the young cameraman who had
whacked her with 40 pounds of cold steel, "but that was my head you
hit!" The cameraman looked at her briefly, sneered, and then returned to his
shot. Joan Egland was a prop. Politicians' staffs assemble crowds to form the
background for TV pictures. The props are expected to applaud; they are not
expect to complain.

            Joan's husband, Stanley
Egland, 72, went up to the young man and tapped him on the shoulder.
Cameramen--officially they are known as "videographers" though some years ago
they were nicknamed "Visigoths"--hate to be touched: It jiggles the camera. The
young man whirled around, and that's when Egland gave him a shove. In Iowa,
when you smash somebody in the head with a large piece of metal, you are
expected to apologize.

            Bob Dole was oblivious to
all this, of course. Surrounded by cameras, sound men, still photographers, and
reporters, he could barely see the audience, let alone take notice of the
casualties in it. The room at the Iowa State Memorial Union was a small
one--campaigns try to get the smallest room possible to make the crowds look
bigger, and so the press horde must muscle its way through tight spaces. The
pencil press can sometimes hang around the edges, writing sardonic little
comments in their notebooks, but the TV crews must get good pictures and good
sound. That is why they exist.

            So the
major danger of the press is not, as James Fallows argues, that journalists
threaten democracy by their shallow and relentless cynicism. And the major
danger is not, as Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues, that political coverage is
"strategy saturated," "poll-driven," and "manipulated by artful consultants."
The main danger of the press corps in America today is that they can knock your
block off. The boys on the bus have become the beasts on the bus.

            The number of crews chasing the candidates around grows
larger every election cycle. At an event in Iowa this year, there were five
crews from CBS alone, including a crew for 60 Minutes , one for a special
the network was doing, one for Sunday Morning , another for the news that
night, and one for the "pool"--the take-turns-and-share system sometimes
imposed on the press in a futile attempt to cut down on this sort of
insanity.

            Multiply that by the other
major networks plus CNN and C-SPAN, add the local affiliates and independents,
and you begin to get the idea. Just a few presidential cycles ago, you would
see a crew from, say Tallahassee, Fla., or Rockford, Ill., only if a local man
was running.

            Today, TV crews from
smaller markets are in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states as a matter of
routine. And it's not just because time on the "bird" (the communications
satellite) has gotten cheap. Such coverage is good marketing: "Your Live at
Five NewsTeam covers Election '96!" It also looks good at license-renewal time:
Your station has helped fulfill its "public service" commitment.
License-renewal applications don't discuss, though, how many citizens you have
conked in the head.

            Also,
as Tom Brokaw notes, these days "every local television station and tabloid
show and news service and whatever is all organized for what I call Big Event
television. ... It's cheaper than going out and doing hard work or breaking
original stories or investing time in doing investigative stories. They get a
truck and picture up and they look like a national news organization."

            At the Holiday Inn in West Des Moines in February, Steve
Forbes showed up for a campaign brunch with 43 camera crews. "Please move
away," Kevin McLaughlin, the Forbes chairman for Polk County, pleaded with a
press corps that insisted on standing between Forbes and the audience. The
press did not move away. It couldn't: There was no "away." Cameramen, sound
men, still photographers, and reporters clogged all available space, jostling
people as they sat and ate. "I paid good money!" a man yelled at a camera crew
planted directly between him and the candidate. The sound man turned around and
mouthed an apology but did not move.

            Four days later, at lunch
time in Nashua, N.H., at Martha's Exchange, a restaurant and brew pub, Forbes
engaged in a staple of primary campaigning: a "meet and greet" (sometimes
called a "grip and grin") with diners. It is not easy under the best of
circumstances--few diners actually want to be interrupted by politicians while
chewing--but Forbes was still being followed by an enormous press contingent.
As soon as he exited his bus, he was surrounded by camera crews and boom mikes
arching overhead like brontosauri looking for lunch.

            Forbes entered the
restaurant and walked over to the candy counter where he purchased some
homemade fudge for $3.42, handing over a $10 bill and two pennies. (Steve
Forbes carries pennies? I wrote in my notebook.) He then put a piece of fudge
in his mouth, chewed, and turned toward the cameras. Which is when they surged
forward to catch whatever gems might usher forth from his lips and when a
50-ish woman waiting for a table got hit in the head by a camera.

            "Could you please watch
out?" she asked the cameraman.

            "Shut up!" he screamed at
her.

            "What did you say?" she
said to the cameraman.

            "Shut up, shut up, shut
up!" he screamed at her. What the prop didn't understand was that she was
ruining his sound. Without thinking about it, America's TV audience has come to
expect near-perfection when it comes to sound and video. The pictures must be
in focus and steady--no bounces, no jiggles. And the sound must be
interference-free. People are listening in stereo now.

            "These
crushes do get big, but it's what we do ," says Susan Zirinsky, executive
producer for Campaign '96 at CBS News (and model for the Holly Hunter character
in Broadcast News ). "Very infrequently do you miss a major shot if
you're a network crew. It doesn't happen ." And they don't miss the sound
either. "Sound becomes so critical," Zirinsky says. "If a whole news
story is one comment, you don't want to miss it."

            And so you don't miss it. Forbes swallowed the fudge.
"Good," he said.

            Then he strode through the
press crush, knowing it would part for him. But the aisles couldn't accommodate
all the cameramen and photographers who wanted a good angle on Forbes. One
cameraman leapt up on a table as astonished diners looked up at him. Then
Forbes plunged into the kitchen. "Guys, guys, we have food here!" a waitress
wailed as one camera crew dragged its cable over a tray of cheeseburger.

            The camera and sound
people blame producers who, when the competition comes up with a picture or
soundbite you missed, don't want to hear excuses about how you didn't want to
trample some old lady.

            And not
just old ladies. The next day Forbes went to Sunapee, N.H., where his campaign
searched out the quaintest general store they could find to demonstrate how
Forbes, unlike Lamar Alexander the day before, knew the price of milk. Quaint
general stores have quaint narrow aisles, and the few people inside were
quickly run over by a metal-packing press corps. Which is where I got slammed
in the head by a cameraman. As I struggled to stay on my feet, I looked at the
side of his camera and saw a C-SPAN decal. Getting whacked in the head by
C-SPAN is like getting kneed in the groin by Mother Teresa. "Does Brian Lamb
know you're behaving this way?" I asked my assailant.

            Neither the Federal Communications Commission nor the
Federal Elections Commission keeps track of injuries to civilians by the press.
All evidence is anecdotal. But any number of "anecdotes" showed up in the press
this year. Jeff Greenfield, writing in Time on March 4, told of a Lamar
Alexander rally in Des Moines where he saw a cameraman accidentally slam a
tripod into the head of young woman, "knocking her into semi-consciousness."
The Associated Press reported that in Center Barnstead, a tiny New Hampshire
village, Pat Buchanan was unable to talk to any civilians because of all the
media around him, and that a staffer had to rescue Buchanan's nephew from an
onrushing camera crew by yelling, "Stop it! You're squashing the kid!" The
Nashua Telegraph reported on jostling within the press horde that led to
a fight in which "one cameraman was left lying in the snow."

            If the cameramen are
turning on each other, maybe there's some hope the rest of us will be
safe.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Maledict<I>oratory</I>

            The high costs of low
language.

            Sunday, Jan. 14, 1996: A
day that will live in--well, not infamy, exactly. Blasphemy would be closer to
it.

            Early that afternoon, the
Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Indianapolis Colts to win the American
Football Conference championship. Linebacker Greg Lloyd, accepting the trophy
in front of a national television audience, responded with enthusiasm. "Let's
see if we can bring this damn thing back here next year," he said, "along with
the [expletive] Super Bowl."

            A few
hours later, Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys offered this spirited defense
of his coach on TV after his team won the National Football Conference title:
"Nobody deserves it more than Barry Switzer. He took all of this [expletive]
."

            Iwatched those episodes, and, incongruous as it may sound,
I thought of Kenneth Tynan. Britain's great postwar drama critic was no fan of
American football, but he was a fan of swearing. Thirty years earlier, almost
to the week, Tynan was interviewed on BBC television in his capacity as
literary director of Britain's National Theater and asked if he would allow the
theater to present a play in which sex took place on stage. "Certainly," he
replied. "I think there are very few rational people in this world to whom the
word '[expletive]' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally
forbidden."

            It turned out there were a
few more than Tynan thought. Within 24 hours, resolutions had been introduced
in the House of Commons calling for his prosecution on charges of obscenity,
for his removal as a theater official, and for censure of the network for
allowing an obscene word to go out on the airwaves. Tynan escaped punishment,
but he acquired a public reputation for tastelessness that he carried for the
rest his life. To much of ordinary Britain, he became the man who had said
"[expletive]" on the BBC.

            Neither
Greg Lloyd nor Michael Irvin was so stigmatized. "It's live television," NBC
Vice President Ed Markey said, rationalizing the outbursts. "It's an emotional
moment. These things happen." Irvin wasn't about to let that stand. "I knew
exactly what I was saying," he insisted later. "Those of you who can't believe
I said it--believe it."

            Swearing isn't the only public act that Western
civilization condones today but didn't 30 years ago. But it is one of the most
interesting. It is everywhere, impossible to avoid or tune out.

             

            

               I am sitting in a meeting at the office, talking with a colleague about a
business circumstance that may possibly go against us. "In that case, we're
[expletive] ," he says. Five years ago, he would have said "screwed." Twenty
years ago, he would have said, "We're in big trouble." Societal tolerance of
profanity requires us to increase our dosage as time goes on.
 

               

               I am walking along a suburban street, trailing a class of pre-schoolers who
are linked to each other by a rope. A pair of teen-agers passes us in the other
direction. By the time they have reached the end of the line of children, they
have tossed off a whole catalog of obscenities I did not even hear until I was
well into adolescence, let alone use in casual conversation on a public street.
 

               

               I am talking to a distinguished professor of public policy about a
foundation grant. I tell her something she wasn't aware of before. In 1965, the
appropriate response was "no kidding." In 1996, you do not say "no kidding." It
is limp and ineffectual. If you are surprised at all, you say what she says:
"No shit."

            

            What word is taboo in middle-class America in 1996? There
are a couple of credible candidates: The four-letter word for "vagina" remains
off-limits in polite conversation (although that has more to do with feminism
than with profanity), and the slang expression for those who engage in oral sex
with males is not yet acceptable by the standards of office-meeting
etiquette.

            But aside from a few
exceptions, the supply of genuinely offensive language has dwindled almost to
nothing as the 20th century comes to an end; the currency of swearing has been
inflated to the brink of worthlessness. When almost anything can be said in
public, profanity ceases to exist in any meaningful way at all.

            That
most of the forbidden words of the 1950s are no longer forbidden will come as
news to nobody: The steady debasement of the common language is only one of
many social strictures that have loosened from the previous generation to the
current. What is important is that profanity served a variety of
purposes for a long time in Western culture. It does not serve those purposes
any more.

            What purposes? There are a couple of plausible answers. One
of them is emotional release. Robert Graves, who wrote a book in the 1920s
called The Future of Swearing , thought that profanity was the adult
replacement for childhood tears. There comes a point in life, he wrote, when
"wailing is rightly discouraged, and groans are also considered a signal of
extreme weakness. Silence under suffering is usually impossible." So one
reaches back for a word one does not normally use, and utters it without undue
embarrassment or guilt. And one feels better--even stimulated.

            The anthropologist Ashley
Montagu, whose Anatomy of Swearing , published in 1967, is the definitive
modern take on the subject, saw profanity as a safety valve rather than a
stimulant, a verbal substitute for physical aggression. When someone swears,
Montagu wrote, "potentially noxious energy is converted into a form that
renders it comparatively innocuous."

            One
could point out, in arguing against the safety-valve theory, that as America
has grown more profane in the past 30 years, it has also grown more violent,
not less. But this is too simple. It isn't just the supply of dirty words that
matters, it's their emotive power. If they have lost that power through
overuse, it's perfectly plausible to say that their capacity to deter
aggressive behavior has weakened as well.

            But there is something else important to say about
swearing--that it represents the invocation of those ideas a society considers
powerful, awesome, and a little scary.

            I'm not sure there is an
easy way to convey to anybody under 30, for example, the sheer emotive force
that the word "[expletive]" possessed in the urban childhood culture of 40
years ago. It was the verbal link to a secret act none of us understood but
that was known to carry enormous consequences in the adult world. It was the
embodiment of both pleasure and danger. It was not a word or an idea to mess
with. When it was used, it was used, as Ashley Montagu said, "sotto
voce , like a smuggler cautiously making his way across a forbidden
frontier."

            In that
culture, the word "[expletive]" was not only obscene, it was profane, in the
original sense: It took an important idea in vain. Profanity can be an act of
religious defiance, but it doesn't have to be. The Greeks tempted fate by
invoking the names of their superiors on Mount Olympus; they also swore upon
everyday objects whose properties they respected but did not fully understand.
"By the Cabbage!" Socrates is supposed to have said in moments of stress, and
that was for good reason. He believed that cabbage cured hangovers, and as
such, carried sufficient power and mystery to invest any moment with the
requisite emotional charge.

            These days, none of us believes in cabbage in the way
Socrates did, or in the gods in the way most Athenians did. Most Americans tell
poll-takers that they believe in God, but few of them in a way that would make
it impossible to take His name in vain: That requires an Old Testament piety
that disappeared from American middle-class life a long time ago.

            Nor do we believe in sex
any more the way most American children and millions of adults believed in it a
generation ago: as an act of profound mystery and importance that one did not
engage in, or discuss, or even invoke, without a certain amount of excitement
and risk. We have trivialized and routinized sex to the point where it just
doesn't carry the emotional freight it carried in the schoolyards and bedrooms
of the 1950s.

            Many
enlightened people consider this to be a great improvement over a society in
which sex generated not only emotion and power, but fear. For the moment, I
wish to insist only on this one point: When sexuality loses its power to awe,
it loses its power to create genuine swearing. When we convert it into a casual
form of recreation, we shouldn't be surprised to hear linebackers using the
word "[expletive]" on national television.

            To profane something, in other words, one must believe in
it. The cheapening of profanity in modern America represents, more than
anything else, the crumbling of belief. There are very few ideas left at this
point that are awesome or frightening enough for us to enforce a taboo against
them.

            The instinctive response
of most educated people to the disappearance of any taboo is to applaud it, but
this is wrong. Healthy societies need a decent supply of verbal taboos and
prohibitions, if only as yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure and
define themselves. By violating these taboos over and over, some succeed in
defining themselves as rebels. Others violate them on special occasions to
derive an emotional release. Forbidden language is one of the ways we remind
children that there are rules to everyday life, and consequences for breaking
them. When we forget this principle, or cease to accept it, it is not just our
language that begins to fray at the edges.

            What do we do about it?
Well, we could pass a law against swearing. Mussolini actually did that. He
decreed that trains and buses, in addition to running on time, had to carry
signs that read "Non bestemmiare per l'onore d'Italia." ("Do not swear for the
honor of Italy.") The commuters of Rome reacted to those signs exactly as you
would expect: They cursed them.

            What Mussolini could not
do, I am reasonably sure that American governments of the 1990s cannot do, nor
would I wish it. I merely predict that sometime in the coming generation,
profanity will return in a meaningful way. It served too many purposes for too
many years of American life to disappear on a permanent basis. We need it.

            And so I am reasonably
sure that when my children have children, there will once again be words so
awesome that they cannot be uttered without important consequences. This will
not only represent a new stage of linguistic evolution, it will be a token of
moral revival. What the dirty words will be, God only knows.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Blood Simple

            The "Negro problem," wrote
Norman Podhoretz in 1963, would not be solved unless color itself disappeared:
"and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means--let the
brutal word come out--miscegenation." Coming after a lengthy confession of his
tortured feelings toward blacks--and coming at a time when 19 states still had
anti-miscegenation statutes on the books--Podhoretz's call for a "wholesale
merging of the two races" seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had
failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely
prospect of intermarriage.

            Podhoretz's famous essay
was regarded as bizarre at the time, but 33 years later, it seems like
prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between
1970 and 1992, the number of mixed-race marriages quadrupled. Black-white
unions now represent 12 percent of all marriages involving at least one black,
up from 2.6 percent in 1970. Twelve percent of Asian men and 25 percent of
Asian women are marrying non-Asians. Fully a quarter of married U.S.-born
Latinos in Los Angeles have non-Latino spouses. We are mixing our genes with
such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new
"multiracial" category to the census in the year 2000. This orgy of
miscegenation has not yet brought the racial harmony for which Podhoretz
longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope
once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool.

            The
Census Bureau's "multiracial" proposal has provoked strong reactions from
civil-rights activists who fear that many African Americans will defect to the
new category, thus diluting black political power. But the debate, properly
framed, is not just about "light flight" from the black community. The debate
is about our very conception of race. For a "multiracial" box would be an
admission that the five points of our modern-day "ethno-racial pentagon"
(black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Native American) are not fixed or divinely
ordained, but fickle and all too man-made.

            Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has
no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between
the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power
of race, however, derives not from its pseudoscientific markings but from its
cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed
matters so much that the biologists' protestations fall away like Copernican
claims in the age of Ptolemy. So the question, as always, is whether it is
possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually
reinforce one another.

            The
leaders of the fledgling multiracial movement say that their category, and more
broadly, their lives, represent the way out. By marrying across the color line,
by raising mixed-race children without regard to labels, they promise to
obliterate our antiquated notions of racial difference. As a newlywed who has
recently joined their ranks, I hope they're right. When the time comes, I won't
want to infect my Chinese-Scotch-Irish-Jewish children with bloodline fever. I
won't force them to choose among ill-fitting racial uniforms. That said,
though, there are plenty of reasons to wonder whether intermarriage can ever,
as one partisan put it, "blow the lid off of race."

            Foremost is this reality: Racialism is highly adaptive.
That is, no matter how quickly demographic change proceeds, we seem to find a
way to reinvent and sustain our jerry-rigged pigmentocracy. A case in point is
the term "Hispanic." Ever since this category was added to the census in 1977,
we've been told that "Hispanic" is merely a linguistic category, that Hispanics
"can be of any race." Today, amid a boom in the Hispanic population, we hear
that caveat the same way smokers read the surgeon general's warning. The story
of the last 20 years is the way heterogenous Hispanics--who ought to have
exposed the flimsiness of racial categories--became just another homogenous
race. The square peg, by our thinking, had been rounded off.

            Will
this happen to "multiracials"? Their numbers are still small. Despite the
quadrupling of multiracial marriages since 1970, only 5 million people today
qualify--and that's counting racially distinct parents as well as their
mixed-race kids. This may not be enough of a critical mass for multiracials to
become a race of their own. Moreover, multiracials have less reason to cohere
than Hispanics ever had; they include every conceivable combination of races,
and they are not bound together by language. Still, in a nation accustomed to
thinking of "official races," they'll feel pressure to form an interest group:
multiculturalism's latest aggrieved tribe.

            One possibility is that all multiracials, over time, will
find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less
stigmatized than "pure" blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than
"pure" whites. Their presence, like that of the "coloreds" in old South Africa,
wouldn't subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the
black-white caste system. Again, however, the sheer diversity of the
multiracials might militate against this kind of stratification.

            Yet
this same diversity makes it possible that multiracials will replicate within
their ranks the "white-makes-right" mentality that prevails all around them.
Thus we might expect a hierarchy of multiracials to take hold, in which a mixed
child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such
blood. In this scenario, multiracials wouldn't be a distinct group--they would
just be distributed across a continuum of color.

            Sociologist Pierre van den Berghe argues that such a
continuum is preferable to a simple black-white dichotomy. Brazilians, for
instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of
tipo , or "type," behold with disdain our crude bifurcation of race. Yet
no amount of baloney-slicing changes the fact that in Brazil, whitening remains
the ideal. It is still better for a woman to be a branca (light skin,
hair without tight curls, thin lips, narrow nose) than a morena (tan
skin, wavy hair, thicker lips, broader nose); and better to be a morena
than a mulata (darker skin, tightly curled hair). Subverting racial
labels is not the same as subverting racism.

            Still
another possibility is that whites will do to multiracials what the Democrats
or Republicans have traditionally done to third-party movements: absorb their
most "desirable" elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It's quite
possible, as Harvard Professor Mary Waters suggests, that the ranks of the
white will simply expand to engulf the "lighter" or more "culturally white" of
the multiracials. The Asian American experience may offer a precedent: As
growing numbers of Asian Americans have entered the mainstream over the last
decade, it is increasingly said--sometimes with pride, sometimes with
scorn--that they are "becoming white."

            We could thus end up with three reconfigured races. In the
"black" box: black-black offspring. In the "mixed" box: black-Latino,
black-Asian, black-white, and Latino-Asian kids. In the "white" box:
white-white, white-Asian, and perhaps white-Latino issue. Absurd? One need only
recall the baroque lexicon of "quadroons" and "octoroons" to know the absurd
uses to which our powers of taxonomy can be put.

            These cautionary scenarios
demonstrate that our problem is not just "race" in the abstract. Our problem is
the idea of the "white race" in particular. Scholar Douglas Besharov may be
right when he calls multiracial kids "the best hope for the future of American
race relations." But even as a "multiracial" category blurs the color line, it
can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial
adoption or mixed marriages or class-climbing, so long as we speak of whiteness
as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter.

            We return, then, to the
question of politics. Perhaps we should abolish all racial classifications.
Perhaps we should supplement the five-race scheme with a "None-of-the-Above"
category. Perhaps we should replace affirmative action with a class-based
alternative. Perhaps we need a leader of mixed heritage--say, Colin Powell--to
educate the public about the realities of race. Whatever it takes, though, we
need to do more than marry one another if we are ever to rid our minds of
color-consciousness. "The way of politics," Podhoretz lamented a generation
ago, "is slow and bitter." Indeed. But it is the only lasting way. Our ideology
of "blood," like blood itself, is too fluid, too changeable, and too easily
diverted to be remade by lovers alone.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Asian or American?

            Asian-Americans, who so
rarely appear in print or on television, can tell you that the media are no
mirror of the nation's complexion. But they understand that the media do
reflect the nation's psyche--and that is why the events of recent weeks have
been so distressing. First, U.S. intelligence analyst Robert Kim was accused of
spying for South Korea. Then, the John Huang/Lippo scandal broke, raising
suspicions about Asian money in American politics. Suddenly, there was no
shortage of Asian names in the news. Just as suddenly, a question was in the
air: Do Asian-Americans have dual loyalties?

            No one,
to my knowledge, has framed the issue quite so explicitly. William Safire, for
instance, has hyped the so-called "Asian connection" with dark mutterings about
"favor-hungry foreigners," "insidious networking," and "penetration by Asian
interests." The pull quote in his Oct. 10 column--"Selling influence to rich
aliens"--veers into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion territory. But
even Safire felt compelled recently to throw in a "some-of-my-best-friends"
paragraph of praise for hard-working Asian-Americans. The old Nixon hand knows
well that innuendo is effective only if well calibrated.

            Still, the unmistakable subtext of Safire's columns and the
press coverage of the Lippo affair is that Asians in America are just
that--Asians in America, sojourners and foreigners. Thus, when we learned that
Huang had raised over $5 million for the Democrats, little distinction was
made--reportorially or morally--between contributions from abroad and
contributions from Americans of Asian descent. Moreover, Huang's activities,
however unlawful, have now given rise to a presumption that "Asian-American
political participation" is merely a cover for some sinister foreign
agenda.

            Of course,
the notion that Asian-Americans are torn between an outward allegiance to this
country and a hard-wired fealty to some Oriental motherland has a long and
undistinguished pedigree. The indelible Chineseness of Chinese immigrants was
the rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The indelible Japaneseness
of Japanese-American citizens justified their internment after Pearl Harbor.
Small wonder that Asian-Americans have protested the tenor of the Lippo
reportage and the portrayal of Asian-Americans as people with divided
loyalties.

            
But the source of these stereotypes is not
solely white racism, or even the more subtle prejudices of Safire and his ilk.
It is also, to a lesser but still substantial degree, the racialist language of
modern-day identity politics.

            "One ever feels this
twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder." So wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, describing,
in The Souls of Black Folk , a "double consciousness" that afflicted, yet
graced, the coloreds of his day.

            Nearly a
century later, the metaphor of dual identity endures in our racial narratives.
The notion that minorities are instrinsically alienated from themselves--and
that the struggle is somehow ennobling--is a central tenet of multiculturalist
ideology. We see it in ethnic-studies courses and academic talk of "racial
destiny." We see it in the deconstructions of O.J. Simpson's blackness. We see
it in the ghosts and doppelgängers who populate the melodramas of Amy Tan and
her imitators.

            This bifurcation is intuitively appealing because it makes
concrete the ambivalence of assimilation, the gnawing sense among many people
of color that membership in the mainstream comes at a high personal cost. The
symbolism of split personalities and divided souls also has visceral power. And
there is a certain romance to the imagery, adorning the ordinary lives of
nonwhite folk with the dignity of redemptive suffering.

            But there
is too much that is flawed about this pose. For, what do we presume when we
speak of the minority person's "dual identity"? We presume that "racial
identity" is foreordained and monolithic, and ever at odds with "national
identity." We presume also, as Stanley Crouch has dryly observed, that identity
is never more complex than double.

            
Black nationalists, like their counterparts in
"Asian America" or "Latino Nation," believe that race is primordial, as organic
as gender. But consider the Asian-American: Thirty years ago, there was no such
creature. There were only Americans of Chinese descent, or Japanese, or Indian.
But over the course of a generation, activists and bureaucrats have
manufactured a single race out of a diverse mass of several million people
whose origins can be traced to dozens of countries.

            What has
bound this Asian-American "race" together is not its biological badge--eyelid
folds, hair color, pigmentation--but its cultural content. Through magazines
and campus clubs and advocacy organizations, self-appointed race leaders have
sought to create an "authentic" Asian-American consciousness by inventing
something called "Asian-American culture." The fact that they are succeeding
tells us something about the magnetic appeal of racial fundamentalism. More
importantly, it reminds us that "racial identity" is utterly malleable--and
that "racial essence" is utterly artificial.

            Yet, even if we did believe in the fixity of races, "double
identity" is meaningless unless we also presume that American identity is
immutably white. As the critic Albert Murray has long argued, that wasn't even
true in Du Bois' time. It is even less true now--and not because America, in
the classic pluralist formulation, is a "nation of nations," a neutral holding
pen for various diasporas; nor because America is some dehumanizing,
single-mold "melting pot."

            What gives
lie to anyone's whitewashed vision of national identity--and what makes America
exceptional--is the fact that American culture is more hybridized and
mongrelized than anything humanity has ever before seen. When California
Caucasians are practicing Feng Shui and Zen meditation, when suburban Asian
teens are reciting gangsta rap lyrics, when salsa sales are surging past
ketchup sales, how can we speak with a straight face about the ineffaceable
whiteness of American life? And how then can we sustain the race-nation
opposition central to "double consciousness"?

            
Ultimately, the weakness of the dual-identity
myth is that it reduces humans into bits of binary code. It treats the American
experience as a simple equation plotted along two axes, as if class or gender
or birthplace or birth order or family structure mattered not--as if
contingency never sculpted one's sense of self. And, in the name of
anti-racialism, it recommits the worst errors of racialism: Denying the
minority individual his full, complex humanity; interpreting his voice as the
mere expression of a greater Volksgeist .

            In the milieu of
contemporary multiculturalism, that sort of illogic can be affirming. So long
as color is a proxy for entitlement, there will be many who find it useful to
ostentatiously posit a conflict between their racial core and their assimilated
shell. But the fallout from the John Huang debacle should remind
Asian-Americans that claims of racial loyalty can cut both ways. And it should
remind us all that flimsy notions of the minority's eternally dual identity,
whether tinged with xenophobia or candied with race pride, in the end amount to
just so much double talk.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Virtue of Inefficient Government

            Thomas Jefferson said, "The
government which governs best, governs least." But Jefferson's wisdom needs
updating. The lesson of the 20 th century is clear: The government
which governs best, governs least efficiently.

            
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the
private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of
input. What is the government's "output"? But let us measure the efficiency of
a government by how well it is able to implement its own goals, whatever they
may be. This could be quantified in terms of money, people, or the total
elapsed time between the adoption of a policy and its complete implementation.
A perfectly efficient government would find its platforms instantly
implemented; a completely inefficient one would expend all its resources
without accomplishing any of its goals.

            By this reasonable standard, the first place in efficiency
must go to dictatorships--the more vile, the more efficient. The more absolute
the power of the local tyrant, the more rapidly and completely his policy
desires are implemented. Cruelty and unpredictability are the techniques of the
real efficiency experts. Dissidents complaining? Just shoot them. Minor minions
acting up? Torture them--making sure to include some of your previous
favorites--and the rest will snap into line. It does cost a few bullets, but
bullets are cheap. And there is always a friendly arms merchant (usually from a
country with an inefficient government) ready to sell you some, even to arrange
foreign aid to help with the financing.

            Despotic governments are so
efficient that they are easy to administer. Even the least capable or sane
humans can run them. Look at Caligula, Idi Amin, and the current bête
noire of the tin-hat set, Saddam Hussein. Once the opposition is dead, and
all but the most compliant are purged from the dictator's forces, what's there
to worry about? Foreign invaders or liberators? They usually serve to merely
entrench a tyrant.

            That these leaders pillage
their people, destroy their economies, and leave no legacy apart from large
Swiss bank accounts tends to obscure their achievements as models of
efficiency. This efficiency hurts the citizenry because, by and large, the sort
of person who wants to be a dictator is rather nasty and self-serving. An
efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the
right sort of man never seems interested in the job.

            Hereditary
monarchies once provided a few well-meaning rulers. A despotic king might pass
power on to more enlightened progeny. The first Medici wasn't all that nice a
guy, but by Lorenzo's time, the Medici stock had mellowed a bit. Such brief
windows of rationality did not last long, but they gave mankind a much-needed
break. The Italian Renaissance flourished in small islands of such tolerance
amid a patchwork quilt of fiefdoms run by local strongmen.

            
There are no examples in the modern world of
absolute power being wielded for anything like the greater good--and it is hard
to imagine the situation arising. How would Mother Teresa ever come to
power? Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the applicant pool for this
sort of job isn't pristine to begin with.

            The record of holy rulers is
none too good anyway--religious regimes tend to rank right after outright thugs
when it comes to efficiency. The mandate of God might seem like the ultimate
tool of power, but in practice, a theocracy is less efficient than the
whimsical brutality of a lone, unfettered ruler. This is not to say that
religious governments can't be brutal--they are, as a rule--but rather, that
they are bound by more constraints. The word of God generally is written in
some ambiguous form that is open to interpretation, and there is never a
shortage of interpreters. The leaders of a religious dictatorship must always
be on guard against some holier-than-thou revisionist bearing a new and
improved "Truth." In addition, the deity has a funny habit of prescribing more
rules and regulations than even liberal Democrats do, thus distracting
religious regimes with random rituals and requirements. Religious movements are
at their most efficient when they seek very basic goals--like subjugating women
or stifling free thought. Complex agendas are much more difficult for them to
accomplish.

            Military dictatorships
generally are less efficient than those run by lone despots or the clergy.
Every self-respecting dictator will decorate himself with grand military
titles--but let us set these baubles aside and concentrate on dictatorships run
by genuine career military officers. Perhaps it is the military respect for
rank, discipline, and the maintenance of a chain of command, or--more
likely--the military love of acronyms and paperwork in triplicate. For whatever
reason, true military leaders are generally less effectual than plain old thugs
and zealots (although their political opponents get just as dead). As further
proof of my thesis, rank seems to correlate well with inefficiency: Few of the
generals who have served their country as despots can hold a candle,
efficiency-wise, to Col. Qaddafi. And it was a sad day indeed for hapless
Liberia when it suffered the ignominy of a coup led by a master sergeant.

            The
Communists briefly occupied an intermediate stage in the hierarchy of
inefficiency. Condemned in their heyday as having total or "totalitarian"
power, their regimes were later revealed as corrupt bureaucracies, more
inefficient (and thus better) than we believed. Dismal images of Russia
unraveling after communism collapsed make an unintended point: At least there
was something to unravel, unlike in so much of the rest of the world. Poor
communism was inefficient enough that its people were able to accomplish some
things despite it, but efficient enough that they couldn't have cable TV. It
sat like a ball on a hill: Ultimately, it had to roll down one side of the hill
and collapse into democracy, or roll the other way and devolve into the
personality-cult despotism of a local tyrant. Tito and Castro are examples of
the latter, and they may soon have imitators, for it remains to be seen how
many post-Soviet democracies will last.

            It is popularly supposed (particularly by people who live
in them) that democracies are "good," while various forms of despotism are
"bad." The evidence favors a far simpler proposition. Simply put, governments
are bad. The fundamental prerogative of governing is to control the actions of
individuals, and this power is remarkably prone to misuse. Quibbling that evil
leaders are to blame, not the institution of government itself, is a pathetic
evasion, reminiscent of an NRA bumper sticker that reads, "Governments don't
kill people, only criminal leaders kill people." Sorry, but with a 1-1
correspondence, why exempt the mechanism? Without the force of government
behind them, Pol Pot would have been fairly harmless and Hitler, a third-rate
artist. With it, each killed millions. Ted Bundy with the government behind him
would have been a lot worse than Ted Bundy operating solo.

            The examples of great evil
done by governments are easy enough to rattle off. But what about the examples
of great good to balance them? There aren't any. Politicians and other
apologists for the institution gamely assert the supposed benefits of
government, but it is a short and shallow list. Good is done, to be sure, but
in little dribs and drabs that aren't enough to cover the cost. How many
centuries of good government would it take to balance the score for the
Cambodians?

            The reason
societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their
alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because
its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. The
constraint of maintaining constant popularity is simply too large a burden to
bear. So, happily, very little gets done that is extremely bad--or extremely
good.

            
Democracy could always make itself efficient by
voting to anoint an absolute ruler. Democratic procedures brought Adolf Hitler
to power, for example. But this rarely happens. Instead, democracies evolved
ever more elaborate ways of tying the hands of their chosen leaders.

            The prize for ultimate
inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that
our "leaders" are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on earth. In a few weeks
those of us who overcome inertia and apathy will enter polling places to choose
our president, with less real choice than ever. Each candidate has tried to
outdo the other in adopting popular centrist stances and avoiding anything
difficult. We can rest assured that neither man will challenge the fundamental
structure that will render winner and loser ineffectual, come Inauguration Day.
Perhaps it would be better to have a restrained and less intrusive government,
as Jefferson envisioned. A pleasant thought, but one that relies on politicians
to restrain themselves. Better to let them restrain each other through
inefficiency, caught in a morass of checks and balances, our freedom guarded
not by fierce virtue but, rather, by simple unfeasibility. Not an elegant
result, but a practical one. I think, in this sense, Jefferson would be
pleased.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Olympic Gene Pool

            Why the human race keeps
getting faster.

            
               By Andrew Berry
            

            ( 2,168 words; posted
Thursday, July 4; to be composted Thursday, July 11 )

            On May 6, 1954, at Oxford
University's Iffley Road track, Roger Bannister became, by just half a second,
the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. The Holy Grail of
middle-distance running was his. Forty-two years later, however, that
achievement seems less significant. Four-minute miles are commonplace; the
current record, held by Algerian Noureddine Morceli, is 3:44 , more than 5
percent faster than Bannister's speed. What Iffley Road witnessed was just
another step along the road to an ever quicker mile, part of the inexorable
improvement of athletic performance that we usually take for granted,
particularly when the Olympics roll around. If you stop to think about it,
though, such constant progress is remarkable. After all, as biomechanical
machines with a standard set of parts, humans should be subject to the same
limitations we see in, say, automobiles. How come they aren't?

            A lot
of entrepreneurs and technophiles would like us to think that the answer has to
do with discoveries in the world of sports technology. A new Nike shoe is
trumpeted as something that will shave at least one-thousandth of a second off
your 100-meter time. Trainers measure the rate of buildup of lactic acid in
your muscles, then claim that their programs will control it. Nutritionists
fine-tune athletes' diets. Even the old sexual-abstinence-before-the-race dogma
is being re-evaluated under the all-seeing eye of science. But I consider all
this little more than tinkering. Sports records would continue to tumble even
if training methods or athletic clothing or sexual practices were exactly the
same today as they were in 1896, when the first modern Olympics took place.
These minor miracles are the product neither of technology nor of training but
of demographic patterns that affect us all.

            Over the past century, the human race has been affected by
a slew of what demographers call "secular" trends. (In this context, "secular"
does not refer to a trend's lack of spirituality but to its longevity: Secular
trends are long-term modifications, not just brief fluctuations.) One such
trend is an increase in average size. You have to stoop to get through the
doorways of a Tudor cottage in England because its inhabitants were smaller
than you are, not because they had a penchant for crouching. Another trend is
in life expectancy. People are living longer. Life expectancy in Africa
increased over the past 20 years from 46 to 53 years. Over the same period in
Europe, where things were already pretty comfortable to begin with, life
expectancy increased from 71 to 75 years. The global average was an increase
from 58 to 65 years.

            
Probably the most striking change, though, is how much more quickly children
are maturing. A 12-year-old child in 1990 who was in what the World Health
Organization calls "average economic circumstances" was about 9 inches taller
than his or her 1900 counterpart. This is not solely the product of the first
trend--the increase in average size--but also due to the fact that children
develop faster. Girls menstruate earlier than they used to. The age of menarche
(the onset of menstruation) has decreased by three or four months per decade in
average sections of Western European populations for the past 150 years. There
is a good chance that our 1990 12-year-old already had started to menstruate.
Her 1900 counterpart would still have had three years to wait.

            What do such trends have to do with athletic performance?
Well, if we're living longer and growing up faster, that must mean we're
producing bigger, better bodies. Better bodies imply faster miles. We run
faster and faster for the same reason it is now common for 11-year-old girls to
menstruate. But why are these things happening?

            
Demographers have offered a variety of explanations, but the main one is that
our diet is improving. A 12-year-old ate better in 1990 than she would have in
the Victorian era. This conclusion is supported by studies of the social elite:
Because its members were well-nourished even in the early years of this
century, this group has experienced relatively little change, over the past 100
years, in the age girls first menstruate. Another explanation is that health
care is getting better. In 1991, according to the WHO, more than 75 percent of
all 1-year-olds worldwide were immunized against a range of common diseases.
Smallpox, that scourge of previous generations, now is effectively extinct.
Probably the best measure of how much healthier we are is the rate of infant
mortality, which measures both the health of the mother (a sickly mother is
more likely to produce a sickly baby) and the health of the baby. In the past
20 years, infant mortality around the world has dropped from 92 deaths per 1000
live births to just 62. A lot of this can be chalked up to primary-heath-care
programs in the developing world--the African average, for instance, has
dropped from 135 deaths per 1000 births to 95. But there are also significant
improvements in the developed world, with infant deaths dropping in Europe over
the same 20-year period from 24 per 1000 live births to just 10.

            Better health care affects athletic ability directly. This
is true in the trivial case in which, say, antibiotics cure a runner's fever
before the big race, but it may also be true in a more significant way.
Diseases contracted in early infancy can have a lifetime impact on health--not
necessarily a big one, but an impact nevertheless. Previous generations bore
scars from all sorts of non-life-threatening diseases, the stuff everyone
picked up as a baby. Nowadays, though, more and more people grow up with no
history of disease. Since top athletes inevitably are drawn from the healthiest
sector of the population, a generally superior system of health care means a
bigger pool of people to draw from. You are much more likely to find someone
who can run a mile in 3:30 in a sample of several million superbly healthy
people than you are in a sample of 10,000.

            The
pool of potential athletes has expanded in other ways, too. First, the
population has exploded. Second, we are coming ever closer to a worldwide
middle class, the class from which athletes typically are drawn. Whether, in an
age of multinational capitalism, we may talk reasonably about a post-colonial
era is way beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains, however, that
the developing world is doing just that--developing. Even Mozambique, which
ranks at, or near, the bottom of national per capita gross national product
tables, has shown an increase of some 20 percent in adult literacy rates over
the past 20 years. Literacy rates are merely an index of education, which
itself is another way of talking about a global move away from a hand-to-mouth
lifestyle.

            The decline of empire has its Olympic corollaries. Britain
won, on average, 17 gold medals per Olympics in the five official games held in
its imperial heyday before World War I. That average has dropped to only five
medals per Olympics in the 17 held since. This is not a reflection of declining
athletic standards in Britain, however; it's a function of how much more
competitive other nations have become. The Olympics originally were the
preserve of the socioeconomic elite of the socioeconomic elite among nations.
Consider this: Only 13 nations participated in 1896, but there were 172 in
1992. Black Africans didn't take part until the third modern games, held in St.
Louis in 1908. Even this was accidental: Lentauw and Yamasami, Zulu tribesmen,
entered the marathon because they happened to be in St. Louis as part of an
exhibit about the Boer war. Lentauw finished ninth despite being chased into a
cornfield by dogs.

            Since
all these are changes in how we live, not anything innate, we have to conclude
that what we are describing here are effects of environment, not genes. Let us
assume that our 1900 and 1990 12-year-olds are identical twins magically born
90 years apart. The 1990 girl still will grow up faster, end up bigger,
menstruate earlier, and live longer than the 1900 girl. Perhaps way, way back
in human history, when our forebears were still fleeing saber-toothed tigers,
natural selection for athletic prowess came into play. But all that ended long
ago. Indeed, the laws of natural selection probably work against athletes these
days: Given the rigors of training schedules, it is possible that today's top
athletes have fewer children than average.

            
Just because nurture has a more significant
effect on athletic performance doesn't mean that nature lies dormant, though.
Genetic variation exists for just about any trait you choose to study, and the
ability to run quickly would be no exception. To take a trivial case, we know
that the inheritance of extra fingers or toes is determined genetically. It is
quite possible that the possession of an extra toe would hinder an aspiring
miler--their genes have affected their athletic performance. One genetic factor
that may be influencing performance trends is what is known as "hybrid vigor."
Cattle breeders have known about this for a long time: Take two inbred lines of
cattle, cross them, and what you have is "better" (say, larger) than any single
individual in either of the two parental lines. This does not require natural
selection; it is the accidental byproduct of combining two previously isolated
stocks. There are a number of theories to account for this at the genetic
level, but it has proved difficult to discriminate among them. It is possible
that modern humans exhibit some form of hybrid vigor simply because migration
and admixture of populations are now occurring at unprecedented rates. Perhaps,
just perhaps, such hybridization is being translated into enhanced
performance.

            That doesn't mean, however, that genetic differences in
athletic ability can be correlated automatically with race. That is a claim
that is impossible to test, because you cannot control, in an experimental
sense, environmental differences among the study groups. Sure, you will find
more Africans or descendants of Africans standing on the podiums at the end of
Olympic track events. And you will find far fewer Asians on those same podiums.
But can you, therefore, conclude that Africans have better genes for running
than Asians do? No. Environmental differences between the two groups could
account for differing levels of athletic success. It is scarcely surprising
that Ethiopian or Kenyan distance runners do better than everyone else, since
they are in the habit of running immense distances to and from primary school,
middle school, and high school. The training is what's crucial, not the
blackness. The Chinese sports establishment also has carried out an enormous,
and effective, experiment to help dispel the myth that race has a direct
relation to athletic ability. Until recently, a quick glance at the medals
table confirmed every stereotype people held about Asians and sports. Then the
Chinese decided to produce record-breaking female distance runners (and
swimmers), and, boy, did they ever. In 1992, China ranked fourth in the
Olympic-medal haul.

            You can
bring a single generation up to speed through training, but the trends we're
dealing with transcend individual generations. Which brings us to another
question: Will there come a time when the human machine will hit some sort of
natural limit and an Olympic Games pass without a single record tumbling? In
principle, yes.

            There are some barriers that simply cannot be broken. We
will never run a mile at the same speed at which we now run 100 meters, for
instance. The laws of oxygen exchange will not permit it. Race horses seem
already to have hit that outer limit. For years, they were as good as human
athletes at pushing back speed records, but then they simply stopped getting
faster. Take the prestigious British Derby. From 1850 to 1930, winning times
dropped from 2:55 to 2:39. But from 1986 to 1996, the average time has
been--2:39. Unlike people, race horses are specifically bred and reared to run.
Generations of careful genetic selection have ensured that today's race horse
has every possible speed-enhancing characteristic. Training techniques, too,
are tremendously sophisticated. But you can go only so far. You can only breed
horses with ultralight thin bones to a certain point; the bones will break
under stress if they get any lighter.

            Human improvement, like
race-horse improvement, must eventually bow to the basic constraints of
biomechanics. The age of menarche cannot keep on falling forever. On the other
hand, it is clear from the remarkable demographic changes of just the past 20
years that these long-term trends are with us still. They may be slowing down
in some more developed societies, but they roar along in others. And these
trends will continue to fuel the improvement in athletic performance. Several
new records will be set in Atlanta. And in Sydney in 2000, and wherever the
Olympics are held in 2044. We will continue running faster and jumping further
for a good long while to come.

             

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Insufficient Funds

            The folks in Bill Clinton's
White House see November's election as a replay of Ronald Reagan's 1984
electoral triumph. But they may be overlooking a more obvious parallel: Richard
Nixon's landslide in 1972.

            Until his campaign moved
into gear, Nixon's popularity, like Clinton's until recently, was low--stuck at
the "nemesis figure of 43 percent," as Theodore White recounted in The
Making of the President, 1972 . But, again like Clinton, Nixon was fortunate
in the choice of his opponent. By fall of 1972, in full contest with the
hapless George McGovern, Nixon was enjoying 60 percent-plus popularity.

            Though
Nixon had no Gennifer Flowers growing in his home garden, he had been plagued
by allegations of unethical--or at least unattractive--behavior dating back to
his earliest political days in California. Still, while the public might think
twice about buying a used car from either "Tricky Dick" or "Slick Willie," most
people seemed willing, then as now, to make an independent judgment about the
incumbent's ability to govern--especially when weighing it against the capacity
of his challenger.

            Both presidents came into their second-term election
campaigns having governed against type: Nixon, the Republican, proposed to
establish a federally guaranteed income for all families with children. He
extended the food-stamp program nationwide and established a federal benefit
floor for the elderly and disabled. Urged on by a Democratic Congress, he
signed a pile of big-government initiatives. These included a 20 percent
increase in Social Security benefits, plus automatic cost-of-living
adjustments; the "black lung" disability benefit program for miners; and
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.

            Grants for
low-income housing programs, needy college students, the arts and humanities,
urban renewal, mass transit, community health, and worker training gushed from
the federal Treasury. When inflation jumped in the summer of 1971, Nixon didn't
fool around with balanced budgets, tight money, or other conservative nostrums;
he slapped on wage and price controls. ("," he had remarked a few months
earlier.)

            
Democrat Clinton, on the other hand, having set
off leftward at the start of his first term, soon reversed course. Under strong
pressure from the GOP Congress in his third year in office, he submitted a plan
that purportedly would balance the budget in seven years--at the price of deep
domestic spending cuts. Later, on the campaign trail, he declared his devotion
to school uniforms, youth curfews, tough crime control, and kiddie-safe TV
programs. Where Nixon would have doubled family welfare rolls, Clinton signed a
bill that promised to deny benefits to most welfare recipients after five
years. "The era of Big Government is over," Clinton proclaimed in his 1996
State of the Union address.

            The
challengers to both presidents were undermined by the rise of noisy extremists
in their respective parties who alarmed many mainstream voters. For McGovern,
it was the hard left, abetted by the hippie fringe--Bella Abzug, along with
Abbie Hoffman. For Dole, it is the religious right and noisy populists--Ralph
Reed, with Pat Buchanan looking over his shoulder. The 1972 Democratic platform
was a wish list compiled by every liberal--even radical--group in the country,
who carried their banners across the floor of that year's party convention.
Southern whites and blue-collar workers deserted the party, and its
fund-raising capacity was debilitated for years to come among big donors and
small givers alike.

            The GOP had its 1996 convention under far better control,
but the fractures, made evident during the contentious primaries, were no less
deep. Debarred by his own party from running on his record of fiscal and social
moderation--and with Clinton pre-empting much of the conservative agenda--Dole
sought, as McGovern had in 1972, an eye-catching proposal to set him apart from
his competitor.

            And, like McGovern, Dole was
enticed into an untenable choice, not by his party's fringes, but by ostensibly
responsible establishmentarian elements. For McGovern, it was the liberal
professors of Yale and Harvard who persuaded him to embrace his misbegotten
$1,000-a-person "demogrant"--a cash-welfare plan that would have put half the
country on the take. For Dole, the damage was done by a coalition of pinstriped
supply-side enthusiasts and Nobel laureates from Chicago, Harvard, and
Stanford. These worthies lured the red-ink-wary Dole into espousing an
across-the-board 15 percent tax-rate cut that even the average voter (not to
mention most of Wall Street) could spot right off as a budget buster.

            With the
economy rebounding smartly from the brief 1971 recession and inflation
temporarily in check, even the unpopularity of the raging Vietnam War couldn't
shake the power of Nixon's incumbency. McGovern's big blip in the polls came
earlier than Dole's post-convention gain. His gap with Nixon, according to
White, narrowed briefly to 5 percentage points after a string of primary
victories. The disastrous Democratic Convention, however, left McGovern a then
record-setting 23 points in the hole. Dole got a bounce out of the
well-orchestrated Republican Convention, but soon fell back into a double-digit
deficit. With the gap still of landslide proportions in most polls, Dole has
been written off, correctly or otherwise, by the pundits. (See this week's
"Horse
Race.")

            
Finally, lest their opponents' weakness not
suffice to produce a landslide, both incumbents got further help from a
third-party candidate: Nixon from George Wallace, who drained white Southern
support from the Democrats, and Clinton from Ross Perot, who likely will drain
white suburbanites from Dole.

            Beyond the election, the
parallels may break down. Nixon's Watergate sins (dismissed by the public on
the eve of the election as, at most, the work of overzealous campaign aides)
caught up with him in his second term. Clinton's Whitewater and assorted other
troubles, having been more thoroughly aired in his first term, may have run
their course. In any case, it's hard to imagine Clinton's vice president, Al
Gore, accepting bundles of cash in his White House office as Spiro Agnew
did.

            It's not so hard, however,
to imagine the GOP following the pattern set by the Democrats after 1972:
pulling themselves together momentarily to field a winning centrist candidate
four years later--and then thwarting his ability to govern (as the Democrats in
Congress did Jimmy Carter's)--thereby producing an era of domination by the
opposition for the next two decades.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Why Kids Have Kids

            Does welfare spawn
out-of-wedlock babies? The architects of the recently passed welfare reform
believe it does. They hope that curbing payments for additional children and
enforcing parental work requirements will reverse the 25-year trend that has
brought large numbers of unmarried mothers onto the welfare rolls.

            In 1965,
24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to
single mothers. By 1990, the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants
and 18 percent for whites. Every year, about 1 million more children are born
into fatherless families, at an enormously increased risk of growing up in
poverty.

            Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in
out-of-wedlock births have been unconvincing. Conservative Charles Murray, for
example, blames overly generous federal welfare benefits. But as David Ellwood
and Lawrence Summers have shown, cash welfare benefits rose sharply in the
1960s and fell in the 1970s and 1980s, when out-of-wedlock births rose
most.

            Liberals
have tended to favor the explanation offered by William Julius Wilson, who, in
a 1987 study, attributed the increase in out-of-wedlock births to a decline in
the marriageability of black men, due to a shortage of jobs. But Robert D. Mare
and Christopher Winship have estimated that at most 20 percent of the decline
in marriage rates of blacks between 1960 and 1980 can be explained by
decreasing employment.

            
Abetter theory might be called "Reproductive
Technology Shock." In the late 1960s and very early 1970s (well before Roe
vs. Wade in January 1973), the availability of both abortion and
contraception increased dramatically. Many states, including New York and
California, liberalized their abortion laws. In July 1970, the Massachusetts
law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people was
declared unconstitutional. Many observers expected liberalized abortion and
contraception to lead to fewer out-of-wedlock births. But the opposite
happened, because of the decline in the custom of "shotgun weddings."

            Before
1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that most women would only
engage in sexual activity if it came with a promise of marriage in the event of
pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that
even if they left one woman, they would be unlikely to find another who would
not make the same demand. In the 1970s, women who were willing to get an
abortion, or who used contraception reliably, no longer found it necessary to
condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.
But women who found abortion unacceptable, or who were unreliable in their
contraceptive use, found themselves pressured to participate in premarital
sexual relations as well. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused
sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners.

            By making the birth of the child the physical choice
of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a
social choice of the father. And while only a few unmarried mothers once
kept their babies, only a few put them up for adoption today, because the
stigma of unwed motherhood has declined. Once shunned by their peers and
whisked out of town, pregnant teen-agers now receive both encouragement and
support to keep their babies, stay in school, and participate in other social
activities.

            Although
doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the
technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was
adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed
with similar drama, at about the same time.

            
The use of birth-control pills at first
intercourse by all unmarried women jumped from 6 percent to 15 percent in just
a few years, and probably much more among sexually active unmarried women. The
number of abortions among unmarried women grew from roughly 100,000 a year in
the late 1960s (compared with some 322,000 out-of-wedlock births) to more than
1.2 million a year (compared with 715,000 out-of-wedlock births) in the early
1980s. During the same period, births per unmarried woman roughly doubled for
whites, while the fraction of white unmarried women rose about 30 percent. For
black unmarried women, the birth rate actually fell by between 5 percent and 10
percent, but this was offset by an increase of about 40 percent in the number
of unmarried black women. Meanwhile, fertility rates for married women of both
races declined rapidly, making the out-of-wedlock birth ratio even larger.

            The
shotgun-marriage rate itself declined only gradually, but that is not
surprising. Social conventions change slowly. It took time for men to recognize
that they did not have to promise marriage in the event of a pregnancy in
exchange for sexual relations. It may also have taken time for women to
perceive the increased willingness of men to leave them if they demanded
marriage.

            One final puzzle, however, requires explanation. The black
shotgun-marriage ratio began to fall earlier than the white ratio and shows no
significant change in trend around 1970. Here, federal welfare benefits may
play a role. Because blacks, on average, have lower incomes than whites, they
are more affected by changes in welfare benefits. As a result, the rise in
welfare benefits in the 1960s may have resulted in a decline in the black
shotgun-marriage rate, and thus, in an increase in out-of-wedlock births.

            What should be done? Even if
possible, attempts to turn back the technological clock by restricting abortion
and contraception would now be counterproductive. Besides denying reproductive
freedom to women, such efforts would increase the number of children born and
reared in impoverished single-parent families. Most children born out of
wedlock are reported by their mothers to have been "wanted," but "not at that
time." Some are reported as not having been wanted at all. Easier access to
birth-control information and devices and to abortion could reduce the number
of unwanted children and improve the timing of those whose mothers would have
preferred to wait.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Don't Take It So Personally

            About 130 years ago in
England, an unlikely coalition of feminists, trade unionists, and clergymen
transformed the sexual mores of the day. The alliance began progressively
enough, as a campaign against a law authorizing the police to round up
prostitutes--and other women suspected of loose morals--and force them to
submit to pelvic exams. The law was repealed. Thrilled at their newfound clout,
feminists looked around for another issue.

            They
found it in white slavery, or "traffic in women." The cry went out. Newspapers
took it up, running story after story about virgins sold to drooling
aristocrats. New laws were passed. The "social-purity" movement was born.

            Things spun quickly out of the feminists' control. Whipped
into a frenzy, citizens formed the National Vigilance Association, but rather
than protecting impoverished virgins the vigilantes conducted a crusade against
prostitutes, homosexuals, music halls, theaters, paintings of nudes, and French
novels (which they burned). At first, feminists joined in the fun. But when the
misogyny and terror of the social-purity movement became impossible to ignore,
they withdrew into the background. Which is where they remained for the next 20
years, discredited and humiliated, until the next wave of feminist activism
came around.

            Feminist
historian Judith Walkowitz published an essay about this incident back in 1983,
during the height of feminist anti-pornography fervor. She wanted to show what
can happen when feminism joins forces with the public-decency crowd. Now what
can happen has happened. The social-purity movement that is the Clinton sex
scandal has at least some of its roots in feminist thought, and the embarrassed
mumbles of Gloria Steinem, et al., on the Lewinsky question show that feminists
know it. For instance: Why were Paula Jones' lawyers able to depose Clinton on
every sordid detail of his sex life? Because of sexual harassment laws that say
a man's entire sexual past may be considered relevant in a lawsuit, even though
a woman's may not. This arrangement was one of the triumphs of feminism over
the past two decades.

            
Like its 19 th century counterpart,
the women's movement will be forced to retreat from the field, confused and in
disarray, if it doesn't come to terms with its mistakes. The biggest one (as
many have pointed out) was blindly following the lead of that most illiberal of
thinkers, Catherine MacKinnon. With her belief that unwanted sexual advances
and utterances (and even, in some cases, wanted ones) degrade women so
profoundly that it's worth limiting free speech to prevent them, MacKinnon laid
the intellectual groundwork for today's sexual harassment laws. Before today,
the most egregious outcome of MacKinnonism was the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Liberal feminists (myself included, I'm sorry to say) were so eager to "educate
the public" about sexual harassment, to say nothing of wanting to get rid of an
anti-abortion Supreme Court candidate, that they were willing to overlook the
frightening precedent being set. A man's political career was nearly ended and
his private life pawed through while an entire nation watched, even though the
charges against him were never subjected to the rigorous standards of evidence
that would have prevailed in a court of law.

            Back in
the 1960s and 1970s, before feminism came to mean anti-pornography statutes and
laws against "hostile work environments" and other forms of censoriousness,
there were all kinds of feminists. There were the liberal kind, such as Betty
Friedan, who believed in the Equal Rights Amendment, day care, birth control,
and abortion. There were the libertarian kind, such as Walkowitz, who argued
for sexual freedom, no matter how troublesome the consequences. (There were
also feminists who just seem goofy in retrospect, such as women's-music types
and flannel-wearing lesbian separatists.)

            The healthy diversity of feminist life was killed off by
two things: 1) In the late 1970s, after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to
pass, the women's movement deliberately switched from the political arena to
the courts. A legal strategy for change had worked for Thurgood Marshall of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, so why not? The answer is as true for women's rights
as it has been for civil rights: A movement always suffers when it fails to
subject its ideas to wide public debate. 2) Influenced by MacKinnon and others,
what the women's movement decided to seek in the courts was equal protection
plus : the right to work plus special protection against nasty
people in the workplace; the right to make their own sexual decisions
plus special protection against older, savvier guys who take advantage.
But rights are not necessarily cost-free. A relentless expansion of my rights
usually ends up imposing burdens on your rights, or even on other rights of my
own. The fury that followed some of the more questionable expansions of women's
rights has made it difficult to talk about anything else.

            During a
debate on feminism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt once passed a note to a
colleague that said, "What do we lose when we win?" It was the sort of dour
remark that made Arendt unpopular among her female peers. That's a shame,
because Arendt's thought offers a way out of feminism's current jam. She stood
for the clear separation of the public from the private sphere, a distinction
dismissed as patriarchal a long time ago by feminists who thought it denigrated
domestic life. But failing to see the importance of this distinction has got
feminism into the trouble it's in today.

            
To Arendt, the elimination of the
public-private distinction is what distinguishes 20 th century
totalitarianism from earlier and lesser forms of oppression. Even in the days
of absolute monarchs, a person's home was his (or, to a lesser degree, her)
castle. But totalitarian governments want to control your private life down to
your psyche and to mold you into a New Man or New Woman on whatever model
they're peddling.

            Conversely, Arendt's public
realm is the exact opposite of the private realm: It's where you're not
protected and shouldn't be. A classicist, Arendt saw the public arena as a
version of the Athenian agora--a world of political theater, where the harsh
light of publicity shines upon fierce debate. Arendt's conception of the public
was phrased in quasimilitaristic language almost expressly designed to irritate
feminists (it didn't, but only because they had stopped listening). She
declared that, for the public realm to function effectively, participants must
display a love of glory. It is a hunger for glory and all that comes with it--a
willingness to sacrifice one's personal desires to the common good; a sense of
honor, dignity, and fair play--that allows politics to rise above a mere
squabbling among interests. This is a spirit feminism lacks, which is why it
has allowed women's interests as a class to trump the common interest in
privacy.

            Rediscovering Arendt's
public-private split wouldn't necessarily entail abandoning the feminist notion
that the personal is political. We're all better off because feminists turned
hitherto private topics into subjects of public debate. Who'd want to go back
to the days when you couldn't even talk about condoms? The problem is that
we've reversed the phrase: We've made the political personal. It's one thing to
put sensitive subjects out there for discussion. It's another thing to welcome
jurists, reporters, and the rest of the American public into our bedrooms. As
it turns out, it may not be such a good idea to welcome them into our
workplaces and schools either, at least not as warmly as we have. So should we
do away with all forms of sexual harassment law? Or just parts of it--the
hostile work environment clause, say, or the gender-biased evidentiary rules?
It will take years to find the best place to draw the line, and we'll never get
it perfectly right. The important thing is to realize that it's way past time
to move it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Mars to Humanity: Get Over Yourself

            So far, popular reaction
to NASA's announcement that its scientists have discovered evidence of life in
a meteorite from Mars has been pretty positive. Only a few cynics have accused
the space agency of a ploy for more funding. But that may change as the
implications sink in. Last week's announcement is the biggest insult to the
human species in almost 500 years, step two in a three-step process that will
leave humanity totally humbled.

            Ptolemy (second century)
was the first and boldest in a long succession of spin doctors for the primacy
of human beings. The whole universe, he postulated, rotated around us, with the
Earth sitting at the center of heaven itself. Any marketing consultant will
tell you that positioning is everything, and center-of-the-universe is hard to
beat.

            A
Polish astronomer named Copernicus (1473-1543) rudely pointed out: Sorry
earthlings, we spin around the sun, not vice versa. This might have made
Copernicus unpopular, if he hadn't had the good sense to die the day his book
went to press. His follower, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), built a telescope and
used it to piss in the soup even more. The sun, it seemed, has spots on it. Far
from being the perfect furnace of heaven, it has a face covered with celestial
zits. The moon is an uneven and pockmarked rock, and Jupiter upstages Earth by
having multiple moons. The sky went from being a perfect clockwork centered on
Earth to a fairly shabby neighborhood in which we were a minor resident.

            This revelation was disquieting enough that the authorities
of the time sought the only rational solution--they decided to burn Galileo
alive if he didn't recant. Eventually Galileo did sign a decree saying that the
Earth sat at the center of the universe, while muttering, "Eppur si moeve"
("But it still moves") under his breath. Giordano Bruno, a sort of
16 th -century Carl Sagan, popularized these concepts without
repenting, saying, among other things, that "innumerable suns exist.
Innumerable earths revolve around those suns. Living beings inhabit these
worlds." A soundbite like that would have gotten Bruno his 15 minutes of TV
celebrity if he'd been around last week. But this was 400 years ago, so they
roasted him to death instead.

            Bruno's
crime, like Galileo's, was to undermine the uniqueness of our planet, and by
doing so, to threaten the intellectual security of the religious dictatorships
of his time. People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances
in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on
a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped
barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights
activists instead.

            But the hubris that makes us insist on a special role for
humans and Earth didn't disappear: It just found other bases. Among the
sciences, biology became the last refuge, for within its realm, Earth was still
special. Life was the unique and sacred phenomenon of which we humans were the
crowning glory. Consciously or not, mainstream opinion in biology--until last
week--orbited around the essential mystery of life on Earth just as surely as
the Ptolemaic view was lodged in the firmament. Only a few brave scientists
violated the taboo and speculated on life beyond Earth.

            Most visions of
extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional
extraterrestrials of Star 
               Trek or a hundred other space operas
are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place
are mostly WASPish men. A galaxy full of these folks is no stranger than a
Kiwanis club meeting: We have met the aliens, and they are us! Darker visions
of life beyond earth support human supremacy in another way. After all, even
the most monstrous and advanced alien foe can be vanquished by the likes of
Sigourney Weaver or Will Smith. For that matter, those hapless aliens can't
stay ahead of the doughty X-Files team without a conspiratorial
collaboration with that least effective of all entities, the U.S.
government.

            Alien
stories that are claimed as true are no better. Why Earth would be such a
fascinating place for UFOs to visit is left unexplained. I mean, really:
Roswell, N.M.? Inevitably, the UFO stories climax in the ultimate tribute to
human ego. The aliens, it seems, have traveled umpteen billion miles so they
can abduct us from our beds and have sex with us. I'm told that once you try a
human, you never go back.

            The NASA discovery suggests that life is probably a pretty
ordinary phenomenon that occurs anyplace you give it half a chance. Earth isn't
special. The alien life forms aren't special either. Instead of highly logical
humanoids with pointy ears or other endearing characteristics, they seem to be
a lot like simple bacteria. Should they invade, Will Smith can wipe them out
with some Listerine.

            When there's only one
example of anything, its very uniqueness makes it special. Life on Earth was
special because it was the only life we knew. In this case however, the dogma
being shattered is based fundamentally on ignorance. Nobody knew whether there
was life on Mars because, oddly enough, nobody had looked until now. The whole
field of biology has rested precariously on a single data point--life on Earth.
Last week, we got a second data point.

            
Research over the last 20 years has changed the scientific view of life.
Researchers have found fossils, similar to those in the meteorite, in some of
the oldest rock on Earth. There was evidence that life was present just as soon
as the planet cooled and solidified. If that happened so quickly on Earth, why
not on Mars, whose early stages of development were quite similar to
Earth's?

            

               A > succession of discoveries has taught us about archeabacteria, very
ancient and primitive single-cell organisms that live in the places you'd least
expect anything to call home. They inhabit the near-boiling water of geysers in
Yellowstone, and the even hotter water in volcanic vents on the ocean floor.
They are in oil wells and the crevices of basalt deep within the earth. A basic
tenet of biology used to be that the energy requirements of all living things
are met ultimately by the sun--mainly through plants converting sunlight into
more easily digestible forms of energy. The archeabacteria live far from any
contact with the sun, subsisting instead on heat from the center of the Earth,
nourished only by sulfur and other elements leaching from the rock. Some
scientists have estimated that the sum of these tiny organisms spread deep
within the Earth outweighs all the forms of life on the surface combined.
Perhaps we surface-dwelling life forms are the exceptions--bizarre mutations of
the normally deep-dwelling archeabacteria that populate the interiors of
planets all over the galaxy. If the discovery is what it appears to be, the
inside of Mars may still be full of them.

            Looking ahead, we can anticipate the next frontier of
hubris. Sure, there may be life on other planets--if you call that life. But
humans are still the only intelligent life--right? The wagons will
circle to defend this last bastion of human conceit. Technology is only just
beginning to let us search the skies for the telltale clues another
civilization might offer. People who speculate on the odds can be either upbeat
or quite discouraging depending on what ax they have to grind. But as with life
on Mars, until you get a chance to take a look, how confident can you be one
way or another? Maybe it's true that we're the only members of the big brain
club, but I'll lay my bets with ET.

            There's a consolation
prize for humanity, though. The steady erosion of our claim to a special place
in the universe has come with a steady growth in our maturity as a species.
What greater intellectual puzzle can there be than dealing with nature on its
own terms? Wallowing in a solipsistic world dictated by our own hubris isn't
much of a challenge in comparison. Mankind is not special by virtue of our
address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated
here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these
beliefs. Our true distinction is the intellectual journey that brought us to
this understanding.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Obnoxious for Peace

            Richard Holbrooke is a
person many people can't stand. Though he may be no more ambitious or
egotistical than a lot of career-minded Washingtonians, he is exceedingly
transparent about it. Physically large, he can be seen in photographs towering
over his rivals--and sometimes elbowing them out of the picture frame. A
courtier worthy of Shakespeare, Holbrooke is legendary for his flattery and
back stabbing, and even for buttering someone up and sticking the knife in at
the same time.

            Those who
tend to roll their eyes at the mention of Holbrooke's name will find much
eye-rolling material in his book To End a War: From Sarajevo to Dayton and
Beyond , which is about his role in negotiating a peace settlement in
Bosnia. In places, Holbrooke's account reads like a self-nominating speech for
secretary of state or the Nobel Peace Prize, distinctions for which his stomach
audibly growls. Holbrooke seldom declines the chance to fluff up someone who
might be useful to him in the future, especially if that someone is a
journalist. Roger Cohen of the New York Times is "astute." Stephen
Engelberg, also of the Times , is "impressive." William Pfaff of the
International Herald Tribune is "insightful." Holbrooke suffers from a
strain of narcissism that impels him to quote himself, frequently and at
length, including from diaries, articles, TV interviews, faxes, and private
letters to the president. His name-dropping is out of control. At one point, he
offers the odd boast that it was his idea to send Ron Brown on a trade mission
to Bosnia--the mission that led to the death of the commerce secretary and 34
others.

            But those who fixate on Holbrooke's insufferability do him
a serious injustice. Holbrooke lacks subtlety, modesty, and discretion. He can
be vain, pompous, and ridiculous. We know this. But he also managed to carry
off, almost by sheer force of personality, an accomplishment that eluded
governments, world leaders, and multilateral organizations for four years: He
ended the war in Bosnia. The story he tells is really about performing a kind
of jujitsu with his own personality, channeling his dubious personal
qualities--his bullying, his egomania, and his impatient ambition--toward the
noble (and perhaps Nobel) end of peace in the Balkans. One of the lessons his
book teaches is that in politics, self-interest isn't the opposite of public
interest. To the contrary, ego can be the engine that makes political and
diplomatic accomplishments possible. By the end of the book, I couldn't help
liking and admiring Holbrooke--not despite his evident flaws but in a curious
way because of them.

            
Holbrooke's intervention in the Balkans is a rejoinder to the social
historians' conceit that individual actors don't really matter. In the summer
of 1992, Holbrooke went to Bosnia as a private citizen, with a refugee aid
organization, and saw horrors such as Muslims being driven out of the town of
Banja Luka, where their families had lived for four centuries. He resolved to
try to do something about it. As part of candidate Clinton's foreign policy
brain trust, Holbrooke prodded him to take an interventionist stand, which
Clinton did. After the election, Holbrooke wrote a memo to Warren Christopher
and Anthony Lake advocating the strategy known as "lift and strike"--lifting
the arms embargo that prevented the Muslims from defending themselves, and
bombing the Bosnian Serbs. He also asked for the job of special negotiator on
Bosnia. Holbrooke's rival Lake made sure none of this happened. The Bosnia job
went to someone else. Holbrooke was kept away from the issue and on the
periphery of foreign policy-making in general. Eventually he was named
ambassador to Germany. Clinton's tough talk stopped.

            
But Holbrooke still cherished hopes of
involving the United States. Offered the post of assistant secretary of state
for European affairs, a job he considered beneath his dignity, he took it for
the sake of directing American diplomatic efforts in the Balkans. As he pushed
and prodded, wheedled and connived, the crusade became more personal. Early in
his shuttle diplomacy, three colleagues, including his top deputy, were killed
in a gruesome road accident for which the Bosnian Serb warlords were indirectly
to blame. This tragedy spurred him in his hazardous ricocheting between
Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo and helped bring about better-late-than-never
NATO airstrikes in 1995. When he was dissatisfied with official policy,
Holbrooke undermined it. For instance, he was supposed to take advantage of the
bombing to demand a cease-fire by all sides. In fact, he encouraged the
Croatian-Muslim Federation to keep fighting, since it was making territorial
gains that he thought would make a territorial settlement easier.

            Holbrooke
does not waste a lot of time on the question of whether intervening in Bosnia
was in our national "interest." In answer to former Secretary of State James
Baker's view that we didn't have a dog in that fight, he asserts the United
States had a Samaritan's obligation to stop ethnic cleansing. The Europeans
having failed, we were the only ones who could do anything about it. Inside the
administration, he fought off objections from the military. Spooked by anything
that smacked of "mission creep" or "nation building," the Pentagon resisted
sending American troops to Bosnia and has refused to allow them to become
involved with refugees, elections, or human rights. Holbrooke continues to
argue for what he calls a "maximalist" interpretation of our military role. He
views it as a scandal that the Bosnian Serb war criminals Ratko Mladic and
Radovan Karadzic have yet to be captured and brought to justice.

            The narrative climaxes in Dayton, Ohio, where the
combatants sat around an Air Force base for three weeks and reached a peace
accord. Holbrooke is a proponent of the intuitive, improvisational school of
negotiation. He played tennis with Franjo Tudjman, drank shots of plum brandy
with Slobodan Milosevic before lunch, enacted hysterical scenes of feigned and
real anger, and essentially sat on the heads of the various participants until
they cried uncle. Here the story becomes especially gripping and takes an
unexpected turn. It is the president of the Bosnian Muslims, Alia Izetbegovic,
who turns out to be the biggest obstacle to peace, unwilling to make even
meaningless concessions. On the other hand, the brutal but undeniably charming
Milosevic, the man most responsible for starting the Yugoslav civil war, saves
the accord with territorial concessions at the last moment.

            Surely Holbrooke pursued
peace in the Balkans in part for the glory involved. And as one not afflicted
with false modesty--or any other kind--he clearly enjoys his plaudits
immensely. But by the end of the book, the issue of Holbrooke's motivation no
longer looms very large. From an early stage, he found himself drawn into
something larger than himself, something more compelling than his own career.
As the object elevates him, his pettiness melts away.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Get Spun

            When the Flytrap scandal
broke in January, I joined the media herd in calling it fatal. The chance that
Bill Clinton would serve out his term, I estimated early on, was only 25
percent. This laughably inaccurate prognostication reflected the hysteria of
the moment and has illustrated for me the foolishness of making predictions,
especially ones that can be proved wrong and used to shame you in social
settings. I also learned something else: why the press is so eager for
Clinton's downfall. If a doctor tells a patient he has six weeks to live and
the patient survives for many years, it's humiliating for the doctor.

            There are
other reasons--conscious, unconscious, and semiconscious--why journalists would
like to see Clinton kaput. On the high-status but low-interest White House
beat, there is no story as exciting as that of the fall of a president. You
can't get around the fact that bad news for him is good news for us. An even
more powerful reason flows from the groupthink that afflicts the White House
press corps. The general consensus is that, since 1992, Clinton has got away
with murder--on draft dodging, Gennifer Flowers, Whitewater, Travelgate, Paula
Jones, etc., etc. From the day the Lewinsky scandal broke, many journalists
determined this could not and should not happen again. The feeling that the
Slick One must not be allowed to elude capture once more is palpable in the
daily White House briefings, in the hostile questioning by David Bloom of NBC
or Deborah Orin of the New York Post , and in the massive play the
scandal continues to receive everywhere.

            Clinton's unanticipated resilience leaves reporters in an
awkward position. Journalists are most comfortable following public opinion,
not leading it. Now they must explain to themselves and to their audiences how
it is that the public has not come to share their low opinion of the president.
One obvious explanation is the strength of the economy. Another is that moral
strictures have loosened, at least when it comes to political leaders. But
faced with the reality that the president has actually become more popular
since the scandal broke, journalists have ventured a third explanation of late:
Clinton has survived thanks to diabolically effective "spin."

            This
theory is now treated as acknowledged fact. "Given the White House's
state-of-the-art public relations machine, it is not a surprise that the
President has appeared to enjoy the upper hand," wrote Don Van Natta Jr. in one
recent New York Times story. The Chicago Tribune refers casually
to the president's "obsessive and adroit image machine." That the White House
is wickedly good at PR is the premise of Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton
Propaganda Machine , a new book by Howard Kurtz, the Washington

               Post 's media reporter. Kurtz points to the skill of White House Press
Secretary Michael McCurry. Writing of Clinton's 60 percent approval rating
before the scandal, he notes, "McCurry and his colleagues had mastered the art
of manipulating the press and were reaping the dividends." Elsewhere Kurtz
comments, "It was a carefully honed media strategy--alternately seducing,
misleading, and sometimes intimidating the press--that maintained [Clinton's]
aura of success."

            
Is it not possible that the aura of success is
generated by real success? Might Clinton have become a popular president not by
brainwashing the nation but by legitimately winning the public's support? In
fact, there's no real way to judge the effectiveness of media relations except
results--and the results depend far more on the underlying reality than on the
spin. But "spin control" remains a useful explanation for reporters who can't
understand how the public can like this guy. In fact, it's not the first time
they've trotted it out. The current round of barbed paeans to the White House
PR machine echoes press grousing during the Reagan years, when reporters sought
to explain why the public supported a president they believed was ineffective
and incompetent. Since journalists knew they weren't wrong, Reagan's
popularity had to be a tribute to his team of Hollywood image makers. Michael
Deaver did it with smoke and mirrors.

            That
reporters now think of the Clintonites as master spinmeisters is especially
ironic in light of what they said about the White House spin machine a few
years ago. Back then, the common wisdom was that the administration was
breathtakingly inept at communications. Officials assigned to deal with the
press were arrogant and hostile. The result was an administration that was
regularly embarrassed by PR "fiascoes." Officials naively thought they could
bypass the press and speak directly to the public. In 1994, Kurtz himself
wrote, "By initially trying to circumvent the White House press corps, the
president and his aides clearly underestimated the degree to which negative
news reports could cause them political trouble."

            Administration officials sort of liked this line, because
it exonerated them at a substantive level. They had failed only at
communicating their agenda. The inverse of the proposition--that they have
great form but lousy content--pleases the same officials far less. In reality,
very little has changed. It is true, as Kurtz writes, that McCurry is an
especially smooth and capable spokesman. But the reason he is so well liked is
that he is generally straightforward and truthful; he does not go in for heavy
spin. Judged as a whole, the Clinton media-wrangling team is not obviously more
skillful than others past. Few reporters think Ann Lewis is a more competent
communications director than her predecessor Don Baer. I would venture that
none thinks Sidney Blumenthal is more effective as a press tactician than his
first-term counterpart, David Gergen.

            When journalists explain
Clinton's popularity as the result of brilliant spin, what are they saying?
"Spin" means the administration using the media to mislead the public. So they
are, in effect, praising the White House for lying to them--and getting away
with it. What does that say about the journalists themselves?

            Reporters, whose job is
depicting reality, profess to despise spin. In fact, they like getting spun. It
makes them part of the great Washington game, and it gives them something to
act cynical and world-weary about. If politicians took to telling the truth,
journalists would lose their role as interpreters. But to say that the White
House spin is working amounts to saying that you, the journalist, are failing
in your job of blocking it. It's a startling admission--all the more shocking
because it isn't true.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Betty and Monica

            Jeff Danziger's cartoon,
originally in the Los Angeles Times and reprinted in the Sunday New
York Times , shows Monica Lewinsky and Betty Currie sitting at a booth in a
fern bar. Lewinsky, slathered in makeup and dressed in what presumably is
intended to represent a designer outfit, clutches a frilly cocktail and gabs
away in Valley speak: "So, I'm like, yuh, and he's like, duh, and I'm like
thinking about a new car." Currie wears a raincoat and stares uncomprehendingly
at her companion over a cup of coffee. "That's nice," she says. The caption is:
"Now we are asked to believe that Betty Currie tried to get Monica Lewinsky a
job because they were actually great friends."

            Danziger
was probably borrowing his joke from a column by Maureen Dowd, who also finds
the idea of a friendship between Currie and Lewinsky laughable. "Mr. Clinton
said it was Betty who became friends with Monica," Dowd wrote in the March 8
New York Times . "It makes sense that the 58-year-old secretary, known
for her dignity and discretion, would have enjoyed the dithering visits of a
shopaholic who thought she was having a high school romance with the President,
like, of the United States." The general belief seems to be that Clinton or his
minions have essentially concocted the notion of a bond between Currie and
Lewinsky in order to explain Lewinsky's many visits to the White House and the
high-level help she received in searching for a job in New York.

            We may be at the stage in the scandal where any assertion
by Bill Clinton or his partisans has everyone not only doubting it but also
immediately assuming the opposite. And often for good reason. In this case,
however, it turns out that Currie and Lewinsky were friends. The
original link was apparently Walter Kaye, the New York advertising mogul,
Democratic donor, and friend of Lewinsky's mother's who sponsored Monica for an
internship at the White House. The Kayes and the Curries are friends who have
socialized together in New York City. It is not surprising or intrinsically
suspicious then, that Currie, who has a reputation for looking out for White
House interns with whom she has no personal connection, would have been helpful
and friendly to Monica.

            Because
none of the principals is talking, it's hard to discover much about how close a
relationship Lewinsky and Currie developed. But the two do seem to have been
friends. Interesting detail: Mourners who attended the funeral of Betty
Currie's brother--Theodore Williams Jr., who died in a car accident last
December--recall seeing Lewinsky there. Lest anyone assume that Monica showed
up at the Metropolitan Baptist Church that day to ogle the president, a source
who asked not to be named says Lewinsky was spotted in the kitchen back at the
Currie home in Arlington. She helped clean up and serve food to the
out-of-towners. In fact, she brought a dish.

            
This background casts a rather different light
on the plausibility of Clinton's claim in his Paula Jones deposition that
Currie helped Lewinsky find a job in New York. Another fact that has been
largely ignored, according to friends of Currie's, is that she and Vernon
Jordan have been friends for 30 years. She also has a long-standing friendship
with White House Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta. Like most everyone in
politics, she uses her connections on behalf of her friends. Thus when Jordan
says that Currie called him to ask him for help in finding Lewinsky a job in
New York, there is every reason to think he is telling the truth--and it's at
least plausible that Currie was calling at her own behest, not Clinton's.

            None of
this is to say that Clinton wasn't sexually involved with Lewinsky, or that he
wasn't also interested in Jordan's efforts to find her a job. But the automatic
presumption that a personal relationship between Currie and Lewinsky couldn't
have existed says less about the president's lack of credibility than about the
assumptions of certain white people. An older black secretary and a rich white
airhead, many reporters and pundits have glibly conjectured, couldn't have
enough in common to be close. This testifies to a failure of imagination. It
also embodies a mentality that is not quite racist but smacks of
condescension.

            The attitude is not limited to journalists and cartoonists.
One of the first Washington Post stories about Currie quoted an
anonymous White House official. "She dresses nicely and she speaks well, and
she's neat," the official said of Currie. "Her sweaters are probably stacked up
nicely in her closet." This was someone who worked with her, sounding as if
Currie was applying to be a domestic servant. Who would ever assume that the
president's executive assistant wouldn't be neat or use proper grammar?
You can't imagine anyone describing a white presidential assistant--Evelyn
Lincoln or Rose Mary Woods--this way.

            Another grating manifestation
of this mindset is the way Currie is constantly referred to as "dignified."
This compliment threatens to become for black women what "articulate" is for
black men such as Vernon Jordan. Though meant as praise, it is in fact highly
patronizing. A middle-age white person would seldom be characterized as
"dignified" or "deeply religious" (unless he is some kind of religious
fanatic). The clichés that have been employed to describe Currie embody an
assumption that most African-American women are not dignified.

            Lots of people writing about
this sex scandal want to make Betty Currie out to be the ultimate victim, taken
cruel advantage of by a truth-evading president who happened to be her boss.
What Currie has been put through is certainly unpleasant. But let's remember
that a lot of innocent bystanders have been subjected to swarming reporters and
unexpected legal bills--and perhaps faced with hard choices between loyalty and
integrity. Currie, who has had a long career in politics, is no naif. As one
old pal of hers told me, "There is a kind of worldly-wise woman in there--this
has been lost in all the saintly religious stuff. She is very good to her
friends. And those friends include Monica."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Football Caucus

            Three of the 73 Republican
freshmen elected to Congress in 1994 arrived in Washington with the status of
celebrities. One was Sonny Bono, lately replaced by his widow, Mrs. Bono. The
other two were both former professional football players, both from Oklahoma
and both aggressively religious. The white one is Steve Largent, who represents
Tulsa. The black one is J.C. Watts, who grew up poor in the hamlet of Eufaula
and represents southwestern Oklahoma.

            From the
moment they arrived, the two have had an aura about them. Both won desirable
committee assignments. They are frequent guests on talk shows and favored
speakers at GOP fund-raisers. Largent has been touted in conservative
publications such as the Weekly Standard as having what it takes to be a
Republican vice president. Watts, who is also frequently mentioned as veep
timber, gave a big speech at the party's 1996 convention in San Diego and was
selected by Newt Gingrich to deliver the Republican response to Bill Clinton's
1997 State of the Union address. (His signature line, used in both speeches:
"character is simply doing what's right when nobody is looking.") Even
nonconservatives praise Watts in somewhat patronizing tones. "The cynical,
secular world of Washington might snicker a bit at his home-made, hand-me-down
wisdom," Steve and Cokie Roberts write in their syndicated column. "But in the
Eufaulas of America they know he's right."

            You're not supposed to say that Watts and Largent are dumb
jocks. This taboo is a form of political correctness that even Republicans
endorse. But in truth, the stereotype is not too far off the mark. Both are
embarked on undistinguished, if not utterly futile, careers in Congress. While
they're both very nice men, in an unworldly sort of way, they're in way over
their heads. Treated as stars, they're really just mascots.

            Largent
was the more successful football player and is a more extreme conservative. A
pass receiver for 14 years on the Seattle Seahawks, he was inducted into the
Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1995. His concerns are principally the taxes that
afflict upper-income earners like himself (he's worth several million dollars)
and issues that flow from his evangelical Christianity, such as opposition to
gay rights. "My faith is the foundation of my life," he says. "I won't deny
that, because the way I relate to people is a reflection of my faith." On his
Web site is a profile touting his anti-tax zeal. It is reprinted from the
Spotlight , the newspaper of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. (A spokesman
for Largent said he thought the Liberty Lobby was merely a "conservative,
pro-family organization" and didn't know it was anti-Semitic.) Largent's two
signature proposals are abolishing the tax code on Jan. 1, 2002--an idiotic
gimmick Largent is either stupid enough to believe in sincerely or cynical
enough to push despite its idiocy (I have my hunch) and something called the
Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act.

            
What makes Largent ineffectual is not his
extremism but rather his disinclination to compromise or operate as part of a
team. As part of the small, ongoing insurrection of conservative true believers
against Speaker Gingrich, he has essentially given up his chance to get bills
introduced or to have an influence on the Republican agenda. Largent appears to
have decided early on that Gingrich was spineless. When the speaker decided to
surrender to President Clinton during the government shutdown, Largent voted to
keep it closed. He subsequently opposed the 1996 budget agreement and called on
Gingrich to step aside during his ethics trouble. During one heated GOP caucus,
he made a scene by telling the speaker that he wouldn't succeed in intimidating
him, because burly NFL linebackers had tried and failed.

            Largent
does have a kind of blinkered integrity. Along with another colleague from
Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, he blew the whistle on House Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster's offer of $15 million in road
pork in exchange for votes for the highway bill. But Largent's own passes have
all been intercepted. He had to withdraw his parents' rights bill when even
religious leaders opposed it as too extreme. His end-the-tax-code initiative
had merely given fodder to the Clinton administration in its efforts to paint
Republicans as irresponsible. On a daily basis, Largent spends his time trying
to attach anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and anti-NEA amendments to anything
with an H.R. number. (On Meet the Press , he recently advanced the novel
argument that without Roe vs. Wade we would have 26 million more workers
helping to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent.) He sees Washington as a
city filled with "temptations" and pines openly for his family in Tulsa.

            J.C. (Julius Caesar) Watts was not Largent's equal as a
football player. A quarterback at the University of Oklahoma, he led his team
to two Orange Bowl championships but never made it from the Canadian Football
League to the NFL. He has been marginally more effective as a congressman,
because he has cooperated with the leadership. Watts has succeeded in helping
his district and state--saving an Air Force base from closure and winning $90
million for a new cross-town bridge in Oklahoma City in exchange for his vote
for the transportation bill. His pet community renewal bill, an enterprise-zone
type proposal, was defeated--but at least it got to the floor.

            But
despite his go-along, get-along affability, Watts is unlikely to accomplish
much in the House. The problem is that Watts would never be given a leading
role in his party if he weren't black. Republican affirmative action is the
basis for his career, and Republican political correctness is the basis for his
reputation. Though Watts is a minister, when he speaks without a script, he can
do little more than utter what Steve and Cokie gently describe as "home-made,
hand-me-down wisdom." Here's a sample from our phone conversation: "We can
agree without being disagreeable. I'm not trying to be like anybody or
different from anybody. I'm here to be who I am. I'm comfortable with that. I
am not an anti-conservative kind of person--whoever else is who they are, and
whoever else isn't, is something different. I didn't come to Washington to be
like somebody or be different from somebody. At end of the day, I'll let the
talking heads and experts do their thing." A world-class waffle. Watts can go
on like this forever. On affirmative action, he has urged "caution." When I
asked if he would have voted for Proposition 209 in California, he said, "I
understand the people who have voted for it, and I understand the people who
voted against it." Asked which he would have been, he answered, "Good
question."

            
If Watts sticks to his pledge to step down
after six years, next term will be his last. But like other term limit
traitors, he is now hedging. "I think I'll do what the state of Oklahoma
wants," he told me on the phone last week. "I'll just weigh it." But then Watts
added that he had seen too many people fail to leave the stage while the
audience was still applauding. "Whenever I leave, whether six or eight or 20
years, I'm comfortable to allow history to speak," he said.

            Oklahoma's jocks may be no
denser than many of its other Republican politicians. This is the state, after
all, that gets credit for sending Don Nickles and Ernest Istook to Washington.
Indeed, Largent and Watts could match lack of wits with plenty of House members
from both parties and all 50 states. But it's uncontroversial that many
Congress members are dim. Only about former football players are you not
allowed to say so.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bill Paxon's Mysterious Epiphany

            Briefly displacing Monica
Lewinsky as Topic A last week was a news flash from Capitol Hill. Bill Paxon, a
well-scrubbed, 43-year-old Republican representative from Buffalo, N.Y., was
retiring. This came as a shock, because Paxon was viewed as an ambitious fellow
with a long career ahead of him. Though he had been displaced from his position
in the House Republican leadership as punishment for his role in the failed
coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich last July, he remained popular with his
colleagues. As recently as a few days before his withdrawal, Paxon had been
busy canvassing support for a challenge to Dick Armey for the post of majority
leader. But instead of announcing his candidacy for a job that would put him in
line to become speaker of the House, Paxon pledged never to run for
anything--not even dogcatcher--again. Like his wife Susan Molinari, who quit
last year to become a news anchor on CBS, he said his move was prompted by a
desire to spend more time with his family.

            Despite
the eagerness of the Sunday-morning pundits to embrace it, the official story
does not begin to add up. A purely political creature, Paxon has spent his
entire adult life in two jobs: New York state assemblyman and member of
Congress. Here he was giving up his life's work, with no idea of what he would
do instead, because of an epiphany that seemed totally out of character. His
transformation from someone desperate to spend more time with his colleagues
and less with his family to someone desperate to spend none with his colleagues
and all with his family happened within days. And even if you take his
explanation at face value, why would Paxon rule out seeking elective office
ever again, even after his daughter was in college?

            The predictable result has been a plague of rumors, all
nasty and none very plausible. The only remotely convincing interpretation is
that Paxon knew but was not willing to admit publicly that he could not defeat
Armey and that, without a path forward, he lost heart. Beltway outsiders might
wonder why any of this even matters. Paxon is the world's most replaceable
man--a lightweight operator of fungible principles, not especially
conservative, not especially moderate, and with no great or special political
talent. He will be forgotten in months, if not minutes. What is significant
about the episode, and about the haze of innuendo surrounding it, is the way it
epitomizes what the Republican House has become. In the past year, the House
side of the Capitol has become not only an extraordinarily vicious environment
but also an entirely unproductive and unsatisfying one. Paxon's hasty departure
and whatever invisible machinations lie behind it show that the devil makes
work for idle hands. They also show the total intellectual and political
exhaustion of the Republican revolution of 1994.

            For over a year, the only
real news coming out of the Republican caucus has been gossip about internecine
warfare, tales about coups and countercoups, ambition, rebellion, and
retribution. The last month has been consumed with especially intense jockeying
and speculation about the leadership hierarchy. Would Paxon challenge Armey for
the majority leader's job (in an election that is nearly a year off)? What
would that mean for the eventual succession to the speakership should Gingrich
quit to run for president? Shortly before Paxon announced his retirement, Rep.
Bob Livingston, R-La., decided that instead of stepping down to become a
fat-cat lobbyist, he would hang around in the hope of winning the speaker's job
after Gingrich leaves. That fueled more kibitzing. Could Armey conciliate the
angry and disappointed class of '94? What would Tom DeLay do? Would there be
another attempt to overthrow Gingrich?

            In short,
the Republican House has deteriorated into a sub-Shakespearean Elizabethan
revenge drama. This is hardly surprising. Where there is no strong leader, no
unifying sense of purpose, and no rule of law, political chaos tends to ensue,
as surely in the Longworth Building as in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. But
the fratricidal House is an amazing change from the heady days of early 1995.
Today's policy vacuum makes the gimmicky Contract With America look like
Lenin's What Is to Be Done? Where there was unity and esprit de corps,
there is now factionalism and demoralization. How did the Republican revolution
turn so quickly into a Brooks Bros. version of Lord of the Flies ?

            
I think there are two important causes. The
first is structural. When he became speaker, Gingrich tossed out the age-old
House rules. He placed a term limit of eight years on himself as speaker and a
limit of six years on committee chairs. In choosing chairs, he suspended
seniority. For example, Gingrich bypassed four more senior members to make
Livingston chairman of House Appropriations. This transformed the political
culture of the House. Advancement no longer had to be slow and steady.
Shake-ups were to be expected. Careers could take off and fizzle suddenly. The
result was a lot of scheming by people such as Paxon who suddenly had an
opportunity to get ahead quickly.

            The
second explanation has to do with the political trajectory of the last few
years. The Gingrich Congress has paid a high price for overinterpreting its
1994 mandate. Gingrich almost lost his job, and though the GOP kept control of
Congress in 1996, its leaders have abandoned both the rhetoric and substance of
anti-government radicalism. Lately, they've been hanging back and venturing
little. In 1998, Congress has only 89 scheduled workdays; the annual average
since 1987 is 140. Gingrich now fears controversy the way a convalescent fears
a draft. This means that all the issues that conservatives care most
about--banning affirmative action, cutting taxes, pushing school choice--remain
on indefinite hold. The demagogic gimmicks get ever more desperate and empty.
Their latest is to fix a date for abolition of the tax code--the idea being
that it would force sweeping reform (details to follow).

            Gone, perhaps for good, is Gingrich's "visionary" rhetoric.
Replacing it is a litany of Boy Scout-scale good deeds reminiscent of nothing
so much as the pointillist Clinton agenda Republicans mocked so sneeringly
around 1996. In his most recent speech, Gingrich boasted about building F-22s
in his district and improving the water quality of the Chattahoochee River. He
also proposed new ideas: giving cell phones to teachers and--I kid you
not--screening Native Americans for diabetes. The main business in Congress
this week was dividing up $173 billion in transportation goodies.

            In a way, the collapse of
conservative principles in Congress only heightens the mystery of why Bill
Paxon quit. The post-revolutionary Republican Congress is an environment in
which he might well have flourished, and where he ought to have felt very much
at home.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Term Limit Traitors

            Before they got control of
Congress, conservatives contended that the big problem in Washington was an
infestation of vermin known as "career politicians." The newcomers came armed
with a powerful repellent. Setting maximum terms of between six and 12 years in
office would function as an antidote to Potomac fever and restore the place of
the "citizen legislator," whose loyalty would remain with the voters who
elected him, not the institution in which he served.

            This
movement caught fire in 1994. By the end of that year, 22 states had passed
term limitations on their own congressional delegations. But because it wasn't
yet clear whether these limits were constitutional--the Supreme Court decided
in 1995 that they weren't--the Contract With America also endorsed a term
limits amendment to the Constitution. And since a constitutional amendment
might not pass, many congressional candidates in 1994 and since have term
limited themselves voluntarily. That is, they've promised to call it quits
after six to 12 years in the House and 12 years in the Senate. One gung-ho
freshman elected in '94 even gave the clerk of the House a letter of
resignation dated January 2001 to demonstrate the sincerity of his promise.

            Forced retirement was a distant prospect then. But now the
most enthusiastic term limiters in the House are facing the expectation that
they will follow through on their pledge. For those who vowed to return to
their plows after six years, the next term will be their last. Several of those
freshmen actually appear to take the idea that they made a promise seriously
and have reaffirmed their intentions of stepping down. But others are
discovering nuances to the issue they never noticed before. In other words,
they have turned into term limit traitors.

            The Benedict Arnold of the
term limits movement is George Nethercutt of Washington state. Nethercutt
defeated the last Democratic speaker of the House, Tom Foley, in 1994 on a
platform that consisted of little more than term limits for members of
Congress. He rode to office by allying himself with a state term limit
initiative that Foley filed suit to overturn. Nethercutt recently changed his
mind. "Make no mistake, I remain committed to term limits, but experience has
taught me that six years may be too short," he said in a statement issued in
February. In a follow-up interview, Nethercutt said that if the voters in
Washington's Fifth District clamored for him to stay, he would consider it.

            Of course,
the chief objection to term limits has always been that the people should have
the right to elect whoever they want to represent them in Congress, including
someone they have elected repeatedly before. Nethercutt now sees the merit of
this argument, but he's far from admitting he was wrong. He says he's still for
term limits--he just had the details wrong. Twelve years would be a more
appropriate limit for the House--with nothing precluding another 12 in the
Senate. And if Washington voters decide they still want Nethercutt after 24
years? We can cross that bridge when we come to it.

            
Nethercutt's fellow turncoat is John Shadegg of
Arizona, one of the young hotheads in the freshman class of '94. In his first
congressional campaign, Shadegg promised he would abide by the six-year limit
set by Arizona voters. That limit, however, was declared unconstitutional, and
Shadegg now feels the tug of his broader responsibilities. "The people who are
honoring the six-year term limit are the ones with the most revolutionary zeal,
and they're the ones that are leaving," he recently told the Arizona
Republic , explaining his defection. In other words, Shadegg thinks people
like himself who support term limits must go back on their word to prevent
people who are really against term limits from getting elected.

            Another
slow learner is Scott McInnis of Colorado, who was elected in 1992. McInnis has
announced he will not step aside in 2000 as he had originally promised. His
reason is that before he was elected to the House, he didn't understand how
important the seniority system was in Congress. If Colorado's representatives
were to heed term limits, the state's congressional delegation would be less
powerful than the delegations from states that don't recognize term limits. The
upshot, he says, would be unilateral disarmament for his state.

            The problem with these arguments is not that they are bad
arguments. In fact, they're quite sensible. The seniority system means you get
power by serving long enough to gain seniority. And a state that voluntarily
limits the terms of its representatives harms itself relative to others. But
there is no excuse for McInnis' just coming to grips with these objections.
After 10 years in the Colorado House of Representatives, the last two as
majority leader, he's no stranger to the concept of seniority. As to the
unilateral disarmament point: It's a very solid objection. But it was an even
better objection when McInnis supported the passage of Colorado's term limits
law in 1994. Had the Supreme Court upheld the Colorado law, a binding term
limit on all the state's legislators would have put it at a far greater
disadvantage than a disposable promise by a few of its legislators. In fact,
McInnis and his colleagues knew perfectly well what they were committing to
when they swore they'd limit their own terms. But back when they made those
promises, before they'd ever been elected to Congress, the prospect of leaving
in six or eight or a dozen years didn't sound so bad.

            The hypocrisy here does not
belong just to the few who made specific pledges. Term limits was the official
position of the Republican Party in 1994. The Contract With America called for
term limits for the entire House and Senate. (Of course, if you read the fine
print, it only promised to bring such a proposal up for a vote.) More senior
Republicans have been as disingenuous as the young bloods. They've just been
more adept at avoiding personal embarrassment. Take Bill McCollum, a Florida
representative who is one of the leaders on the issue in the House. He's in his
18 th year of service and is running for re-election. No one back
home is giving him a hard time on the issue, because he was not so foolish as
to make a personal promise to step down.

            The term limits craze makes a
nice case study in political demagoguery. All the problems the Republican
radicals are belatedly recognizing now were totally obvious at the outset.
Before long, we can expect to hear retirement-averse conservatives making the
rest of the fine arguments against term limits. Experience, they will discover,
is actually valuable. The fact that voters can and do reject incumbents will
strike them as an epiphany. Republican term limit traitors don't need to
apologize for changing their minds, which they have every right to do. What
they owe us is an admission that their professed faith in term limits was phony
in the first place.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Newt Lite

            Try to remember, if you can
for a moment, the old Newt Gingrich. He was a man who liked to talk very
grandly, often describing his political program as "renewing American
civilization" and replacing what he referred to as "the bureaucratic welfare
state" with a new kind of society. The 1994 election that brought him to power
was a "revolution" that he cast in terms of Braveheart , a gory movie
about freedom fighters in medieval Scotland. Republican traitors knew what to
expect. Gingrich blamed liberals for sensational murders and called the
Clintons the enemies of "normal Americans." He drew cosmological charts with
himself at the center and got very fat.

            The new
Newt, by contrast, is a humble fellow. In his book Lessons Learned the Hard
Way , he presents himself as shorn of his old harshness and grandiosity, as
well as of 30 or 40 pounds. On the cover, he appears in faded jeans, hiking
boots, and a leather jacket, smiling as he leans against a post-and-rail fence,
bathed in soft filtered sunlight. The few specific proposals he makes are
stunning in their modesty. For instance, Gingrich advocates diabetes screening
as a way to save Medicare money and thinks it is especially important for
Native Americans, who are highly susceptible to the disease, to monitor their
blood pressure. He admits to mistakes such as failing to keep his mouth shut at
several points, mismanaging the House Republicans, and underestimating his
opponents. He describes himself as tolerant of internal dissent, even
identifying with the GOP rebels who plotted a coup against him last summer.

            Seeing Newt so shrunken is somewhat disheartening. There's
a poignant moment in his mostly very dull book when, as his career is being
torn apart by the House Ethics Committee investigation into his college course,
he describes visiting one of his favorite places, the American Museum of
Natural History in New York. Communing with dinosaurs revives his spirits. In
the old days, Newt didn't need fossils to spur him on. He had the courage of
his convictions and of his boorish aggression. Now he comes across like a
victim of some Dale Carnegie re-education camp--it's as if he's constantly
reminding himself of his image-consultant's lessons in seeming nice. Where the
old Newt was a compelling meanie, the new one offers anodyne platitudes and
empty uplift. He calls at one point in his book for "a serious conversation
about our national future." At another point he writes of the Republican
agenda, "What we have to offer people ... is strength and adventure, the
experience of a new level of life-enhancing energy, and love of a great
country." This could be anyone talking--Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, or
Marianne Williamson.

            What
happened to transform the raging bull into Caspar Milquetoast? There are
various theories. Some think Gingrich has modified his behavior because he is
still fighting for survival, trying to appease the House Republicans who
plotted to overthrow him and might plot again. I've heard others suggest that
he is an undiagnosed manic-depressive coming off a three-year spree. Perhaps
the most common view is that Newt is merely positioning for 2000, trying to
diminish his stratospheric "negatives" in preparation for a presidential
run.

            
None of these explanations quite cuts it.
Whatever his past gaps in judgment, Gingrich is too smart to think he has a
realistic chance of being elected president. His unpopularity is deep and
indelible. If he does run in the 2000 primaries, it will be as a way of
gracefully exiting his job as speaker. (He has to step down in 2002 anyway,
according to the rule he set.) In fact, I don't think Gingrich's transformation
is all that calculated. To be sure, his book is disingenuous at points. He says
the coup plot was merely a cry for attention by the GOP freshman class of 1994,
not a serious attempt at getting rid of him. That's ridiculous. And nowhere
does he mention one of his biggest mistakes--the $4.5 million book deal.
Gingrich returned the advance, but he still wrote (or caused to be written) two
books, of which this is the second and more nearly readable. But Gingrich's
arrogance is genuinely diminished. He truly seems a different person.

            I think
the new personality-modified Newt is mainly the product of his shattering
experiences in 1995 and 1996. Gingrich tried to lead a revolution and ended up
with his head in the guillotine. In a way, this catastrophe was the result of a
misunderstanding. Gingrich was never of the same mind as the radical freshmen.
Before the Contract With America, he was not notably anti-government. To the
contrary, he thought the GOP had suffered as a result of its foolish opposition
to popular federal programs. But Gingrich had a swollen ego. He thought of
himself as a world historical figure, so when the election of 1994 gave birth
to a movement, he stepped forward to lead it. In fact, it drove him. He was
thus the person standing in the intersection when the would-be conservative
revolution smashed into the moderate reality of American politics.

            Gingrich is now picking himself up off the asphalt. His
plan for the future is to stay out of traffic. Beyond that, he proposes the
Republican Party support something he calls "entrepreneurial government." He
would let the private sector act wherever possible and get the government to
act more like a business. This is probably what Republicans would advocate if
they were smart. Entrepreneurial government is compatible with tax cuts and
does not demand an assault on purposes and programs that the voting majority
regards as essential. It is a politics with great potential appeal to an
electorate increasingly dominated by an independent, stock-owning middle class.
This kind of politics does not alienate women. If the GOP could adopt it as a
general approach while distancing itself from aggressive social conservatism,
Democrats would have reason to fear at the presidential as well as the
congressional level.

            But Newt's entrepreneurial
idea, which stresses flexibility and innovation in how government discharges
its role, contradicts the libertarian urge to have government simply butt out.
And Gingrich still wants to have it both ways--or at least to make the class of
'94 think he does. According to his numbers, government at all levels currently
consumes about 38 percent of personal income. Gingrich proposes reducing it to
just 25 percent. If you subtract the 16 percent that goes to state and local
spending, that means the federal government would defend the country, pay for
electricity to light the Capitol dome, and do not much else. But that's not all
Gingrich intends to have it do. He wants to "protect" Medicare, dole out
hundreds of billions in highway subsidies, and fund research into diseases that
affect Republicans.

            Here Newt Lite has something
in common with Newt Heavy. His interesting ideas don't quite add up.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Worse Than Drudge

            Clinterngate entered its
baroque phase Sunday, when Joseph diGenova, a prominent Washington lawyer who
has been one of the most incontinent television commentators on the scandal,
appeared on Meet The Press . In a tone of quivering outrage, diGenova
announced that he had received a tip from a reporter that diGenova and his
wife, Victoria Toensing (who is also his law partner), were the targets of a
private investigator connected to the Clinton White House.

            There is
no evidence for this. But it has now been widely reported--as an allegation by
diGenova. Sunday and Monday, White House spokesman Mike McCurry denied it.
Tuesday, Clinton's lawyers David Kendall and Robert Bennett issued a statement
saying that while Terry Lenzner, a professional investigator, was working with
them, "We have not investigated, and are not investigating, the personal lives
of Ms. Toensing, Mr. diGenova, prosecutors, investigators, or members of the
press." DiGenova interprets the phrase "personal life" as Clintonian fancy
footwork and thus as confirmation of his charge. "The White House lied about it
on Sunday, they lied about it Monday and they lied about it yesterday,"
diGenova said in a telephone interview. "Mike McCurry lied and he did it well.
That's his job. But the rest of us don't have to believe this crap."

            Why would the White House be investigating Joe diGenova and
Victoria Toensing? DiGenova says he is at a loss to explain, since he and his
wife have been "very fair" to the president in their scores of recent
appearances on programs including Rivera Live and Crossfire . TV
bookers love diGenova because he is a former prosecutor who goes for the sound
bite, and also because he is a former independent counsel himself. Between 1992
and 1995, he looked into charges that Bush administration officials instigated
an improper search of Bill Clinton's passport files during the 1992 campaign.
(And largely exonerated the accused. Imagine how Republicans would howl if a
Democratic independent counsel let a Democratic administration off the hook.)
Though both diGenova and Toensing are Republicans who are hostile to Clinton
and supportive of Kenneth Starr, they usually argue against the
independent-counsel law in general.

            But
diGenova is being disingenuous in pretending he has no idea why anyone would be
interested in him. If the Clinton team has investigated diGenova and Toensing,
it might be because the couple seems to act as a conduit for leaks from Starr's
office. Starr is using his subpoena power to investigate anti-Starr leaks from
the Clinton camp. What would be so terrible if the Clintonites were
investigating Starr's anti-Clinton leaks? Those leaks may be illegal and
violate the president's rights. Clinton's lawyers have every justification for
trying to track them down.

            
If Starr wanted to use an intermediary,
diGenova would be a good bet. He is a friend of several members of Starr's
staff and is especially close to Starr's chief deputy, Hickman Ewing, with whom
he served as a U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration. DiGenova has
longstanding relationships with reporters, dating from his days as U.S.
attorney for the District of Columbia. One could legitimately describe either
diGenova or Toensing as a "Washington lawyer knowledgeable about the
investigation," newspapers' favorite leaker ID. There is no proof that either
has served as a cutout for Starr. But if they haven't, why do they qualify as a
"source" about anything? In fact, the unreliable gossip they sometimes pass on
makes the notorious Matt Drudge look discreet.

            One gets a glimpse of Joe
and Vicky's peculiar role in the fiasco that occurred in late January, when the
Dallas Morning News reported, then retracted, then semi-reasserted that
a Secret Service witness to a Clinton-Lewinsky encounter was prepared to
testify. To recap: On the evening of Monday, Jan. 26, the paper published a
report on its Web site. It quoted a lawyer "familiar with the negotiations" as
saying there was a Secret Service agent who had seen Clinton and Lewinsky in a
"compromising situation" and that he had become a government witness. Hours
later, the paper recanted: "the source for the story, a longtime Washington
lawyer familiar with the case, later said the information provided for
Tuesday's report was inaccurate." The paper further noted that, "The source is
not affiliated with Mr. Starr's office." But the following day, the paper
reissued a version of the story. An intermediary for a witness or witnesses who
might or might not be a Secret Service agent or agents had told Starr's office
about seeing Clinton and Lewinsky in what was now described as an "ambiguous
situation." Inexplicably, the story quoted "former U.S. Attorney Joseph
diGenova, who is not directly involved in the case," as saying that the
intermediary had made contact for the witness or witnesses with Mr. Starr's
office. "In essence, your story is correct," diGenova told the paper.

            Was the
original source also diGenova or Toensing? I think it must have been. Click to
find out why.

            Whether diGenova was the source or not, we do know
that diGenova spoke to the Dallas Morning News on the record, confirming
that a witness of some sort did indirectly pass information to Starr's office.
And we know that Toensing spoke off the record, contradicting the originally
published version. Since diGenova says they weren't representing anyone
involved, on what basis did they know? "This is a small Southern town," says
diGenova. "People talk to a lot of people. Reporters talk to people. Lawyers
talk. You hear things and you pass them on to reporters so that they might
investigate. Sometimes people don't investigate the way they should." This
sounds almost like an admission, and suggests that Starr's office may be
indirectly using journalists to try to substantiate rumors it has heard. In any
event, the fact that the Dallas Morning News considered diGenova a
legitimate source would suggest that the paper's reporter thought he wasn't
just relating third-hand gossip, but had real information from Starr's
office.

            All this
mischief is made much weirder by the fact that diGenova and Toensing are
supposed to be presiding over a big investigation themselves. Rep. Peter
Hoekstra, R.-Mich., the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the
Workforce (formally Education and Labor Committee) subcommittee on
investigations hired the pair in October to investigate corruption in the
Teamsters election, including allegations of involvement by the Democratic
National Committee. In October, they signed a contract that pays them at the
rate of $300,000 a year for 80 hours of work a month each. Committee Democrats
objected to this arrangement from the outset. DiGenova and Toensing are
lobbyists registered on behalf of several clients including the American
Hospital Association. They may be called upon to lobby legislators for whom
they also work as committee lawyers. DiGenova says the problem is theoretical
and that he and his wife have agreed not to lobby members of the committee
they're working for.

            
And there's more. DiGenova also represents
another House committee chairman, Dan Burton, the goofish Indiana Republican.
Burton, too, is both investigator and investigatee. He has been looking into
the 1996 campaign-finance scandals. Meanwhile, he is being looked into for
allegedly putting the arm on a Pakistani lobbyist for campaign
contributions.

            Democrats complain that
given the amount of time they spend with Geraldo, diGenova and Toensing can't
possibly be doing their government job. A Nexis search turns up 368 hits for
the two in the first month after the scandal broke. As of a few weeks ago, the
committee had issued no subpoenas, interviewed no witnesses, and held no
hearings. (DiGenova says it has since issued five subpoenas and has a hearing
scheduled for late next month.) Democrats have demanded to see time sheets; the
lawyers have refused to show them. "We don't work for the Democrats," diGenova
says. "We work for the majority." He says that they do their congressional work
during the day and do media in the evening.

            But the
real problem with diGenova and Toensing isn't their pundit addiction or their
neglect of an investigation that Democrats would just as soon they neglect
anyhow. It's that their myriad, dubious, and overlapping roles keep piling up
without ever being properly explained. It's like one of those Westerns where
the town barber is also the postmaster and the saloonkeeper. In the next scene,
it turns out he's the sheriff too.

            
               If you
missed the demonstration that either diGenova or Toensing was the original
source for the Dallas Morning News report about a Secret Service agent
who witnessed Clinton and Lewinsky in a "compromising situation," click
.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Case for Community Service

            President Clinton has spent
the last six years lecturing Americans about the glories of community service.
AmeriCorps is his pet project, and his administration has encouraged service as
an alternative to jail time. Well, now is the chance for the president to put
his ideas to work for himself. Clinton and his allies are desperately seeking a
dignified way out of Flytrap: How about community service? We should let the
president serve out his term, but let's make him really serve.

            The basic
conundrum for those who want Flytrap to end is this: Any remedy lenient enough
for Clinton diehards will enrage the right half of the country, and any remedy
punitive enough for conservatives will enrage the left half. A solution must
simultaneously 1) minimize carnage to the presidency and the country; 2) be
vindictive enough to sate the GOP; 3) be soft enough to pass the Democrats; and
4) allow us to put the scandal aside (or mostly aside) for the remainder of his
term.

            None of the proposed remedies suffices. House Republicans,
especially those on the judiciary committee, are set on eviscerating Clinton
and won't settle for anything as gentle as censure (even if Clinton does agree
to take his licks standing in the well of the House). A censure plus a fine
also dissatisfies conservatives, because it suggests Clinton can buy pardon. On
the other hand, impeachment would be bloody, endless, and intolerable to most
voters. And resignation would set the horrific precedent that the media and the
opposition can drum a president out of office if they shout enough.

            But
community service, plus censure, might succeed. Every week until the end of his
term, Clinton would spend a few hours on some direct, necessary community
service. Congress would decide--after negotiation with the president--the total
number of hours and the kind of work (more on the specifics of this later). The
service would be an everyday obligation for Clinton, with no presidential photo
ops and no special treatment.

            
What would be the benefits of this regimen? For
starters, Clinton would make tangible reparations for the damage he has
inflicted to society. Many Americans are infuriated by Clinton's notion that
apology is action. His prolific, ever savvier apologies are selfish: They are
designed to make him look better. He has announced that he has accepted
responsibility, but what exactly has he done about it? Redemption, in most
religious and ethical traditions, requires deeds. In service, Clinton could not
allow words to substitute for actions. He would have to act.

            Service
would meet another requirement of Flytrap punishment: It would humble him.
Clinton has suggested that he can best make amends by being an excellent
president. But we require more visible evidence of his regret. Being president
is no suffering for him. In fact, being president reinforces his worst
instincts. His chief Flytrap sin is believing that normal rules and moral codes
don't apply to him, that everyone else exists to do his bidding. His punishment
must remind him that he is merely a man, and so he must be chopped down to
man-size. In service, he could not use his power to bully others. In service,
he would, for the first time in 20 years, take orders instead of give them,
cater to others instead of being catered to. That might begin to cure, or at
least temper, his wicked and dangerous sense of entitlement.

            The humbling of Clinton would also serve a political
function: It would placate conservatives, especially if service were combined
with a haymaker congressional censure. The image of Clinton scraping graffiti
off some high school might persuade enough Republicans to sign on.

            Service, too, might be
cathartic enough to liberate us from our Flytrap obsession. We would no longer
need to debate dada legal technicalities and gasp over sordid details.
Clinton's critics won't be able to gripe that he escaped scot-free: He will be
paying the price, quietly, every week.

            Service
might even benefit the president in the way he cares most about. It must
devastate Clinton--a president obsessed with his legacy--that his place in
history is now secure: He's the reckless lech who ruined his presidency for a
22-year-old intern. Whether he resigns, is impeached, or is censured, that will
be his epitaph. If Clinton does community service, he will still be remembered
as the reckless lech, but he may also be remembered as the reckless lech who
had the grace to make amends for his sins.

            
There are obstacles to Clinton's community
service, but they are surmountable. Would he have time? We can't expect him to
skip G-7 summits so that he can collect roadside trash. But he managed to
squeeze Monica Lewinsky (or rather, she squeezed him) into his schedule--not to
mention dawn-to-dusk fund raising--so surely he can squeeze in a few hours of
good works on Saturdays.

            Some will
object that service, like censure, is not in the Constitution. Congress cannot
impose community service on the president without his permission--that would be
an unconstitutional "bill of attainder." (
                  Slate
               's "Explainer"
examines the "bill of attainder" at greater length here.) But if Clinton consents, censure and community service can
proceed. And he would certainly consent if the alternative was impeachment.

            The thorniest question, of course, is: What kind of
service? It must be dignified: It cannot tarnish the presidency, and it must be
acceptable to Clinton. (So bedpans and chain gangs are out. Sorry, Rep. Bob
Barr, R-Ga.) Yet it must be punitive enough that Republicans will be satisfied.
(It can't be, for example, any activity that lets Clinton talk, even though
that's what he does best. Just as drunken drivers convicted of manslaughter are
forced to recount their sins to high schoolers, Clinton could probably give a
superb heart-to-heart speech on the perils of infidelity. But he would enjoy it
too much for it to be a suitable punishment.)

            Fortunately, a perfect model
for such honorable yet humble service already exists, and it even has a
presidential imprimatur: Habitat for Humanity. Clinton should build houses for
the poor with Jimmy Carter. Or, better yet, he should build houses for the poor
under the supervision of Jimmy Carter. Now that's a Flytrap remedy even
Clinton's worst enemies can love.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No Respect

            In recent weeks, Bill
Clinton's stock has been trading higher. His approval-disapproval rating in the
latest CNN poll is 59-31. This may account for the grudging credit the
president has begun to receive on the weekend talk shows (see

                  Slate
               's "Pundit Central") and in the opinion columns. Commentators
are commending the administration's strategic acumen in proposing to expand
child-care benefits and let 55-year-olds buy into Medicare. More generally,
they have lately accorded Clinton a measure of respect for presiding over peace
and prosperity, and simply for staying afloat for five years.

            Yet,
beneath these acknowledgments there runs an undercurrent of distaste, disdain,
even contempt. Last month, the unapologetically establishment journalist R.W.
Apple Jr. wrote a piece in GQ about Clinton's place in history. Though
he hasn't screwed up in any profound way, Apple contended, Clinton will be
remembered as a middling president, at best. He is a man with a "compulsion to
cut ethical corners" and "total contempt for ethical niceties." Such hostility
continues to peek through at regular intervals. On election night in 1996,
agribusiness spokesman and former TV journalist David Brinkley announced that
Clinton was "a bore" and would always be one. Among members of the Washington
establishment, especially the Washington media establishment, there is a scorn
for Clinton that is not always articulated in public but never fades.

            I'm not talking here about conservative anti-Clinton animus
as represented by the American Spectator , the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, or the Christopher Ruddy-Ambrose Evans-Pritchard-Richard Mellon
Scaife-Jerry Falwell school of conspiracy wackiness. Though this form of
detestation does have a clinical element, it is easy to understand.
Right-wingers hate Clinton in much the same way that left-wingers hated Reagan
(although Clinton is, of course, hardly an ideological threat as Reagan was,
and in fact, many left-wingers also hate Clinton, precisely for being a
centrist). The left had the October Surprise; the right has Vince Foster. What
is much harder to understand is the Clintonophobia exhibited by a Washington
elite that roughly shares the administration's center-liberal orientation. This
group includes the editorial page editors of the Washington Post and the
New York Times , as well as leading columnists for both papers. It is the
oft-expressed view of what remains of Georgetown society. Goodness knows there
are plenty of reasons to dislike anyone, maybe more than the average number in
Clinton's case. What is mystifying is the intensity of the contempt for
him.

            
Let's begin with the conscious reasons. If you
ask one of these Clinton detractors what she objects to, she is likely to
mention that the president is duplicitous, disloyal, and unethical. Michael
Kelly has called the president "a shocking liar." Apple has compared the
Clintons to the F. Scott Fitzgerald characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who left
a trail of broken friends in their single-minded social ascent. Maureen Dowd
recently wrote that the Arlington graves-for-cash scenario sounded like
something Clinton would have done, even though he did not, in fact, do it.
Interestingly, if these critics are much bothered by conventional immoral
behavior, such as the extramarital affairs, they don't make a public point of
it.

            Each of
these criticisms contains a kernel of truth. Clinton almost certainly has not
told the truth about Paula Jones, just as the first lady did not tell the truth
about the travel-office firings. Bill Clinton treated his friends Lani Guinier
and Harold Ickes badly. Investing with James McDougal does not reflect the
highest ethical standards. But those who continue to dwell on these well-aired
matters seldom exhibit much perspective. What president or successful
politician has never acted expediently by dissembling, dropping old friends,
and compromising his ethics at various points? The real question is whether the
extent of Clinton's bad behavior is extraordinary. JFK was a favorite of many
of Clinton's Georgetown critics when they were younger. Kennedy, of course, cut
his corners with a touch of class, something else Clinton is said to lack.
Clinton haters hate Clinton for not having the dignity and sense of restraint
that should attach to his office. Even his jogging shorts, they think, are
unpresidential.

            The next level is less literal, more psychological, and
involves several disparate strands. Many journalists were seduced by Clinton in
1992, and subsequently felt personally betrayed. Joe Klein is the chief
specimen here. During the 1992 campaign, Klein gushed about Clinton in New
York magazine. After Clinton became president, Klein tongue-lashed him in
Newsweek for not measuring up. Klein distilled his own emotional
roller-coaster ride into an excellent novel, Primary Colors . Related to
this sense of betrayal, which is shared in varying degrees by many others who
covered Clinton in 1992, is the feeling that Clinton has "got away with it," in
the sense of never paying the bill for his sexual misdeeds. Related to this is
an attitude not far from envy. Disappointed in Clinton, many of the shrewder
members of the president's peer group seem to think that they could do better
themselves. Since Clinton is no smarter and certainly no better behaved than
they are, why aren't their positions reversed?

            The
generational factor is significant. Everybody distrusts the baby boomers. The
older generation sees them as spoiled and self-indulgent. Those younger see
them as greedy and narcissistic. Often, those who came of age during the 1960s
seem to resent themselves. Just as he gets it from all sides as a member of the
'60s generation, Clinton gets it coming and going on the issue of class. To
Georgetown sophisticates, there is something hopelessly garish and cheap about
the Clintons. At the same time, others sneer at Bill and Hillary for being part
of a snooty meritocratic elite (viz., Renaissance Weekend) with no feel for the
grimy working-class soul of the Democratic Party.

            
But the most important explanation of the
Washington establishment's Clinton hating is that Clinton threatens its waning
power. At the height of the Cold War, Georgetown society was the center of the
political world. These days, it is a vestige, whose only real wellspring of
importance is a president who elevates it with his blandishments and listens to
its advice. When a Republican president like Nixon or Bush fails to heed the
wise men of the permanent government, they can dismiss him. When a Democrat
like Carter or Clinton ignores them, they must launch their missiles. For
whatever reason, the Clintons have been notably uninterested in cultivating the
surviving members of the Georgetown set. During the presidential transition in
1992, the Clintons attended a dinner at Katharine Graham's house and drew
glowing comments from the attendees. They launched a round of intimate White
House dinners. Johnny Apple cooed.

            After that, however, the
president more or less stiffed the Georgetowners. This outraged them--you could
tell because they all said their friends were outraged. In July 1993, Sally
Quinn observed in the Washington Post : "People who have been here and
who have attained a certain social or political position do not want to be
'dissed.' They want the new team to respect them. Because these tribal rituals
were not fulfilled, many people were virtually gleeful when Clinton went into
free fall in the polls. You reap what you sow, was the attitude." As he begins
the sixth year of his presidency, Clinton is reaping it still.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dobson's Choice

            The historian Robert
Conquest has two laws of politics, which are recorded in Kingsley Amis'
Memoirs . The first is that, "generally speaking, everybody is
reactionary on the subjects he knows about." The second is "every organization
appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents."

            Conquest
Rule No. 2 applies nicely to the recent activities of Focus on the Family, an
organization of the religious right run by the radio evangelist and family
counselor James Dobson. Those on the irreligious left describe Dobson as the
most powerful leader of Christian conservatives active today. But lately, his
behavior seems as if it were scripted by his antagonists, People for the
American Way and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

            About two months ago, Dobson began saying in private that
the failure of House Republicans to take his family-values agenda seriously
might impel him to lead a mass walkout from the party. He delivered that
démarche to a meeting of House Republicans in the basement of the Capitol on
March 18. Dobson told GOP leaders that they must act on a range of
social-conservative issues, such as abortion, gay rights, and school prayer--or
else. Unsatisfied with their response, Dobson went public with a series of
unusual interviews in the secular media. Dobson's face appeared on the cover of
U.S. News & World Report , below a headline that read, in part, "Now,
he has decided the Republican Party must convert or be brought down." On
Meet the Press , he said that evangelical Christians who put the
Republicans in control of Congress in 1994 had been "insulted" and
"disrespected" ever since. Asked about the consequences of a walkout, Dobson
told Tim Russert, "It would be the Democrats in the White House and the
Congress, so that would be unfortunate. But you never take a hill unless you're
willing to die on it. And we will die on this hill if necessary."

            Republican
leaders are furious with Dobson over these comments, and for good reason. By
blackmailing them so openly, he is telling them, in effect, to choose their
poison. The GOP can either show Dobson the door, or it can try to move his
radical agenda, which calls for, among other things, abolition of the
Department of Education and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. If
Republicans stiff him, they may lose a crucial component of their narrow
majority. If, on the other hand, they "convert," they get to watch moderates
and economic conservatives flee in horror. In sending a message that the party
can't take its conservative base for granted, Dobson also sends a signal to the
electorate as a whole: Republicans are being ordered around by a frightening
religious zealot.

            
Dobson, 62, is less well known than Jerry
Falwell or Pat Robertson and far more powerful than either of them. Born in
Shreveport, La., he is descended from three generations of Nazarene ministers.
But Dobson did not become ordained as a minister himself. Instead, he took a
Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in child developmental
psychology. His book Dare to Discipline , published in 1970, turned him
into a kind of conservative Dr. Spock, as he has often been described,
eventually selling more than 2 million copies. In 1977, Dobson used the book as
a platform to found Focus on the Family, a nonprofit organization based in
Colorado Springs, Colo. Focus on the Family dispenses family counseling over an
800 number and sponsors Dobson's daily radio broadcast, in which he serves up
advice on marriage and child-rearing along with condemnations of "humanism," a
philosophy he equates with all forms of social permissiveness. The program,
which is heard on 2,000 stations, has helped Dobson develop a mailing list of
more than 2 million names.

            Over the
past decade, he has become more and more explicitly political. In 1988, Dobson
set up the Washington-based Family Research Council, headed by his ally Gary
Bauer, a former Reagan administration official. Bauer is to Dobson as Ralph
Reed until recently was to Pat Robertson. Focus on the Family and the Family
Research Council are now technically separate, but they work hand in glove.
Both raised a ruckus in 1995 when party chairman Haley Barbour ventured the
notion that Republicans could be a "Big Tent" party on abortion. The two
threatened to walk out of the Republican National Convention if the GOP
modified its uncompromising anti-abortion plank or if Bob Dole picked a
pro-choice running mate such as Colin Powell.

            This absolutism contrasted with the stance of the rival
Christian Coalition. Under Reed's leadership, the Christian Coalition was more
politically savvy, more open to compromise with the nonreligious right, and
more accepting of the reality that Republican victory was a prerequisite for
any kind of conservative change. Reed recognized that his power depended on not
demanding constant satisfaction from the party. Thus, in 1996 Reed threw his
weight behind Dole early in the primary season and flirted with the idea of
accepting modified language on abortion in the GOP platform. For this, Dobson
and Bauer denounced him as a power-hungry sellout.

            With Reed
gone into private political consulting, the Christian Coalition has been
eclipsed by Bauer and Dobson. Of late, they have been involving themselves in
congressional races, to the chagrin of the national party. Bauer spent $250,000
in support of Tom Bordonaro, a conservative who defeated the Republican
National Committee-approved moderate in a special election primary in
California. Bordonaro then lost to the Democrat, Lois Capps. Dobson, who has
seldom made political endorsements in the past, recently backed ex-Rep. Bob
Dornan, the well-known ultracon wacko, against a moderate Republican in an
upcoming congressional primary. Party regulars worry that the same thing may
happen again--Dornan will win the nomination and lose to the incumbent
Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, in November.

            
Is Dobson a menace to freedom? Liberals try to
play it both ways. They love to argue that the religious right controls the
Republican Party. But they also maintain that Christian conservatives are
extreme and marginal. In fact, Dobson does have power, but it's of a kind that
depends on subtlety and patience, qualities he tends to lack. To the extent he
can align himself with something resembling majority opinion--on an issue like
partial-birth abortion or opposition to the marriage penalty--he may get
somewhere. But to push his further agenda, he threatens to do to the GOP what
Democratic interest groups did to their party in the 1970s and 1980s--that is,
drag it down to principled defeat.

            Indeed, in what Dobson is
now doing there is an echo of Jesse Jackson's past threats to bolt the
Democratic Party if he and his views weren't accorded more "respect." Appeasing
Jackson--the Mondale/Dukakis strategy--was far less effective than confronting
him--the Clinton strategy. The risk of alienating a voting base is real, but
the risk of looking like a prisoner to the ultras is greater. Most people don't
want to vote for a party that constantly succumbs to extortion from an extreme
faction. You might expect James Dobson, a child psychologist, to understand how
this works.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Microsuits

            Dan Morales, the attorney
general of Texas, was the first state attorney general to begin investigating
Microsoft 18 months ago. In November he filed suit to void clauses in
Microsoft's contracts with computer manufacturers that he said were preventing
them from assisting his probe. Though this case was dismissed, Morales
persevered, joining with 20 other state attorneys general in preparing a
wide-ranging antitrust suit against 
                  Slate
               's parent company.

            But last
week, at the very last moment, Morales dropped out of the suit. Why? First, he
received a letter from the heads of several Texas-based companies, including
Compaq and CompUSA, urging him not to bring a case that would harm an industry
employing more than 300,000 Texans. Then, Michael Dell, founder of the
Austin-based computer company that is both a Microsoft ally and one of Texas'
largest employers, came by to see him. Just after that meeting, Morales
announced he wouldn't sue, explaining in a prepared statement that "several
officials of Texas' computer industry have expressed concerns that the filing
of a lawsuit against Microsoft may negatively impact their companies as well as
the consumers of the state."

            The antitrust case against Microsoft may or may not have
merit. And it may or may not make sense for 50 states to run their own
antitrust policies alongside or in opposition to the national one. But Morales'
decision is pretty shocking in any event. If Texas' chief legal officer is
going to take it upon himself to decide whether Microsoft should be prosecuted,
that decision should be based on whether he believes the company has violated
the law. Instead, Morales openly interpreted his duty as promoting his state's
commercial interests. Morales said, in effect, I don't care whether Microsoft
is breaking the law. The issue is whether Microsoft is good for business in
Texas.

            Of course,
Morales was merely explicit where other AGs prefer to be coy. Tiny Utah, home
to Novell, a Microsoft rival, is a vigorous participant in the states' suit.
Tiny South Dakota, home to Microsoft ally Gateway, is not. California, where
Microsoft antagonists Netscape, Oracle, and Sun live, has signed on. Washington
state, where Microsoft lives, has declined. Washington state Attorney General
Christine Gregoire determined that there was "no need" to duplicate the federal
effort.

            
In the curiously booming business of multistate
lawsuits, economic factors often interfere with lofty considerations of the
law. When Michael Moore, the attorney general of Mississippi, sued to recover
Medicaid costs from the tobacco industry in 1994--a case that led to the $368.5
billion tobacco settlement now up for debate in Congress--41 other states
eventually joined in. Among the few that did not were the biggest producers of
tobacco: North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia.

            You'd
have to be pretty naive to expect political considerations to play no part in
the deliberations of any public prosecutor, even in criminal cases. But
multistate actions, as these sign-up-sheet lawsuits are called, are almost
pure politics. They generally reflect the ambitions of state elected
officials rather that the claims of sound public policy.

            If General Electric is selling an unsafe toaster, we have a
Consumer Product Safety Commission with jurisdiction to investigate, regulate,
and litigate. The CPSC must decide whether that toaster should be sold to
consumers anywhere in America. Does it make sense for each state to be deciding
that question all over again--either agreeing, in which case the effort is
redundant, or disagreeing, in which case the result is a toaster that is legal
in Ohio but illegal in Kentucky? It's like every state having its own foreign
policy--which happens to be another futility-generating trend. Multistate suits
add another layer of absurdity: the states reinventing the wheel of federalism
by attempting to act in unison.

            The flurry
of multistate lawsuits is the result of an odd alliance between liberal legal
activism and conservative devolutionary zeal. In the 1970s, the consumer
movement fired up state attorneys general to begin going after corporate
malefactors. One of the first multistate actions was a suit filed by six
attorneys general against oil companies for price fixing in 1973. Another was
filed against General Motors in 1977 for falsely claiming that some of its cars
contained rocket engines. Such suits increased with the falloff in consumer
protection and antitrust enforcement during the Reagan years. The regulatory
agencies in Washington have grown more aggressive since Bill Clinton arrived in
1993. But somehow, more federal activism has only spurred the litigious
exuberance of the 50 AGs. Various states have recently gone after deceptive
advertising in car leasing, sneaker price fixing, and telemarketing scams. At
the moment, they are shadowing the Justice Department in an antitrust
investigation of Visa and MasterCard.

            
Perhaps the biggest factor in the multistate
litigation boom is Moore. As Peter Pringle recounts in Cornered , a new
book about anti-tobacco litigation, Moore turned himself into a household name
with his suit against Big Tobacco. As the suit progressed, Moore was featured
in Vanity Fair and on every TV news program known to humankind. The
National Law Journal named him lawyer of the year in 1997. Moore
incurred some suspicion and jealousy from his colleagues. He also became their
role model. Hubert H. "Skip" Humphrey III, the attorney general of Minnesota,
filed his own suit against the tobacco companies. It was settled last week for
$6.1 billion. Humphrey used the occasion to attack Moore's settlement as a
"sweetheart deal."

            Now all
AGs want to be the next Michael Moore. There are folks willing to help. As one
Washington PR person explains, these cases are often marketed to the state
attorneys general by corporate and public-interest lobbyists. First they go to
the most eager beavers: Skip Humphrey or Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Second tier, but nearly as promising, are Morales of Texas, Scott Harshbarger
of Massachusetts, and Dennis Vacco of New York. Another good source of lawsuits
is the National Association of Attorneys General (known informally as the
National Association of Aspiring Governors). NAAG meets four times a year so
its various committees can hash out ideas for litigation, like the billing
fraud case now being developed against the hospital chains.

            In the case of Microsoft, Blumenthal of Connecticut appears
to have won the coveted prize, managing to eclipse Iowa Attorney General Tom
Miller, who is chairman of the NAAG's antitrust committee, and New York's
Vacco, who heads the consumer committee. Blumenthal's face has been everywhere
in the last week, and he is clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight,
building valuable name recognition for the day when he decides whether to run
for governor or senator. Others may pause to wonder why Connecticut--and 19
other states--needs an antitrust policy separate from that of the United
States. The question whether regulation of commerce is a state or national
affair was supposed to have been settled in 1789.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Salvation Through Quotation

            Dan Rostenkowski has been
making public appearances in Chicago, dining at his old haunts with politicians
like Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator, and meeting with potential clients of
his "consulting" business. Though he has yet to visit Washington since his
release from prison, he aspires to return to respectability in the city's eyes.
The strongest sign that he will accomplish this task was buried on Page A12 of
Monday's New York Times . In a story about who deserves credit for
balancing the budget, Rostenkowski was quoted as saying, "George Bush had as
much to do with reaching out to balance the budget as anybody I know. He
finally recognized that there would have to be revenue increases."

            The
significance lies not in the substance of this quote but in the fact of it. For
Rostenkowski, who is referred to only as "the Illinois Democrat who headed the
Ways and Means Committee in 1990," being treated by the Times as an
authority on politics, rather than as a news story himself, marks a giant step.
Obligingly, the author of the article, Robert Pear, did not find it necessary
to remind readers that the former chairman is on parole after a stretch in
prison. Nor did he dwell on the irony that Rosty did his own modest part to
unbalance the budget by stealing $600,000 from the government, a crime for
which he has yet to voice any apology or regret. The Times simply
treated him as a thoughtful elder statesman.

            Well-versed in the ways of Washington, Rostenkowski knows
that for someone in his position, quotation is more important than contrition.
It is a lesson he might have learned from Michael Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, Tony
Coelho, Elliott Abrams, or Bob Packwood. All these figures, brought down in
political scandals, have nonetheless managed to re-establish themselves as
players in Washington. The drill is fairly simple. First you resign, get thrown
out of office, and go to jail, community service, detox, or whatever. Then you
visit Quote Rehab, and come out as a Beltway citizen in good standing.

            The fallen
politician and the reporter are engaged in a reciprocal stroke. For the
politician, being quoted means respect and acceptance. What ties you to the
Washington community--inside knowledge, social connections, the common
enterprise of governing--turns out to be stronger than what drove you away from
it--getting caught with your fingers in the till, committing perjury, or what
have you. For the reporter, a humbled politician is always great copy. Someone
who has been brought low by scandal will tend to be more daring in his
utterances, because he is trying to recover status rather than preserve it. He
has nowhere to go but up. The reporter is happy to help elevate him in exchange
for a good quip or even a few bland words.

            
The Betty Ford of Quote Rehab is Dick Morris.
In record time, Morris managed to change the story from what he did--whispering
secrets to a prostitute, etc., during the1996 campaign--to what he knows and
what he thinks. He has thrown himself at the feet of reporters as promiscuously
as he once threw himself at the feet of ... well, never mind. Morris has been
quite open about what he is trying to do. In September, he told Roll
Call : "I guess a lot of it is that I want people to see that I don't have
horns--even if I was horny." He has been remarkably successful. In most of the
stories that quote him as an expert, he is referred to simply as a former
Clinton adviser or a political consultant (with no mention of the fact that his
only known client is in Honduras). In a Times story about New York City
politics, Morris is described only as "the former White House political
consultant who has worked regularly over the last 25 years in New York
politics." In a Washington Post story about Madeleine Albright's good
relations with both parties, he is called "Dick Morris, a political consultant
to both Democrats and Republicans."

            In these
stories, as in countless others, Morris serves reporters by playing what they
call a "trained seal"--a glib source who can be counted on to deliver an
apposite quote to substantiate the thesis of any story. In a Washington
Post story about how John Hilley, an administration official, was crucial
to the budget deal, Morris offers: "Without him, there never would have been a
budget deal. Literally." In an AP story about Al Gore's weaknesses as a
successor to Bill Clinton: "He does the steps, but he doesn't hear the music."
Part of Morris' appeal for journalists is that he is willing to teach it round
or teach it flat to suit the needs of their stories. He will defend Clinton as
a political genius and a man of integrity. But if the reporter wants him to say
that Clinton signaled Janet Reno not to appoint an independent counsel, as the
editors of National Review clearly did last April, he's happy to oblige.
"Definitely, I think that happened," he told them. In a New York Times
story about Clinton's disloyalty to subordinates, Morris offers: "There is a
certain empirical truth to what [James] McDougal is saying. Just look at the
carcasses." Never mind that Clinton was unaccountably loyal to Morris himself
after his self-induced downfall.

            The point is not that disgraced politicians must be treated
as unquotable pariahs forever. But they should be used sparingly, and much more
skeptically, as a last recourse rather than a first. Rostenkowski is a proven
thief and liar. Morris' views are almost always totally worthless, because he
obviously will say anything, to anybody. Though he used to pride himself on
never being quoted in the press, he now scurries to return calls from the
St. Louis Post Dispatch and Investor's Business Daily . Morris
gets much more out of the transaction, in terms of selling copies of his book
and putting ignominy behind him, than the readers of the papers that quote him
do. I called him to ask about the phenomenon, but for once he didn't want to
play. It violated his policy, he said, of "not talking about the scandal or its
effects." He would be happy, however, to discuss politics or policy.

            At the very least, a decent
interval and a reminder of what these folks did wrong would be appropriate. But
reporters might ask whether they need to quote them at all. One of the irksome
conventions of American journalism is the pretense of superneutrality: A
knowledgeable and reliable reporter is not allowed to make even obvious or
uncontroversial points directly. If you're going to say the sky is blue, you'd
better find a meteorologist to say it for you. Most of the time, this is merely
inefficient, a waste of time and newsprint. In the case of Quote Rehab,
however, the trustworthy reporter puts his own observations in the mouth of
someone far less credible. Dan Rostenkowski and Dick Morris end up speaking for
the New York Times .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Nut Watch

            
Everything you need to know about Larry Klayman can be gleaned from a press
release he blast-faxed to the world two weeks ago. The heading read:

            CLINTON
ALLIES BEGIN SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUDICIAL WATCH

            Use "Friendly" Newsweek
Reporter to Harm Memory of Grandmother of Larry Klayman

            Likely
Complicity of Clinton Private Investigators

            The
unhinged prose that followed responded to an item filed by Newsweek
reporter Daniel Klaidman. Klayman did not dispute the fact that he is suing his
mother, Shirley Feinberg. He claims his mom won't pay him back $50,000 he spent
on private nurses for her mother, his grandmother, Yetta Goldberg, who died
last August at 89. He did not want this suit to become public, but the
Clintonites, he asserted, learned about it and leaked word to Newsweek .
The final paragraph of his statement bears quoting in full:

            Klaidman used this
information, obviously dug up by private investigators of the Clintons to
suggest that the Judicial Watch chairman will sue anyone, and so hurt Klayman
by trampling on the memory of his grandmother. This is untrue, unfair, and
outrageous! What is true is that Klayman will do what is right, no matter who
is involved. Whether it means caring for his sick and dying grandmother who
raised him, guaranteeing payment to her nurses, or taking action to make sure
they are paid. Klayman will not shrink from his standards of ethics and
morality. Unlike Klaidman, who wants to curry favor with Clinton administration
friends such as [George] Stephanopoulos, Klayman looks to no one, other than
God, for guidance and direction.

            In fact,
Newsweek did not hear of this lawsuit, which was concealed under the
name of a collection agency that belongs to Klayman, from the White House. It
found out from Klayman's brother, who volunteered the information. But the
point is not just that this Klayman conspiracy is imaginary and far-fetched
( Newsweek , which broke the Lewinsky scandal, is hardly "friendly" toward
the White House). It is that, as evidenced by this and other paranoiac
effusions, Klayman is off his rocker.

            This became abundantly evident when I went to interview him
at his Washington office this week. After attempting to ascertain whether I was
a Clinton spy or worked for Salon magazine ("in our view, a front for
the Clinton administration"), Klayman told me that "private investigator types"
working for Clinton have been spotted "casing" his office. With darting eyes
and barely repressed rage, he alleged that administration secret police keep
files on him. He went on to tell me that Ron Brown was probably murdered
because of what he knew about various administration scandals. Alleging the
existence of forensic evidence of murder, he explained, "Everybody in that lab
believed there was a round hole the size of a .45 caliber bullet." (In one TV
interview, Klayman suggested the killer was "perhaps the president himself.")
The Brown cover-up is the subject of one of the 18 lawsuits Klayman has filed
against the administration. Another concerns the investigation into the death
of Vince Foster, who Klayman thinks may also have been murdered.

            In other
words, Klayman is one of the fringe characters who has sprouted in the moist
ground of the Clinton scandals as mushrooms do after a spring rain. But Klayman
is not treated like a fringe figure. He has, by and large, achieved the
mainstream credibility he craves. He is a frequent guest on such TV programs as
Crossfire , Rivera Live , MSNBC's Internight , and The
Charles Grodin Show (with whose twitchy host he seems to have a special
affinity). Klayman is financially supported, praised, and frequently cited by
the wider conservative movement. But he isn't just a nutter who gets right-wing
foundation money and gets on television. He's a nutter with a law degree who
takes advantage of the courts to harass his political opponents. How does he
get away with it?

            
The press elevates Klayman for a couple of
reasons. On television, there are more and more shows that take off from the
Crossfire format, expecting guests to represent strongly contrary
positions. If one thinks Ken Starr is out of control, the other, ideally,
should argue that Bill Clinton knifes people and buries their bodies in the
White House basement. If these guests scream and yell, so much the better.
Barking, however, undermines the pretense of a rational debate. Klayman, who
presents a coherent façade while making wild and unsubstantiated charges, is
perfect. With print publications, there's a different problem. Fine profiles of
Klayman have recently appeared in Newsweek and the Washington
Post . But the conventions of newspaper journalism are such that an
"objective" reporter cannot render his own opinion that the subject has a screw
loose. Klayman is described in such terms as "controversial legal gadfly."

            You might
think mainstream conservatives would be wary of Klayman's tactics. Tort reform
was part of the Contract With America, and he is a one-man litigation
explosion. But so far, conservatives have been silent, perhaps because Klayman
has proved remarkably effective at abusing the people most right-wingers
dislike. His primary vehicle is a $90 million invasion of privacy suit filed
against Hillary Clinton and others on behalf of the "victims" of Filegate.
Never mind that congressional investigators and Ken Starr have decided that the
gathering of FBI files on previous administration officials with names starting
with letters A through G was not part of a grand plot to harass political
opponents. Klayman has found an opening to harass his political opponents,
inflicting costly all-day depositions on Harold Ickes, Stephanopoulos, James
Carville, Paul Begala, and many others.

            In these torture session, Klayman rants and raves and
demands to "certify" for the court answers that he deems evasive. ("What does
'certified' mean," Ickes responded to Klayman, "other than 'crazy'?") Klayman
asks administration officials about whom they date, where they go after work,
whether they were expelled from school for disciplinary problems. One
23-year-old White House assistant was interrogated about a triple murder that
took place at a Starbucks in Georgetown. Klayman videotapes these depositions,
excerpts of which air on Geraldo when Klayman appears on the program,
and publishes the transcripts on the Internet. This is in pursuit of a case
about the invasion of privacy, remember. But resistance is largely futile. Last
week, the presiding judge in the case sanctioned Stephanopoulos for not looking
hard enough for documents covered by a Judicial Watch subpoena. As punishment,
Stephanopoulos has to go through the ordeal of another deposition and pay some
of Klayman's legal costs. The ultimate goal of the Filegate suit appears to be
to inflict this treatment on Hillary Clinton.

            Why don't
the courts put a stop to this? Some judges have tried. In 1992 in California,
Klayman lost a patent case on behalf of a distributor of bathroom accessories.
His obnoxious behavior got him barred from Judge William Keller's courtroom for
life. Klayman has hounded Keller ever since. He appealed the ruling, accusing
Keller of being anti-Semitic and anti-Asian (Klayman is Jewish; his client was
Taiwanese). After losing his appeal and being scolded by the appeals court
judges, he tried to appeal to the Supreme Court. He has not given up yet. It is
this matter, he has said, which led him to found Judicial Watch in 1994. The
organization supports requiring judges to undergo psychological testing and
holding them personally liable for "reckless" rulings. It also advocates
removing Keller from the bench.

            
More recently, in a trade case in New York,
Klayman found himself on the other end of charges of ethnic bias. When Judge
Denny Chin ruled against Klayman's client, Klayman wrote Chin a rude letter
asking about his contacts with John Huang and suggesting that Chin's being an
Asian-American Clinton appointee may have biased him. The connection was
imaginary. In our interview, Klayman claimed press accounts of this incident
have made it sound as if the Huang-Chin connection was baseless. He said it was
supported by a document discovered in one of his lawsuits. But the document,
which he faxed to me, turns out to be merely a list of Asian-Americans
appointed by the Clinton administration. Chin fined Klayman $25,000 and barred
him from his courtroom for life. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of
Appeals threw out the fine but upheld the expulsion. "I've got ethics
complaints pending against all four of them," Klayman says.

            Despite Klayman's record of
abusing the courts, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, has been
extremely indulgent of his antics in the Filegate case, giving him wide
latitude to issue subpoenas. Whether Lamberth has succumbed to Klayman out of
ideology, permissiveness, or fear of reprisal it is impossible to say. Last
week, Lamberth did finally throw out a fishing-expedition type subpoena Klayman
sent to New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. After Mayer reported Linda Tripp
had lied about a youthful arrest for robbery, Klayman asserted Mayer had been
fed the information by the Clinton secret police and that it was thus relevant
to his Filegate case. It turns out, as Mayer wrote in The New Yorker
this week, that her source on the robbery incident was Tripp's former
stepmother--who has since agreed to go on the record. But Klayman still
believes the White House fed the Tripp arrest story to Mayer. "She's not
telling the truth about that," he says. "Were there Clinton private
investigators working with her?" Maybe he'll ask his mom in her next
deposition.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Is Hillary's Deal?

            Last week, I was included in
a group of journalists invited by Hillary Clinton for an off-camera but
on-the-record "dialogue" about the administration's plans for celebrating the
millennium. This session attracted an unusual amount of interest, because it
was the first time the first lady was going to have to face questions from
reporters about the sex scandal. As we filed into the Map Room, familiar from
the White House coffee videos, we were told that she would entertain questions
that didn't have to do with the millennium toward the end of the hour.

            The first lady arrived,
dressed in a pale but intense yellow suit, and proceeded to circumnavigate the
room and greet everyone. She then sat down at the head of the table and for
about 45 minutes explained, with help from a few others, what the White House
Millennium Council has planned. It intends to perform a number of good works,
mostly historical in nature, such as restoring the flag that inspired Francis
Scott Key to compose "The Star Spangled Banner" and conserving the original
Declaration of Independence and other documents. At last Helen Thomas of UPI,
who had been looking rather agitated, piped up.

            "How do you think the
president's bearing up?"

            "I think he's doing very
well, Helen," the first lady responded, a bit awkwardly.

            "Is it hard?"

            "Well,
we're working on a lot of very important things," Hillary said. "He's been
spending a lot of time speaking to leaders around the world and consulting with
his political and diplomatic and military advisers about the situation in Iraq.
And that's the primary thing on his mind right now."

            The interview was going nowhere. Although Hillary was
prepared to answer tough questions, reporters didn't seem to have the stomach
to ask them--or at least, I didn't. To interrogate Hillary about the news of
the day--a report in the Washington Post that a Secret Service agent had
seen Bill and Monica alone together in the Oval Office--would have seemed to
add insult to the injury she presumably had suffered at the hands of her
husband already. But then someone pitched her a softball that elicited what I
think is the most inadvertently revealing thing she has said on the subject to
date. Hillary was asked whether she was surprised, and perhaps gratified, by
the public's response to "the situation." For her complete answer, click .

            This
answer was most of all revealing for what Hillary, in a lengthy discourse, did
not say. In explaining why the American people were supporting her husband
despite plausible allegations of a sexual relationship with an intern, and
perhaps of a cover-up, she did not claim that it was because her husband had
done nothing wrong or that it was because the American people believed his
denials. Indeed, the first lady did not even assert that she believed
his denials. Rather, she made a version of the point that many pundits have
made in recent weeks. The country has thrived under Clinton's leadership, and
the American people are "savvy" enough to weigh--and here the argument remained
implicit--his character flaws against his record as president.

            
This answer points to something many people
have long suspected: that there is a psychological bargain, if not a literal
one, involved in Hillary's continuing to stand by her man. Reading a bit more
into her answer, one might understand that she is furious at her husband but
stays with him out of respect for what he is capable of, and out of calculated
self-interest. In other words, Hillary's "deal" with her husband may resemble
what has emerged as the American public's deal with him, writ small.

            But what
struck me during the interview is that for all the speculation, nobody really
has any idea what she thinks. Does Hillary Clinton believe her husband's
denials? Does she love him, despise him, or both? Do they have an open marriage
in which his extracurricular activity is accepted, or is each new revelation a
painful surprise to her? We all project our own views and experiences onto the
First Marriage. But there is no indication that anyone, including even close
Clinton friends, has any idea what's inside Hillary's head. What she knows, and
what she thinks, determines whether she is a victim or an accomplice, a
long-suffering spouse or a kind of co-conspirator. Remaining an enigma lets her
retain the benefit of the doubt. So long as we don't know, we can't really
judge.

            The key question may be not what Hillary knew but when she
knew it. She surely is aware that her husband was unfaithful to her before he
became president--he admitted as much on national television. She may have
thought, however, that she was giving him another chance and that he was
promising, in exchange, to do better. It may have come as an awful surprise to
her to discover--assuming it is true--that her husband was still screwing
around after he was elected. There are degrees of knowledge, of course. Hillary
could have known in detail, known in general, not wanted to know, or truly had
no idea. And she might not care, be hurt but not surprised, or be deeply hurt
and surprised. Here is a grid that expresses the four basic possibilities.

             

            
Let's consider each of these, beginning in the
northeast corner and moving clockwise. If she didn't know that her husband was
still fooling around after his election in 1993, but does care, it seems to me
she is in the most sympathetic of the available positions. She would be in the
same spot as many members of the press and public, who thought that Clinton had
made a tacit agreement to quit fooling around for the duration of his
presidency, for the sake of common sense if not common decency. On learning
that her husband had not lived up to his half of the bargain, Hillary would be
very upset. But she would also realize that she couldn't leave him while he was
in the White House, in part because her tenure is co-terminal with his. If she
made a mistaken bet that her husband could reform, she is now in the position
of a Siamese twin. If his presidency dies, her quasi-co-presidency dies with
it.

            If, on
the other hand, she didn't know, but also didn't much care, that would suggest
an immoral alliance à la JFK and Jackie. In fact, such a bargain might be
deemed much more ruthless in the Clintons' case, as the wife's reason for
tolerating her husband's misbehavior would probably be less a desire to keep up
decent appearances than a desire to gain and retain power herself. If this is
the way it is, Hillary has used her husband for the sake of her own career as
much as he has used her to advance his. This wouldn't leave much ground for
sympathy.

            If Hillary knew what her husband was up to and didn't care,
her position is even worse. If she knew her husband was going to continue to
philander and agreed to help him pretend that he had reformed and become a good
husband, she has been a party to a hoax. If accepting a faithless husband was
her price of power, as Margaret Talbot recently argued in the New
Republic , she would be his accomplice, not only in a fraud on the public
but also, perhaps, in what most people would recognize as sexual
harassment.

            But what
if Hillary knew (or at least strongly suspected) that her husband hadn't
changed, and did care? She would be both victim and accomplice--furious at him,
yet for reasons of the heart or reasons of power, or both, unwilling to bring
him to book. She would be in the morally ambivalent position of the abused
spouse, both deserving of sympathy and responsible for her own failure to act.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that this is the contradictory position she is
actually in. But I repeat: When it comes to what Hillary Clinton thinks, no one
really has a clue.

            Was Hillary
Clinton surprised by the public's response to "the situation"? Click for her
full answer.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Leak Soup

            Since leaks became a big
issue in the Clinton sex scandal, the whole affair has taken on a surreal
Alice in Wonderland quality. For the past several days, the press has
been trying simultaneously to report stories derived from anonymous leaks,
report on the phenomenon of these leaks, and--in the editorial pages--express
an opinion about the propriety of the leaks. If the definition of media
unfairness is the press behaving as prosecutor, judge, and jury, then the
definition of media absurdity is the way the press is now acting as prosecutor,
judge, and defendant.

            We
slipped down the rabbit hole Feb. 6, when the New York Times reported
that the president's secretary, Betty Currie, had, while testifying to a grand
jury, contradicted Clinton's sworn testimony about his relationship with Monica
Lewinsky. According to the Times story, which was attributed to "lawyers
familiar with her account," Clinton summoned Currie to the White House Sunday,
Jan. 18, the day after he was deposed by lawyers for Paula Jones. These sources
told the Times that Clinton rhetorically asked Currie, "We [Clinton and
Lewinsky] were never alone, right?" According to the same sources, Currie has
handed over to the independent counsel gifts from the president to Lewinsky
that Lewinsky had given Currie.

            If, as various White House spokesmen and the president's
private lawyer David Kendall have charged, the source of this leak was the
office of the independent counsel, it is a serious offense. Disclosing
information from a grand-jury proceeding violates the federal rules of criminal
procedure and would subject attorneys in Starr's office to contempt charges and
possibly jail time. Starr himself could be fired by the attorney general--who,
if she isn't worried about setting in motion an infinite regression, could name
an independent counsel to investigate the independent counsel.

            There is
no telling for certain where the Currie leak came from. It might have sprung
from Starr's office; from Currie's lawyer (in which case it would not be
illegal); or from Clinton's team, which could have found out about Currie's
testimony from her lawyer. A preponderance of evidence, however, points in the
direction of Starr. Here are the reasons.

            
1) The Times account was spun for
maximum harm to Clinton. (The catch-up story in late editions of that same
morning's Washington 
               Post presented roughly the same facts in a
less damning way.) By casting Clinton's question to Currie as rhetorical, the
Times ' source implied that he was asking Currie to lie to back up his
version of events. If not rhetorical, the same question would have no such
conspiratorial connotation. It might indicate only that Clinton was trying to
refresh his recollection. In fact, this has been the defense offered by the
president's lawyers and spokesmen since the Currie story broke. There's no
reason anyone sympathetic to Clinton would have included that "right?"--even if
Clinton had said it.

            The
disclosure was timed for maximum damage to Clinton. At the moment it broke,
Lewinsky was facing an imminent deadline for striking an immunity deal with
Starr's office. Like several previous leaks (some of them subsequently cast
into doubt), the Currie story contained what looked a lot like a message from
Starr to his reluctant witness: I have other evidence against you and Clinton,
so you'd better cut a deal quick. Even if the Clinton side wanted to get this
damaging revelation out in order to spare itself pain later, it would have had
every reason to hold back until Lewinsky and Starr concluded their
negotiations.

            
2) The story quoted a White House spokesman
saying point-blank that the leak was "false." Currie's lawyer, Lawrence
Weschler, also said it was false that Clinton had tried to influence Currie. If
the leak did come from Currie's lawyer or from the Clinton legal team, the
Times was a willful party to a gross deception. It's almost impossible
to believe the New York Times would mislead its readers by allowing a
source to plant a story and deny planting it in the same news article.

            The same
day the Times story came out, Kendall rattled off a 15-page letter to
Starr denouncing it and other leaks. Starr fired back a defensive response.
Everyone spent the weekend debating who was right. This left the Times
and, to a lesser extent, other news organizations in the screwy position in
which they remain. The paper had to report on the debate about where its leak
had come from. But its goal was not the usual one of news reporting, which is
to find the truth. The Times , after all, knows the truth here: It knows
who its own sources are. But in this case, it has granted its own version of
immunity to an act of potential lawbreaking for the sake of gathering
information about other potential misdeeds, much as a prosecutor such as Starr
might do.

            
A few days later, the Times
editorialized: "The President's lawyer, David Kendall, and this week's
designated spinner, Paul Begala, cannot prove their sweeping televised
assertions that Mr. Starr has illegally leaked grand jury testimony. If he did,
the Federal court that supervises him and the Attorney General, who has the
power to fire him, have the resources to deal with prosecutorial misconduct."
Hold it right there. The Times knows whether Kendall and Begala are
correct or not. But it doesn't want to say, so it hides behind the legalistic
formula that Kendall and Begala "cannot prove" their allegations. And if the
Times thinks that such leaks are "prosecutorial misconduct," why does it
participate in them?

            Is there any way out of this
morass? It's tempting to say that reporters shouldn't accept leaks unless the
bias of the source can be indicated. But that's probably not realistic. The
price of getting the story is often a promise of full anonymity. So long as
there's competitive pressure in the press, sources will use the outlet that
affords them the greatest protection.

            What the press can do is
cover leaking more aggressively. The Times can't very well send
reporters snooping around after colleagues in the same newsroom. But there's no
ethical stricture against reporters who aren't getting spoon-fed by Starr
pursuing the story of how and why and to whom the independent counsel's office
is leaking. Howard Kurtz, the media reporter of the Washington Post ,
does this a bit from time to time. For a story on the Currie leaks, he
interviewed Michael Oreskes, the Times Washington bureau chief. Oreskes
declined to tell him, of course, who the Times ' sources were. Instead of
leaving it there, the Post should dig a little deeper. A reporter has an
obligation to protect his sources. He doesn't have to protect anybody else's.
So why hasn't 
                  Slate
                outed the leakers on Starr's staff and
elsewhere? Because I haven't been able to establish who they are. Anyone who
knows, please feel free to leak it to me.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Out of Left Field

            One does not ordinarily
expect a slim volume written by an academic philosopher and published by a
university press to cause widespread consternation on the right. But for some
reason, Richard Rorty's new book, Achieving Our Country , which is based
on a series of lectures delivered last year at Harvard, seems to be having that
effect. Writing in Newsweek , George Will commented last week that the
book "radiates contempt for the country." (Perhaps more to the point, it
radiates .) And in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard , David
Brooks contends that the book's criticism of the left is merely the latest in a
succession of moves designed to advance the author's academic career. Brooks
accuses Rorty of being a "pseudo-deviant" who poses as a critic of academic
radicals while really congratulating them.

            You'd
think high-minded conservatives would approve of Richard Rorty at some level,
even if they disagree with him. He is, after all, a philosopher who writes good
English prose in defense of the 100 percent American philosophy of pragmatism.
Rorty has no truck with campus PC and is by all reports a humane, thoughtful,
and decent man, not the kind of self-promoter or manipulative careerist Brooks
posits. Achieving Our Country tells members of what Rorty calls the
"cultural left" to come down from their postmodernist ivory tower and think
about how to make the country they live in a better place. Rorty says radical
academicians should wipe that sophistical smirk off their faces, lose their
mocking disdain for America, and view it more as their progressive ancestors
did: as a great, problem-filled country that must be brought into closer
alignment with its ideals.

            Isn't this the kind of loyal opposition right-wingers are
supposed to want? The harsh response to Rorty may have something to do with his
penchant for gratuitous, con-baiting asides, such as the one in which he
absurdly states that "we caused the death of a million Vietnamese out of sheer
macho arrogance." In the course of the book, Rorty sets even liberal teeth on
edge with such outlandish statements, though they are usually contradicted in
more sober moments. (He thinks the Cold War was necessary and that Reagan was
correct to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire.") But I think that what
really alarms the right about Rorty is not his moments of rhetorical excess but
rather the buried fear that the left might one day wake up and take his advice.
If the alienated theorists of academe transformed themselves into a Rortyan
left--a unified, engaged, and patriotic left--conservative columnists could run
dry of material in a matter of weeks.

            It
wouldn't be good news for Republican politicians, either, if the left listened
to Rorty and joined a common crusade for social betterment. His book argues not
only that academic leftists, the heirs to the '60s New Left, need to become
pro-American but also that they need to quit knocking heads with the heirs to
the Old Left--the Cold War liberals--and vice versa. Rorty wants to draw a
curtain over the distinction between liberals and leftists. We should all
forget about our past conflicts, he says, and realize that we were always on
the same side, more or less. "It would be a good idea to stop asking when it
was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, to have left the Communist
Party," Rorty writes. "A hundred years from now, Howe and Galbraith, Harrington
and Schlesinger, Wilson and Debs, Jane Addams and Angela Davis, Felix
Frankfurther and John L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois and Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert
Reich and Jesse Jackson, will all be remembered for having advanced the cause
of social justice."

            
Some on the right may fear the emergence of a
new left-liberal Popular Front that looks up to all these ancestors.
Conservatives achieved a general unity despite their wide differences during
the Reagan years, and they might think the left is capable of doing the same
thing. But what Rorty proposes is still several decades away, at least.
Disagreements on the left are far more ingrained--and more meaningful--than he
seems to fathom. But even if they were to magically vanish overnight, they
aren't about to dissolve in favor of anything resembling Rorty's agenda. His
political platform, a kind of Swedish model democratic socialism couched in
extracts from Whitman and Dewey, is about as likely to sweep the country at
this point as freemasonry or theosophy.

            In trying
to persuade lefties of various stripes to quit fighting, Rorty borrows a
strategy from pragmatist philosophy. He takes questions that he doesn't find
useful to his cause--such as who was correct about Vietnam or about the Cold
War--and rules them out of order. They aren't helpful to us in moving forward,
so there is no point in discussing them. But the issues that have split the
American left in this century were not the expression of narcissistic small
differences. They represented fundamental splits--between supporters of
constitutional democracy and its opponents, between friends and enemies of
human rights, between people who believe in limited government and those who
want an overweening state. Arthur Schlesinger and Angela Davis were not on the
same side, even in the most general way. For Rorty to brush aside even these
conflicts as the nuances of ancient history is both crude and an offense to
those liberals who were on the right side. In constructing an inclusive
tradition of the American left, he would undermine the sound tradition of the
American left. Rorty, who comes from a distinguished family of progressives and
anti-communist left intellectuals, ought to know better.

            But even if these old battles somehow were to cease to seem
relevant, which they might to a generation raised in a world without communism,
it is hard to imagine a revival of interest in the kind of democratic-socialist
program Rorty sees as the essence of national betterment. Though he is at his
most vague on the subject of actual policy, one gathers that what he wants is a
kind of economic third way: A government that redistributes wealth through the
tax system while providing uniform social benefits, such as health care and
pensions. Unions should be more powerful, corporations less so. It's the
dull-but-worthy program of Dissent magazine, circa 1967. Think of
Bulworth without the rhymes. Rorty believes that it is merely the greed
of the wealthy that prevents the country from solving all its problems. They
want to keep their money for themselves! And navel-gazing literary critics let
them get away with it!

            Personally, I don't think
that what stands in the way of Rorty's utopia is the failure of Frederic
Jameson and Terry Eagleton to endorse it. It's that there's not enough caffeine
in America--and that the whole world is in retreat from all forms of socialism
and semi-socialism. Rorty writes about politics as if he'd been holding out in
a small cave without newspapers for the past several decades. He has not
gleaned anything from the experience that the Atlantic democracies have had in
governing themselves over the past 30 years, or from their rather mixed record
in dealing with social ills. Nor does he consider the possibility that markets
might be effective in dealing with some social problems. Conservatives can quit
fretting. Liberals might be out of it, but we're not about to start taking cues
from a peacenik philosophy prof. who's still chasing after the Swedish
model.

            
               If you
missed Rorty's slap at George Will, click .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            How the Iowa Electronic Markets Work

            Pundits often talk about a candidate's stock going
up or down. At the Iowa Electronic Markets (operated by the University of Iowa's
Henry B. Tippie College of Business), this really happens. You can bet on a
candidate by buying stock in him or her. If the candidate wins, you get a
dollar for each share you own. If he loses, your shares are worthless. The
amount you pay for each share depends on the seller's confidence that the
candidate will win. When the candidate is doing well in the race, investors are
confident that their stock will pay off, so they charge more for it when they
sell. When he's doing poorly, they charge less. If you buy shares in the
candidate when his stock is low, you don't have to wait for Election Day to
cash in. You can sell your shares at a profit as soon as his stock
improves.

            Right now, the Iowa markets are trading stock in
four contests: The Democratic presidential nomination (click here to see the prospectus and latest quotes), the Republican
presidential nomination (click here ), the New York Senate race (click here ), and which party will control Congress (click here). "Office Pool" reports the latest share price for each
candidate or party as of noon ET that day, along with 
                  Slate
               's
analysis of who's up, who's down, and why. For updates or more complete
information, visit the Iowa Electronic Markets site.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dog Days of Summer

            The
traditional summer "silly season" finally arrived in Fleet Street Friday when
most British papers chose as their top news story a claim that sunbathing is
good for you. A report published in the British Medical Journal by a
team of Bristol epidemiologists infuriated cancer charities by saying there is
"evidence that the potential benefits of exposure to sunlight may outweigh the
widely publicised adverse effects on the incidence of skin cancer." The report,
which led the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph and made the front pages of the
Times and the
Independent , said that sunbathing could protect against heart disease
and multiple sclerosis and that more people would die from keeping out of the
sun than from being in it. The report also made the banal observations that
"people find lying or sitting in the sun enjoyable and relaxing" and that "this
subjective sense of well-being may be important in itself in improving the
quality of a person's life."

            An
even sillier "silly season" story, appearing the same day on the front pages of
the Times and the Financial Times , concerned the British government's decision
to establish a task force to study the threat of an asteroid hitting Earth and
destroying all life on the planet. The FT said that a plan to avert
Armageddon has been demanded of the government by an opposition member of
parliament named Lembit Opik, whose Estonian grandfather Ernst had an asteroid
named after him. Asked whether the proposed establishment of a Near Earth
Object Task Force wasn't rather a limp response to such a cataclysmic threat, a
spokesman for the Science Ministry said defensively, "It's not as if there are
asteroids hovering above the earth."

            Other
prominent stories in the British press included Thursday's $90 million
record-breaking sale at Christie's in London of a famous art collection looted
by the Nazis from the Austrian Rothschilds in 1938 and recently restored to
their American heirs, and the news that fox hunting is almost certain to be
abolished in Britain now that Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he will
support legislation against it.

            The
Daily Telegraph , the Financial Times , and the Independent ran
editorials Friday about Britain's re-establishment this week of diplomatic
relations with Tripoli following Libya's belated admission of responsibility
for the 1984 death of a British policewoman who was killed by shots fired from
the Libyan Embassy in London. The FT said this was the right decision,
not because Muammar Qaddafi was now "a Jeffersonian democrat" but because "he
has started to come into line with international law enough to justify a policy
of engagement rather than isolation." The Telegraph , however, said that behind this decision and an earlier one by
Britain to exchange ambassadors with Iran lay "an unwillingness to stand up to
terror-sponsoring regimes that have large commercial contracts in their gift."
The paper said Britain's current cozying-up to Libya, Iran, and China distances
it from the United States and "exposes the Government's proclaimed Atlanticism
as increasingly questionable." The Independent , on the other hand,
supported the Libya decision on the opposite ground--"that
by establishing dialogue, we are differentiating ourselves from the US." It
said, "Britain too often comes across as an American cat's-paw."

            A
report in the Guardian Friday from Tehran said that conservative clerics
have struck a blow at Iran's reforming President Mohammed Khatami by closing
the newspaper Salam , which helped his rise to power. There were now
fears that two other progressive Iranian newspapers, Sobh-e-Emrouz and
Kordad , will be closed down. A bill that the clerics pushed through
parliament Wednesday restricting press freedom is expected to compel
journalists to reveal sources and to bar many opposition writers and editors
from "any form of press activity," the Guardian said.

            The
Guardian led its international section Friday with accusations that the
Pakistani government executed hundreds of suspected criminals before they were
brought to trial. In Punjab, the home province of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif,
more than 850 people have been shot by police since he came to power two years
ago, according to a Punjabi paper, the News . The police explanation of
these killings is often that the suspects died "in cross-fire" during street
battles with criminal gangs, but Pakistani lawyers and human rights groups say
the killings are deliberate and authorized by Sharif's government, the
Guardian said. It also quoted what it said was a recent U.S. State
Department report on Pakistan saying that "the police committed numerous
extra-judicial killings and tortured, abused and raped citizens" and that
"there is no evidence that any police officers were brought to justice."

            The same Sharif promised
President Clinton that he will hand over Osama Bin Laden to U.S. authorities at
the earliest opportunity, the Indian daily Asian Age said Friday. In
its main front-page story, the paper reported from London--where the prime minister
stopped to meet with Tony Blair on his way home from Washington--that this was
one of Clinton's conditions for brokering a peace deal between Pakistan and
India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Another was the early withdrawal
of Muslim mujahideen guerrillas from Kashmir, whose incursions there are the
cause of the latest India-Pakistan military conflict. Bin Laden, accused by the
United States of masterminding the terrorist bombings of U.S. missions in East
Africa last year, is hiding in Afghanistan under the patronage of the
Pakistan-supported Taliban regime, Asian Age said. The United States has
demonstrated its seriousness about getting its hands on him by announcing
simultaneously with Sharif's arrival in Washington that it is freezing trade
with "all territory under Taliban control or influence."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            eBabe

            This
week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion
models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show
Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to "bid on eggs from beautiful,
healthy and intelligent women." Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared
his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the
media and politicians who are "looking into" whether he can be stopped. Most
people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they
don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the
auction--and each other.

            

               1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his
experience as a horse breeder and asks, "We bid for everything else in this
society--why not eggs?" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris "can put you into your
own designer baby by selling eggs," predict that his success will steer "the
future of human breeding" toward "genetic engineering."

            

               2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While
fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts
simultaneously debunk that scenario. "Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but
the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture," observes
ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an
ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty.
Second, everyone carries "recessive" genes, which are invisible in this
generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can
pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a
child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can
inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.

            

               3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest.
Doomsayers predict that once "beautiful eggs are available strictly to people
who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them," the rich will transform
themselves into a "super-race" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris
replies, "It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of
only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that
beauty usually goes to the highest bidder." But this reply only fuels concern
that gradually, society will separate into "genetic haves and have nots."

            

               4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest.
Harris writes that only men with "substantial financial resources" are fit to
give his models' offspring "a financially secure and stable life." But skeptics
wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy
these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce
children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist
Sydney Sharpe put it, "Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact
has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who
sign her up."

            

               5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the
unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A
model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs.
(One of Harris' "angels" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does
Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs?
"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the
truth," he says. Annas concludes that since there's "no way to know how much of
their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or
exercise," only a "naive" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the
photographs displayed on the site. "You don't want to see the models," he
points out. "You want to see pictures of their parents." On this theory,
children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on
one side and fools on the other.

            

               6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that
beauty "shows healthiness and longevity." On his site, he writes, " 'Natural
Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful." Skeptics question
this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these
days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the
Today show how much "medical screening" he has given his egg donors,
Harris answered, "None."

            

               7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says
he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold
sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris'
detractors reply that beauty is "superficial" and conveys a "harmful
preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of
character." This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer
who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the
movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.

            

               8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises
beauty not as an end but as a means to "success," since people who are
physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having
chided Harris for exalting social advantage over "character," critics turn
around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful,
they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic
information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are "beautiful,
healthy and intelligent," he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT
scores. London's Independent envisions "Bimbo births." A fertility
expert shrugs, "If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous
woman who has an IQ of 68, let them."

            

               9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure
capitalism, saying it's "unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make
money" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse
Harris of "taking advantage of couples trying to conceive" and exploiting
"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell." USA
Today laments, "This is about human need. And human greed."

            

               10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday,
Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On
the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction.
Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA
Today described the models as "struggling actresses," reported that they
were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying,
"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse ." Harris' sole
verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was "better than
prostitution."

            Harris
constantly refers to the donors as his "girls" and describes them like
cattle--"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls." He gets a 20
percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for
executing financial transactions or medical procedures. "We have no control
over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or
accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability
of buyers to buy items," he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to
"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on
the Web." To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women
throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps
like him have come away with the profit.

            

               11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post
thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about
selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his
models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up
publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell
advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models),
hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to
his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that
ronsangels.com is really aimed at "adolescent boys."

            

               12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology
watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by
Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing
other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and
woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a
human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. "Ever
since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization
of people and selling of eggs," one fertility expert complains to the New
York Times . USA Today says the egg auction "just might force an
Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the
Internet taking us?"

            

               13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases.
The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the
critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. "When you have large
transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud," a
computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive
technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that "there's very little that you can do
to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected," and
"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to
scrutinize where the eggs are coming from."

            

               14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences.
Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories
to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human
psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn
out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child
may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today
show, Harris said of this theory, "That's a pretty cynical view of human
nature.") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty
queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her
true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's
good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually
destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.

            

               15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense
of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that "having sex
is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the
next generation." But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words:
"our genes." "The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much
stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site," Fisher
observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a
decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he
focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you
don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.

            

               16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited.
Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to
favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have
successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious
response is to attack the whole "prejudice" in favor of beauty. "The standards
of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really
genetics facts," says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, "we
should think about" whether to "accept the existing prejudices and then try to
eugenically manipulate them" or to transcend those prejudices.

            This
critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending
to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs
and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their
mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of
human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the
worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start
with the latter rather than the former?

            Second, Harris assumes
that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian
perfection. "Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state," he
writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite
like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the
modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved
to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become
more than material. At least, most of us have.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P>Is the &quot;Sensation&quot; Art Worth the Fuss?</P>

            Dear
David,

            Thanks for your speedy response. I found your
comments more interesting than your earlier ones, mainly because you
acknowledged liking some of the artists in the show. And that's good. I'm glad.
I was beginning to wonder whether you were a knee-jerk neo-conservative, which
is even worse than being a knee-jerk liberal. (Knee-jerk liberals are at least
motivated by a desire for social justice, while knee-jerk neo-conservatives
operate strictly out of fear--a fear of change; a fear of human instinct; a
fear, it often seems to me, of their own latent homosexuality.)

            Getting back to Chris Ofili: No, I do not think
that his inclusion of porn cutouts in the painting brands him as a rude
provocateur. Remember, the Virgin Mary may be a timeless symbol, but she is
also a flesh-and-blood woman, and Ofili is hardly the first artist to eroticize
the Virgin. It's been going on at least since the Renaissance. (I'm sure you're
familiar with Leo Steinberg's book on the subject.) Moreover, since you're a
guy, I shouldn't have to tell you that virgins are sexy.

            Why do you speak of Sarah Lucas as nasty? I think
she's major. I loved Au Naturel , that bare mattress piece with the melon
breasts and erect cucumber. It manages to be both cultivated and raw at the
same time, which is basically what I look for in any work of art. The piece
evokes Rauschenberg's famous painted Bed and might be seen as
Rauschenberg's bed unmade.

            If we get away from the art stars (Hirst, Ofili,
etc.) for a moment, I'd like to say that, for me, there were many small
discoveries in the show. For instance, I had never before seen Mat Collishaw's
Bullet Hole , and I found it totally engaging. As you know, it's a big,
lighted close-up of a head wound that bears an unsettling resemblance to an
anus, and when I saw it, I thought to myself, "That's the story of my life.
Half head, half asshole." Or, to be more elegant here (in keeping with the
spirit of your own mandarin replies), you might say that the piece subverts the
tradition of staged photography, blasting a hole through the cold, calculating
heart of '90s art.

            I agree with you that
Simon Patterson is not the next Picasso, but so what? The Armory Show of 1913,
probably the last show in New York to cause this level of commotion, had its
share of duds as well. Let's concentrate on the artists we like. There are lots
of first-rate artists in "Sensation," and I can't think of any other recent
show that captures so forcefully the particular feeling of being alive in the
'90s, which sometimes means feeling like you're dead (I loved Ron Mueck's
Dead Dad ).

            Yours
truly,

            Deborah

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dysfunctional Dole

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               This is a political
concern, not personal. Each time I see the erectile dysfunction ad with Bob
Dole, I cringe. What happened to his statesmanlike demeanor? Is it entirely a
coincidence that we have a president who can get it up (for each and every one
who asks), instead of a president who can't? Do we need to know about Bob's
penile trouble in order to go forward? Must we be a party to all his
witherings? Surely someone agrees with me.
            

            

               --Ricespring
            

            Dear Rice,

            Prudie guesses Mrs. Dole
and her campaign aides agree with you. And Prudie is reminded of the old
vaudeville joke about an older gentleman who tells a friend that he finds sex
at his age terrific. Especially the one in the winter.

            
--Prudie, neutrally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Your advice to the
seemed fair and balanced. How rare. I thought, however, I might take the
opportunity to chime in and mention that I have got wind of the existence of an
herb, indigenous to Thailand, which reportedly stimulates the actual growth of
existing breasts. I've heard only scattered reports about it, and those mostly
relating to the Thai government's efforts to quell its export. Your readers who
are currently considering artificial augmentation (which as a man I find
repugnant) may just want to wait a while. I'm sure a fistful of American money
will have the Thai people throwing seeds over the border in no time.
            

            

               --Ameer
            

            Dear Am,

            After an inquiry
regarding Bob Dole's ... well, anyway, your letter is most interesting. Prudie
has heard nothing of the Thai herb. It is hard to imagine, though, why any
government would embargo such a product, unless the plastic surgeons' lobby has
already got to them. Prudie hopes your information is correct--if only so some
health food company can market a product called Gingko Bilbooba.

            
--Prudie, naturally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I grew up being
taught that people should not make loud noises when eating in public. I am
quite bothered by co-workers who eat loudly at their desks, which are very near
to mine. (It is common practice in our office to eat at one's desk, since
there's no nice place to eat on the premises.) One person in particular always
comes over to talk while loudly snacking on potato chips and other items.
Trouble is, I can't think of any remotely acceptable way to convey my
unhappiness with this behavior. I'd be very grateful if you could.
            

            

               --J.W. in Massachusetts
            

            Dear J.,

            You are correct that you
cannot come right out and say, "It is gauche to come over and serenade me with
your potato chips, so please go away." Here are a few options that are not
confrontational. You might have something to read during lunch, sort of a de
facto "Do Not Disturb" sign. You could hook up to Walkman earphones. You might
inform everyone that you are meditating, or simply say you'd love to visit
during a coffee break, but lunch is when you've decided to catch up on your
checkbook/Italian lessons/letter to Mom/fill in the blank. Prudie sees no
reason to be held prisoner to a potato chip. As for the sounds from other
desks, use earplugs or the above-mentioned Walkman to drown out the sounds of
celery.

            
--Prudie, tactfully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My wife and I are
gearing up for our daughter's third birthday party. We had a blowout (45
people) for her first, a pretty large to-do for her second (35 people), and
have decided that this party will be for 3-year-olds and close relatives only,
thank you. Many of our friends are relieved, I think, not to have to give up a
summer Sunday afternoon. But, of course, there are those who expect to be
invited, and I don't know how to break it to them that they are not welcome. To
make things worse, they have already told me about the ridiculously expensive
gifts they have purchased for our irresistible little birthday girl. I am
looking for a delicate way to get the gifts but stand firm on the
invitations.
            

            
               --Not Entirely
Unselfishly,
            

            

               Daddy
            

            Dear Dad,

            Prudie will try not to
be too judgmental about your delicacy, though your wish to grab the gifts with
no party attached leaves something to be desired. In addition to looking
askance at your rather material approach, Prudie has long disapproved of
elaborate birthday parties for tykes ... going back years ago to a celebration
for a 1-year-old child, where the parents engaged a chimp and a trainer, and
the animal bit the birthday girl. But back to your deal: Since people have
already mentioned their gifts and their plans to launch your darling into year
No. 3, you may be stuck for one more over-the-top party. Prudie suggests,
therefore, that you say on the invitations, "Shirley Ann's Last Birthday Party
With Grown-ups." The inference will be clear that next year, when the child is
4, she will have her own circle of friends from ... well, somewhere. If you are
absolutely not up to having dozens of chums this year, tell them that it's just
playmates from now on--and be prepared to forgo some loot.

            
--Prudie, directly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My daughter recently
graduated from high school after a successful year of captaining the winning
softball team. During the softball season my husband and I got to know many of
the team parents and were particularly taken with the extended family of a
ninth-grader, a new player on the team. At the end of the school year, I called
to invite this family, their young daughter, and her older brother--also a
graduating senior--to our house for a cookout with the softball coaches before
our daughter left for summer study abroad. I did not intend this party to be a
graduation or a bon voyage party for our daughter. We were quite taken aback
when various members of this other family brought gifts and graduation cards
for our daughter ... including cash totaling about $200! We had prepared no
graduation gift for their son, whom my husband and I do not know well. My
daughter expressed gratitude and is writing thank-you notes and plans to bring
the family a gift from France. I wonder if I should have done things
differently--perhaps whipped up a card and cash between serving courses? Should
we send a gift as the son prepares to go to college? Should I have anticipated
the interpretation of my invitation as a gift solicitation, given the timing?
Or should I just relax and consider their gifts a generous expression of their
appreciation for my daughter's leadership and mentoring of the younger player
throughout the year?
            

            

               --Julie
            

            Dear Jule,

            Prudie votes for
"relax." Your motives were pure and a good time was had by all. It may be a
personal bias, but Prudie has long wished the tit for tat principle would fall
by the wayside. The giving of gifts simply to even things up is just another
version of "You look lovely"/"So do you." Your daughter's present from France
will be very meaningful, and the timing will be perfect.

            
--Prudie, genuinely

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               You missed something important about the
problem of "." Vague or unintelligible phone messages, with a clear reply
number, are now a tool of telemarketers. Some of them do this just to get the
victim to call an expensive toll number. Many refer to correcting a credit
problem, which is fictitious.
            

            
               Of course, Slurred
Off could have had a simple garbled message, I suppose. How boring.
            

            

               --Jim S.
            

            Dear Jim,

            What an interesting take
you have offered. Because Prudie harbors hostility toward intrusive
telemarketers, she is most happy to pass the word. And she does not want one
letter from the offending telephone pests arguing with her. She knows it's a
tough way to make a living, but unsolicited pitches are just junk mail
delivered by a human voice.

            --Prudie, feistily

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 264: &quot;The $156K Problem&quot;

            
               Overheard at
Sotheby's Tuesday: "My intention is to do whatever he indicates to me he wants
done with them. He may want them returned. He may want me to destroy them. He
may not care at all." You make the prediction: Who will want whom to do
what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 263)--"Exchanging Glances":
            

            

               
                  Despite a recent clash of gunboats, yesterday a South Korean
freighter delivered something to the North Korean port of Nampo, the first part
of a trade between the two nations. What is being swapped for
what?
               
            

            
"Slaves for rum. And then the United States supplies the cane sugar, and ...
No, wait, hang on. I may have this wrong."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "North
Korea gives up its dreams of agrarian reform under collectivism; South Korea
gives up a phantom economy built on cronyism and kickbacks; the International
Monetary Fund just gives up."--Mike Pesca
            

            "The
South generously agreed to trade the North its position in
Salon.com."-- Bill Wasik
            

            
"Episodes of M*A*S*H for kimchi. Yes, that is all I know about Korea.
What of it?"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "I
don't know.  And neither does George W. Bush."-- Peter Lerangis
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            I'd just like to point
out, in case you were planning a satirical musical comedy about the crisis in
question, something you can do to a song from West Side Story : "Korea,
I've just met a place called Korea!" This you cannot do with "Kosovo" without
offending the rhythm and a sense of human decency. An early version of this
sort of thing that I recall with particular pleasure was Mad magazine's
East Side Story --that being the location of the United Nations.
Khrushchev, the leader of the Jets, sang, "When you're a Red you're a Red all
the way from your first party purge to your last power play." As a 12-year-old,
that's where I learned about party purges, and about Khrushchev for that
matter. Back then--and is there a more demoralizing phrase?-- Mad was
prized as the only satirical voice reaching suburban adolescents. Now with
plenty of smart comedy aimed at kids-- The Simpsons and Letterman
come to mind-- Mad is as superfluous and weary as the grandfather we
shunted into that nursing home. (Was that us? Certainly not. It was the
neighbors. Bastards.) In fact, I've just renewed my daughter's subscription.
She seems to enjoy it, and I may yet be in the mood to read a movie parody
called "Star Drech."

            
               Market Value
Answer
            

            In exchange for 200,000 tons of fertilizer from
South Korea, North Korea will discuss family reunions.

            Some conjecture that Sigmund Freud will rise from
his grave to discuss the equating of fertilizer with family, of shit with
mother, then take in a movie, perhaps that charming Notting Hill , then
continue being dead. (And by "some" I, of course, mean "me.")

            The first round of
talks, held in Beijing Tuesday, was largely devoted to trading accusations over
last week's naval skirmishes and complaining about the accommodations in the
hotel, except for the part about the hotel.

            
               Discontented
Extra
            

            All the following
remarks could have been made by arrogant senior executives at Coca-Cola, drunk
on their own power probably mixed with rum--and it's kicky summer fun to think
of them that way--but none was. Can you match each with its actual disappointed
speaker?

            
               The
Disdain:
            

            1. "We don't like you; and that's been my motto my
whole life, growing up."

            2. "I was probably too nervous, not much believing
what I can do."

            3. [It was] "grave and irregular."

            4. [She has] "a deep feeling of remorse."

            5. "I'm tired of the
divisiveness up here."

            
               The
Speakers:
            

            A. A money-hungry Salon staffer wishes its
IPO had yielded bigger bucks and that other online magazines would just die or
something.

            B. Grumpy Knicks forward Larry Johnson assesses
non-Knicks, and--if I can go out on a limb here, and bear in mind I'm just
speculating--Tina Brown.

            C. Apologetic tennis great Martina Hingis seems to
resent her absent mother, although I've not actually seen her in a clinical
setting.

            D. Crotchety Shimon Peres wishes Israeli police
hadn't shot his fellow MP Azmi Bishara, but he doesn't wish it all that hard.
"I didn't come here to denounce," he said at Lod City Hall. "I'm here to enjoy
a lobster dinner, away from the prying eyes of certain pushy rabbis who ...
whoops!" he didn't add.

            E. Exasperated Jeb Bush is pretty sure his
spendthrift wife, Columba, wishes either that she hadn't bought "$19,000 worth
of clothes and jewelry on her Paris shopping spree," or wishes that she hadn't
tried to smuggle them through customs, or wishes that she hadn't got caught.
One of those.

            F. Disdainful Coke executives sneer at the
misfortunes of ... Nah, of course they don't. Responsible corporate citizens
every one. (Although I've not actually seen them in a clinical setting.)

            G. Cranky Orrin Hatch is
annoyed that everyone doesn't just agree with him, and he thinks the best
remedy is to mount a futile run for the presidency.

            
               The
Answers:
            

            
               1-B, 2-C, 3-D, 4-E,
5-G.
            

            
               Greg Diamond's
Ongoing Extra
            

            There's still time to
mock the AFI's Greatest Legends List of movie stars by devising a brief
plot summary of a movie in which any equally ranked pair--for instance Kirk
Douglas and Lillian Gish are both rated No. 17--should have co-starred.

            Inspirational example:

            No. 18 Sunrise
Boulevard --A young screenwriter (James Dean) falls under the spell of a
disturbingly sexually precocious child movie star (Shirley Temple) who lives
alone in her Hollywood mansion with a dead monkey and an ancient tap-dancing
Negro butler.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            
               M*A*S*H was set in Korea.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Old <STRONG><EM>Slate</EM></STRONG>, New <STRONG><EM>Slate</EM></STRONG>

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            Kenneth Starr: a &quot;Witty and Benign Companion&quot;

            In an
interview Tuesday with Britain's Daily Telegraph , Kenneth Starr accused President Clinton of
continuing to lie to the American people but reserved his harshest words for
Monica Lewinsky. The independent counsel's only stated regret was that he
didn't do enough to stop Congress publishing the most salacious material in his
report. He deplored Congress' decision to authorize publication of the
unexpurgated evidence instead of "screening and winnowing" it first. "I wish I
had done more to say to Congress: be careful," he said. Some of the most
sensitive evidence he gathered has never been made public, he said; and "had
the President seen fit to tell the truth, we would have been spared the
intrusive nature of the details." But he said that much of the information
published was vital to the credibility of Lewinsky's testimony.

            Starr
complained that even now, a year later, Clinton has "admitted no offences,
other than to have the inappropriate relationship, which is not a matter of
interest to federal law. To the contrary: he has very vigorously stated that he
at no time committed any federal offences." Starr said that "in one of the most
unfortunate episodes of the entire drama" Clinton made the decision, when his
relationship with Lewinsky came to light in January 1998, that he was not going
to tell the truth. He was advised by Dick Morris "that the American people
would readily forgive an adulterous relationship, but they would not be
forgiving of offences against the justice system. And the President informed
him, 'Well, we will just have to win, then.' Thus, instead of telling the
truth, admitting the facts and seeking forgiveness of family and nation, he
launched a campaign designed to erode confidence in the duly appointed system
of justice."

            Asked
if he regretted the personal distress suffered by Lewinsky, Starr replied:
"She--as an obviously highly intelligent young adult, a professional, a college
graduate--made a most unfortunate judgment, and that was that she would commit
federal crimes in order to obstruct the judicial process in the form of a
sexual harassment action [the Paula Jones case]. Not only that: she importuned
another person, Linda Tripp, to likewise engage in federal crimes. That was
serious business. She did it not on the spur of the moment; she did it over a
considerable period of time. She knowingly went to one of the most powerful
lawyers in the country, who in turn guided her to another lawyer to prepare
what she knew to be a perjurious affidavit. One should not blink at those kinds
of offences." Because of her decision "not to be readily forthcoming," Lewinsky
had "put the nation through seven months of a wretched and miserable 24-hour
news cycle," he said. "Miss Lewinsky did not co-operate until July 1998. This
could have been over in January." The enduring lesson of the whole affair,
Starr said, was that "we in the United States take the law seriously and that
we are all accountable."

            The
Telegraph , a conservative paper that was vigorously anti-Clinton
throughout the scandal, sponsored a lecture by Starr Tuesday. His interviewer
was much taken with him. "The grimly bespectacled prosecutor is only the public
face," he wrote. "In private, he is a witty and benign companion. He enjoys a
Martini and is relaxed on the subject of sex: by no means the prudish
teetotaller portrayed by the White House. One of the best legal minds of his
generation, he speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences, with the same
exhaustive precision as his celebrated report."

            In an
editorial Wednesday headlined "Gore's Burden," the Times of London said
Vice President Al Gore's virtues are largely being ignored in the election
campaign because of his "intense and inevitable association with President
Clinton--to whom some 55 per cent of the electorate believe that Mr Gore is
'too close' for their comfort." If he is to beat Bill Bradley for the
Democratic nomination, "he must emerge as something more than the President's
favoured successor," the paper said. "Mr Clinton secured the White House as the
candidate of change. In this respect, at least, Mr Gore has lessons to learn
from his President."

            But
the main focus of the British press Wednesday was Prime Minister Tony Blair,
whose speech at the annual Labor Party Conference promising to end the class
war, create equality of opportunity, and purge Britain forever of "the forces
of conservatism" generated many editorials. His "vision of a nation more like
America than Britain is laudable," the Times said, "but he will have to
pursue it with a passion and defend it with care." The Daily Telegraph ,
however, called it a "strangely nerve-wracked speech, at once
belligerent and insecure, that seemed to reveal an inner uncertainty about what
his Government is trying to achieve, and why." The liberal Guardian said the
speech was "as accomplished as any speech Mr Blair has given," but the
Independent
said "real radicalism needs substance, not just a collection of good tunes."
The Financial Times
praised his radical rhetoric, but also said he failed to explain "how all this
translates into hard-edged policies."

            
Another FT editorial said the ice is breaking in corporate Japan, with
companies changing "in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few years
ago." It concluded, "As Japan's politicians continue to posture in much the
same old familiar ways, the economy is at last beginning to be restructured
from the bottom up." But in Tokyo, Asahi
Shimbun dwelt on the human cost of this, reporting a rapid rise in the
number of Japanese businessmen diagnosed as psychotic depressives. "The trigger
for their slide into mental illness is constant anxiety in the workplace," it
said. "Many are alarmed by the prospect that their company's restructuring
drive will single them out." Some of them check into a Tokyo psychiatric clinic
at weekends in order to find the strength to go to work on Mondays, when
important business meetings are often held, the paper added.

            In Israel, Ha'aretz led its
front page Wednesday with a report
that the change of government in Israel has ended efforts by Russian mobsters
to establish ties with Israeli government officials. Such ties had been
"ripening" under the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, it said, quoting police
and intelligence sources, but were broken after Ehud Barak won the
election.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Republican Shakeout

            This
weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and
sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the
front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who
finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the
sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in
third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames,
John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a
playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their
playbook of messages for the remainder of the race.

            
               Elizabeth
Dole
            

            

               Playback
            

            

               1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of
Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press ,
Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had
cracked "the top three." Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames
as a horse race ("win, place, and show") and noting that "no one's ever won the
Republican nomination without finishing in the top three" at Ames. Newspapers,
cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though
Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a
"solid third" and a place among the leaders by crossing the "double-digit"
threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: "The other seven candidates could
not crack double digits."

            

               2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to
finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on
Meet the Press , that "the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole
won that." The Boston Globe called Dole "the winner of this
contest-within-the-contest." Dole touted her "victory" on every talk show and
cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news
conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's "real winner."

            

               3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been
"outspent by millions of dollars." Her spokesman told reporters that "on a
dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes."
Reporters love an underdog. "From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big
winner may be Elizabeth Dole," concluded Time .

            

               4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw
poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her "surprisingly" strong
third. "Dole Revived," the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On
This Week , George Will conceded, "There had been a lot of very skeptical
stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the
biggest winner."

            

               Playbook
            

            

               1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP
tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to
create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play
Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, "we finished close to second,"
Dole told reporters Saturday night. "This is going to become a two-person
race." The press agreed. "Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush
or finish a close second," recalled the Post . Instead, "he finished
closer to Dole than to Bush."

            

               2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs
to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is
political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On
every talk show, Dole vowed "to demonstrate that the candidate with the most
experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're
talking about president of the United States."

            

               3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that
distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up
anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk
shows) to "women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my
hand, a woman they dare to believe in." Newspapers hail Dole's female followers
as evidence "that she can attract new voters to the GOP."

            
               Gary
Bauer
            

            

               Playback
            

            

               1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and
seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three
rather than four (e.g., "bronze medal," "win, place, and show"), Bauer changed
metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached "the first rung of candidates"
and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called
himself the "breakout candidate." While some pundits lumped Bauer with the
winners, others offered him the next best position--"leading the rest of the
pack"--or at least distinguished him from the "losers."

            

               2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin
win. Like Dole, he won a crucial "contest-within-the-contest." His scant margin
over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the
post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer "did what he had to do ...
beat Pat Buchanan," and therefore "can legitimately say he is the candidate of
the Christian right," establishing himself as "one of the winners," the "three
or four" candidates who "got their tickets punched" to stay in the race. Talk
show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether
Buchanan was finished.

            

               3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer
and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself "the conservative in a two-man race"
against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. "Forbes, Bauer
Battle for Right," the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes
failed to break away, "he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough
fight for the leadership of the conservative wing."

            

               4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than
Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition,
inexperience, and working-class heritage. "I am running against some big bios
... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a
senator," Bauer argued on Late Edition . "I have never run for president
or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place." Newsweek 's
David Brooks wrote that Bauer "overcame his own financial disadvantages" and
joined Dole as the two surviving "Have-Not candidates."

            

               Playbook
            

            

               1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and
loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded
the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low
score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more
Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the
more he plays into this scenario.

            

               2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after
Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right.
Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself "the son of a maintenance man."
On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer "is becoming the
populist in the race," noting that Bauer's supporters "love the fact that he
was the son of a janitor."

            

               3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative
quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the "Reagan"
candidate against "Bush-Gore" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and
other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces
Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing
that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the
moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by
giving Bush a semifinal contest.

            
               John
McCain
            

            

               Playback
            

            

               1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw
poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday
to discuss it. "If you're going to be taken seriously," Brit Hume asked him,
"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide
that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?" In
reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames "meaningless." His chutzpah bowled over
the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show "a pretty smart move" and
portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place
among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.

            

               2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had
bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too,
"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to
participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the
Iowa Republican Party." The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to
candidates who had been in Iowa "years and months." McCain, explaining his
decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: "You always want
to fight on ground that is most favorable to you." For this, the media executed
Quayle and spared McCain. "Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I
think McCain is still in," concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in
reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.

            

               3. Viability. "Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,"
McCain regally announced, "I will review the new political landscape" and begin
"engaging the other Republican candidates." Why does McCain get a bye? Because
he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New
Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later.
Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and
several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames,
and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.

            

               4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an
arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a "fund-raiser," "a sham and a joke"
in which campaigns spent "millions" to "buy" votes. "My campaign theme is to
try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of
special interests," he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's
retort--"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you"--played right
into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons
for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his
reasons were moral rather than political.

            

               Playbook
            

            

               1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a
bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll
rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't
"real votes." "We'll have real votes in New Hampshire," McCain argued on Fox
News Sunday . "That's where real people are motivated to vote." On Face
the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on "the genuine balloting
process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina."

            

               2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest
that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has "taken a position on
ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa." On This Week ,
Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might "have to do something dramatic,"
such as "make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think
these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' " This is McCain's greatest
triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations
and accusing him instead of principle. "I've taken a lot of unpopular
positions," he conceded on Fox News Sunday .

            

               3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without
damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage.
Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin
Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and
Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running
against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory
in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.

            So
here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown,
chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the
establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will
exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the
candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his
war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the
contestants. Let the games begin.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape

            Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I,
the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all
humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City
and rents trucks from U-Haul.

            The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You
will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA,
but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers
but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs
special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning
answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's
supply of Turtle Wax?"

            But first, the Shopping Avenger would like to tell
his own tale of consumer woe. Many of you might find this a shocking statement,
but even the Shopping Avenger sometimes gets smacked upside the head by the
evil forces of rampant capitalism. Granted, this seldom happens when the
Shopping Avenger is wearing his cape and codpiece and special decals, but the
Shopping Avenger seldom ventures outside the Great Hall of Consumer Justice in
his cape and codpiece and special decals, on account of the fact that he
doesn't want to get arrested.

            What you should know is
that by day the Shopping Avenger is a mild-mannered reporter for a major
metropolitan magazine, and it is in this guise that the Shopping Avenger
sometimes finds himself holding the short end of the consumer stick. Whatever
that means.

            Take the following incident, which occurred at Heathrow
airport, which, I am told, is somewhere in Europe. The Shopping Avenger, who
was scheduled to transit home from the Middle East through Heathrow, was
feeling ill and generally fed up at the end of his trip and so decided to
upgrade himself, using his own money, to business class. The total cost of the
ticket: $1,732. Remember that exorbitant sum.

            The first flight, out of
the Middle East, left late and arrived even later at Heathrow, though not too
late to make the connection. However, the Shopping Avenger and several other
passengers were met at the gate by a British Airways agent, who said that there
was no time to make the connection, which was leaving from a different
terminal. Technically, he admitted, there was enough time, but since British
Airways was committed to "on-time departures," the plane's doors would be
closing early. The Shopping Avenger argued in his mild-mannered manner that
British Airways did not, in fact, have a commitment to "on-time departures"
because the originating flight did not depart on time. The Shopping Avenger
received no answer to this statement. Instead, the Shopping Avenger was booked
onto a later flight and so asked the agent if he could use a British Airways
telephone to call Mrs. Shopping Avenger, who would be waiting for him at the
other end. The agent directed the Shopping Avenger to the British Airways
business-class lounge, where a telephone would be made available to him.

            You, of course, know what happened next. The Shopping
Avenger was told by a very nasty airline employee that only first-class
passengers would be allowed to use the telephone. When the Shopping Avenger
argued, in an increasingly less mild-mannered manner, that the call was
necessitated by a British Airways screw up and, therefore, British Airways
should pay for the call, he was told that pay phones could be found outside the
lounge. This was when Shopping Avenger stated very loudly that for $1,732, he
should be allowed to make a two-minute phone call. And it was the weekend!
Weekend calling rates, for Pete's sake!

            But British Airways is an insufferably greedy
little company, and so the Shopping Avenger was given no recourse but to invoke
the power of his high office. The Shopping Avenger asked this nasty lady if she
had ever heard of the Shopping Avenger. To the Shopping Avenger's dismay, this
was her answer: "No."

            What about 
                  Slate
                magazine? "No."

            Well, whatever. The Shopping Avenger, while not
identifying himself as the Shopping Avenger--this would have meant changing
into his codpiece and cape in the business-class lounge--informed this poorly
informed British Airways employee that the Shopping Avenger was America's
foremost consumer advocate (this is a lie, but she's English, so what does she
know?) and that the Shopping Avenger would hear about this treatment and seek
vengeance.

            Well, did her tune ever change. Not exactly her
tune--she remained as mean as a ferret, but she did let Shopping Avenger use
her telephone.

            The moral of this story
for the world's airlines: Penny-pinching might make you rich, but it also gets
you blasted in 
                  Slate
                magazine. The other moral: Superheroes
should never travel without their codpiece under their pants.

            There is only one airline the Shopping Avenger believes
understands the fundamentals of customer service, and that is Southwest
Airlines. But more on that in the next episode. First, this month's U-Haul
outrage. The following letter contains perhaps the funniest story the Shopping
Avenger has heard about U-Haul, and by now the Shopping Avenger has received
upward of 6.7 million complaints about U-Haul. The story comes from one Susan
Hwang:

            "A year ago, I, too, reserved a truck at U-Haul and
get this--they said someone with my SAME NAME--Susan Hwang is really
common--and going to the SAME SUBURB of Chicago, picked up my truck. Amazing!!
They had to rent a bigger truck to me, which, of course cost more and at that
point, they have you by the balls."

            At least the anatomically
confused Susan Hwang got her truck. Most of the Shopping Avenger's
correspondents wind up having to rent from Ryder and Budget, who seem to keep
extra trucks on hand in order to benefit from U-Haul's nefarious practice of
overbooking.

            On a semi-positive note, the Shopping Avenger did finally
hear from Johna Burke, the U-Haul spokeswoman, who apologized for the
inconvenience caused K., the . (For other U-Haul horror stories, click .) K.,
you'll recall, was left standing in the U-Haul parking lot when a credit-card
reservation he'd made was dishonored by U-Haul. "Mr. K.'s two day rental
reservation should have been honored so long as he provided us with his credit
card number, which we will assume was the case. This is what we at U-Haul call
a 'confirmed reservation.' "

            Burke's letter, though, is filled with what we at
Shopping Avenger call "bullshit."

            "Once we have a confirmed reservation we should
have moved heaven and earth to see that Mr. K.'s two day reservation was
filled," Burke wrote.

            Yes, of course they
should have--but they never do. This is not Burke's fault. She is simply paid
to explain the inexplicable. The Shopping Avenger has received 164--no
exaggeration for effect in this instance--letters so far from people who say
they had confirmed reservations with U-Haul, only to show up and find no truck
waiting for them. The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from more--to show
Burke and the bossmen at U-Haul the hollowness of their concept of "confirmed
reservations."

            One more thing before we get to our tale of rabbinical woe:
the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax
comprises a year's supply of Turtle Wax?"

            Fifty-eight of you wrote in, 48 with the correct
answer, which is, of course: "Depends upon how many Turtles you wanna wax," in
the words of one of our winners, Samir Raiyani. Or, as another of our winners,
Karen Bitterman, wrote, it "depends on the size of the turtle--and whether or
not you park it in a covered space."

            Unfortunately, because so
many of you wrote in with the more or less correct answer, the Shopping Avenger
is unable to award the contest prize, which was to be a year's supply of
Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.

            Now to our hapless rabbi, Rabbi S., who wrote the Shopping
Avenger seeking worldly justice in his case against TWA. The story of Rabbi S.
is entirely typical of the airline industry--a minor problem made enormous by
the cruelty and ignorance of employees who are, in theory, hired by the
greedheads who run the airlines to take care of passengers.

            Rabbi S., his wife, and kids arrived at Kennedy
airport in time for his flight to Detroit, parked curbside, unloaded their
luggage, and proceeded to the check-in counter. There the rabbi asked a TWA
representative if he could leave his luggage by the counter for his wife to
check in while he parked the car, to which he received a positive response and
left to go park. No one told him, though, that he must first show his
driver's license to the ticket agent.
            

            The ticket agent refused to check the rabbi's bags
once he left, telling the wife that "security reasons" forbade him from
checking the luggage of ticket holders who were not present. But then she told
Rabbi S.'s wife: "If you want, you can pay an extra $100 for the extra
bags"--i.e., charge his luggage to her ticket.

            "How could it be a
security issue," Rabbi S. wrote the Shopping Avenger, "if they're ready to take
money for the bags?"

            Rabbi S. was running late (Kennedy airport is not a
parking-friendly place), and his wife refused to check her bags without his
bags. She was then told that she would miss the flight, and then her children
began crying, and then she began crying.

            Rabbi S. finally made it back to Terminal 25 minutes
before the flight was scheduled to depart. His wife handed him one baby and
took the other to the gate. "The woman at the counter treated me like a piece
of dirt," he wrote. "First she said she's not sure whether the flight is still
open. Then she took more than five minutes to look around and find someone who
said, 'Yeah, I think we just closed it a minute ago.' ... In the meantime, my
wife went to the gate and the people at the gate told her there's plenty of
time for me--and let her wait outside the gate for me for another 15 minutes.
Alas, my wife didn't realize that [I] could not come because of the luggage
issue and the haughtiness of the people downstairs."

            At the ticket counter, Rabbi S. was told that he
wouldn't make this flight and that he should book himself on another. His wife
and one of his children, meanwhile, got on the flight to Detroit. Rabbi S. had
TWA book him on another flight, a Delta flight, and he schlepped--that's the
only word for it--to the Delta terminal, only to be told that his was a
"voluntary" transfer--he was late for his TWA flight--and so therefore he would
have to pay an additional $300. "My fault!?!? I'm thinking to myself, 'If your
people would have been competent enough to tell me that I should show my
license and courteous enough to put the luggage on for my wife, then I would be
on a flight now with my family to Detroit, not roaming an airport with a
starving baby being sent on a wild goose chase."

            Here the story becomes as confusing as the Book of
Leviticus, but suffice it to say that TWA continued to torture Rabbi S. for
another day--finally forcing him to buy a new $400 ticket.

            "I have never in my life
been treated so horribly," Rabbi S. wrote.

            The Shopping Avenger contacted Jim Brown, a TWA spokesman,
to discuss Rabbi S.'s case. To his surprise--the Shopping Avenger has not had
very good experiences on TWA--Brown investigated the complaint and wrote: "TWA
has issued a credit for the value of Rabbi S.'s ticket for $244. In addition, a
Customer Relations representative has been communicating with the rabbi on this
incident and is sending him the difference between that ticket and the cost of
a new ticket, $219, plus a letter of apology for the behavior of our
representatives at Kennedy Airport. She is also enclosing four travel coupons
valued at $75 each."

            Brown, however, had no
explanation for the behavior at the Kennedy ticket counter--entirely typical
behavior that often makes the already unpleasant air travel experience
completely unbearable.

            In the next episode, the Shopping Avenger will tell the
story of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that seems to actually care about
customer service. But the Shopping Avenger needs your help! Keep those airline
stories coming--and all those other stories, too--except computer stories. Let
me say again, the Shopping Avenger does not fix computers.

            One final request: The Shopping Avenger would like
to hear from anyone who has actually eaten Rice-a-Roni and from anyone who
could explain why it is known as "the San Francisco treat."

            Onward, shoppers!

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Two Wild and Crazy Guys

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Bowfinger
                (Universal Pictures). Great reviews for
this Eddie Murphy-Steve Martin comedy about a low-rent movie-maker (Martin) and
his ragtag stable of actors: "Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far
this year" (Richard Schickel, Time ). Martin, out of desperation, hires a
painfully awkward nerd (Murphy) who has no film experience other than being "an
active renter at Blockbuster" but who bears a striking resemblance to action
star Kit Ramsey (also played by Murphy). "It's one of those comedies where
everything works," writes Roger Ebert (the Chicago Sun-Times ). A few
find the film spotty ("likable albeit hit-and-miss"--Kenneth Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ), but most agree this ranks with Martin's and Murphy's best
comic works. (Click here to find out more about Murphy and here to find out more about Martin.)

            

               
                  Brokedown Palace
                (20 th Century Fox Film
Corp.). In a strikingly similar plot to last year's Return to Paradise ,
Kate Beckinsale and Claire Danes star as two recent high-school grads who
travel to Bangkok, Thailand, on a whim; they get mixed up with an Australian
con artist and wind up in jail with 33-year sentences for drug smuggling. The
critics are unmoved: "just another lurid, contrived, xenophobic tale about
Americans trapped in hideous foreign prisons" (Kevin Thomas, the Los Angeles
Times ). A few call Danes' performance better than the rest of the film but
concede that even her nice turn can't save the film. (Click here to see a
boatload of pictures of Danes.)

            

               
                  Illuminata
                (Overseas FilmGroup). John Turturro
directs, co-writes, and stars in a story set in turn-of-the-century New York
about an acting troupe whose onstage and offstage lives intertwine. Most
critics report mixed reactions: "[T]his handsome, airtight meditation on art,
celebrity, love, and rampant repertory-group horniness indulges in a lot of
very American navel gazing" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly ).
Janet Maslin gives the film its most upbeat review, calling it an "enormously
fond homage to the world of acting, beguilingly presented and filled with
knowing backstage humor" (the New York Times ). Two stars get special
note for their performances: Christopher Walken as a flamboyantly foppish
critic and Susan Sarandon as an aging but still dynamite diva. (Click here to
visit the John Turturro Shrine.)

            

               Book
            

            

               
                  The Woman Who Cut off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club
               ,
by Julia Slavin (Henry Holt). In Slavin's debut collection of fantastical and
surreal stories, characters fall in love with trees, swallow their lawn-care
professionals, disintegrate (literally), and--as you may have guessed from the
title--cut off their legs at chi-chi country clubs in the Hamptons. Critics
respond positively for the most part: "even at their most outlandish these
stories never feel forced ... Slavin's uncluttered, room-temperature prose
renders the monstrous familiar, even beautiful" (Charles Taylor, the New
York Times Book Review ). Others note that "[i]t seems to be a common,
almost universal, tactic in American literature to depict the suburbs as a
duplicitous world where a safe, materialistic, blandly cheerful surface
conceals a dark secret life" and that the stories' predictable outlandishness
verges on becoming "precious" (Judy Budnitz, the Village Voice ). Or as
Kirkus Reviews writes, "Slavin has a warped sense of humor and enjoys
rubbing the reader's nose in it." (Read the first chapter here.)

            

               Television
            

            

               
                  Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
                (HBO; Saturday, Aug.
21; 9 p.m.). Halle Berry's pet biopic (she stars and executive produces) of
Dandridge, the first African-American to earn an Oscar nomination for Best
Actress, gets a lukewarm reception: "a devoted but ultimately dull hagiopic"
marred by "a flat script and uninteresting narrative" (James Poniewozik,
Time ). Some of the more sordid parts of Dandridge's life have been left
out, and several critics say that while Berry captures Dandridge's beauty and
glamour, she lacks her heat and sensuality. Berry has said she hopes this movie
will launch her into the kind of leading roles that are (as in Dandridge's day)
unavailable to black women; Variety seems to think it will, weighing in
with a great review: "an enthralling biopic ... her most heartfelt performance
to date" (Laura Fries). (Click here to find out more about the movie and here to
find out more about Dandridge.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Movie
            

            
               
                  Detroit Rock City
                (New Line Cinema). Pans for this
tale of four high-school boys and their quest to watch a Kiss concert: "loud,
vulgar, cartoonish, obnoxious, dizzying, disposable and more than a little bit
shrill" (Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago Sun-Times ). Highlight: a tongue-cam
point of view from inside Gene Simmons' mouth.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            WWW.Dubya.Com

            
               SUBJECT:
gwbush.com is just a cybersquatter

            
               FROM:
Matt Maddox

            
               RE:
            

            

               DATE: Wed Sept 29

            Actually, the article fails to include one critical
fact: Zack Exley's Bush parody site was not set up to express opinions--or even
to parody Bush. Exley is a cybersquatter who demanded $20K from the Bush
campaign for the rights to the domain name. When they refused, he set up an
anti-Bush site. The guy even claims to be non-partisan. This is just a case of
electronic blackmail that the media blowhards want to turn into a free-speech
case.

            (To respond, click
here.)

            
               SUBJECT:
G.W. Bush is the real cybersquatter

            
               FROM:
Diane

            
               RE:
            

            

               DATE: Tue Sept 28

            Personally, I think the Bush camp is acting like
brats that didn't get everything they wanted at Christmas. As I'm sure y'all
know, the Bush campaign purposely combatted the possibility of competing with
mock spoof sites like gwbush.com by BUYING domain names (over 60 sites, from what I got
from the Newsweek article). Some examples (and go ahead and try them):
www.georgebushbites.com, www.georgebushblows.com, georgebushsucks.com,
www.bushbites.com, www.bushsux.com. All these sites will
automatically lead into George Dubbawya's Web site (www.georgewbush.com). Neat, huh?

            GWBush.com and another Zack Exley site squeaked by
this, and since the campaign couldn't buy it, they decided to get rid of it.
Funny, I thought that politics and campaigning were about freedom of speech and
the ability to compete. The Bush campaign has a sweet monopoly on that.

            If you would like more information, you should go
to the site that is actually handling this case: www.rtmark.com. It has everything from the cease
and desist letter to any articles remote to the subject.

            (To respond, click
here .)

            
               SUBJECT:
"Analysis" from 
                  Slate
               's adman

            
               FROM:
Michael

            
               RE:
            

            
               DATE: Wed
Sept 22

             

            How ingenious of 
                  Slate
                to
publish a sales pitch under the guise of analysis. This column is tantamount to
having an ABC account exec go on World News Tonight to deliver a special
report on why Drew Carey gives you more bang for your media buck.

            The impact of the Web on the campaign is a worthy
topic, but a little more objectivity, please.

            (To respond, click
here.)

            
               SUBJECT:
The weatherman is just a middleman

            
               FROM:
R. Wells

            
               RE:
            

            
               DATE: Mon
Sept 27

             

            Your comments about weather hysteria were generally
right on, but I felt your comments about the role of the Web in promoting that
hysteria missed the point. Access to weather information on the Web is a giant
leap forward in weather media because it allows one to avoid the hype and
hysteria with which the general news media covers extreme weather. Check out
www.wunderground.com. The
information is straightforward, but interestingly displayed. I could track
Floyd, read Weather Service bulletins, and follow satellite images without
having to suffer through moronic anchor-blondes screaming into microphones over
the sound of the wind. Weather sites on the Web eliminate the media middleman,
and isn't that the point?

            (To respond, click
here.)

            
               SUBJECT:
Conservatives w/ compassion are "wimps"?

            
               FROM:
Mike

            
               RE:
            

            

               DATE: Thu Sept 23 

            A conservative shows genuine compassion and he gets
called a wimp!? Maybe he should have called a news conference and told the
wounded to "put some ice on it." Here's a news flash: Conservatives are human
too. They have wives, children, pets; they love and make love, have gardens, go
to church and make friends.

            (To respond, click here .)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            2000 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

            We tried to hold off--honest we did. As a service
to civic sanity, 
                  Slate
                earnestly intended to delay launching our
heavy election-year political coverage until November 1999. That would be a
full year before the election, which ought to be enough time for citizens to
read 10-to-20 books on current issues, study the candidates' platforms, listen
to half a dozen debates, and make the kind of thoughtful decision our Founding
Fathers intended. Certainly no citizen outside the media-political complex has
been complaining that a year of presidential politics is not enough.

            But we give in. The
presidential campaign is going full-throttle and the nomination races, at
least, might well be over by a year before the actual election. Others in the
media are covering the election as if it were a mere, say, 11 months away. So
we will too, starting this week. (And if others in the media went and jumped
off a cliff, would we do it too? Yes, probably.) Although blame for this
development is ordinarily pinned on states like California, greedy for
attention, that have front-end-loaded the primary system, the media themselves
are also to blame, along with political consultants, pollsters, and so on, all
of whom have a vested interest in the "permanent campaign" (a concept used in a
book title, if not actually invented, by Sidney Blumenthal, but not necessarily
invalid for that reason alone). Thanks to the election industry, politics are
now available year-round, like strawberries. And if you remember politics
tasting sweeter before it got industrialized, that's probably just your
imagination.

            Our chief political correspondent, Jacob Weisberg, has
spent the past year writing cultural criticism under the rubric "The Browser."
He was hoping to spend a few more months gazing at paintings and reading novels
before lowering his sights, but now he has loyally abandoned art for life.
Jacob is already filing political analysis and reportage several times a week
under the rubric "Ballot Box" (the latest addition to our collection of Boxes).
If you missed his amusing dispatches from the Iowa Straw Poll this past
weekend, it's .

            Early next week, we'll be launching "Office 2000"
(catchy, don'cha think?), our official 
                  Slate
                election page. Among
its offerings will be:

            

               Links and an opinionated guide to the day's best political stories on the
Web.

               Links and shameless touting for all 
                     Slate
                  's current political
stories (whether they're the best or not).

               A daily joke, crafted by the finest humor artisans from the freshest
material available.

               Mark Alan Stamaty's weekly animated cartoon.

               Our daily chart of candidate prices in the Iowa Electronic Market, graphed
against 
                     Slate
                  's own Pundits Index. Not to be confused with last
weekend's bogus straw poll, the Iowa Market (a product of the University of
Iowa business school) trades "stock" in candidates. It's slightly complicated
(click here
for an explanation), but the point is to see if the invisible hand of
capitalism can beat the gasbags at predicting election results.

               Links galore to the campaign Web sites, media, and other useful stuff for
politics junkies.

            

            Shortly after Labor Day,
we'll be launching a new column, "Net Election," published by

                  Slate
                in conjunction with the Industry Standard , "the
newsmagazine of the Internet economy." 
                  Slate
                will supply a weekly
political analysis of the election as it's playing out on the Web, and our
friends at the Industry Standard will supply a weekly business
analysis--who's buying ads on what sites, and so on. By common consent, 2000
will be the Internet's first grown-up election: the first where the Web and
e-mail are expected to play a serious role. So maybe it's OK by us after all
that the whole thing is starting so early.

            
               Frayed Nerves
            

            "The Fray," 
                  Slate
               's reader discussion
forum, has been transformed, effective this week: new technology, new user
interface, new rules of the road. Our readers send us piles of clever and
insightful e-mail messages, responding to what they read in

                  Slate
               . Part of our purpose in redesigning The Fray is to get more
of this brilliance out where it can be shared with other readers and possibly
incite an even more brilliant response. To that end, we have 1) made The Fray
free of charge and available to all 
                  Slate
                readers; 2) created
discussion threads related to specific 
                  Slate
                departments and
articles rather than general topics; 3) provided links at the end of each
article allowing you to post a message reacting to that article and/or to read
how others have reacted or replied. Every posting can start a new discussion
thread, or extend an ongoing discussion, or "branch off" an ongoing discussion
to take it in a new direction. Especially wise or witty responses will be
reprinted or excerpted on the article page itself.

            The philosophical point
here is that many people (we hope) would enjoy engaging in a vigorous
discussion of something they have just read but have no special interest in
joining an online "community," which is the usual emphasis of Web site bulletin
boards. If you want to join our community, you're very welcome, and you can
treat The Fray like any other BBS. Here is a
link to all our current discussions, including a general discussion, a
discussion for Fraygrants (regulars in the "Old Fray"), and a discussion of
technical issues. But if you simply want to tell us how wrong we are about
something, you can skip all that and post a message from the offending page
itself.

            
               You E-Mail Us, We'll
E-Mail You
            

            We've also revamped our e-mail auto-deliveries to
give you more choices. To get your favorite parts of 
                  Slate
               
delivered to your inbox (without getting the parts you can't stand), you must
be a subscriber. But it's only $19.95 a year and you get a free gift and blah,
blah, blah. (Have I made the sale? Subscribe here .
Thanks.) Subscribers may choose
any or all of the following e-mail editions:

            
               News
            

            Daily delivery of "Today's Papers," plus a selection
from "International Papers," "The Week/The Spin," and "In Other Magazines."

            
               Money
            

            Monday through Friday delivery of James Surowiecki's
"Moneybox" column, plus other 
                  Slate
                economic and
financial articles.

            
               Culture
            

            A Monday through Friday e-mail of

                  Slate
               's take on the latest books, movies, and music,
including "Summary Judgment," our summary of all the other reviewers.

            
               Politics
            

            Monday through Friday, all our political stuff.

            
               News Quiz
            

            And only "News Quiz," Monday through Thursday.

            
               
                  Slate on Paper
               
            

            You want the whole thing?
OK, here it is as a Word document, formatted to look like an old-fashioned
paper magazine and e-mailed (as an attachment) every Friday.

            
               At Your Service
            

            Finally, in case you're having trouble keeping
straight all the wonderful things 
                  Slate
                is doing for you, our
readers, check out our new and improved "Reader
Services " pages. You will find it hard to believe that any single
magazine, let alone a Webzine, could be so profuse in its offerings and so
loving toward its readers.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Remembering Herb

            "A reviewer once said that I was the master of the
'Don't Know' school of economics," wrote Herbert Stein in his last book,
What I Think . And then he added, "I don't know that I am the master of
it, but I surely avow membership in it more openly than most other economists
do."

            That mixture of wry humor and openness to further
argument endeared Herb to the many friends and admirers who mourn his death
today at the age of 83. His embrace of don't-knowism was real. ("I have always
been mystified by international finance since I took a course in it at the
University of Chicago 62 years ago," he wrote in a 
                  Slate
                ""
exchange a year ago--almost, but not quite, embarrassing me out of a
disquisition on the International Monetary Fund and the sad state of the
Russian and Japanese economies.) But his reticence was not grounded in false
modesty. Herb well knew how keen was his intellect and how sharp his wit. And,
especially in his earlier years, he did not suffer fools gladly--at least if
they were stubborn in their foolishness. "Most people--even those who read
editorial and op-ed pages--do not want to encounter opposing views," he mourned
in What I Think . "They want to be massaged not informed."

            But mind-massages were
not for Herb. He recognized, perhaps better than most of his economist
colleagues, how complicated and fast-changing the world can be. And so he kept
his mind open to new facts, new ideas whether about , , , or ("what produces
them for most people has very little to do with politicians").

            Unfortunately one of Herb's all-time great pieces of
parody, written for the Wall Street Journal , on whose Board of
Contributors he sat for more than two decades, is not available on the Web. But
anyone with access to back copies of the Journal should consult "The
Full Marriage Act of 1977," in which Congress, having expressed its ranked
preference for marriages made in heaven, arranged by the participants, arranged
through the personals column of New York magazine, or arranged by
mothers, undertakes to provide "spouses of last resort."

            Herb was as ready for new
adventures as he was for new ideas. How many economists of Herb's distinction,
accomplishments, and years would, for example, undertake to write for an online
magazine startup? Yet, even before 
                  Slate
                moved from Kinsleyspace
to cyberspace, Herb signed up to moderate the magazine's "." And how fewer
still would be those with the daring (and the sense of humor) to top off that
taxing experiment with an even bolder venture: "." 
                  Slate
               's
original adviser to the public on matters of morals, manners, and
macroeconomics was, in fact, none other than Herbert Stein, former adviser to
presidents. Herb did it anonymously, of course (though a sharp-eyed reader
might have guessed from the drawing of "Prudence" that accompanied the column
if they hadn't already been tipped off by the tone). But Herb enjoyed it so
much--and he did it with such flair--that I don't think he would mind my
revealing the secret.

            And he did enjoy it. "One cure for unrequited love,"
Prudence reminded a lovelorn reader, "is requited love. There are other cures
also, such as devotion to the study of the Finnish language." To a reader
worried about being bad at small talk, Prudence counseled, "You are making too
much of this. What everyone wants in a conversationalist is not a good talker
but a good listener. You could be Oscar Wilde and no one would go home from a
party saying, 'Gee, Oscar was witty tonight.' Many would go home saying, 'Gee,
I was witty tonight.' " In the day of automatic door unlockers, should a man
still walk around a car to unlock the door for the woman he is escorting?
Absolutely, Prudence replied, noting the opportunity thus afforded for "sweetly
kissing her on the cheek. Modern gadgets will not do all that and real men
don't want them to. Something has to be left for the men to do." As for the shy
advice-seeker worried "about the possibility of having to kiss a girl,"
Prudence replied, "If that situation arises, you will have no problem. Perhaps
you will 'have' to kiss her because she has kissed you. In that case your
spontaneous, unpondered reaction will be to kiss her back. Your problem will
not be hesitancy about kissing but addiction to it."

            Herb was deeply saddened by the death of his wife,
Mildred, a few years ago. He wrote about his loss only indirectly, in what was
surely the most popular of his "It Seems to Me ..." columns in

                  Slate
               , "." Why, he asked, as he watched husbands and wives
walking up the hill to the Kennedy Center for a performance, "is this basic
woman so valuable to the man whose hand or arm she is holding?" And in his
exploration of the question, it was clear that he had in mind the wife with
whom he had "walked up that hill to the Kennedy Center many times."

            Herb once set down a list of "," sayings that you
won't find in Bartlett's but that "resonated" with him. The authors
ranged from Milan Kundera and Dante to , whom he served as chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers. He also included an aphorism of his own: "If
something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Sadly, that was true of Herb
himself.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Right Stuff Yogurt

            
               High
Culture
            

            The
British Broadcasting Corp. reports that microbiologists at the Institute of
Biomedical Problems in Moscow have developed a special yogurt made from
bacteria culled from the saliva and guts of Russian cosmonauts. Originally
developed to help space travelers maintain healthy levels of bacteria in their
intestines, the yogurt has become so popular with the cosmonauts that the
institute is marketing it commercially, along with new varieties of cottage
cheese and traditional Russian cheese products made with the same cultures. Who
knows what NASA may be up to, but one American microbiologist has remarked that
there is no evidence that the out-of-this-world yogurt is really better than
any other yogurt product.

            
               Fungi
Man
            

            A
five-year study by 200 plant scientists has produced a "family tree" of the
plant world that details the relations of the world's million species of
photosynthesizers. Findings include: There is not one plant kingdom but three;
a rare tropical flower is the closest living relative of the Earth's first
flowering plant; and many plant families appear to have evolved from a single
"Eve," whose close relatives survive in some of today's more pristine lakes.
The study also confirmed the theory that fungi are more closely related to
humans than to plants.

            
               Not a Shroud of
Doubt?
            

            New
research
by botany professor Avinoam Danin (Hebrew National University in Jerusalem)
lends credence to the theory that the Shroud of Turin is Jesus Christ's burial
cloth. Based on his analysis of pollen grains and plant images (imprints of
flowers and other plant parts) taken from the shroud, Danin says the cloth
existed in the eighth century, and maybe even before. He presented his findings
at the 16 th International Botanical Congress in St. Louis this month
and also offered evidence that the shroud originated in or near Jerusalem, the
International Herald Tribune reports. Continuing to dispute the theory
that the shroud wrapped Jesus' body are scientists at the University of
Arizona, who reiterate the results of their 1988 carbon dating of the cloth:
The cloth is no more than 600 years old, they say. "It's not the burial cloth
of Jesus," physics professor Douglas Donahue told the Associated Press.

            
               Quality Control
for Legal Pundits
            

            Legal
pundits: Boon or bane? Both, say law professors Erwin
Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California and Laurie
Levenson of Loyola Law School. TV and radio legal pundits both educate
and mislead the public about legal proceedings, Chemerinsky told the AP. The
two professors say the remedy for out-of-control commentators is a set of
voluntary guidelines (outlined here ), which will "raise the professional quality of
behavior" of legal commentators and the media outlets that broadcast them. The
guidelines suggest that pundits "1) comment only on subjects that the
commentator knows first hand, by watching the trial or reading trial
transcripts; 2) speak as neutral experts whenever possible, and disclose
potential conflicts of interest and biases; and 3) refrain from scoring trials
like sports events or predicting jury verdicts." Two nationwide voluntary
lawyers' groups--the American College of Trial Lawyers and the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers--have adopted similar codes for their
members in response to the proposal, which has been outlined in recent law
review articles.

            

               Professor Full Monty
            

            A
Florida State University law school professor is returning to work after a year
off following a sexual harassment charge. Sixty-five-year-old William McHugh
was placed on paid leave (read the letter
from FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte to McHugh) after dropping his shorts to
show a female student his hernia scar--a move that also exposed his genitals.
The student filed a sexual harassment complaint against McHugh, who admitted to
showing his hernia scar but insisted that the full Monty was accidental.
According to the Tampa 
               Tribune , a panel of FSU professors
concluded a five-month investigation recently and found that McHugh had,
indeed, suffered from accidental exposure.

            
               They're
Here
            

            A
group of gay intellectuals has launched the Independent Gay Forum ,
which declares itself independent of left-right politics. Its
libertarian-minded associates include Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings
Institution, Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute, and the Cato Institute's
David Boaz.

            
               Boomeranging
Diploma
            

            MIT
has revoked for five years the diploma of 1998 graduate Charles Yoo for his
role in the death of freshman Scott Krueger, reports the Chronicle of Higher
Education . As "pledge trainer" at the Phi Gamma Delta house, Yoo supplied beer and whiskey
to Krueger and other pledging freshmen, instructing them in how to become a Phi
Gamma Delta "brother." After Krueger drank the beer and whiskey, he consumed
some spiced rum provided by another brother and fell into a coma, suffocating
on his own vomit. A year after Krueger's death, a grand jury indicted the
fraternity chapter as an organization for manslaughter and hazing. (The case
was never tried because the fraternity chapter had disbanded by the time of
arraignment; click here for a list of news items from MIT on the
subject.) MIT's Committee on Discipline revoked Yoo's diploma after reviewing a
dean's official investigation of Krueger's death. Although it isn't unusual for
colleges to suspend degrees for cheating or plagiarizing, Yoo's punishment
marks what may be the first time a degree has been revoked for a violation of
student disciplinary code.

            
               Information Wants
To Be Free?
            

            The
academic community is protesting a new law that will require all recipients of
federal research grants to make their research data public through the
Freedom of Information Act . Researchers fret that corporate
and political interests will use the FOIA powers to stifle research on
controversial subjects by bombarding them with information requests.
Confidentiality agreements will also suffer, they worry. The law would also
require the disclosure of what has traditionally been confidential--from
medical histories of research subjects to scientists' e-mail addresses and
notebooks. The Clinton administration has proposed a regulatory fix that would
limit the definition of what information researchers must make public, as well
as the "reasonable fees" that federal agencies can charge for obtaining
requested data. The budget office intends to publish its final regulations by
Sept. 30.

            
               The Doctor Is
Out
            

            The
Massachusetts Medical Society has ousted
Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, editor of the society-owned New England Journal of
Medicine , citing differences of opinion concerning "administrative and
publishing issues." More specifically, reports the Boston Globe ,
Kassirer opposed "branding"--using the journal's prestige to sell other
MMS-owned products and publications, such as journals HealthNews and
Heart Watch , whose quality and accuracy editors at the Journal do
not control. Additionally, over the past year the society has been striking
deals, such as a partnership with barnesandnoble.com, and upgrading its online
services--activities that strike Journal editors as too commercial.
Executive Editor Marcia Angell assumed the interim editor
position on the condition that the medical society not use the name "New
England Journal" in the title of new society-run publications.

            
               Egghead
Updates
            

            Last month, "" reported
the student boycott at Obafemi Awolow University in Nigeria. The students'
demand--that a top university administrator be fired for failing to confront
issues of campus cult violence--has been embraced by the Nigerian government.
Africa News reports that the government has ordered universities to
eradicate the cults and established a commission to investigate cult activity
and the inaction by universities. ... Mexico's National Autonomous
University student strike is stretching into its fifth month. The protest over
increased tuition--from 2 cents a year to about $150--has evolved into a fight
for the future of the university. The administration has consented to a
revocation of the tuition hike, reports National Public Radio, but now the
students and many professors are insisting on a more active say in how the
university is run. The strike may be losing steam, though: Students who want to
return to school are holding demonstrations against the strikers.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The NRA Shoots To Kill

            

               The House passed compromise gun control legislation. The
measure requires background checks on gun-show sales but reduces the time
authorities have to perform them from three days to one. A tougher measure
resembling last month's Senate legislation was defeated, despite ardent
lobbying by President Clinton and Janet Reno . Everyone agrees it's a coup for the
National Rifle Association, which had been taken for dead after Littleton.
Democrats explained the loss by asserting that 1) the NRA distorted the stricter
measure, claiming it would lead to confiscation and a national gun registry;
and 2) House Republicans are aware of their constituents' support for gun
control but are unwilling to defy the NRA on the cusp of an election year.

            

               The House authorized states to decide whether to let the Ten
Commandments be displayed in public schools. Proponents offered the
bill as a response to "children killing children." Detractors called it an
unconstitutional violation of the church-state line. The spins: 1)
Conservatives sincerely believe that this will prevent youth violence. 2)
Conservatives sincerely believe that by attributing youth violence to immorality, they can relieve
pressure to pass gun control legislation.

            

               Kosovo update: 1) Western diplomats urged Russia to end its
occupation of Kosovo's main airport. Russia agreed to share control of the
airport but still demands its own peacekeeping zone. Western officials say that
Russia is too Serb-friendly to be entrusted with such authority and that
Kosovars won't resettle in a Russian-controlled zone. The likely compromise: a
Russian "zone of responsibility" inside a NATO-controlled area. (Read
Wednesday's "" for gloating in the Russian press.) 2) Britain estimated ethnic
Albanian casualties at 10,000 and unearthed a Serbian torture chamber full of
hideous paraphernalia and photos of suspected victims. 3) More than 33,000
Serbs have fled Kosovo, fearing Kosovar Albanian reprisals. NATO and Serbian
church leaders urged them to trust the peacekeepers and stay. Meanwhile,
more than 46,000 Kosovar Albanians streamed back in, despite NATO's warnings of
land mines. 4) U.S. officials say President Clinton approved a CIA plan to
bring down Milosevic's government. They claim the plan isn't directed at
Milosevic personally.

            

               A former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army was
arrested. The FBI located Kathleen Ann Soliah, a well-to-do doctor's
wife and mother of three, through tips from viewers of America's Most
Wanted . She was indicted in 1976 for allegedly placing pipe bombs under
police cruisers (the bombs didn't explode). Her Minnesota neighbors expressed
shock, citing her community involvement and her terrific casserole.

            

               Coke is making Europeans ill. Coca-Cola products were removed
from store shelves in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands after
dozens of drinkers complained of nausea and intestinal trouble. (See "" for a
European reaction.) The company traced the problem to a preservative used on
shipping pallets and a bad batch of carbon dioxide, neither of which presents a
serious health threat. Financial experts say the serious threat is to Coke's
overseas sales, which make up 73 percent of its profits.

            

               Al Gore declared his candidacy for president. His speech and
accompanying interviews stressed his independence from Bill Clinton. But George
W. Bush called Gore "the status quo," and the White House agreed that Clinton's
agenda will be "a very successful platform for the vice president to run from."
Despite Gore's announcement, the 
                  New
York Times
                and the 
                  Washington Post
                printed editorials about Bush
euphoria.

            

               Thabo Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as the president of South
Africa. This is the country's first handover between democratically
elected governments. Mandela received a unanimously fond farewell . Former
apartheid supporters called him "a saintly man," and a conservative white paper
declared that he will be "sorely missed."

            

               Amazon.com bought a stake in Sotheby's. Their joint online
site will auction antiques, collectibles, and rare books. Spins: 1) It's a
revolution in online auctioning! 2) No, eBay had already cut a deal with
Butterfield & Butterfield, another art auction house. 3) The partnership
between the venerable institution and the brash startup will be awkward. 4)
Sotheby's CEO says they're a good match: "We both got started as booksellers.
... It's just that we got started 251 years earlier."

            

               Phil Jackson will coach the Los Angeles Lakers. He'll make $30
million for five years. Predictions: 1) Jackson will work the same magic with
the Lakers that he did with the Chicago Bulls. 2) The magic was all Michael
Jordan's; no amount of coaching could save Los Angeles' underachieving
egomaniacs. Click here for the mostly jubilant local reaction.

            

               George W. Bush kicked off his presidential campaign in Iowa and New
Hampshire. Vice President Gore will do the same Wednesday in
Tennessee. The spins: 1) Bush's declaration marks the earliest start ever to a
presidential campaign. 2) No, he's been campaigning for months. 3) So when will
he lay out his positions? (Read 
                  Slate
               's "" on how
Bush flaunts the courage of his clichés. Click here for Time 's luminous cover profile of Bush and
here for Newsweek 's more skeptical version.)

            

               Kenneth Starr may release a final report criticizing the
Clintons. The New York Times says he won't try to indict them
but might publish a damning account of their behavior. The consensus prediction
is that this would jeopardize Hillary's senatorial ambitions. Starr vows to
plot his course independent of the political consequences, but Maureen Dowd
says he's "still on revenge autopilot ." David Carr and Jill Stewart
digest Starr's move--and Bob Woodward's new book--in "."

            

               The New York Knicks reached the NBA Finals. They are the first
eighth seed (i.e., lowest-ranked playoff team in their division) ever to
accomplish this feat. They will face the top-seeded San Antonio Spurs. Sports
writers debated whether it's a triumph for 1) Knicks guard Allan Houston, a
previous underachiever who scored 32 points in the decisive game; 2) Coach Jeff
Van Gundy, who had nearly been fired earlier in the season; or 3) New York,
whose prestige was already bolstered by cleaner streets and lower crime.

            

               Scientists are trying to clone human embryos. The

                  Washington Post
                reports two attempts by private
companies to grow embryos--a practice banned among federally funded researchers
but allowed in the private sector. The sanguine spin: The companies are just
growing stem cells to cure diseases; they're not cloning humans. The
pessimistic spin: One will lead to the other.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Timor the Merrier

            

               The Senate passed a ban on "partial-birth" abortions. The 63
to 34 vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to override President
Clinton's promised veto. The measure would ban a particular procedure often
used in late-term abortions. Supporters' spin: Abortionists are killing live babies . Opponents' spin:
You're trying to kill 
                  Roe vs. Wade
               . (Last year,

                  Slate
               's Atul Gawande the arguments over partial-birth
abortion.)

            

               Elizabeth Dole dropped out of the presidential race. She said
her inability to keep up with front-runner George W. Bush's fund raising made
her campaign "futile." Dole supporters' spin: Campaigns are now decided by money, not message. Dole detractors' spin: The
reason no one gave her money is that she had no message. Feminists debated
whether Dole 1) broke new ground for women in politics; or 2) failed to provide
an agenda for future progress. 

            

               Indonesia elected new leaders and voted to relinquish control of East
Timor. In the first contested election in Indonesia's history, the assembly
selected Abdurraham Wahid, a moderate Muslim cleric, as president. After a day
of violent protest by supporters of opposition candidate Megawati Sukarnoputri,
the assembly elected her vice president. Skeptics said the elections were
democratic in name only and questioned the new government's ability to unite
the country's diverse population and revive the economy. But the New York
Times , Los Angeles Times , and Washington Post deemed the elections a promising break
with Indonesia's autocratic history.

            

               The New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves are in the World
Series. The Braves beat the New York Mets to win the National League
Championship. The Yankees prevailed over Boston in the American League. The
Atlanta-New York pairing is a rematch of the 1996 World Series, which the
Yankees won. The Braves, who are making their fifth World Series appearance
this decade, are billed as the "team of the 90s" (ESPN). With 24 World Series
Championships, the Yankees are claiming the title of "team of the century."

            

               The Senate blocked campaign-finance legislation. Only 53
senators voted to cut off a Republican filibuster, seven short of the number
needed to force a vote on the bill. The sponsors, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.,
and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., scaled back the legislation, which had been
approved by the House, in order to increase support in the Senate. The bill
would have banned "soft money" but would not have regulated issue ads.
Opponents had held that the measures would infringe on free speech. But the

                  Los Angeles Times
                called this argument "a sham,"
saying big money is not only corrupting the American political system, it is
"holding the Senate hostage ." The GOP spin: We handed
reformers their hats. The Democratic spin: No, you handed us a campaign
issue.

            

               Scientists recovered an intact woolly mammoth in Siberia. They
dug the 23,000-year-old animal out of permafrost soil and transported it--still
frozen--to a Russian laboratory. This spring, scientists will thaw the block
and examine the animal and surrounding plants. Researchers said the find
offered unprecedented opportunities: 1) to determine why mammoths became
extinct; 2) to understand the world's climate at the time; and 3) to clone the
animal. Supervising scientist Dick Mol said, "This is a dream for me--to find
the soft parts and touch them and even smell them. It's very
exciting."

            

               Kenneth Starr resigned from the criminal investigation of the
Clintons. Robert Ray, Starr's top assistant, will complete the
investigations of White House conduct regarding Kathleen Willey's sexual
harassment allegations and the dismissal of travel-office staff. Ray will also
oversee the final report on Starr's five-year investigation. Ray said his work
will be "responsible and cost-effective," but the White House said he was a
politically motivated ideologue. The 
                  Washington Post
                said Starr's legacy was mixed, but
"he should be remembered as a man who--hampered alike by intensely adverse
conditions and by his own missteps--managed to perform a significant public
service." Starr's spin: Personal attacks and political divisiveness made it
impossible for me to continue. Democrats' spin: Now you know how the Clintons
have felt for five years.

            

               President Clinton and congressional Republicans are meeting to
negotiate the budget. Clinton has threatened to veto many of Congress'
proposals. With only five of the 13 appropriations bills approved, Congress was
forced to extend the temporary spending measure that is keeping the government
open beyond its Thursday expiration. The GOP spin: We'll protect Americans from
Democratic tax hikes. The White House spin: We'll protect social programs from
Republican budget cuts. The cynical spin: The numbers require either tax hikes
or budget cuts. The feel-good spin: At least now they're talking .

            

               Pakistan's military leader promised to restructure the government and
restore democracy. Pervaiz Musharraf, who led last week's army coup
that ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, announced that a military-civilian
council would be formed within a week to govern the country, but provided no
timetable for relinquishing power. He also withdrew troops from the Indian
border and called for the resumption of peace talks. The rosy spin: After
Sharif's corruption and ineptitude, Musharraf is a godsend. The gloomy
spin: Without a timetable for democracy, he's still a dictator.

            

               The Dow Jones industrial average fell 630 points in a week. It
was the biggest decline in 10 years. The most frequently cited causes were: 1)
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's cautionary comments to investors (he warned that
stocks and bonds could plunge if investors were to lose confidence in the
market); 2) anticipation of higher interest rates; and 3) fear of inflation.
The bearish spin: The big correction is starting. The bullish spin: Relax,
we're already bouncing back. ("" explains what Greenspan really said.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Rules of Engagement

            If the
Internet is going to become the new campaign battleground, then a lot of
people-from federal officials to campaign consultants to election lawyers-will
jockey to define the rules of engagement.

            Should
individual political activity online, such as posting a message urging people
to vote for a particular candidate, be considered free speech or a campaign
contribution?

            Should
links between political Web sites be considered informational, or should
campaigns have to put a monetary value on a link and include it in federal
election filings?

            Should
a new top-level domain-.pol, for example, if it's not already taken-be created
for political Web sites to stem the growth of counterfeit or unauthorized
sites?

            These
were among the issues considered at a three-day conference-"Campaigns in
Cyberspace: The Promise and Practice of Digital Politics"-held recently by the
Aspen Institute. The Washington-based think tank assembled a panel of election
lawyers, federal regulators, Internet political consultants, academics,
journalists (including this writer), and others to devise recommendations to
help Congress and the Federal Election Commission revise laws for Internet
campaigning.

            "The
Internet is sort of the new town hall. Citizens can speak their minds and talk
to each other and talk to candidates freely," says Christine Varney, a
conference participant and former White House adviser who now heads the
American Bar Association's standing committee on elections. "At the same time,
regulations exist to safeguard against abuses and fraud. The question is how to
do that effectively on the Net. My position on all of these issues is to make
sure we don't intervene until we see more maturity in the marketplace."

            The
think tank's panel agreed, recommending that political activity on the Internet
be promoted, "absent specific intent to use the Internet to circumvent the
law." The group also proposed that candidates and party committees be allowed
to link their Web sites to others without considering the links contributions
or expenditures. In addition, some groups prohibited from making direct
contributions in federal elections, namely corporations and unions, should be
allowed to link to candidate Web sites as long as the links are bipartisan.

            Two
additional provisions would look at proposals to stem the growth of
unauthorized Web sites that purport to belong to a candidate and would require
periodic review of regulations to judge their impact on the use of the Internet
to spread political activity.

            The
Aspen Institute's conference presages an inquiry by the FEC, which could come
as soon as Oct. 28, to examine a whole slew of issues. Among the questions on
the docket: how the Internet fits with current regulations regarding political
action committees, corporations, unions, and individuals who want to express
advocacy of a candidate or an issue online. At press time, the FEC was
finalizing a 27-page draft proposal outlining the specific issues that the
commission intends to examine.

            "We
needed to have a generic inquiry as opposed to addressing one aspect at a
time," says David Mason, a Republican commissioner who attended the conference.
"We're not proposing 27 pages of regulations of the Internet. We're posing
questions."

            FEC Chairman Scott Thomas,
a Democrat who was also at the conference, noted that the Federal Election
Campaign Act of 1971 outlined three principles that need to be preserved on the
Internet: 1) disclosure of how money is raised and spent to influence
elections; 2) limits on the amount that any one person can contribute to a
campaign; and 3) restrictions on independent spending by corporations and
unions.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Preparing for a United Korea</SPAN></SPAN>

            

               
                  
                     
                        Economist
                     , July 10
               
            

            The
cover story forecasts that North Korea is doomed to
imminent collapse. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung must strengthen that
country's democracy and institute more market reform to prepare for a single
Korea. ... The editors urge a halt to the coddling of Kim Jong Il.
The North Korean leader's plan to test another long-range missile is proof that
Kim can only be persuaded to back down by the threat of economic sanctions.
... An article worries that American banks are shakier than
they look. Though U.S. banks boast mounting profits, the credit quality of
their loan portfolios has declined precipitously. ... Another
piece advocates new measures to discourage the trend
toward recruiting kids into armed conflict, including raising the U.N.
Convention minimum age for soldiering from 15 to 18 and pledging to withhold
recognition from rebel groups that recruit kid fighters.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine, July 11
            

            The
cover story concludes, as previously predicted, that the abortifacient RU-486
will revolutionize the politics of abortion. The pharmaceutical company that
plans to market the drug won't name its manufacturers, lest pro-lifers hound
them out of business. RU-486 will make abortions less invasive and more
politically tenable, since it can be administered early in a pregnancy by a
wide range of practitioners in the privacy of a doctor's office. ... An
article describes how Epinions.com, a new Internet company offering an online
"Zagats-for-everything," started up in 12 weeks. Typical of "second-generation"
Web firms, the company was founded by Silicon Valley veterans who abandoned
fortunes in unvested stock options to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. The
firm quickly coalesced based on professional connections and recruited capital
before writing any code. ... A photo essay, pinpointing where executions
and incinerations took place, documents the destruction Serbs wreaked on one
Kosovar street.

            
               
                  The
Nation , July 19
            

            The
cover story assails the avarice of drug companies for
developing lucrative lifestyle drugs to treat impotence, baldness, wrinkles,
and toenail fungus, while ignoring unprofitable deadly diseases. Since 1975,
only 1 percent of new medicines were developed to treat tropical diseases.
Meanwhile the pet drug market is exploding, producing pills to alleviate
separation anxiety in dogs. ... A sidebar castigates the
Clinton administration for championing the interests of drug companies to the
detriment of public health by trying to prevent the sale of generic substitutes
in developing nations. ... An editorial condemns the Supreme Court's spate of decisions
that have sacrificed individual rights to protect state rights.

            
               
                  Newsweek , July
12
            

            The
cover story forecasts that within six years Latinos will
become the predominant minority in the United States, due to booming
immigration and birth rates. Hispanics will alter the country, since they are
heavily Catholic, concentrated in important electoral states, and vote in
increasing numbers. ... Latin Gen-Xers--called Generation Ñ --cling to their Hispanic heritage and shape
popular culture through their artistic contributions. ( Time beat
Newsweek to this conclusion with its recent Latin pop cover story
featuring Ricky Martin.) ... Political handicappers claim Elizabeth
Dole's anal-retentiveness will hinder her campaign, according to an analysis . Her attention to detail might be what the GOP needs
if George W. keeps confusing Slovakia and Slovenia. ... An article counsels that Hillary Clinton must overcome the
carpetbagger question and press-phobia to win the New York Senate race. Mayor
Giuliani has his own problems: He will be weakened by a tough primary
challenge, and if a GOP challenger runs in the general election under the
Conservative Party banner, Hillary will cakewalk back to Washington.

            
               
                  U.S. News &
World Report , July 12
            

            The
cover story assesses HRC. By protesting Medicare cuts,
Hillary signaled her distance from her husband, but she still needs to
establish a rationale for her candidacy. ... A piece maps the minefield of New York state politics. Hillary
must energize blacks and Hispanics without alienating white ethnic suburbanites
who favor Giuliani. Rudy plans to consolidate his lead in the burbs by pushing
school vouchers, while Hillary will tap into health-care frustrations and make
the election a national contest. ... An article argues that projected budget surpluses rest on the
shaky assumption that Congress will maintain budget ceilings by slicing popular
domestic programs.

            
               
                  Time , July
12
            

            The
cover story condemns the culture of child's play. An
estimated 40 million American youths participate in organized sports. Parents
send their kids to costly summer clinics and hire professional coaches. The
ultracompetition is spoiling the fun, squeezing family schedules, and
increasing sports-related injuries. ... A piece asks how best to topple Slobodan Milosevic. Washington
wants the pope to condemn Slobo, and the White House might offer humanitarian
aid to Serb cities that oppose him. But the current coalition of opposition
groups is too factious to stage a coup. ... An article condemns President Clinton for ingratitude toward his
loyal vice president. Clinton openly criticizes Al Gore's political skills and
privately claims that he could do a better job campaigning than Gore has.

            
               
                  The New Yorker ,
July 12
            

            The
cover story warns that smallpox poses a catastrophic threat to the United
States. The highly contagious virus was declared eradicated in 1979, and
routine vaccinations ended. But the CIA suspects some nations of stockpiling
the virus for use as a biological weapon. An uncontrolled smallpox epidemic
could be more deadly than a hydrogen bomb attack because the United States
maintains only about 7 million doses of vaccine. ... A piece echoes
speculation that Hillary Clinton's Senate run might be motivated by her
ambition to one day run for president. Its only evidence is a chorus of rumors,
none traceable to the Clintons. An accompanying illustration pictures Hillary
taking the oath of office for the presidency while Bill watches in the
background.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Greatest American Zeroes

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Mystery Men
                (Universal Pictures). The critics get a
few chuckles out of this comic book-based tale of B-team superheroes (the
Shoveler, Mr. Furious, the Bowler), but nobody guffaws outright. The most
enthusiastic: It "triumphs by being its smart, shambling self, though it takes
a while to get there" (Richard Corliss, Time ). Most critics say the
tasty nuggets of fun are too few and far between: It "has moments of brilliance
waving their arms to attract attention in a sea of dreck" (Roger Ebert, the
Chicago Sun-Times ). (To check out the comic book the film was based on
and to watch the trailer, visit the official site.)

            

               
                  The Thomas Crown Affair
                (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This
"slick, gaudily suave guilty pleasure of a movie" (David Ansen,
Newsweek ) gets mainly good reviews. In its favor: 1) It's the first
movie in a long time to have a sexy and mature female lead, the 45-year-old
Rene Russo. 2) It's the first decent movie of the summer not aimed at teens, a
"highly pleasurable popcorn movie for adults" (Susan Wloszczyna, USA
Today ). 3) Its extravagance is fun (the story centers on a billionaire who
steals art for kicks). Not all critics are entranced by this remake of the 1968
Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway film. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street
Journal writes that Russo and co-star Pierce Brosnan's sex scenes "spark so
little heat I found myself wondering if they'd give a damn for one another in a
down market." The New York Times ' Janet Maslin concurs, calling the
romance "papier-mache." Side note: Ebert uses the bizarre sexual euphemism
"rumpy-pumpy" for the sixth time in eight months in his negative review in the
Chicago Sun-Times . (Click here to watch the trailer.)

            

               
                  Dick
                (Sony Pictures Entertainment). Everybody loves
Dick , "a gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire" (Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Entertainment Weekly ) of the Watergate scandal told from the point of
view of two teen-age girls. Much of the cast is plucked from TV comedy shows
such as Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live , so the humor
tends toward the broad and low. 
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein is
enchanted not just by the humor but also by the straight history: "Under its
slapstick shenanigans, this modest movie offers a convincing vision of Nixon
White House operations as a sordid buffoon show undone by a couple of painfully
earnest innocents." A handful of critics complain that the "nincompoopery is
difficult to sustain over the course of an hour and a half" (Michael
O'Sullivan, the Washington Post ). (Click to read the rest of Edelstein's
review.)

            

               
                  Sixth Sense
                (Buena Vista Pictures). Excellent notices
all around for this "psychological thriller that actually thrills" about a "sad
little hamster of a boy" (Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly ) who sees
visions of dead people and the psychologist (Bruce Willis cast against type)
determined to help him. It is "virtually guaranteed to rattle the most jaded of
cages" (John Anderson, the Los Angeles Times ). One cage is left
unrattled, though: Stephen Holden of the New York Times delivers an
uncharacteristically nasty write-up, calling it "gaggingly mawkish supernatural
kitsch" that is "a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May
Come ." (Click here to visit the official site.)

            

               Book
            

            

               
                  The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin
               , by Richard Lourie
(Counterpoint Press). Critics find this novel, told from the point of view of
Russia's most famous and ruthless dictator, a fascinating, chilling, and
surprisingly humor-filled work: Lourie's "flat, ruthless prose ... is also
sometimes ruthlessly funny" (Lance Morrow, Time ). Some wonder at the
author's desire to explore the mind of a man who murdered so many, but most are
impressed with his results. One fault, though, is that "this supposed
autobiography is missing what often makes an autobiography great: the
memoirist's obvious self-deception"(Ken Kalfus, the New York Times Book
Review ). (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Remedy
               , by Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks). Reviewers get
giddy over this British electronica duo's latest: "more fun than Fatboy Slim,
more creative than the Chemical Brothers ... takes house music to the next
level. Make that the level after next" (Rob Brunner, Entertainment
Weekly ). It's blessed with "post-cool happiness" (James Hunter, the
Village Voice ), which makes it "an antidote for ennui, using hedonistic,
ass-wiggling enthusiasm and 'ain't-no-mountain-high-enough' lyrical
proclamations" (M. Tye Comer, CMJ ). (Click here to buy the CD and to listen to audio samples from the
album.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Book
            

            
               
                  Broke Heart
Blues
               ,by Joyce Carol Oates (Dutton). Good reviews for Oates'
29 th novel, which follows the way a small town remembers its
teen-age hero, John Reddy Heart. It "dramatizes how wanting and memory compete"
and explores how "lonely, unhappy people mythologize their adolescence" (D.T.
Max, the New York Times Book Review ). Many critics marvel at Oates'
prolific output: "It's a wonder she hasn't run out of that all-too-scarce
literary fuel, imagination. But she hasn't" (Linda Wolfe, the Washington
Post ).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Turkey on a Roll

            The
Turkish earthquake continues to lead world newspapers, though the focus has now
shifted to the inadequacy of rescue efforts, the difficult conditions for
survivors, and the apportionment of blame.

            
Toronto's Globe and
Mail accused the Turkish government, which spends billions on
armaments, of not having "the forethought to stockpile the heavy equipment
needed to dig people out at quake sites." Similarly, the Independent of London
contrasted the armed forces' success in battling the
Kurdish separatists of Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdish Workers' Party with its
failure to help quake victims: "It turned out that while they could assault the
PKK with US attack helicopters, they could not even set up soup kitchens for
Turkish civilians 24 hours after the earthquake."

            A
leader in Britain's Observer took an unusual position, claiming that the carelessly erected buildings of the
1980s, which have been blamed for the quake's massive death toll, represent
Turkey's "attempt to escape from stagnation and backwardness by letting private
enterprise rip." During this building boom, "Many people got rich quick, many
corruptly. But Turkey had taken a great, stumbling stride towards 'modernity,'
towards the unprotected free-market economy which the European Union enforces
on nations hoping to join it." The paper defended the "fast-buck entrepreneurs"
as "the people who carry within them the potential to bring about real changes
for the better after this catastrophe." The leader concluded, "It's hard not to
conclude that Turkey needs an old-fashioned, democratic, middle-class
revolution, in which these new social forces would take the political power to
which they are entitled. Only they can complete the transformation of Turkey
into a law-bound, stable and open democracy of the European family. And the
earthquake of 1999 would be remembered as a beginning, not only as a
tragedy."

            Hong
Kong's South China Morning
Post praised the response of emergency services staff to the
crash landing of a China Airlines jet at the city's Chek Lap Kok Airport
Sunday. Although two passengers were killed and at least 200 injured in the
incident, the paper said that the prompt response undoubtedly saved lives. But
the same paper reported a contradictory sentiment from one passenger, a
former New York policeman: "I heard rescue teams talking on walkie-talkies
directing people to come to help. It sounded like they were not familiar with
the airport." According to the paper, more than 230 people have been killed in
accidents involving this model of aircraft--the McDonnell Douglas MD-11--in the
past year. In recent weeks the SCMP has warned about wind shear at the
airport, which opened last July.

            In
South Africa, the African National Congress-led government's hard-line stance
on pay raises has brought about its first showdown with public sector unions. A
one-day general strike has been called for Tuesday, Aug. 24, with the
participation of unions for nurses, courts and prison staff, police, and
teachers. Essential service providers who are forbidden to strike are expected
to come down with "white flu" on Tuesday. The government has offered a 6
percent wage raise for nonteachers and 6.5 percent for educators, while the
unions demand a 7.3 percent increase and more involvement in the budgetary
process. According to the Johannesburg Star , the government's refusal to negotiate "has
united unions across the ideological and race spectrum for the first time since
the 1980s."

            Citing
a group of U.S. lawmakers visiting East Timor, the Sydney Morning Herald
reported that there is strong evidence that the Indonesian
military has "worked with militia groups to sabotage" the upcoming vote for
autonomy there. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told reporters that he will call on
President Clinton to "support the sending of armed UN peacekeeping troops to
the former Portuguese territory," even though the Indonesian government has
refused to allow international peacekeepers into East Timor for the ballot. In
the Straits
Times of Singapore, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the United States
should tie its Indonesian aid to the referendum. He told the paper, "[I]f the
election is full of intimidation and it is not fair and there is retribution
after the election, then I think we will have to re-evaluate our assistance to
Indonesia in a very negative way."

            Britain's Daily
Telegraph
reported Monday that thousands of racing pigeons sent out
in the week of the recent solar eclipse have gone missing. Owners believe the
birds were confused by the blackout. One pigeon fancier told the paper, "We
don't know for sure whether the eclipse has scrambled the birds' brains. But
whenever the sun and moon are in close proximity we have a very bad race with
lots of birds going missing." According to the Telegraph , this is the
worst disaster to befall the pigeon world since 80,000 British homing pigeons
were killed by torrential rain over the English Channel in June 1997.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>How Much Would <I>You</I> Sell For?</SPAN></SPAN>

             

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Aug. 28
            

            The
cover editorial accuses the United States of covering
up Russia's economic misbehavior. The New York money-laundering probe destroys
the illusion that the Russian economy is becoming civilized. The West should
admit that loans to Moscow are a naked effort to avert Russian implosion.
... A piece reports that workers are auctioning their
services on Internet sites such as www.bid4geeks.com.

            

               
                  New
               
               
                  Republic
                  , Sept. 13
            

            The
cover story calls for an end to racial profiling.
Eliminating racial profiling will make policing more difficult, but the cost is
worth bearing because profiling burdens targeted groups, engenders rage against
the police, and undercuts the ideal of a colorblind society. ... An
article exhorts George W. Bush to answer the cocaine
question. Americans don't want another president burdened by explosive
secrets.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , Aug. 29
            

            The
cover story condemns the "Milosevic Generation." Serb twentysomethings are both
despairing and corrupt. "Sponsor girls" trade sex for pilfered designer
clothing. Most young Serbs are plotting to emigrate because there are no
opportunities at home. All deny atrocities occurred in Kosovo.
... A profile hypes Marc Anthony as the next Frank Sinatra.
The crooner followed Ricky Martin's footsteps from Menudo to Latin pop stardom,
but Marc Anthony's angelic voice and passionate presentation will trump
Martin's bubblegum appeal. His English-language debut should finally bring him
crossover success.

            
               
                  Mother Jones ,
September 1999
            

            

               Mother Jones joins the New York Times Magazine (above) in
focusing on Serbia's lost generation. A sympathetic article about Serbian draft
dodgers says tens of thousands of them crossed into Hungary to avoid serving in
Kosovo. Only 2 percent have been granted political asylum, and few are
authorized to work. Visas to Western countries are rarely granted.
... A piece denounces Alexander Haig for parlaying his brief
stint as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state into a career as an international
influence peddler. The former general helps defense manufacturers sell weapons
to dicey countries such as China and Pakistan.

            
               
                  U.S.
News
                
               
                  & World Report , Aug. 30
            

            
California Institute of Technology vaults from fourth to first in the
magazine's annual university rankings . Its three-to-one
student-faculty ratio is much praised, as is its annual spending of $192,000 on
each student. (The magazine revised its methodology to reward high spending on
instruction.) Cal Tech's 900 undergrads are so hard-working that one computer
science lab is scheduled from midnight to 2 a.m. ... Harvard, MIT,
Princeton, and Yale fill out the top five . Swarthmore is the top liberal arts college . ... An article claims that research universities are refocusing on
undergraduates in response to charges that they take students for granted.
Boston University, for example, forced its three Nobel Prize winners to teach
undergraduates.

            

               
                  Time
               , Aug. 30
            

            The
cover story is a baby boomer's first-person account of taking
care of her elderly parents. ... A poll finds that 84 percent of Americans don't think cocaine
use should disqualify Bush from office. A related article says the cocaine flap may have exposed W.'s campaign
as ill prepared. ... A piece reports on anti-drug Mormon youths who are
terrorizing Salt Lake City. The "Straight Edgers" get their high from fighting.
Three are on trial for murder, and a vegan Straight Edger just finished
probation for firebombing a McDonald's.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Aug. 23
            

            The
cover story presents a kinder, gentler portrait of Bill
Gates. The man whom competitors call the "Satan of Software" may throw temper
tantrums and compete fiercely, but he's basically a fun-loving family guy who
prefers sedans over limousines and breaks into mini-golf courses for kicks. The
article reveals that he recently transferred a huge chunk of stock to his
charitable foundation, boosting its endowment to $17 billion. ... An
excerpt from a book based on a survey of 1,000 kids reveals
that children don't want more time with their working parents, they want mom
and dad to make more money.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  Nation , Sept. 6 and 13
            

            The
cover story counters the conventional wisdom that the Iowa
straw poll boosted Steve Forbes and hurt George W. Bush. Forbes' second-place
finish proves that his support has a low ceiling, and Bush's victory
demonstrates that the GOP is jerking the party back into the mainstream and
successfully co-opting Clintonian themes. ... An editorial applauds the
Clinton administration for abandoning its singular focus on drugs in United
States-Colombia policy. More resources for economic development and alternative
crops are the only way to quell guerrilla violence, ensure political stability,
and cut drug production.

            

               
                  Weekly
                
               
                  Standard , Aug. 30 and Sept.
6
            

            The
cover
story crowns Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as America's leading
conservative. He is especially lauded for his loyalty to "originalism," the
theory that the Constitution should be interpreted in accord with original
intentions of the framers (as channeled by the judge). ... An editorial
laments the presidential campaign's substance deficit. Only Al Gore is
presenting policies for voters' consideration. Bill Bradley, George W. Bush,
and Elizabeth Dole are wooing voters with charm, biography, anodyne rhetoric,
and "calculated haze."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Campaign on the Web

            By their Web sites ye
shall know them. The presidential candidates have staked their places on the
Web to raise money, to distribute speeches and position papers, and to show off
their cybersavvy. Some sites are better than others. Here's a quick guide.

            
               Democrats
            

            
               Bill
Bradley  
            

            Bradley pitches himself as
a reformer disdainful of big money. The site even offers a copy of his personal
financial disclosure statement. However, you'll soon discover that clicking
around the site causes an unsolicited "Make a Contribution" box to pop up
repeatedly on your screen.

            

               Bottom line: Large, confident, and dull
            

            
               Al
Gore
            

            Lest anyone associate Gore
with Bill Clinton's sex life, two of the departments you can click to from any
page are "The Gore Family " and "Tipper
Gore ." And while other sites gloss over the legal rules for giving
money, this
contribution form requires donors to check boxes stating, "I am not a
foreign national who lacks permanent resident status in the United States" and
"The funds I am contributing are my own personal funds and not those of
another."

            

               Bottom line: Cybersprawl
            

            
               Republicans
            

            
               Gary
Bauer
            

            Bauer's site lets you
pledge to write a check but, unlike other sites, doesn't let you use your
credit card online. There's also an "Online Internship
Application ," which offers students experience in "correspondence,
grassroots organization, volunteer coordination, fundraising, events planning
and coordination, and media events." Hurry--the deadline for the fall term is
Aug. 6.

            

               Bottom line: Low-tech, high dudgeon
            

            
               George W.
Bush
            

            This site takes
personalization to the next level, asking for information in
return for an individualized pitch. An "Issues " page focuses on Bush's favorite topics, such as
"Faith-Based Initiatives ." The "En
Español" section offers several pages in Spanish, including this item , which touts Bush's corazón y
visión . An audio message of the day communicates directly to
supporters. The "Youth Zone " explains Bush's view of politics--it's
just like baseball! The parties are leagues, the primaries are playoffs, and
the general election is the World Series.

            

               Bottom line: Prosperity with a surface.
            

            
               Steve
Forbes
            

            Calls itself "America's
first full-scale Internet campaign" and is by far the most technically
sophisticated site, with an array of slide shows, videos, and a "personal control panel " that repackages his position
papers, speeches, and press releases as links from an icon symbolic of
high-tech, individual empowerment.

            

               Bottom line: The gold standard
            

            
               Orrin
Hatch
            

            Uncharacteristically hip
in appearance, the home page features Hatch silhouetted against a black
background. Supporters are encouraged to stuff virtual ballot boxes by a
vote
online page, which links to Internet polls. A page of media
links invites disciples to write editors and create the illusion of a
groundswell for their favorite dark horse. Weekly Hatch Toons attack the
senator's opponents: A cartoon of a wayward youth smoking something quotes the parents'
impression that their boy is "presidential material. ... If we can just hang on
'til he's 40."

            

               Bottom Line : Spare and strange.

            
               Alan
Keyes
            

            The site is utterly
disorganized but lovingly maintained by Keyes' acolytes. Its audio and
transcript archive of his speeches and radio shows is amazing.

            

               Bottom line: Grassroots 
               fire and brimstone
            

            
               John
McCain
            

            A special page for the
Bush
campaign exposes Bush's server as the largest single source of visitors
to McCain's site and offers 10 reasons why Dubya staffers should browse (Reason
No. 1: to contribute). A link to a campaign-finance
petition underscores McCain's reformist position. His "Campaign Store" offers
"Official Campaign Material" that "may be ordered for a small contribution." A
biographical video costs $25. Clicking "John McCain on the Issues"
takes you not to his position papers (which requires a further click) but to
the "McCain Poll," which invites you to weigh in on a rigged question. Since
McCain is presumably too principled to change his mind based on this "poll," it
seems to be a participation device for the gullible.

            

               Bottom line: Curious George gets caught
            

            

               Reform
            

            
               Pat
Buchanan
            

            When Buchanan switched
parties, he also switched his Web site and logo. For a Reform candidate, he's
surprisingly upfront about his pro-life plank, though "Cleaning Corruption Out of Government " is (more suitably) his
No. 1 issue. His new book, which prompted critics to call him soft on Nazi
Germany, is proudly displayed on his home page, so you can judge it for
yourself (but first you'll have to buy it). The low-tech site lets Pat's
peasant army contribute , join an
e-mail list, and browse speeches, press releases, and policy statements.

            

               Bottom line: Peasants with PCs
            

            
               Donald
J. Trump
            

            The home page calls Trump
"the experienced, decisive can-do businessman America needs as President." The
"How Can I Help Donald?" page claims "you can convince Donald to
run" by giving him $25 or more. Every page ends with a prominent link to a
donation solicitation. The "People Are
Talking About Trump " button takes you to the comments of great thinkers
such as Cindy Adams. And check out his bio :
"Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story,
continually setting the standards of excellence. … He is the archetypal
businessman--a deal maker without peer."

            

               Bottom Line: Too autoerotic for underage viewing
            

            

               Libertarians
            

            
               Harry Browne
            

            When you enter the site, a
pot leaf signifying medical marijuana pops up on your screen. If you click the
link to join Browne's exploratory committee , you get a form that
begins, "Due to the complexity of FEC regulations, we are unable to accept
on-line donations at this time." If you click "Join the Libertarian Party,"
you're required to check a box affirming that you "do not believe in or
advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social
goals"--just to make sure you're not Tim McVeigh.

            

               Bottom line: Wild, Wild Web
            

            

               Unannounced
            

            
               Warren
Beatty
            

            A pretty logo with
literally nothing behind it.

            

               Bottom line: Inauspicious metaphor
            

            
               Criticism and
Parody
            

            
               All Gore
            

            Clever parody site that
captures Gore's ticks and shticks. Headline on the "Goretopia" page:
"Envisioning a post-present future for the generations that will follow the
children of our parent's generation." The "Socialized
Medicine" page exults, "New treatments are slowing the development of
acne." Gore also vows to "give each child a talking Chihuahua" and "reduce class sizes to
0."

            

               Bottom line: If only Gore had such a light touch
            

            
               Bore 2000
            

            The graphics bear an
uncanny (and possibly actionable) resemblance to Gore's official site, but the
content is weak. All jokes, all secondhand. Includes a "Bulletin
Bored."

            

               Bottom line: Stiffer than its subject
            

            
               
                  The Bush
Watch
               
            

            A serious site, light on
graphics but heavy on content, with links to dozens of articles scrutinizing
Bush and several plugs for itself from major news organizations. Calls itself
"a non-advocacy site" and claims to be the "First George W. Bush Site on the
Web."

            

               Bottom line: Opposition research headquarters
            

            
               GWBush
            

            Excellent
libertarian-oriented, anti-drug-war site. Its theme is "Hypocrisy with
Bravado." A stamp on the home page boasts, "DRUG-FREE SINCE 1974." A mock
press
release has Bush promising "to raise the age at which minors can be
tried as adults ... to age 40." Best joke: Every picture of Bush includes a
digitally-added white streak under his nose.

            
               Bottom line: Best
parody site of the campaign
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Guns Don't Kill Baptists

            

               A 
               gunman killed seven people in a Fort Worth, Texas,
church. The shooter, a "loner" with no criminal record, yelled
anti-Baptist rhetoric as he opened fire at a youth worship service. He then
killed himself. The Washington Post 
               criticized congressional inaction on gun control in
the wake of recent shootings. Texas Gov. George W. Bush countered that the
killings were "a wave of evil" that legislation could not stop.

            

               Hurricane Floyd drenched the East Coast. It came ashore in
North Carolina, causing floods and power outages throughout the Southeast, then
was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved north. Most population centers
avoided major damage. Last week's East Coast spin: We're going to get hammered.
This week's East Coast spin: OK, we didn't get hammered, but we got really wet.
(
                  Slate
               's David Plotz the weather reporting
industry.)

            

               President 
               Clinton refused to disclose details of his
administration's deliberations over Puerto Rican clemency. Citing executive
privilege, he denied congressional Republicans' request for records relating to
last month's release of 12 imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalists. The Republican
spin: Clinton played politics with clemency and is trying to cover it up. The
White House spin: Congress is playing politics with investigations and is
harassing the president.

            
               The
United Auto Workers and DaimlerChrysler tentatively agreed to a new
contract. The four-year deal is believed to include a 3 percent annual wage
increase and a guarantee that the company will not block unionization of
additional plants. It must still be approved by DaimlerChrysler's 75,000 union
employees. The UAW had argued that workers deserved to share in automakers'
record-breaking profits. Industry analysts suggested that even with the
wage increases, labor costs per car will decline due to efficiency
gains.

            

               The House passed campaign finance reform. The bill, which was
opposed by the Republican leadership, would ban unregulated "soft money"
donations and curb "issue ads" by advocacy groups. Senate leaders may eliminate
the issue ad provision to overcome a promised filibuster. The New
York Times and Washington Post say the change will call the bluff of Senate
leaders who had objected to the bill on free speech grounds. Republican
opponents say that without additional limits on labor unions' political
expenditures, the revised bill remains unfair.

            

               The United Nations is sending peacekeeping troops to East
Timor. Australia and Asian nations will provide most of the forces,
and President Clinton has promised limited U.S. involvement. Indonesia said its
military would withdraw as international forces arrive. The United Nations
hopes to restore peace and bring back refugees. Others foresee a bloody conflict with
pro-Indonesia soldiers and militia members who are part of a nationalist
backlash against intervention. (
                  Slate
               's  "" explores
the prospects for intervention.)

            

               Another bombing rocked Russia. The fourth explosion in two
weeks killed at least 18 people, bringing the death toll to nearly 300. Russian
police, who suspect Caucasus rebels in the bombings, are sweeping the country
and interrogating darker-skinned people. President Boris Yeltsin says his
government has "the strength and resources to wipe out terrorism." But Moscow
skeptics are questioning Yeltsin's ability to govern in the wake of the
crisis, speculating that he may: 1) resign within days, 2) fire Prime Minister
Putin, or 3) delay parliamentary elections.

            

               Major airlines unveiled service improvement plans. The
voluntary changes were offered as an alternative to proposed "passenger rights"
legislation in Congress. Airlines claim their initiatives will greatly improve
baggage handling, ticket refunds, and information on flight delays.
Congressional critics say the plans are legal "gobbledygook" offering no new protections to passengers.

            

               Pat Buchanan may run for president in the Reform Party.
Despite pleas from Republicans to remain loyal, he's becoming increasingly
vocal about his frustrations with GOP moderates. Pundits variously
characterized the likely move as 1) politically astute, since Buchanan would
gain a platform for his views; 2) a sign of desperation, given his poor
performance in the polls; and 3) misguided, since a three-way race would hurt
the Republican nominee. (
                  Slate
               's Jacob Weisberg that
the move would be good for the Republican Party.)

            

               FBI documents show that the use of incendiary tear gas at Waco was
disclosed in 1995. Records indicate that Congress and the Justice
Department received files detailing the devices used in the raid much earlier
than previously thought. Last week, former Sen. John Danforth agreed to head an
independent investigation of Waco in response to suspicions of a cover-up.
Pundits debated who was more damaged by the new information: Congressional
Republicans who cried "cover-up" while the information was under their noses;
or the attorney general, who was unaware of her own department's reports.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Wine Whine</SPAN></SPAN>

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Sept. 24
            

            The
cover editorial applauds General Electric CEO Jack
Welch and the management trend of "creative destruction" he popularized.
Creative destruction creates tauter companies that can quickly respond to
market changes. ... In an essay , U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urges U.N.
members to reach a consensus that the United Nations should intervene anywhere
human rights are being abused, regardless of territorial boundaries. ...
Winemaking is being corrupted by numerical review ratings, according to an
article . Vintners are providing unrepresentative
samples to rig the system and underproducing good but low-rated wines.

            

               
                  New
                
               
                  Republic, Oct. 4
            

            An
education cover package. One article argues for vouchers and disputes studies
critical of them. Private schools do not skim off the best students from
struggling public schools, and voucher students are not suspended at higher
rates. ... A piece touts the benefits of charter schools. Studies
indicate that the 1,684 charter schools are providing a better education to the
350,000 public school students they serve. Five studies suggest that charter
schools also stimulate conventional public schools to innovate and improve.
... Online continuing and executive education programs are a rip-off,
according to an article : Brand-name bricks-and-mortar universities
receive lots of revenue from them, but the quality of instruction is poor.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine, Sept. 19
               
            

            In the
fourth of six millennium issues, artists depict the millennium with predictably
burlesque results. ... Cockroaches devouring a tomato
symbolizes the destruction of the new world by European conquistadors.
... The environmental consequences of the industrial
revolution are caricatured by a picture of a bear and a coyote tethered, like
cliffhanger heroines, to a pile of logs in the path of an oncoming train.
... A collage of Bill Gates costumed as a Medici together with
Michael Eisner outside a fairytale castle represents the way "culture rode the
coattails of money" in the Renaissance and in the 1990s.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , Sept. 20
            

            The
cover story marvels at the Harry Potter phenomenon. The
best-selling British book series about an orphan who transcends the tedium of
suburban life through his adventures as a wizard-in-training has enchanted both
children and adults. In upcoming books, Harry will take an interest in girls,
and the villain will kill a favorite character. (Click for

                  Slate
               's "Book Club" exchange on the Potter books.) ... An
article trails Bill Bradley around his home town. He shows
off his basketball trophies and his black friend from Little League.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Sept. 20
            

            A
special issue examining "the dawn of e-life" rehashes
conventional wisdom on the transformative potential of the Internet:
Commerce will be revolutionized by Amazon-like companies and
by online auctions that enable individuals to sell oddball items to distant
buyers or bid for services from companies with excess inventory. E-mail is making the workplace more egalitarian by enabling
minions to send suggestions to higher-ups. Campaigns are using the Internet as an organizational and
fund-raising tool.

            

               
                  U.S.
                
               
                  News & World Report , Sept.
20
            

            In a
late addition to the media fuss about the 25 th anniversary of
Richard Nixon's resignation, the cover
story highlights his achievements, including creating the Environmental
Protection Agency, increasing Social Security benefits, opening China, and
seeking détente with the Soviet Union. (
                  Slate
                discounts claims
that Nixon has been rehabilitated in ".") ... An article reports that NATO eliminated only a fraction of the
mobile targets it claimed were destroyed in Kosovo. Russia's withdrawal of
support for Yugoslavia and the bombing of power grids and transportation
networks are what really caused Slobodan Milosevic to cave.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  New Yorker , Sept. 20
            

            The
"Style" special issue lionizes Elsa Klensch, CNN's fashion correspondent, who
was the first person to "bring cameras to the catwalks" and force designers to
explain their clothes for a TV audience. Unlike fashion magazine editors, she
doesn't accept freebies from designers in exchange for product placement.
... An essay celebrates the emergence of Nobrow culture. The
mass-marketing of well-designed consumer products collapses the distinction
between highbrow and lowbrow. Now we are all "Banana Republicans." ...
An article warns that Slobodan Milosevic might be massing troops to brutally
subdue Montenegro, the democratic Yugoslavian republic struggling to separate
itself from Serbia.

            

               
                  Vanity
                
               
                  Fair , October 1999
            

            Bill
Gates tops the magazine's annual ranking of the new media establishment,
followed by Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. ... In an interview, the
68-year-old Murdoch details his overdue midlife crisis: divorce, a move to a
downtown Manhattan loft, a nubile new wife, and an avowed attempt to dress like
his twentysomething sons. ... A book excerpt condemns Pius XII,
"Hitler's Pope," for his complicity in the Final Solution. Before ascending to
the papacy in 1939, Eugenio Pacelli neutered German Catholic opposition to
Nazism, campaigned to remove black troops from the Rhineland, and
contemptuously declined to help persecuted Jews. As pope, he placated Hitler,
never protested the Holocaust, and didn't complain when Rome's Jews were sent
to certain death.

            

               
                  Talk
               
               , October 1999
            

            A
profile of Liz Taylor focuses on her bizarre relationship with Michael Jackson,
who showed up to meet the diva for the first time holding his chimp's hand. The
Gloved One adoringly describes Taylor as "a warm, cuddly blanket that I love to
... cover myself with." ... A self-congratulatory seven-page spread
celebrates the Talk launch party: "In the distance, beneath Madame
Liberty, feline Kate Moss, fearsome Robert De Niro, bronze-bodied Pierce
Brosnan." ... A profile peels away George Pataki's Gomer Pyle exterior
to reveal the New York governor's Machiavellian core. He ruthlessly spread
rumors about the sanity of a 70-year-old mentor when he sought to take her
state Senate seat. Pataki is finally blessing the Senate candidacy of Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, but only because he is maneuvering for the GOP
vice-presidential nomination.

            

               
                  Weekly
                
               
                  Standard , Sept. 20
            

            In a
review of two revisionist books, the cover
story rethinks the U.S. role in Vietnam. Intervention was necessary
because the United States could not abandon a nation resisting communism. Had
the United States maintained its support of the South Vietnamese regime after
1974, South Vietnam would not have collapsed. ... An editorial worries that the election of George W. Bush is no
sure thing. Clinton fatigue will be a less compelling reason to vote for Bush
if Bill Bradley wins the Democratic nomination. A Pat Buchanan Reform Party run
would undercut Bush's support.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  Nation , Sept. 27
            

            The
cover story condemns schoolhouse commercialism. Sponsored
educational materials ask students to count Tootsie Rolls or plan how many
Domino's pizzas are needed for a party. Districts lease advertising space in
school hallways and collect a percentage of vending machine revenues.
... A poem explains why mainstream Republicans wish to
prevent Pat Buchanan from bolting to the Reform Party: "Folks who hate what's
foreign/ And like their neighbors white/ Are vital to the party/ In any race
that's tight."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            CREEP Show

            The delightful comedy
Dick defaces the memory of America's most cherished political scandal.
It's a mustache on the Mona Lisa--or maybe a big, crooked dick on the cover of
All the President's 
               Men . Simply put, the movie makes the charming
case that Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's pseudonymous high-level source, was not
(as recent "Chatterbox" columns have speculated) an FBI honcho such as W. Mark
Felt, but two bubble-headed 15-year-old blondes.

            According to the film,
Arlene (Michelle Williams) lived at the Watergate Hotel, and she and Betsy
(Kirsten Dunst) were the ones who put the duct tape on the stairway lock that
led security guards to the burglars. (The girls were slipping out to mail their
entry to a "Win a Date With Bobby Sherman" contest.) To keep Betsy and Arlene
quiet about having seen G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer) at both the Watergate
and the White House, Nixon (Dan Hedaya) made them "Official White House Dog
Walkers"--in which capacity they stumbled on a room full of people shredding
documents and counting piles of payoff money. As Dick tells it, the
story got even weirder: Here at last is the druggy truth behind détente! And
you won't believe what was really on those 18½ minutes of erased Oval
Office tape!

            The amazing thing about Dick (directed by Andrew
Fleming from a script he wrote with Sheryl Longin) is that it manages to
burlesque the Watergate mythos without trivializing it. Under its slapstick
shenanigans, this modest movie offers a convincing vision of Nixon White House
operations as a sordid buffoon show undone by a couple of painfully earnest
innocents: It's nature's revenge on the overweening. The larger truths are all
there, and some of the smaller ones, too--like the idea that Nixon's paranoia
would extend even to his dog (another Checkers), or that Woodward and Bernstein
might seem as vain and as clumsily ambitious as the felons they're pursuing.
Post-Monica Lewinsky, it isn't odd to think of wide-eyed airheads wandering the
White House. (Post-Monica Crowley, it isn't even odd to think of wide-eyed
airheads drinking in the wisdom of Richard Nixon.) It's blissfully satisfying
to hear Arlene--who has replaced her Bobby Sherman posters with those of her
Dick and who fantasizes about romping on a beach with him in slow motion--come
to her senses and utter the immortal reproach, "You kicked Checkers and you're
prejudiced and you have a potty mouth!"

            Some critics have
compared Dick to Alexander Payne's great Election (1999), to
which it bears not the faintest resemblance. Payne employs multiple points of
view, probes his characters' psyches, and edits with a snap. By contrast,
Dick is rather limp. The pacing is purposefully slack--the gags just
dribble out. Fleming's poker face is perfect for making you giggle at offhand
insertions of Watergate minutiae or urban-paranoid compositions cribbed from
Alan J. Pakula's film of All the President's Men (1976). The movie's
sophistication hits you gradually. Maybe you have to be sophisticated to make a
picture so effortlessly, cheerfully facile about a subject so dark and
convoluted. Dunst and Williams make Betsy and Arlene simple in ways that go
beyond dumb, so that their budding awareness of Dick's mendacity has an
unexpected emotional kick. Like many Americans of that era they're crushed,
they get their own back, and then they leap into the age of roller-disco. The
Bogey Man goes down, and Dick sends you home boogeying.

            M ystery Men is one of those half-straight,
half-spoof comic-book extravaganzas that don't ever work, and what's neat is
that this one does--beautifully. The movie, based on the Flaming
Carrot/Mysterymen comics, unfolds in a dirigible-filled urban metropolis in
which superheroes routinely mix it up with supervillains, and in which there
exists an entire class of nerdy superhero wannabes, each of whom struggles to
concoct a persona that will fully embody what he or she does most ...
superheroically. The protagonist, Roy (Ben Stiller), calls himself Mr. Furious
because his anger supposedly gives him powers undreamt of by mere mortals. He
glowers and snorts like the Incredible Hulk--"I am a ticking time
bomb!"--except that he doesn't transform. He is joined in his crime-fighting
efforts by The Shovel (William H. Macy), who wields the same, and the effete
English Blue Raja (Hank Azaria), whose talent is for operatically flinging wide
his cape and hurling forks, most of which end up sticking out of his companions
instead of his foes.

            The first-time director,
who goes by the (superhero?) name of Kinka Usher, overloads the movie with
skewed angles and screwy lenses and grotesque special effects. What keeps his
work from becoming campily oppressive (like the last, dreadful Batman
picture) is his respect for the untranscendent flatness of ordinary life. These
nerds just can't quite get off the ground. More than that, they're inherently
suspicious of one another: They see through their buddys' superheroic
poses--and their own. Stiller, who struggles to turn his self-hatred into
other-hatred, makes a hilariously morose seether, and Azaria is poetically
twitty--he recalls Marlon Brando's Fletcher Christian. The earnest Macy, the
whitest man imaginable, has been given an African-American wife, to whom he
must constantly defend his unrealized ambitions: "I shovel well. I shovel
very well."

            These idiots can never measure up to the city's most
superheroic crime fighter, Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), a preening egotist
who soars around on a jet pack trashing supervillains, his uniform emblazoned
with product placements. When all the heavyweight bad guys are dead or in jail
(and his celebrity endorsements dry up), he contrives to have one of his old
nemeses, Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) released from the insane
asylum--a bad move, as it turns out, since Amazing has got rusty and
Frankenstein has had plenty of time to hatch a diabolical scheme. Among the
misfits who join up with our three would-be superheroes to liberate Captain
Amazing are Paul Reubens, who brings a glittery-eyed intensity to The Spleen, a
pustuled lisper with toxic flatulence, and the wonderful Janeane Garofalo as
The Bowler, who hurls a ball in which the skull of her murdered father is
ghoulishly embedded.

            The script, by Neil
Cuthbert, deftly juggles the fantasy of what our heroes want to be and the
reality of what they are. They don't show grace under pressure, but they
somehow rise to the occasion, and Mystery Men becomes a triumphant
celebration of nerdy aspiration. I might have complained that Stiller and
Garofalo--who instantly rub each other the wrong way--don't end up falling in
love, and that the film pairs Stiller instead with a conventional ingénue. But
since that ingénue is the meltingly gorgeous Claire Forlani, it would take
someone more superheroic than I to register a protest.

            The world didn't need a remake of The Thomas Crown
Affair (1968), an enjoyable piece of romantic fluff in which worldly
millionaire thief Steve McQueen matched wits with brittle insurance
investigator Faye Dunaway. We didn't need it, but we got it anyway--and it's
pretty terrific. The old script has been smartly overhauled, and the director,
John McTiernan ( Die Hard , 1988), works with a master-craftsman's
elegance. The climax, in which an army of men in trench coats and bowler hats
swap identical portfolios, is like a ballet designed by Magritte. (It's worthy
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which it takes place.) True, there's the
hollow man, Pierce Brosnan, in the McQueen role, but he's not bad here: His
passivity is archly amusing. And then there's Rene Russo. She makes her
entrance in furs and a pair of sunglasses, with creamy lips and mussed red
hair--both sleek and sexily bedraggled. When she cottons (almost instantly) to
the fact that Brosnan is her art thief, she toys with him, happy with the chase
and entertained by his effrontery. You can't spot the moment when she falls in
love: It must be when it dawns on her that she's the mouse and not the cat.
Before you know it, she's roiling with doubt and heartbreakingly vulnerable,
and this slick thriller romance becomes more than an ultracivilized game. Russo
has never been less than agreeable, but here's she's something else: a movie
star.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Fatal Attraction 

            The struggle among Patrick Buchanan, Donald Trump,
Jesse Ventura, and Ross Perot's lieutenants for control of the Reform Party
only looks like the clash of celebrity egos. Actually, the Reform Party is
splitting along the fault line between American progressivism and American
populism--rival traditions represented most recently by presidential candidates
John Anderson (1980) and George Wallace (1968). Natural allies and
natural enemies, progressives and populists simultaneously attract and repulse
each other. In 1992, and to a lesser extent in 1996, Perot managed to unite
both Anderson progressives and Wallace populists, but if history is any guide,
nobody will pull off that miracle in this election.

            John Anderson's progressive Republicanism belonged
to the distinctive political tradition of Greater New England--a territory that
arcs from Maine to the Pacific Northwest and was settled by
19 th -century Yankee Protestant settlers. The Yankee's secularized
Puritanism combines an enthusiasm for social reform--such as abolitionism,
Prohibition, women's suffrage, civil rights, eugenics, and the anti-smoking
crusade--with an often-priggish moralism and an apocalyptic horror of
"corruption." Most third-party movements have originated in Greater New
England. The name of one movement launched during World War I tells the whole
story: The Nonpartisan League.

            The Germans and
Scandinavians who settled in western Greater New England reinforced the secular
puritan ethos, although they were more likely to be socialists than the
Yankees, whose fear of corruption has often made them enemies of big
government. And Prohibition divided liquor-hating Northern Protestants from
beer-loving Germans. Even so, the Protestant pietism of many Germanic Americans
meshed neatly with the Puritan religious culture of New Englanders and their
western cousins, while socialist enthusiasms were easily merged with Social
Gospel Protestantism in the northern-tier states. It is no coincidence that
Anderson, the standard-bearer for the Yankee-Germanic tradition in 1980, is of
Swedish descent--nor is it a coincidence that in 1984, Anderson, formerly a
Republican, voted for Walter Mondale, a fellow Swedish-American.

            Southern populism, which earlier had produced Huey P. Long,
Georgia's Tom Watson, and the Southern supporters of William Jennings Bryan,
spawned George Wallace. Populism has more often found a home in the Highland
South than in the coastal "black belt," which has been dominated since colonial
times by the elitist conservatism of ruling-class Bourbon families and their
allies. Drawing on the traditions of the Scots-Irish settlers of Appalachia and
the Ozarks, Highland Southern populism encourages a tribal approach to politics
and rewards leaders who are flamboyant and bellicose. Andrew Jackson was an
early example of this type; Patrick J. Buchanan is its latest incarnation.

            Perot united Anderson
progressives and Wallace populists, but in an unstable pairing. Wallace's
supporters were social conservatives who favored activist government, as long
as it benefited them and their families, while Anderson's voters were social
liberals more concerned with good government than with expensive government.
The Wallace voters tended to be white working-class Democrats on their way into
the Republican Party; the Anderson voters by contrast were often former liberal
Republicans in transit to a new home in the Democratic Party.

            In the federal deficit, Perot found an issue that resonated
with both progressives and populists. In the minds of the skinflint
progressives, spending money one does not have is a form of moral depravity.
The deficit issue mobilized Jacksonian populists because it spoke to their
fears about a remote government dominated by the rich and powerful. Unlike
deficit reduction, the trade issue divided populist protectionists from
progressives, many of whom favor free trade.

            Thanks to his
deficit-reduction coalition, Perot won more votes in 1992 than any third-party
presidential candidate since "Bull Moose" Progressive Theodore Roosevelt in
1912. Perot's 19 percent of the total bettered Wallace's 13.5 percent in 1968
and Anderson's 7 percent in 1980. The core of Perot's support that year was New
England and Greater New England, with his best state--no surprise--Yankee
Maine. While his rhetoric was populist, his positions were progressive. The
progressives preferred government by experts to mob rule; Perot claimed that
"smart people" in Washington already had the plans, all that was lacking was
the will to implement them. Progressive reforms such as initiatives and
referendums, like Perot's vague notions of direct democracy, tended to bypass
legislatures and to concentrate plebiscitary power in allegedly nonpartisan
executives--the president, governors, city managers.

            Ignorant Perot critics called his technocratic approach
"fascism," when it was old-fashioned American progressivism. The progressives,
like their predecessors among the Mugwumps--the independent-minded Republicans
who spurned their party's presidential candidate in 1884--and Liberal
Republicans and Whigs and Federalists, have long favored fiscal conservatism.
Perot and his Concord Coalition allies, the New Englanders Paul Tsongas and
Warren Rudman, were as horrified by the federal deficit as the Mugwumps had
been appalled by the support of Bryanite populists for bimetallism and as the
Liberal Republicans, a generation earlier in the Gilded Age, had been
frightened by paper money.

            Perot, then, has the mind
of a Greater New England progressive but the heart of a Highland Southern
populist (his native Texarkana belongs to the western fringe of the Highland
South). If Perot's message appealed to Yankee and Nordic progressives in the
northern tier, his anti-establishment populism, and no doubt his flamboyant
persona, appealed to the kind of voters whose ancestors had cheered on Huey P.
Long and "Sockless Jerry" Simpson. Perot did very poorly in the conservative
South--but his showing was best in parts of the South that had voted for George
Wallace.

            With the federal deficit removed as an issue by 1996,
Perot's coalition of Snow Belt good-government reformism and give-'em-hell
hillbilly populism dissolved. The puritan crusaders of the North and the
alienated populists of the South may share common political enemies, but little
else. A century ago, Northern progressives such as The Nation 's E.L.
Godkin viewed populists such as William Jennings Bryan as barbarians, and they
returned the favor by viewing Mugwumps as enemies rather than as potential
allies.

            Then, as now, economic
policy divided rather than united the opponents of the two-party system. In the
1890s, Mugwumps such as Godkin crusaded for free trade and against tariff
protection for corrupt manufacturers. In the 1990s, northern fiscal
conservatives such as Anderson, Tsongas, and Rudman have backed free-trade
agreements such as NAFTA. For their part, Highland Southern populists tend to
rally around harebrained economic programs, elevating them from an instrument
of policy into a symbol of a crusade against their enemies. For the followers
of Andrew Jackson, the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States was
the panacea; for the disciples of William Jennings Bryan, the panacea was
silver coinage; for the followers of Ronald Reagan, supply-side economics was
the crackpot quick fix. For Buchanan, the symbolic economic issue is a revival
of high tariffs on manufactured imports.

            The factional war within the Reform Party, then, represents
the decomposition of the movement into its Northern progressive and Southern
populist wings. Buchanan can be described as a Southern populist, as can Pat
Choate and Ross Perot, whose populist sentiments appear to have triumphed over
their progressive principles. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, who attempted
to wrest leadership of the party away from Perot, is a classic Greater New
England progressive, as is former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, whose name
was circulated as a possible Reform Party nominee. Jesse Ventura is the product
of Minnesota political culture, with its mix of Yankee and Germanic reformism
and its long history of influential regional third-party movements such as the
Nonpartisan League and the Farmer-Labor party. And it's not stretching to
assign Donald Trump to the Northern progressive camp.

            If Perot backs Buchanan, then the capture of the
Reform Party by right-wing Southern populists is likely. At that point, the
progressives will do what they have always done best: They're never happier
than when they are demonstrating their moral, political, and religious purity
by heading for the exit and starting their own small but pure church or party.
New Englanders, fearing British corruption and tyranny, provoked the American
Revolution. A generation later, during the War of 1812, many New Englanders
considered seceding from the United States, whose federal government was then
dominated by Southern politicians. In the antebellum era, New England-based
Conscience Whigs denounced the North's pro-South Cotton Whigs as corrupt. After
the Civil War, high-minded liberal Republicans walked out on their partners,
the sleazy Stalwarts. In the early 20 th century, the Progressive
Republicans, led by Robert La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt, stormed out of
the GOP to form their own Progressive Party.

            So look for the Reform Party's displaced
progressives to declare the purity of their principles, denounce the corruption
of the populists who have taken over the party machine, and march out--to found
a new party, perhaps, from which, in time, they can secede.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            FBLie

            

               The FBI 
               admitted lying about its actions in the Waco
disaster. After six years of denials, the agency confessed it had aimed
"pyrotechnic" tear gas at the Branch Davidian compound. "We continue to believe
that law enforcement did not start the fire," said the bureau. Janet Reno
commissioned an investigation and vowed to "get to the bottom" of the
misrepresentations. She admitted, "I don't think it's very good for my
credibility."

            

               The Bank of 
               New York may have laundered money for the
Russian mafia. Investigators are examining whether mobsters diverted
funds--including foreign aid--out of the country through an offshore network
built by a former International Monetary Fund official. According to the
Washington Post , Steve Forbes and George W. Bush are
criticizing Al Gore for naively accepting Russian pledges of economic
reform.

            

               Sprinter 
               Michael Johnson broke the world record for the
400-meter dash. The Associated Press tallied his long list of medals and
called him "the
most dominating track and field athlete of the 1990s." "I can do better,"
Johnson commented.

            

               The U.N. 
               war crimes tribunal caught a suspected Bosnian war
criminal. Gen. Momir Talic, the highest-ranking Serbian official to be
arrested so far, was seized in Vienna. The Washington 
               Post
predicts that the arrest will remind other suspected war criminals not to travel abroad .

            

               The Federal 
               Reserve raised short-term interest rates.
The hike was widely expected, but Fed officials surprised analysts by hinting
that they may raise rates again in October. The stock market, which had rallied
in anticipation of the move, remained stable, and bond prices inched up. The
New York Times warned Congress not to sabotage the Fed's actions by
passing tax cuts.

            

               American Airlines employees were caught smuggling drugs to the United
States. They stashed cocaine and marijuana in food trays and used their
security clearances to transport the contraband.

            

               China will prosecute the leaders of Falun Gong
               . A
government order excused most followers saying they had been brainwashed into
joining a subversive political organization.

            

               Samuel Sheinbein will serve a murder sentence in Israel. The American
teen-ager had fled to Israel after allegedly committing murder in Maryland. The
Israeli Supreme Court refused to let him be extradited back to the States.
Under a plea bargain, he will serve 24 years in prison. Prosecutors from both
countries decried the way he manipulated the discrepancies between the two
legal systems.

            

               Cleveland's school voucher program was ruled unconstitutional.
A Federal judge ruled that the program's publicly financed scholarships to
parochial schools violate the separation of church and state. City officials
wondered what to do with the 3,800 students who were scheduled to begin private
school classes today. Critics and supporters of vouchers wondered whether the
Supreme Court will finally address the issue.

            

               An earthquake in Turkey killed at least 18,000 and possibly as many as
45,000. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet in effect charged
construction authorities with , and international papers roundly condemned
their shoddy building standards. The London Independent noted that while
the Turks "could assault the [Kurdish] PKK with US attack helicopters, for
Turkish civilians 24 hours after the earthquake." David Plotz explains why the
Turks to bury their dead. "" reports that the grassroots relief effort could
strengthen Turkish democracy.

            

               The Los Alamos whistleblower resigned. Colleagues had called
Notra Trulock's allegations against Wen Ho Lee racist and had said there was
not a "shred of evidence" against Lee . Trulock
countered that only three of the 12 initial suspects in the case were of
Chinese background and called a recent report exonerating the Clinton
administration "a whitewash."

            

               Hurricane Bret 
               hit Texas. Meteorologists had predicted
the storm would equal 1992's Hurricane Andrew in power and destruction, but
Bret hit the least-populated stretch of the Gulf Coast and was quickly
downgraded to a tropical storm.

            

               George W. Bush said he 
               hasn't used drugs since 1974.
After vowing never to discuss his drug history, he admitted that he had "made
some mistakes" but said he would have passed a 15-year background check in
1989. The media debated whether Bush's drug history should be probed.
Presidential contenders Gary Bauer and Sen. Orrin Hatch said Americans are
entitled to know about felonies committed by a candidate. Time 's John
Stacks argued that past dabblings with cocaine could make Bush's drug
enforcement policy hypocritical. Maureen Dowd chastised Republicans for protecting Bush's past
after years of investigating President Clinton's. William Bennett chastised
Democrats for investigating Bush's past after years of protecting Clinton's.

                  Slate
               's "" blasts the media for hounding Bush while
pretending that the story is driving itself.

            

               Three Japanese 
               banks will merge to create the world's
largest financial institution. Bank executives hope the union will
resuscitate the Japanese banking industry and thus the entire economy. The
New York Times hails the move as "a long-overdue effort to deal with the
realities of an overcrowded market, massive bad loans and woefully low profit
margins."

            

               Scientists 
               found evidence of a previously unknown ancient
primate. They say that a 15 million-year-old fossil of an African ape
provides new evidence of a common ancestor of gorillas, chimps, and humans.

            

               A study alleges 
               that 6 percent of Internet users are
addicted to being online. "Marriages are being disrupted, kids are getting
into trouble, people are committing illegal acts," warns its author. "If you go
back far enough, I guarantee that the defenders of cultural normalcy were
terrified by the invention of the toaster ," retorts Joel
Achenbach on the Washington Post Web site.

            

               French prosecutors 
               blame Dodi Fayed for Princess
Diana's death. The Guardian reported that Fayed commanded an intoxicated chauffeur to drive them and that
both could have survived had they been wearing seatbelts.

            

               Jenny Thompson swam 
               the world's fastest 100 - meter
butterfly race. The record, set by Mary Meagher in 1981, was the
second-oldest in swimming.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 317: &quot;She's Still Got It&quot;

            
               "We are quite the
best country in Europe. In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland
Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations of
the world," said Margaret Thatcher in her first speech at a Conservative Party
conference since stepping down as prime minister in 1990. Lady Thatcher was
inspired to speak by a particular cause. What?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's Question
(No. 316)--"Don't Do It, Deacon Don!":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        Deacon Don Thomas of the Lily of the Valley
Church of God in Christ in Fairbanks, Alaska, defends what he does to reach the
community: "Yeah, we want to compel people to come to Christ, but at the same
time we don't want to intrude on people. I think there's a big difference."
What does Deacon Don do? 
                        ( Question courtesy of Charlie
Glassenberg. )
                     
                  
               
            

            "Nude
choir."-- Brooke Saucier
            

            "Well,
that explains the 'You May Already Have Been Saved!' letter that came
yesterday."-- Jon Delfin
            

            "I
think keeping your church in Alaska is an excellent method of giving the
impression of nonintrusiveness."-- Michael S. Gilman
            

            "Kids
these days. Isn't the threat of eternal damnation compelling
enough?"-- Dennis Cass
            

            "You
know, Fairbanks is such a small town, he probably wouldn't have to do much
besides hit the bars talking about Christ dying for your sins and shooting a
good game of nine-ball, and folks would just follow him. It would be something
to do, and once they got bored with Don's sermons, they could eat
him."-- Kate Wing
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            A method adopted by
demure advertisers who don't wish to intrude is to ask permission. When you buy
something online or fill out a warranty card, there's often a little box at the
bottom: Check here if you wish to receive announcements about our new products
and services that may delight and amuse you. Some go further and involve other
people: Check here if you'd like us to sell your name to strangers who will
send you information about utterly unrelated products that will frighten and
confuse you. They never ask you to volunteer for the really good stuff: Check
here if you'd like more information about Claire Pospisil, say. I believe they
use a similar form for undergraduates having sex at Cornell. Check here if
you'd like me to unbutton your blouse. Check here if you'd like me to touch you
there. Check here if you'd like Jesus to save you from burning in hell for what
we just did so pleasantly to one another. Deacon Don, help!

            

               Technochrist 
               Answer
            

            Deacon Don used "Voice Blast," a technology for
sending phone messages simultaneously to an unlimited number of people, reports
Bradley Foss of the Associated Press.

            And it's not just Deacon Don. Ball clubs are
calling thousands of season ticket holders, schools are contacting everybody's
parents, and disaster-prone regions are planning emergency warning systems. But
some consider blast voice mail a nuisance and, when unsolicited, an invasion of
privacy.

            "It's just, like, phone spam," says Jason Catlett,
president of Junkbusters Corp. A former database analyst for AT&T, Catlett
started Junkbusters in 1996 to help consumers defend themselves against
telephone marketing.

            In January, when Dick Clark left messages on the
answering machines of residents in Washington, D.C., and Detroit to promote the
American Music Awards on ABC, a front-page story in the Washington Post
described his pitch as a "telephonic assault" on the public's ear. "The
geriatric old fool should be dragged out to the Mall and trampled by wild
horses," the Post did not add.

            The Telephone Consumers
Protection Act of 1991 prohibits automated ads to residential phones without
prior consent, but allows blast voice mail for institutional investors,
schools, and emergency services, and compelling people to Christ.
Hallelujah.

            
               Though

               Dead, He's Still Got It Too Extra
            

            The release of the
latest batch of Nixon tapes shows that death has not softened the old
anti-Semite, except in the sense that he's dead. Some samples:

            

               On Max Frankel and the New York Times : "Don't give them anything.
And because of that damned Jew Frankel all the time--he's bad you know. Don't
give him anything."

               On Daniel Ellsberg: "Incidentally, I hope to God he's not Jewish is
he?"

               On American communism: "The only two non-Jews in the Communist conspiracy
were Chambers and Hiss. Many felt that Hiss was. He could have been a half, but
he was not by religion. The only two non-Jews. Every other one was a Jew. And
it raised hell with us."

               On Pentagon Papers Judge Murray Gurfein: "He's a Jew, a liberal. But I
think tough. I think tough. But he may be sucking up to the liberal left. In
New York, you just can't tell what happens to those guys."

            

            The Nixon Library issued
a statement saying the president was not anti-Semitic. Then we all had a good
laugh and went out to dinner.

            
               Chris

               Kelly's Me-Wonderful-Me Extra
            

            Participants were invited to submit actual examples
of authorial self-praise as smug and fatuous as Warren Adler's: "My novels ...
explore the mysteries behind love and hate, the darkly amusing, deeply
disturbing and ultimately unanswerable questions that they inspire."

            Read more of Warren
Adler's insights into the work of Warren Adler at www.warrenadler.com. The home page appears to
be printed on parchment, so you know he's a real writer.

            "
'When I cleverly coined the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism." ' (William
Safire, every third column.)"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "
'It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole
bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be
fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm
hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard
impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like
that and they piss me off. I loved the book, but I think anyone with 200 pages
of footnotes in a book of fiction is in fact saying "Fuck you, see if you can
read it." ' (David Foster Wallace, about Infinite Jest [weighing in at
1,088 pages, including 200 odd pages of footnotes] in Salon .)"-- Andrew Staples
            

            "
'What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal
dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrons. I want
to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the
burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better
is my work.' ( Babylon 5 writer Harlan Ellison.)"-- CK
            

            " 'You
see what happens with Bill Faulkner is that as long as I am alive he has to
drink to feel good about having the Nobel Prize. He does not realize that I
have no respect for that institution and was truly happy for him when he got
it.' (Not, strictly speaking, self-praise, but it is Ernest Hemingway in
Selected Letters 1917-1961 , edited by Carlos Baker, Pages
768-769.)"-- Dan Dickinson
            

            " 'My
fault is honesty.' (Jesse Ventura. Not, strictly speaking, a writer. But
killing himself with pills might accelerate his reincarnation as a 38DD bra, so
better to let him swim along in his pool of piety.)"-- John Barnicle
            

            "
'Someday someone's going to dissect my whole life through my work. When I
finished writing (the opening episode of Wasteland ) I cried because I so
felt for the main character. ... It's fun, but it's really sad.' (Kevin
Williamson in Entertainment Weekly .)"-- CK
            

            "
'What I mean to do, by evoking the people whose lives and work I have admired,
is not to dictate the terms of virtue but to invite other people to reciprocal
thoughts about what seems to them to be inescapably good or important, and how
to put that into a life.' (Jedediah Purdy on himself, in a recent

                  Slate
                'Dialogue.')"-- Arthur Stock
            

            " 'One
of the smartest things I did was call a management coach. She gave me this
advice: Stop worrying about yourself and concentrate on how to make Nickelodeon
a good place for all our employees to work. That was a transforming moment for
me. ... At the center of everything I did at Nickelodeon was honoring creative
people.' (Geraldine Laybourne, not strictly speaking a writer, writing in the
New York Times with the help of some other writer just to turn out 500
words. Laybourne now honors creative people at Oxygen Media by making sure that
they don't have health insurance so their creativity isn't stifled by taking
their kids to the doctor. And no pensions means no complacency. Refusing to
become a Writers Guild signatory, Oxygen Media uses only scab writers. No
union. No benefits, but plenty of honor.)"-- Ed.
            

            " 'The
reason War of the Roses has become a classic is that it deals with these
unanswerable questions. And I have a feeling the moviemakers caught that. They
got it from my book like a virus. ... That's what makes it enduring. It deals
with the eternal mysteries of life. Why do people love? Why do they hate? How
are people attracted to one another? What breaks up relationships? From my
point of view as a novelist it came out of my subconscious, but it has found
its way into popular culture.' (Warren Adler)"-- CK
            

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Caribou dung.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Tabloids Show Restraint!

            From the moment it became clear that John F.
Kennedy Jr. and his two passengers had been lost at sea, Keeping Tabs--who was
passingly acquainted with Kennedy--began to brace herself for the inevitable
tabloid onslaught. During the first week after the crash, though, the tabs
seemed so stunned by Kennedy's death that they exercised--dare we say it?--a
modicum of restraint. Sure, they couldn't resist a few salacious details here
and there ("Carolyn was haunted by dire premonition!" screamed the National
Enquirer ), but they all weighed in with elaborately reverent photo tributes
that were virtually indistinguishable from those in the mainstream press. The
Enquirer , which called its special memorial issue "a loving tribute,"
even offered to forward its readers' condolences to the Kennedy family, a
gesture that seemed touching in its inappropriateness.

            But the honeymoon was short-lived. The
tabs--especially the Globe --soon woke from their stupor and attacked the
story with their usual zeal, claiming to have the inside track on everything
from the "secrets the tragic couple took to the grave" to the precise condition
of the victims' bodies. A look at some of the sorrier moments in Kennedy
coverage:

            
               Most tenuous Kennedy tie-in: The
Enquirer 's story about the death of actress Sandra Gould, best known as
nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched . The Enquirer manages
to find it "ironic" that Gould died just days after Kennedy, given that
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once bumped into her at Bloomingdale's and confided
that John and Caroline were "huge fans."

            
               Most tasteless
headline: "The Kennedy Clan: Who's Left?" above a Globe photo spread
identifying each of the 26 Kennedy cousins.

            
               Trend we'd like to see nipped in the bud right
now: The Star 's anointing of Caroline Schlossberg's 6-year-old son
as the heir apparent to the Kennedy mantle, noting the boy's "charming
personality and ease with strangers" as well as his "uncanny resemblance" to
his uncle.

            
               Story so pathetic it almost made us laugh:
The Globe 's insistence that Kennedy could have "averted tragedy" had he
heeded his July 16 horoscope, which warned Sagittarians to "remain close to
home." "His headstrong Sagittarian nature refused to bow to the laws of the
universe," laments astrologer Lynne Palmer.

            
               Photo so pathetic it
almost made us laugh: The Globe 's shot of convenience store employee
Mesfin Gebreegziabher holding items similar to the ones Kennedy purchased on
his way to the airport the night he died: a bottle of Evian water, a banana,
and a package of Duracell batteries.

            
               Most unnecessary story: The Globe 's
list of the "Dream Couple's 50 favorite things," including Carolyn Bessette's
favorite masseuse (Bree Neumann) and John's favorite cereal (oatmeal).

            
               Most unnecessary photo: A tie between the
Globe 's full-page shot of John receiving what is said to be his last
communion and the Star 's grainy frame-grab purportedly showing the
Today show's Katie Couric "breaking down" while reporting from Hyannis
Port, Mass.

            
               Most groan-inducing
euphemism for death: The Globe 's story on Kennedy's lifelong love
affair with planes ends by suggesting that "on July 16, like his dad, John took
his big plane to heaven."

            With the Kennedy story so dominating the tabs this month,
what little other news there is seems incidental. (You know something's
going on when the Globe devotes two pages to a behind-the-scenes look at
PBS's Antiques Roadshow .) Perhaps that's why they devote so much ink to
happenings in the world of celebrities' dogs. For starters, the Enquirer
reports that for his recent wedding, singer Phil Collins booked his dog into a
$350-a-night luxury suite. (The bad news in this case would apparently be for
Collins' new mother-in-law, who had to make do with a standard $280 room.) The
Globe claims that actress Sarah Michelle Gellar--whose thoughts on John
Kennedy's passing are dutifully recorded in the Star 's "Hollywood Weeps"
story--threw a lavish, catered birthday party for her dog, Thor, and 20 of his
nearest and dearest. And canine lovers everywhere will no doubt sleep easier
knowing that actress Bea Arthur is on their side: The Globe reports that
she has begun a crusade on behalf of the "innocent greyhounds" abused in dog
racing.

            It's not all fun and games for celebrity canines,
however. As if the Kennedy family didn't have enough to deal with, the
Star reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is married to Kennedy
cousin Maria Shriver, accidentally killed the family's chocolate Labrador when
he ran over it with his Humvee. According to the National Enquirer , Jack
Nicholson accidentally hit his 7-year-old son's Shih Tzu with a golf club; the
pup reportedly recovered after receiving 57 stitches to the abdomen. (In other
golfing mishaps, the Enquirer claims that Sean Connery "screamed in
pain" after being "hit in the butt by a stray golf ball that raised an angry
red welt.") The Globe reports that comic Pauly Shore is terrified that
his missing puppy has been eaten by coyotes, while Brad Pitt forces his
"overweight mutt" to work out on a treadmill for 30 minutes a day. The
Star , meanwhile, says that a jealous Pitt is hoping to buy a new dog for
girlfriend Jennifer Aniston because the pooch she "adores" was a gift from her
ex-fiance, actor Tate Donovan. (Aniston, by the way, might want to compare
notes with Connery: The Enquirer says that she too fell victim to a
freak rear end accident this month when an overzealous deer "nipped her
hindquarters.")

            The Star has been
obsessed with Pitt and Aniston of late but can't seem to make up its mind about
just what's happening in their bed. First, columnist Janet Charlton claimed
that Pitt has "spiced up" the couple's "already sizzling sex life" by bringing
home the "tough guy" props he wears in the film he's now shooting. But just two
weeks later, Charlton shared the distressing news that the couple's love life
is being ruined by his penchant for antiques hunting on the Web: He's
apparently "so caught up" in his Net surfing that he "forgets Jennifer's
keeping his bed warm."

            And while we're on the subject of the tabloids' short
memories: Why can't the Star remember what it says about country
superstar Shania Twain? The July 27 issue boasted that one of the magazine's
photographers had snagged the first photo ever taken of Twain and her husband,
Mutt Lange, whom the story claimed is so camera-shy that he wouldn't even pose
for his own wedding photos. So imagine our happy surprise when we saw Twain's
"secret wedding album" in the Star 's Aug. 17 issue, including no fewer
than six shots of the dashing groom himself.

            And finally, while the public's grief over
Diff'rent Strokes star Dana Plato's death might not have been on a par
with that afforded John Kennedy Jr., the Globe reports that Plato's
14-year-old son, Tyler, has plans to erect a memorial to his late mother at an
Oklahoma sandwich shop. It will be, a source explains, a "small-scale version
of Althorp, the shrine to Princess Diana." Keeping Tabs hopes they all rest in
peace.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Gunned Down

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Wild Wild West
                (Warner Bros.). No debate on this one--the critics
hate it. (A sample jab, from Time 's Richard Schickel: "The film is an
unmitigated disaster.") Despite the winning combination of Will Smith and
director Barry Sonnenfeld, who struck gold together with 1997's Men in
Black , critics say the cast can't overcome the horrendous script. The
Wall Street Journal 's Joe Morgenstern calls it "an eight-legged turkey,"
and Todd McCarthy of Daily Variety writes that it's "just not there."
Roger Ebert ( Chicago Sun-Times ) sums it up: "[It's] a comedy dead zone.
You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. ... There are moments when all
artifice fails, and you realize you are regarding desperate actors, trapped on
the screen, fully aware they've been left hanging out to dry." Or, as Susan
Wloszczyna advises in USA Today , "Handle West like an old boot:
Sniff at your own peril." (Visit the official site.)

            

               
                  South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
                (Paramount Pictures).
After emphasizing just how gross this film version of the popular Comedy
Central series is ("the potty-mouth on this R-rated cartoon is pretty
mind-boggling"--Gary Dauphin, the Village Voice ), critics go on to
praise it: "Hilarious, willfully filthy" (Janet Maslin, the New York
Times ); David Ansen ( Newsweek ) calls it "tasteless, irreverent,
silly and smart." Nasty highlights: 1) A torrid gay affair between Saddam
Hussein and Satan. 2) An enormous talking clitoris. 3) A series of musical
numbers, one of which is titled "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch." Most critics do not
admit to being offended, save one: Roger Ebert, delivering a far more negative
review than most, admits he laughed all through the film but says, "I did not
always feel proud of myself while I was laughing. ... A lot of the movie
offended me." (Click here to read a less positive review of the film: "South
Park is another movie straight from the smoking pits of Hell," and for
David Edelstein's rave in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               
                  Summer of Sam
                (Buena Vista Pictures). Critics call Spike Lee's
latest worthy but deeply flawed. The film follows an insulated Italian-American
community in the Bronx during the summer of 1977, when the Son of Sam killer
was terrorizing New York City. On the upside, John Leguizamo's performance as a
philandering hairdresser is "raging, startlingly visceral" (Maslin, the New
York Times ), and Lee's evocation of the tension that gripped the city--the
blackouts, looting, and violence--is enthralling. On the downside, the film is
long, wandering, and something of "a glum and unpleasant experience" (Kenneth
Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). Several critics also say Lee's
direction tends toward the heavy-handed. Ebert departs from the pack, giving
the film 3.5 stars and a rave review: It "vibrates with fear, guilt and lust."
(Click to read Edelstein's review.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  
                     Eleanor Roosevelt Volume 2: 1933-1938
                  
               , by
Blanche Wiesen Cook (Viking). Reviewers praise the second volume of Cook's
biography as well researched, thorough, and fascinating. Many also take it as a
point of departure for talking about Hillary Clinton. Maureen Dowd's review in
the New York Times Book Review is largely a laundry list of the
differences between Clinton and her admitted hero: "[Roosevelt] did not engage
in the shadowy manipulation practiced by other opinionated First Ladies. ...
Unlike Hillary, Eleanor ignored personal insults, sloughed off negative news."
Dowd ends her review by asking, "Are you listening, Hillary?" Most notably, the
book reveals excerpts from Roosevelt's letters that confirm suspicions, raised
in the previous volume, of her amorous relationship with Associated Press
reporter Lorena Hickok. Also of note are explicit examples of Roosevelt's
anti-Semitism both in her private life and her public life: She was an advocate
for the oppressed in all corners of the world--except, apparently, in Nazi
Germany. (Click here to listen to an interview with the author, courtesy of the
New York Times .)

            
               
                  
                     Wonders of
the Invisible World: Stories
                  
               , by David Gates (Knopf). Positive
reviews for Newsweek critic Gates' first story collection (after two
novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Jernigan ). Publishers
Weekly calls it "Gates' best so far." The stories range in topic from a gay
man who takes in his sister's son while she checks into drug rehab, to an old
man's religious awakening after a stroke. Michiko Kakutani writes in the New
York Times that although Gates "delineates his characters' predicaments
with a pitch-perfect ear," the collection suffers when "a certain authorial
smugness creeps into the narration," which leaves the reader "feeling superior
to his characters, irritated with their solipsistic mind games and
self-inflicted wounds." (Click here to
read one of the stories in this collection.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=630250921-01071999>America Alone</SPAN>

             

            

               
                  Economist , Oct. 23
            

            The
cover editorial argues that the United States is an
uncertain colossus, despite its military and economic dominance. The rejection
of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and cuts to international peacekeeping
funds demonstrate the spread of American unilateralism. But the United States
can't guarantee global stability by might alone: It must work with allies.
... A survey piece argues that Germany has replaced
France as the dominant player in the European Union. ... An article explores McDonald's Hamburger University--one
of 1,600 corporate universities operating in America. HU teaches the
fundamentals of hamburgerology in 26 languages to 7,000 students a year. Its
new dean hopes to acquire the accreditation to award graduates official
diplomas.

            
               
                  New
Republic , Nov. 8
            

            The
magazine celebrates its 85 th anniversary with a cover essay claiming
that liberalism has triumphed in the realm of ideas during the 20 th
century. Each nation values liberalism in a different way. In nations such as
India, democratic freedoms are most fundamental. In nations such as Korea,
negative rights--guarantees against government interference--supercede
democratic values. In China, positive freedoms--primarily welfare
guarantees--trump democratic and negative freedoms. ... An article says recent natural disasters are not evidence
of global climate change. The real evidence for global warming is two long-term
trends: The incidence of heavy downpours is increasing and the "frost-free"
season is lengthening.

            
               
                  Harper's ,
November 1999
            

            An
article describes Big Sugar's stranglehold on public policy. Taxpayers support
an irrigation system that facilitates Florida sugar growing but ruins the
Everglades. Sugar barons have funneled $13 million to federal officeholders in
the past eight years to block any cuts in sugar subsidies, which add $1.4
billion to consumers' food bills. ... A reflection on Woodstock '99
concludes that the concert was a slow-motion riot clogged with overflowing
sewage, overpriced concessions, and acoustic atrocities. The crowd's attempt to
raze the festival grounds symbolizes the collapse of communal bonds and
boundaries.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , Oct. 24
            

            The
cover story claims that the Reform Party's greatest asset is its pop-culture
appeal. The piece echoes the familiar line that party members are a nut stew of
United Nations haters, pot-legalizers, and campaign-finance reformers. Juicy
detail: Jesse Ventura views Pat Buchanan as a shill sent by the traditional
parties to sabotage the Reform effort. ... An article marvels at a
"linguistic big bang" in Nicaragua, where deaf kids have invented their own
language in a generation. Teachers at a school for the deaf were so inept that
the assembled kids improvised a complex sign system, demonstrating that
language is innate, but requires community to grow. This is the first time
linguists have observed a language's birth. One creative sign: Daniel Ortega is
identified by a tap on the wrist, a mockery of the ex-president's gauche
Rolex.

            
               
                  Forbes ,
Nov. 1
            

            An
article explores McDonald's niche offerings. Since the
hamburger market is plateauing, McDonald's allows franchisees to offer new food
stuffs such as McBrat, the bratwurst on a bun in Wisconsin. McLobster Rolls are
reviving New England sales; Indophilic Brits are eating McChicken Tikka; and
Indians can enjoy the new Maharajah Mac.

            
               
                  Time , Oct.
25
            

            The
cover story spends a week in a suburban St. Louis high
school. Highlights: Twenty percent of students take psychopharmaceuticals, from
Adderall to Zoloft. In lieu of metal detectors, "Safe Teams" of faculty and
police target troubled students. The teams are assisted by 60 kids who snitch
on their peers. "Deseg" students bused from the inner-city find class
differences harder to bridge than racial ones. Some kids work 40 hours a week
to make up the allowance gap. (Read 
                  Slate
               's prescription for what
ails American .) ... An article questions television's awkward
embrace of gay characters. Nearly 30 homosexuals are featured in prime time,
but few shows are sophisticated enough to script love lives for their
homocharacters.

            
               
                  Newsweek , Oct.
25
            

            The
cover package celebrates 20 th -century American
sports with the recollections of key figures. Muhammad Ali reveals that he plans to fight an exhibition
match, despite his Parkinson's. He says the violent trash talking of his youth
was an attempt to scare white folks because "they scared us." Jesse Owens ' daughter recalls her father's pride at defeating
the "master race" during the 1936 Olympics. NBA Commissioner
David Stern details how a "generation of virtuosos" turned basketball into
a marketing machine. ... An article slaps Black Entertainment Television for refusing to
pay its talent decent wages. Comedians get a fraction of union scale, and even
BET's marquee talk-show host bristles at the network's blaxploitation.
            

            
               
                  U.S. News &
World Report , Oct. 25
            

            The
cover story argues that archeology casts authoritative doubt
on creationism but corroborates key parts of the Bible. For instance, a
ninth-century B.C. inscription memorializing a victory over the "House of
David" provides material evidence of the Jewish king's existence, while the
remains of a crucifixion victim indicate that the Romans would have killed
Jesus as the gospels allege.

            
               
                  Weekly Standard ,
Oct. 25
            

            An
editorial congratulates the Senate for killing the "arms
control fantasies" of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It was an
unenforceable joke. Our next (Republican) president should rebuild America's
nuclear defenses. ... An article laments the decline of Dukakis Democrats. There are
no paleoliberals left for the right to lampoon. The party of Clinton and Gore
really has forged a pro-free-trade, fiscally conservative third way.

            
               
                  The Nation , Nov.
1
            

            The
chief cover story , countering basic conservative theology,
argues that peace activism helped win the Cold War. The nuclear freeze movement
undermined support for an aggressive military buildup by emphasizing the cost
and riskiness of the Cold War. The Reagan administration's own proposal to
eliminate nuclear weapons was sparked by the peacenik slogan "zero option."

            
               
                  Business Week ,
Oct. 25
            

            A
piece argues that Japan's economic slide will transform the Japanese way of
doing business. Trade agreements and the tightening of capital markets have
opened Japan to foreign investment. The Internet is energizing homegrown
entrepreneurs and increasing the national appetite for business risk.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Mother Nature

            The Borders around the corner, which would never
dream of selling dirty books, is stocking its register display this week with
another kind of smut: Weather Porn. There's Storm of the Century ,
Isaac's Storm , The Perfect Storm , When the Wind Blows , and
my favorite, Nature on the Rampage , a Kamasutra for weather nymphos.
Nature on the Rampage 's cover promises "Hurricanes, Droughts, Wildfires,
Tornadoes, Floods, Heat Waves, Blizzards. Also Volcanoes, Earthquakes,
and even Comets!" ( Even comets! ) Inside are titillating photos--houses
bitten in half by tornadoes, cars swallowed in snow banks, etc.--and details to
arouse even the most jaded weather fetishist. Did you know that several
Americans are killed every year when lightning strikes a phone pole, courses
through the phone line, and electrocutes them as they are making a call? Tip:
Use a cordless.

            Mother Nature, the
Vanessa del Rio of this weather bordello, has never seemed more fascinating
than she seems today. Hollywood's flood of natural disaster
movies-- Volcano , Twister , Asteroid , The Flood,
etc.--ebbed just in time for the real thing: earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan,
a drought on the East Coast, Hurricane Floyd and its allied floods. Americans
have followed all this obsessively, with weather Web sites reporting record
traffic in the days before Floyd's landfall. Is there anyone who can't explain
the Richter scale or distinguish between a Category 4 hurricane and a Category
5?

            With all this talk of upheaval ("Nature's Bedlam," as
Nature on the Rampage likes to call it), you'd think we were suffering a
plague of chaos--record numbers of Category 5 hurricanes, epic tornadoes,
droughts, and the like. It's true that the United States, with its endless
coastline, vast climatic variation, massive fault lines, and dozens of active
volcanoes, is exposed to more than its share of Mother Nature's fury. But the
number of natural "events" nationwide and worldwide remains constant. (Some
meteorologists speculate that we are entering a busy hurricane cycle, but the
jury is still out.)

            Americans are more alert
to Mother Nature's rage in part because more people are in its way. According
to Time , 139 million Americans live in regions threatened by hurricanes.
Earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes endanger millions more. Because property
follows people, natural disasters have become more destructive: A storm that
rips through Florida today shreds many more houses than it would have in 1970.
According to the National Science Foundation, natural disasters now cause about
$100 in damage per American per year, five times as much as a generation ago,
even accounting for inflation.

            It's no accident that anxiety about nature is surging
during a time of domestic tranquility and (relative) world peace. Weather is a
form of war, God's conflict with man. Weather is defined by martial
metaphors--"fronts," "clashing" air masses, "striking" storms. (War, curiously,
is full of meteorological metaphors: a "hail" of bullets, the "fog" of battle.)
Everyone needs an enemy. It's easy to understand why we replace vanishing
Mafiosi and Commies with asteroids, hurricanes, and volcanoes. Natural disaster
books dominate best-seller lists for the same reason: In an age without great
wars, these are our war narratives.

            Today's paranoia about the Earth Mama also owes
something to millenarianism, both religious and environmental. Pat Robertson
has blamed Orlando's nasty weather on Disney World's hospitality to gays.
Christian millennial Web pages find biblical significance in every blizzard or
quake. Greeniacs, too, view natural disasters as retribution. Hot Zone
author Richard Preston, the Alfred Hitchcock of germ terror, has described
murderous jungle viruses this way: "The Earth is mounting an immune response
against the human species. ... Mother Nature is going to get even."

            Gaia theorists, who
contend that the planet is a superorganism in which creatures unconsciously
regulate the atmosphere in order to ensure favorable conditions for life, also
believe Mother Nature is on the warpath. James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia
theory, writes that "Gaia ... always keep[s] the world warm and comfortable for
those who obey the rules, but [is] ruthless in her destruction of those who
transgress. Her goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of
this, we shall be eliminated."

            But the most important reason why Mother Nature seems more
powerful these days is the media. The ascendance of the Weather Channel, the
USA Today weather page, and weather Web sites (click for an earlier

                  Slate
                piece on the weather Web) have turned weather into national
entertainment. We can (and do) view weather satellite photos of any spot on
Earth with a click, hear forecasts 24/seven, and watch live footage of weather
disasters on television. There is an endless appetite for weather. It is more
important than sports, more dramatic than the news, and always changing.

            (The media fuel weather
obsession partly because we can now do something about the weather, not
just talk about it. TV stations send barrages of warnings about storms,
hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards. These warnings undoubtedly save
lives: Natural disasters may cause more property damage in the United States,
but they kill fewer people.)

            The blanket coverage of Mother Nature exacts a price:
weather fatigue. The more she's covered, the less people care about her, and
the more reporters hyperbolize. All three newsmagazines turned their Hurricane
Floyd articles into jeremiads about worsening weather. Time warned of a
future of "supercanes," "hypercanes," and "megastorms" that would make Floyd
look like a spring shower.

            The final reason for our Mother Nature obsession is
politics. As Jodie T. Allen in 
                  Slate
                in 1997, a primary function
of any disaster is to funnel pork to important states. President Clinton
choppers in for commiseration and photo ops. The woebegone victims congratulate
themselves for their fortitude. The National Guard is called out to do whatever
it does (guard?). Congress busts the budget caps to protect the poor sodden
folk. Then the victims bank the cash and return to their flood plain or tornado
alley. Economists call this moral hazard. Politicians call it constituent
service. In the end, it seems, Mother Nature is just another welfare mom,
ruining homes and taking billions of tax dollars to do it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Road to Beverly Hills

            Monday, Oct. 4; Holiday
Inn Express, O'Fallon, Ill. (outside St. Louis)

            As far as I can tell, there have been three
brilliant diet-food innovations over the last 15 years. The first was fat-free
Entenmann's. I was skeptical of this product until the Gulf War of 1991. During
the congressional deliberations on whether to approve the use of force to drive
Iraq from Kuwait, House Speaker Tom Foley delivered a rousing call for
bipartisan patriotism. I covered the speech and was struck by how thoughtful
Foley was, what a skilled orator he was, and quite frankly, how thin he'd
become over the past few months. After the speech, I went grocery shopping at
the Georgetown Safeway and, as luck would have it, spotted the speaker picking
up some provisions himself. I went over to him and, under the guise of
congratulating him on his moving speech, attempted to check out what he had in
his cart. It was filled with boxes of fat-free Entenmann's. I mean, his cart
was a virtual Entenmann's mountain. I became a believer.

            The second great dietetic discovery was Baked Lay's
Potato Chips. Oprah has already discoursed at length on this delectable treat,
so there is no need for me to elaborate here.

            Yesterday, on the first day of our journey to Los
Angeles, I discovered the third major innovation. We were just outside of
Hagerstown, Md., when we chanced upon a strange-looking McDonald's. It was
packed with the usual pimply high-schoolers, but it was tiny, and carried a
bunch of McProducts we hadn' t seen before. One stood out from the rest: The
McSalad Shaker. The McSalad Shaker comes in a slurpee-style cup with a domed
lid. You add the dressing (I chose a low-fat, 30-calorie concoction) then shake
vigorously.

            The McSalad Shaker solves two previously
intractable problems of salad consumption. The first is the unequal
distribution of dressing. The second is the tendency of lazy restaurateurs to
chop salad into large, unwieldy pieces, making it impossible to eat without
violating the etiquette rule against eating vegetables with a knife. The
McSalads are diced into tiny pieces, barely discernible to the human eye. You
can spoon them into your mouth as if you were eating a hot-fudge sundae. Like
fat-free Entenmann's and Baked Lay's, this product fools your brain into
thinking you are consuming some obesity-inducing treat. But unlike those other
innovations, the McSalad is actually nutritionally sound. Indeed, it provides
something that is desperately missing from most American diets.

            There is a slight problem with the McSalad
slogan--"Dress 'em, Shake 'em, Enjoy 'em"--which sounds vaguely lewd. And also
because the product fits into an automobile cup-holder, there are potential
liability concerns. McDonald's recently issued a press release that reads:
"WARNING, WARNING, WARNING. Salad consumption requires a fork, and hence, two
hands, so do not partake of this product while driving a motor vehicle or
operating heavy machinery!" -- a disclaimer that rivals "Do not take your
toaster oven into the shower with you."

            Sadly, as we have discovered during a long
McSalad-free trek across Kentucky, the McSalad Shaker is available only at 900
experimental outlets. American politicians should stop focusing on transforming
the entire health care system and pass legislation requiring that the McSalad
Shaker be extended to all McDonald's outlets. Full coverage! The country would
end up saving so much on the health care of otherwise obese Americans that
solvency of Social Security could be ensured into the next millennium.

            Besides not being able to find another McSalad
shaker, there are two things I'm scared of on this trip: sex and death.
Regarding the latter, Bob tells me that, in his experience, every time you
drive across the country there is one moment when you almost die. You'll have
been driving for 10 straight hours across North Dakota when suddenly the wind
blows a huge metal road sign into your lane. Or a row of trucks barreling at 80
miles an hour won't let you merge into their lane. I've been certain that this
moment of doom has already occurred several times, but Bob assures me it's
still to come.

            Regarding sex, I think I'm safe, at least through
the Eastern Seaboard and the Appalachians.

            On the radio, they are still talking about the
Brooklyn Museum's controversial art exhibit. Giuliani is clearly wrong in
trying to stop the exhibit, but how many people defending the museum right now
would be trying to shut it down if the art was offensive in other, even less
acceptable, ways? If it were racist, for example. What if there was a big
picture of, say, the Jews killing Christ. That would cause a sensation, Mr.
Saatchi!

            Regarding my traveling companion: Bob forbade me
from talking about his germ phobia, although it was kind of hard to understand
what he was saying through that surgical mask he was wearing. (Just joking!)
But just between you and me, it's really bad. He thinks the water is so
contaminated, he won' t take ice cubes in his drinks. He calls them "death
cubes." And we can't have the coffee that comes with our complimentary
continental breakfast because they might have drawn the water first thing in
the morning without letting the taps run for the two minutes required to flush
the lead out of the pipes. ("Even if they said they'd done it," Bob says,
"would you believe them?")

            Pray for me.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 325: &quot;Wrapped Attention&quot;

            
               In a TV commercial
running in Houston, friends cover a Diane Keaton look-alike in bubble wrap then
roll her down a hill and through a sprinkler. We don't find out what's being
advertised until the end, when the tag line comes up. For 500 points and the
game: What is the tag line?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's Question
(No. 324)--"Mad About Beef":
            

            

               Fill in the blank as Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to South
Korea, comments on some declassified documents with this personal anecdote: "My
residence had just been broken into by six students angry about beef quotas.
They tried to burn my house down. And I thought, 'God Almighty, if they get
this mad about beef, what will they do when they learn we have _________ here?'
"
            

            
"Beefcake."-- Matt Sullivan , David Finkle , and Dee
Lacey
            

            
"Cable."-- K. Coombs
            

            
"Copies of the final."-- Dave Gaffen ( Neal Pollack and Dee
Lacey had similar answers.)

            "If
this were 'Match Game '74,' Charles Nelson Reilly would answer 'bazooms.'
"-- Kenton Cernea
            

            
"Martha Stewart's balsamic glazed onions."-- Jay Majors and Barbara
Lippert (similarly, Todd York )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            We risk hubris, given
our lackluster national cuisine--not that I'm knocking high-fat, high-calorie,
high-profit, bland stuff served up on a bun and eaten in a car--if we mock the
food of another country. So, unlike many Quiz participants, I won't. Instead,
I'll point out that one of the pleasures of urban life is
juxtaposition--buildings of different eras, clothing of various subcultures,
books, movies and, of course, food. When we make dinner plans, we don't name
restaurants; we list countries: Should we go for Thai? Italian? Indian?
Mexican? Vietnamese? French? Spanish? Ethiopian? Argentine? Brazilian? Cuban?
Chinese? Cuban-Chinese? And I'll say this: If all the nations of the world got
along as well as do the bagel and mango on my breakfast table every morning,
that would be an impressive amount of along-getting. Right, anxiety-free doggy?
Rrrrrrrrright!

            
               Critical Mass Appeal
Answer
            

            If they get this mad about beef, what will they do
when they learn we have nuclear weapons here?

            During the Cold War, the United States stored
12,000 nuclear weapons in at least 23 countries, including some with a no-nukes
policy, not always informing local governments of this deployment. Currently
American weapons of mass destruction are kept in at least seven foreign
countries--Belgium, Greenland, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, and
Britain.

            It took 16 years to declassify the document,
"History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through
September 1977." William Arkin first requested it in 1983 under the Freedom of
Information Act for use in a book he was writing, Nuclear Battlefield .
An article describing the document is in the current Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists .

            Ambassador Gregg's
colorful anecdotes now delight his colleagues at the Asia Society.

            
               Raymond Chen's at the
Movies Extra
            

            Edward Norton explains what the fighting in
Fight Club is really about: "It's very much a metaphor for
self-transforming radicalism, for the idea of directing violence inward at your
own presumptions. ... The fighting is a metaphor for stripping yourself of
received notions and value systems that have been applied to you that aren't
your own. And freeing yourself to discover who you actually are."

            "And pummeling your opponent into a bloody pulp,"
he did not add.

            (Read more preposterous
actor jabbering here.)

            
               Floyd Elliot's Media
Buyers Extra
            

            Floyd Elliot's News Quiz
responses are for sale to reputable or disreputable advertisers. Drug dealers
welcome. Contact Floyd's parole officer for details.

            
               Sure and Certain Proof
That the '60s Are Over Again Extra
            

            Actual evidence gathered from actual publications,
because the Man can't bust our news sources.

            

               "Gregory Sizer was running a Christian bookstore here when he decided to
launch a second business: selling guns." ( Wall Street Journal , Oct. 19,
1999)-- Jay Carvell
               

               "Tom Jones and the Semiotics of Panty-throwing--by Virginia Vitzthum."
( Salon 's Table of Contents, Oct. 19, 1999)-- Joy Nolan
               

               "Jimi Hendrix's 'Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire' now used to tout Pontiac
Sunfire in TV spots."-- Ed.
               

               "By using her celebrity in exchange for stock in the company, Ms. Goldberg
adds her name to a list of cyberrepresentatives that already includes the
former Star Trek actor William Shatner. I'm speechless."-- Ellen
Macleay
               

               "Peace, love, and understanding--hrrrpphh, that's funny! What a joke. I
swear to God. You know what I'd do? I'd line 'em up and shoot 'em. Yeah, yeah.
Shoot 'em all. Hrrrpphh. Hilarious." (My friend's ex-hippie older brother, now
a golf course designer in Tampa.)-- Jim O'Grady
               

               "The Pink Panther/Owens Corning Fiberglas commercial co-opting Fractured
Fairytales . I hope moose-and-squirrel got mucho bucks out of them,
considering the legalistic stink the P.P. folks (Universal) made several years
ago when a gay nonprofit anti-violence group had the temerity to call itself
'Pink Panthers' (although in this drunk-on-synergy era Universal probably owns
all of Jay Ward's output as well)."-- Fred Gormley
               

               "In 1997, I co-authored a 'comprehensive and dramatically told' ( San
Francisco Chronicle ) biography of radical anti-war priests Daniel and
Philip Berrigan, and it sold many less copies than, oh, Jewel's diary or a
novel by Ethan Hawke. Yet conveniently, my book made it into paperback and can
be purchased by clicking here."-- Jim O'Grady
               

               "In 1968, News Quiz was used to fight imperialism in solidarity with the
workers and peasants, not to promote one's own books."-- Ed.
               

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Funny foreign food, Pokémon.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 322: &quot;We Deliver?&quot;

            
               According to Rep.
John Doolittle, R-Calif., "Sometimes it's barbecue; sometimes it's fried
chicken, sometimes it's pizza; frequently it's more than one of those things."
What is?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               Thursday's Question (No. 321)--"World Series": 
               New York, Bombay,
Sao Paulo, Mexico City--what comes next in this series? Why?
            

            
"Levittown. And I think you know why."-- Larry Amoros
            

            
"Sodium chloride, if you ask a public school student."-- Michael S.
Gilman
            

            
"Perhaps Las Vegas should reconsider the themed-hotel trend."-- Neal
Pollack
            

            "What,
do I look like Marilyn vos Savant to you?"-- Richard Nikonovich-Kahn
            

            "Tel
Aviv. The principal sites for resumed U.S. nuclear weapons testing under a Pat
Buchanan administration."-- Charles Kenher ( Tim Carvell , Floyd
Elliot , Matthew Heimer , and Chris Hammett had similar
answers.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            The temptation is to write a sneering comparison of
rural and urban life. You know: fresh air/fresh ideas; you have to drive at
least 20 minutes to get anywhere/you already are somewhere; Pizza
Hut/pizza--that sort of thing. (And, incidentally, sneering comparisons are a
big part of the next round of SATs. Bring a No. 2 pencil and a look of
disdain.)

            Another way to go was present you with an old
favorite series or two, like this O, T, T, F, F, S, S ...; and this 14, 18, 23,
28, 34, 42, 50 ...

            A third plan was to note that the city of New York
refused to grant a permit for an anti-Klan rally because, since it had just
banned a Klan rally, there was no need for anyone to express an opinion on the
Klan. This would have been hard to tie in to the Series of Cities question, but
no harder than it was for the city to tie it in to the First Amendment. I'm
pretty sure we both could have pulled it off through some kind of sneering
comparison. But it sort of takes the edge off my urban boasting.

            (For answer to series,
turn your monitor upside down. Or see bottom of page.)

            
               Over 6 Billion Served
Answer
            

            Tokyo completes the list in ascending order of the
world's five largest metropolitan areas, coming in with more than 28 million
people.

            Population buffs know
that last week marked the arrival of the world's 6 billionth child. (So if you
had Oct. 12, 1999, Slovenca Vladic, Sarajevo, in the pool, come by and collect
your prize.) Some population fun facts from Earth Action Network:

            

               It took all of human history to 1800 to reach the first billion.

               The world's population has doubled since 1960.

               Baby No. 5 billion was born in 1987, and he still leaves his stuff all over
the floor, unless he was born in Africa or Asia, in which case he probably has
no stuff. And no floor.

               Twenty percent of the world's population owns 80 percent of its wealth, a
gap that is widening.

               Rates of growth are declining except in the poorest parts of the world,
particularly Africa.

               In Africa, half the population is under 18.

               Africa has one doctor for every 10,000 people.

               Family planning has been successful in slowing the rate of growth, but
there is resistance from America where some Republicans oppose these programs.
Congressman Christopher Smith, R-N.J., calls birth control pills "baby
pesticides."

            

            
                 Augmented Quotations
Extra
            

            (Each final sentence
added by News Quiz.)

            

               "When you mention that it's a Christian game, people assume there's no
violence. So I remind them about the Crusades and the Inquisition, then I set
them on fire: The witch must die."-- Robin Westmoreland, designer of "The War
in Heaven," a violent Christian computer game
               

               "Remember that magical moment when your daughter's eyes widened to meet her
favorite characters live on stage? With all that delight and wonder, it's an
experience you'll both remember for the rest of your lives. And now that
unforgettable power and emotion of a live show is available to you and your
company as an extraordinary new marketing tool. That's right: At last there's a
way to turn her delight and wonder into real money!"-- full-page ad for SFX
Entertainment
               

               "Let's face it, when you have angels fighting demons, it is going to be
controversial. Particularly if the angels are topless babes with machine guns,
like in the Bible."-- Andrew Lunstad, chief programmer for "The War in
Heaven"
               

               "The changes are unbelievable. People keep talking about crime and
corruption and not about the amazing things that have happened here. You can't
believe the merchandise in the stores and the shopping centers. And that more
than makes up for the collapse of the health-care system, the declining life
expectancy, the resurgent anti-Semitism, the militant nationalism, and the
fighting in Chechnya."-- Donald Kendall, the man who brought Pepsi Cola to
the Soviet Union, applauding the transition to capitalism
               

               "As you progress down the evil path, you have to do things that are more
and more distasteful, from blasphemy to striking a praying angel. Actually, the
angel is so stuck-up and holier-than-thou that it's kind of fun to kick his
goddamn ass."-- Andrew Lunstad, again, describing some details of his
God-inspired computer game
               

               "I truly feel that God called me to do this. And to make those drunken
rambling midnight phone calls to Bea Arthur: The temptress must die!"--More
from that Andrew Lunstad, who is also one of the co-founders of the software
design firm Eternal Warriors
               

            

            
               Signs That the '60s Are
Finally Over Ongoing Extra
            

            "The Who Join Together for Corporate
Event"-- Reuters headline
            

            Participants are invited
to submit other actual news items that drive the final nail into the coffin of
that turbulent decade. Results to run Thursday, if there are results, which I'm
not so sure, because this may be too narrow a question, but we'll see.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The anti-Hillary
backlash, assuming there ever was a, you know, lash.

            
               More Series
            

            First initial of each number counting up from One.
Stops on the Broadway local.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Barak's Hard Place

            What a difference a plane ride makes. The Israel I
left on Sunday was a nation queasy about peace talks and anxious about its new
prime minister, Ehud Barak. Barak's governing coalition was already squabbling
viciously, a party allied with Barak had splintered and collapsed, the
opposition had called for a no-confidence vote, West Bank and Golan settlers
were readying PR campaigns against Barak's peace schemes, and my in-laws were
shouting at the television every time Barak came on the screen: "He wants to
give it all away!"

            But landing in
Washington on Monday, I touched down in the middle of Barak Euphoria. During
his U.S. visit this week, Barak is traveling not by limousine but on a cushion
of perfumed air. The Israel Policy Forum's new poll of American Jews finds
almost universal support for Barak and his peace proposals. His American visit
includes a triumphal march through the Sunday talk shows, backslapping meetings
with the U.S. president and vice president, and glowing newspaper profiles.
Washington has rarely seemed giddier about a foreign visitor: American papers
have suggested that "peace is just around the corner," that Israel is united
behind its new chief, that final rapprochement with the Palestinians, Syrians,
and Lebanese is just a matter of proofreading the treaties and scheduling a few
ceremonial handshakes in the Rose Garden.

            This discontinuity between the thrill in the air here and
the "facts on the ground" there (to use a favorite Israelism) is striking and
worrisome. America seems to be mistaking the opportunity of peace talks for the
reality of a peace treaty. "The challenge facing Barak in the face of this
euphoria is the danger of unrealistic expectations," says Tom Smerling,
director of the Israel Policy Forum's Washington office.

            True, Barak's election is
a welcome event for Israel and its Arab neighbors. Benjamin Netanyahu was
widely mistrusted and despised by Israelis, and universally mistrusted and
despised by Arabs. A majority of Israelis (admittedly a narrow one) favors
peace talks, and Barak is the best negotiator Israel could send to the table.
He has constructed a broad coalition of pro-peace parties. He has assuaged
Israelis by presenting a hard vision of peace: Barak's peace with the
Palestinians will be a divorce, not a marriage (as former Prime Minister Shimon
Peres imagined). But while Barak may be the best prime minister to bring peace,
that does not mean peace will come. Enormous obstacles remain, obstacles that
an exultant America should stop and remember.

            1 The chasm between Israeli and Palestinian visions of
peace. Peace with Syria is a (relatively) easy matter for Israel. Israel
will surrender the Golan (except for a surveillance base), the territory will
be demilitarized, and Syria will stop Hezbollah guerillas from operating in
South Lebanon.

            The Palestinian problem is much more difficult.
Barak and Arafat are willing to conduct final negotiations, but that
does not mean their positions can be reconciled. Barak may have been elected
largely because he was not Netanyahu, but Barak's publicly stated peace
proposals are similar to Netanyahu's. The Palestinians demand: all the West
Bank, Jerusalem as their capital, the right of 1948 and 1967 refugees to
return, full statehood, and Israeli withdrawal from settlements. Barak rejects
all these conditions, except perhaps statehood.

            Even the most optimistic
Middle East analysts succumb to paralysis when they try to resolve these
disagreements. Barak is likely to concede the Palestinians a capital just
outside Jerusalem and to allow some refugees to return to the West Bank (though
not to Israel proper), but he certainly won't give up all the West Bank or even
a square inch of Jerusalem. The Palestinians, who grabbed the moral high ground
when Netanyahu sabotaged negotiations, have so far shown little willingness to
moderate their demands. The Israelis and the Palestinians (understandably)
delayed resolving these issues until final status talks because they were
intractable. Now final status talks have arrived and, lo and behold, the issues
are still intractable. Already some are predicting the "final" talks won't be
final at all: Israel and the Palestinians will again kick the questions of
Jerusalem and refugees down the road.

            
2 Heightened Arab-Jewish tension. The
mutual loathing and mistrust that divides Israelis and Palestinians is bad
enough already, but the peace process promises to exacerbate it. Serious peace
negotiations are expected to spark anti-Jewish terrorism by Palestinian
extremists bent on sabotaging a half-a-loaf agreement. Jewish extremists will
be no happier. Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank may leave Jewish
settlements encircled by Palestinian territory. Surrounding well-armed and
enraged Jewish settlers with Palestinian land is a recipe for disaster.
Anti-Jewish terrorism during the peace talks of the mid-'90s contributed to the
Peres government's defeat. Barak's fragile coalition is equally vulnerable if
terrorism or settler violence surges. Support for peace could dissolve.

            3 Heightened Jewish-Jewish tension. The peace process
also endangers intra-Jewish relations, which are already fraught. Religious
Jews are feuding with secular Jews. Sephardic Jews are battering the Ashkenazi
establishment about decades of discrimination. Russian immigrants are fighting
with the Orthodox rabbis. Any Palestinian agreement will probably require Barak
to remove or consolidate West Bank settlements. Any Syrian agreement will
undoubtedly require Barak to remove all Golan Heights settlements. There are
170,000 Jews on the West Bank and 17,000 in the Golan. Most of them strongly
oppose any plan to uproot them.

            Israel had a nervous
breakdown when Menachem Begin evicted just 5,000 settlers from the Sinai during
the early '80s. Today's settlers, especially West Bankers, are far more
militant than their '80s counterparts. Some religious settlers deny the
authority of the Israeli government and believe it is their biblical duty to
populate the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria"). They will not leave quietly. It
is difficult to conceive how Barak can remove 17,000 folks from the Golan and
thousands more from the West Bank without fracturing his government.

            4 The instability of Syria and the Palestinian
Authority. Syrian strongman Hafez Assad is old and ailing. His son and
heir, Bashar, is inexperienced (he's an ophthalmologist by training). Assad's
ruling Alawites are a tenuous minority, only 11 percent of the population.
Syria's former patron, the Soviet Union, is dead. Syria's economy is totally
broken. As long as Assad lives, he can manage these troubles and keep an
agreement with Israel. But if he dies, it's not clear that Syria can control
Lebanon or that the Golan border will remain peaceful.

            The Palestinian situation is more perilous. Arafat
is also ailing and has no clear successor. His authoritarian rule has prevented
the emergence of future leaders and the development of strong civic and
political institutions. Extremists (such as Hamas) and moderates are already
jockeying for power. The Palestinian economy is a disaster, devastated by
Israeli limits on Palestinians working in Israel. The return of hundreds of
thousands of destitute Palestinian refugees from camps in Lebanon and Jordan
will only compound the economic misery.

            So if Barak gets his final deal with the
Palestinians, Israel may find itself with a new kind of problem: an autonomous
Palestinian state, a stone's throw (literally) from sacred Israeli territory,
that is sinking into Third World poverty, anarchy, and civil war. This could be
a peace, even a good peace, but it won't be cause for euphoria.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Anti-War Semites

            Last
fall, six days after Israel signed a peace agreement with the Palestinian
Authority, a Palestinian terrorist tried to blow up an Israeli school bus.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faulted Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat for failing to stop the bomber and, prodded by outraged Israeli hawks,
began stalling the agreement to death. This week, two days after Arafat and
Israel's new prime minister, Ehud Barak, signed another deal, terrorists struck
again. This time, Israel's minister of justice vouched for Arafat's "commitment
to fighting terror" and urged Israelis to stand with Arafat in "a coalition of
sane people versus the opponents of peace."

            The
words coming out of the Middle East these days are as revolutionary as the
deeds. Barak and his deputies are not merely changing Israel's policy toward
the Palestinians. They are trying to redefine and reconfigure the whole
conflict. Where Netanyahu saw a struggle between Israelis and Palestinians,
Barak perceives a struggle between those who support the peace process and
those who oppose it. In this configuration, Palestinian militants are allies
not of the Palestinian Authority but of Israeli extremists, and terrorism
against Israel is a reason for more collaboration with Arafat, not less.

            
Israeli hawks, invoking the old configuration, blamed this week's attacks on
"the Palestinians" in general. They accused Barak of betraying Israel and
demanded that he suspend the new agreement. But Barak's aides, while affirming
that "no peace process shall prevail over the personal security of the people
of Israel," rejected the premise that the former threatened the latter. They
denied that peace talks were a "zero-sum game," and they dismissed the Israeli
right's equation of terrorism with the Palestinian Authority. "We can't blame
the Palestinian Authority every time there's a terror incident," argued Israeli
Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh.

            From
Barak's perspective, the latest bombings were an attack not on Israel but on
the peace process. "There are elements who are very determined to disrupt the
process through terror and murder. We won't let them," Sneh vowed. "We cannot
dance to the tune of Hamas and Islamic Jihad." Barak's minister of industry
sketched a symbiotic relationship between Palestinian bombers and Israeli
hawks, warning Israeli rightists to "refrain from the kind of fiery rhetoric
they used in the past, which only encourages the terrorists." Conversely,
Israel's chief of military intelligence suggested that the Palestinian
Authority recognized terrorism as a threat to its interests. Barak and his
aides proposed a "joint Israeli-Palestinian fist" against terrorism and
reaffirmed that Israel's "Palestinian partners" were fulfilling their
"commitment to fight against terrorist acts."

            
Palestinian and Israeli Arab officials reciprocated this spin, reiterating
their "policy of zero tolerance for terror" and declaring the bombers their
enemies. Arafat pointed out that his police had arrested numerous terrorist
suspects and confiscated weapons. "Someone who sends a car bomb today is trying
to destroy the hopes of the Palestinian people," a Palestinian official
declared. One Arab member of Israel's parliament charged that the bombers
sought "the collapse of the Palestinian Authority." Another asserted that
Israeli Arabs and Jews shared a commitment to "the law and the democratic rules
of the game. Whoever carried out [the bombings] is enemy number one of the Arab
community."

            Having
defined the conflict this way, Palestinian officials suggested that Israel's
best means of defeating terrorism was to cooperate with the Palestinian
Authority. They accused the "enemies of peace" of staging attacks "aimed at
destroying the entire peace process." "The answer to anyone who tries to
undermine the peace process is that we are determined to continue," proclaimed
senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. "Palestinians and Israelis,
Arabs--everyone in the region has paid so much in the absence of peace. It's
time for reconciliation."

            The
new configuration is beginning to take hold in the Israeli media. "Barak,
Arafat to cooperate in probe of bombings," announced Monday's Jerusalem
Post . "Barak: Car bombs will not derail process," added Ha'aretz ,
juxtaposing Arafat with "anti-peace Palestinians." Op-ed writers cautioned
against "a self-defeating freeze on the peace process," called Arafat a
"partner" in the "fight against terrorism," and observed that "Israeli
terrorists"--namely, mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein and assassin Yigal
Amir--had staged attacks "aimed at halting the peace process." Borrowing the
language of war, the Post called the latest bombings "the first test of
[Barak's] resolve to march toward the final status agreement 'uninterrupted.'
"

            The
American press, too, is adopting this pro-peace/anti-peace analysis of the
conflict. "The explosions will give ammunition to Israel's right wing,"
predicted the Los Angeles Times . The New York Times reported that
"terrorism" was once again challenging the "Israeli-Palestinian relationship."
The Washington Post , inferring that the bombers sought "to sabotage
Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking," stipulated, "Most Palestinians do not support
terror attacks against Israel, which they regard as only impeding progress
toward the tangible benefits of peace."

            
Framing is a transcendent art. It can serve petty advantage or profound reform.
It can be used to achieve goals or to rethink them, to defeat enemies or to
reassess them, to win wars or to stop them. "There is a war going on between
the peace process and terror" in Israel and the Palestinian territories,
political scientist Yaron Ezrhahi told the New York Times . The bombers
"are fighting the peace process because they know it promises to kill terror
once and for all." Is Ezrhahi Israeli or Palestinian? The Times didn't
say. And if he's right, it doesn't matter.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Life Issue, Take 2

            A
month ago, "Frame Game" that Steve Forbes had begun to delete the word
"abortion" from his comments about abortion, substituting the phrase "the life
issue." By talking about "the life issue," Forbes signals to pro-lifers that
he's one of them, while concealing from pro-choicers that he's no longer one of
them.

            Here's
what Forbes said about abortion in his speech at the Iowa straw poll last
weekend:

            
               Now, the issue of life
is one of the most emotional and heartfelt in America. Like you, I am pro-life
and believe in the life amendment. But many in America don't share our goal,
but that doesn't mean we put our principles aside. The highest form of
statesmanship is to find ways to bring people towards our goal. And I believe
that if we move forward with persistence, patience, engaging in a dialogue, we
can change the hearts and minds of the American people. And I believe that if
we do persist, the time will come--I have faith that the time will come when
once again life will be held sacred in our hearts, in our homes, in our
Congress, in our courts, and, yes, in our Constitution.
            

            And
here's what Forbes said about candidates who fudge their positions:

            
               If a candidate won't
tell you where he stands, that means he either doesn't know where he stands or
he doesn't want you to know where he stands, and either one is not good for you
or the American people.
            

            So,
let's try again. Where do you stand on abortion, Mr. Forbes?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 292:&quot;Military-Industrial Cineplex&quot;

            
               Porcine
screenwriter John Milius praises it as "another link between Hollywood and the
military that seems to have broken down over the years." What is
it?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               
                  Tuesday's Question (No. 291)--"Ocelots": Researchers in Dallas
tried ocelot scent and rat feces but neither worked as well as Calvin Klein
Obsession for Men. What were they trying to do?
            

            
"Develop a pheromone so selective that Charlton Heston would have virtually no
chance to take home the prize in his own 'look-alike' contest."-- Gene
Cluster
            

            
"Determine whether or not obsession really does lie between madness and
delusion. Turns out it lies between cat piss and rat poop"-- Flloyd
Elliot
            

            "Give
Liddy Dole shivery fits so that she would muff reporters' questions about her
stance on Medicaid abortion. Obvious Bush campaign dirty trick--and it
worked!"-- Katha Pollitt
            

            "Find
a smell that evoked the atmosphere of lonely bachelors' homes."-- David
Ballard
            

            "Get
me all hot."-- Dennis Cass
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Chris' Wrap-Up
            

            I don't know how Randy does it (Chorus of voices:
"YOU'RE TELLING US!"). For the last three days I've been tempting carpal tunnel
while cutting and then uncutting very funny News Quiz answers. It's hard to
choose, because so many of them make me laugh and laugh until people who should
by all rights fear me barge into my office and tell me to get a grip. In the
end, of course, the Top 5 Quiz slots go to friends or people I owe money, but
that's no reflection on the rest of you. If you don't usually read the second
page of the Quiz you should, and I feel I've been only cheating myself all
these months by just looking for my own name and secret encrypted love talk
from Beth Sherman.

            Colleen Werthmann is
doing a show called "SHE HATES HER SUPERVISOR" next Monday at the Westbeth
Theatre, 151 Bank St., New York. It's free and if you want reservations you can
call (212) 603-1844.

            
               Stimulating
Answer
            

            Researchers at the Dallas Zoo have been looking for
a scent that will encourage their ocelots to breed. "We thought about what
would work with them and used things like rat feces and ocelot scent," says
research curator Dr. Cynthia Bennett. "Then on a lark my research technician
brought in cologne because a lot of other animals like it and we put Obsession
out and our ocelots went wild over it."

            Bennett's team isn't just doing this for kicks,
although I wouldn't put it past them, knowing Bennett, which I don't. They also
want to find a way to create "scent corridors" so that scattered packs of
ocelots, living in the wild, can find each other and mate.

            Sponsoring a highway has
proved to be such a cheap and effective way for corporations and celebrities to
generate good will; maybe these same groups could be encouraged to pony up for
a few miles of scent corridor. I'm just blue-skying here, but wouldn't you feel
a lot better about your phone bill if you saw a sign that said something like,
"The Next Two Miles of Horny Ocelots Are Brought to You by Sprint"?

            
               Quiz Extra
            

            There is no Quiz Extra.
I'm just a substitute. Sit quietly until the bell.

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            George W. Bush, the Dallas Cowboys, the rub of
love.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Culture War

            After the Columbine tragedy, one faction held guns
responsible for the slaughter, and another blamed the culture. Since the guns
question has been debated into the ground, I confine myself here to the culture
question.

            The culture that was blamed for Columbine was never
clearly defined. Its nature was suggested by terms such as "the '60s,"
"liberal," "permissive," "sex and violence," and "Hollywood, television, and
video games," and it was the media that bore most of the complaint. Hollywood
was told to clean up its act, and theater owners were urged to enforce the
ratings system, to avoid exposing young people to sex and violence.

            Then along comes the Midwest assassin, who earlier
this month killed a black man and a Korean-American man and wounded nine other
blacks, Asians, and Jews (coming out of a synagogue). This time around, nobody
is blaming the culture--at least, not the culture that supposedly caused
Columbine.

            The Midwest killings
were categorized as "hate" crimes. Hate crimes include crimes not only against
blacks, Jews, and Asians but also against gays, "the government" (Oklahoma
City), and the technological age (the Unabomber). They are not crimes against
an individual known personally to the perpetrator or against whom he has a
grievance. (If a man shoots his brother-in-law that is not called a hate crime,
although there is probably hate involved.) They are crimes in protest against
the culture, intended to make a statement of their hostility to the
culture.

            Of course, nobody can blame the '60s culture or Hollywood
for these crimes. The '60s' slogan was "Make love, not war," and the Hollywood
culture is a culture of acceptance--of blacks, Jews, and gays. In fact, it is
that very culture of acceptance that infuriates these madmen.

            The Columbine killers, on
the other hand, shot people they knew, some of whom they had real or imagined
grievances with. But they also fancied themselves as Nazis. They were making a
deadly statement against the American dream, of respectable, middle-class,
suburban life. To that degree Columbine was also a hate crime.

            According to one poll, in the two weeks bracketing the
Columbine incident, the percentage of Americans who thought that the country
was on the wrong track rose from 49 percent to 60 percent. This remarkable
swing is commonly attributed to shock over the shooting. While I can understand
the national bewilderment the event caused, I cannot understand why it should
be interpreted as a judgment against the way the country is going. Two
estranged young men who acquired Nazi attitudes--which they certainly did not
get from Hollywood--made a deadly protest against the way the country is going.
This is not a sign that something is going wrong, except for the ready
availability of guns.

            If you compare the
murders linked to hate crimes with the murders linked to street crimes, the
most obvious thing you notice is how the number of street killings dwarfs that
of hate killings. But despite this, street killings do not cause revulsion
against the way America is going, though they may more legitimately raise a
question about the media than hate killings do because they more resemble
Hollywood depictions. Most cinemaland murders are committed by bad guys whose
motives are pragmatic, not symbolic. Also, these murders are marked by
indifference: The perpetrator does not value life, and he feels neither guilt
nor glory at having killed someone. The hate killer values life and thinks he
is committing a great deed and making a grand statement when he kills.

            Despite these similarities, one should be cautious about
assigning Hollywood responsibility for the culture in which street crime
flourishes. The screen is not the only place--and probably not the most
influential place--where young people acquire ideas of what is acceptable
behavior. They learn these ideas at home, in school, at the shopping mall, on
the street corner, and everywhere else where they observe life and people.
Young people in the ghetto don't have to go to the movies to hear shooting.
What they see on the screen seems real to them because it conforms to what they
see in life. Otherwise it would have no more effect on them than seeing the
feud and swordplay between the Montagues and the Capulets.

            When I was a boy in
Detroit we used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoon and watch the
violence between cowboys and Indians. We knew it wasn't real. Though we played
cowboys and Indians in the street, we did not kill any real Indians. The
reaction of Native Americans to those movies may have been different.

            There is something in American attitudes that condones or
glorifies murder, at least more so than in other countries. If we want to
change that attitude, Hollywood should not be the main place we look.
(Remember, most of the rest of the world watches Hollywood movies without
engaging in orgies of violence.) We have to try to do something about the real
world in which children are growing up. The crucial part of that world is the
home where parents relate to children. What to do about that, I don't know.
Probably there is little that public policy can do. But the fixations on the
media and on the '60s culture do not help in the search for remedies.

            It would also help our thinking if we could avoid
the "sex and violence" mantra. Sex on the screen, or the abundance and
explicitness of it, has only a distant connection, if any, with the homicides
that worry us. Context isn't everything, but it's worth noting that the TV
channel that shows the most violence is the History Channel, with its endless
replaying of World War II: I have not heard anyone say that is an encouragement
to crime.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Brides To Blush At 

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Just a quick comment
on the poor advice you gave to a woman inquiring about a . I married someone
who was briefly married before. However, I was a first-time bride. It is my
contention that if you accept an invitation to attend an expensive black-tie
affair that you should bring a gift of at least the value of your meal. I was
outraged and shocked that anyone would give a gift of less than that. If they
did not attend, a similar, albeit somewhat less expensive gift would have been
acceptable. I think it is incredibly poor taste, rude, and offensive for anyone
to bring a "token" gift--especially if one party has never been married. Shame
on you for promoting bad manners.
            

            

               --RS
            

            Dear R$,

            Prudie is guessing you
subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine, because you are certainly a
mercenary. Prudie also suspects that your husband's prior bride may have
snagged some fabulous presents, thereby irritating you because you
feel--correctly--that people will not spring for two terrific presents within a
short period of time. What is actually in incredibly poor taste is to mentally
make a quid pro quo--the quid being the meal, the quo being the gift. Presents,
my dear, have to do with one's finances and one's feelings--not the cost of a
meal. And how, exactly, by your lights, are guests supposed to know the
cost of the meal? Do you, by any chance, suggest having it engraved under the
répondez, s'il vous plaît ?

            
--Prudie, alarmedly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My co-worker
recently announced her wedding and mentioned that everyone should be receiving
their invitations soon. I decided to give her an elaborate wedding shower and
to include all the women (and their spouses) who work with us. I coordinated
this event from A to Z. Everyone chipped in $30 per couple for a travel
certificate to be used for their honeymoon. About 60 people attended and the
event went off without a hitch. My friend was extremely grateful. My question
is: Am I still responsible for buying a wedding gift? I wasn't sure if it would
be in poor taste for me to consider my efforts and contribution to the shower
enough.
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Unsure
            

            Dear Un,

            Ah yes, we are still in
June, the month for brides. Your query involves some interesting concepts. We
must assume that the woman for whom you organized the shower was a close friend
... otherwise, why else go to all that trouble? Given that your efforts
involved a lot of time (and perhaps paying for the party) and afforded the
couple a wonderful celebratory evening, along with $900 to apply to their
honeymoon expenses, Prudie feels you have given them a grand wedding gift. Why
don't you write a note telling the bridal couple that you had such fun
arranging their party and that you and all the guests at the shower will have
fond thoughts of them while they are away honeymooning. That way they will know
that was the gift you wanted to give them.

            
--Prudie, sentimentally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               In reference to the
letter from "" who was worried about children catching the bouquet: I was
married last summer and gave all the children under 12 a chance to catch a
small stuffed animal before I threw the bouquet to the older girls. This worked
out really well, and I highly recommend it to anyone! That way, my maid of
honor could catch the bouquet without my 6-year-old cousin tripping
her.
            

            

               --CC
            

            Dear C,

            Sweet. Smart. And what
fun if a youngster misunderstands the custom just a little and imagines she
will grow up to marry Winnie the Pooh.

            
--Prudie, delightedly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am alienated from all my brothers and sisters
(except one) for good reason. We do not communicate. No problem there. But now
their children--my nieces and nephews--are beginning to make overtures to me
... e-mails, letters, invitations to graduations, requests to visit, to write
recommendation letters, etc. This even though I have tried to keep my addresses
and phone numbers secret. 
               Am I being unreasonable to extend my desire
to remain incommunicado to the next generation? Don't advise me to make up with
my siblings. I am quite happy to be "divorced" from them.
            

            
               Thanks.
            

            

               --Pat
            

            Dear Pat,

            Are you very rich, or
famous? Mention of your "addresses and phone numbers," along with all these
young people lurching in your direction would suggest there is an attraction
beyond the obvious. You sound a bit misanthropic, to be honest, but assuming
you have supportable reasons for ringing off from many in your family, Prudie
sees no reason to cut off the next generation. It is a possibility that the
discarded siblings have put their children up to warming up the situation, but
that seems slight. If you have no interest in children, or these particular
children, decline the entreaties ... but as gently as you can.

            --Prudie, delicately

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Martha Stewart

            Here is a (partial) list of objects that Martha
Stewart has gilded on recent TV shows: pomegranates, pumpkins, cookies,
chocolate truffles, wrapping paper, oak leaves, acorns, and--no kidding--okra.
The only thing Martha has not gilded is the lily. But wait till it's back in
season.

            Martha has proved that
alchemy is not impossible: Brush enough gold paint on enough flora, and
eventually you'll make real gold. Tuesday's initial public offering for Martha
Stewart Living Omnimedia--Omnimedia, has there ever been a more perfect
name?--killed on Wall Street, rising from $18 to $52 before settling at $36.
She arrived at the stock exchange that morning toting a tray of brioches. She
left that evening holding $1.2 billion (in stock, not dough). Investors bought
a brilliant company: Omnimedia--a Web site, mail-order operation, two TV shows,
two magazines, Kmart partnership, and 27 books--netted $24 million last year
from the gospel of Martha. Kmart sold more than $750 million worth of
Martha-branded products in 1998. Her 1997 decision to divorce Time Warner and
go solo--a split that cost her more than $50 million--has never looked
better.

            What was missing from Martha's IPO was the sniping and
mockery that has dogged all of her ventures. Traditionally, Martha has been
battered by three criticisms. First, she is simply ludicrous. You could not
imagine better comic material than her ideas of "living": the "midnight omelet
dinner for 1,000"; the fruit baskets the size of a Chevy; the advice (in this
month's magazine) to make your own envelopes out of wood veneer, folding them
with a bone knife. Parodies barely exaggerate when they imagine Martha turning
water into wine ("a lovely Merlot") or manufacturing condoms from her own lamb.
A second and more thoughtful batch of critics has charged her with encouraging
class division, promoting soulless domestic conformism, and undermining working
women by making them feel domestically inadequate.

            The final criticism has
been personal. As her unauthorized biography, Just Desserts , contends,
Martha is an icy, horrible person who abused her (now ex-) husband, ignores her
daughter, belittles her mother, sues her gardener for pennies, plagiarizes
recipes from better cooks, and humiliates her staff. Her fabled "Remembering"
columns are a hash of bunkum and hyperbole. The persona she cultivates--the
warm, welcoming hostess with a close-knit family--is a fraud.

            These criticisms have subsided partly because of America's
culture of financial idolatry. Anyone who's worth a billion on paper is worth
sucking up to. Martha is benefiting from parody fatigue as well. She has been a
figure of fun since Entertaining was published in 1982, so all the jokes
are old. And the vitality of the economy is inoculating her. Fripperies that
seemed obscene during the early '90s recession are quite modest by the
standards of 1999.

            But the critical silence
may also represent a long-overdue recognition that Martha is, as she would say,
a Good Thing. In a Tuesday TV interview, she called herself a "teacher. ... We
are offering information, high-quality, well-researched, how-to information."
That is a fair description. What she does is not silly at all, or at least no
more silly than most advice magazines. Her magazines and TV shows retain just
enough nonsense to make them irksome ("sew your own pashmina from home-raised
llamas," and the like), but she supplies valuable instruction about the mundane
tasks of life. Martha Stewart Living may be the most useful magazine
this side of Consumer Reports . This month's issue, for example, offers
excellent advice about making spicy popcorn snacks, cleaning ovens, and storing
rugs and china, among other subjects. Her weekly CBS morning segment packs more
helpful cooking information into six minutes than most cooking shows do in an
hour. It is not false consciousness that makes tens of millions of people
follow Martha every month. It is her good advice.

            But the great achievement of Martha's domestic gospel is
not practical but moral. She has a puritanical sensibility. She believes in the
uplifting power of work. She instructs you so that you will know how to create
objects yourself , grow plants yourself , learn home repair
yourself , cook food yourself . Doing something well is good and
liberating and fulfilling. It strengthens friendships and families: When I saw
her making waffles the other day, it made me want to make waffles this Sunday.
If I make waffles on Sunday, I will invite the downstairs neighbors up to eat
them, and that is undoubtedly a Good Thing.

            Martha practices
materialism, but not consumerism. She believes, rightly, that it makes
you wiser and happier to cook your own applesauce than to buy it. Well, you may
say, it's easy for her to make homemade applesauce. That's her job. But she did
it when it wasn't her job, too. Even if most viewers rarely practice anything
Martha preaches--she calls such slackers "Martha Dreamers" as opposed to
"Martha Doers"--she is still a worthy goad.

            Her DIY credo makes Martha democratically snobbish. She
hews to a country-house sensibility, but anyone can follow it. It
doesn't cost much, because you do it yourself. If a middle-class Polish girl
like Martha can blossom into an affected, Breck-girl faux-WASP, you can
too!

            The final, and most
important, reason Martha is escaping criticism is that Martha Stewart the
person has been separated from Martha Stewart the brand. The principal topic of
discussion about the Martha Stewart Living IPO was Martha Stewart's death.
Analysts speculated what would happen to Omnimedia if Martha were hit by a bus
or cab (or succumbed to an accident in "the potting shed," as the New York
Observer 's Christopher Byron nicely put it). There were two answers:
First, the company has bought a $67 million life-insurance policy on her.
Second, Martha Stewart the brand can survive without Martha Stewart the person,
as Ralph Lauren the brand survives without Ralph Lauren selling every shirt.
(Martha does not appear at all in the current issue of Living .) The
zooming stock price is evidence that Wall Street can distinguish Martha from
her product.

            We should do the same. Critics have savaged her fraudulent
persona and monomaniacal perfectionism for a long time. There is a subtle
sexism in that: The female domestic tycoon is obliged to behave better than the
guys. (This is why Oprah's private life is examined more carefully than David
Letterman's.)

            Fortunately, commerce has trumped personality.
Martha is finally being treated as the CEO of a company called Omnimedia, not
as a bitchy hausfrau. In the age of the divine entrepreneur, no one cares how
badly you treat your kid. We admire perfectionist monomania in Internet
tycoons, so why not in Martha? Politicians get away with advertising bogus
family bliss; Martha should too. On television, Martha shows us how to make a
romantic dinner for the husband she doesn't have, host a party for the kids she
doesn't like, bake muffins for the neighbors who hate her. But those are her
tragedies, not our business (or Wall Street's). The muffins are still tasty,
and that's what matters.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P>Is the &quot;Sensation&quot; Art Worth the Fuss?</P>

            

               
                  Click here to view the entire "Sensation" show
online.
               
            

            I think you may be aware, Deborah, that "Sensation"
had outings in Europe before arriving in the New World (you rap my knuckles for
a supposedly unseen critique). I saw the show more than enough times at
London's Royal Academy in 1997 to form an enduring impression of it, and you
will note that I confined specific criticism in my letter to a painting ;
unlike sculptures or installations, a painting is essentially the same object
wherever it's exhibited. Ofili's work was featured in depth last year at the
Tate Gallery's exhibition for the 1998 Turner Prize, which the artist won.

            I like your suggestive angle on the negritude of
Ofili's Madonna. And your anger at Giuliani for picking on a black artist may
well be justified. (You'd think he'd have learned a lesson about taking
pot-shots at Africans in the outer boroughs.) But even if we accept that
Ofili's dung motif is not to be read as shit but as an exotic artefact, what
about those porno-cutouts? Of course, we don't want to get caught up in the
intentional fallacy, and a work of art of strength should be open to a variety
of interpretations, but I think there's a danger of missing the plot (and
incidentally patronizing African culture) if we deny Ofili's Madonna its
subversiveness, iconoclasm, and sheer naughtiness.

            It's good, too, that we should get straight on the
case of national differences between U.K. and U.S. neo-conceptualism. You are
quite right that the Brits are dead against coming over as theoretically
highbrow. If anything, they veer in the opposite direction--"dumb enough to be
a conceptualist," to paraphrase Duchamp--but is banality the only antidote to
aridity? Almost as painful to my sensibility as the pomposity of
Derrida-quoting Whitney Program graduates is the smarmy, too-clever-by-half wit
of the YBAs. What on earth is one supposed to get out of Simon Patterson's
The Great Bear , which appropriates the London Underground map (a classic
of '30s graphic design incidentally), replacing the tube stops with a seemingly
random array of celebrities, historic and current? I don't think that
meaningless pretension is any less offensive than the over-meaningful
variety.

            "Damien as dangerous" is a new one on me. In London
he is known as an affable restaurateur. (His urinal in the gents at
Pharmacy,which he owns, a vitrine stuffed with detritus, is a masterpiece of
interior décor with attitude .) He is, for sure, the leader of the YBA
pack, even if he has been surpassed in sheer nastiness by his colleagues, the
Chapman twins, Sarah Lucas, Alain Miller. Hirst's is a stylish
nihilism--abjection on ice. Sure it references American minimalism, and sends
it up, but that's hardly his unique achievement: American avant-garde art has
been doing that almost since Judd and Morris, the pioneer minimalists, hit the
scene. And do we really think Hirst's shark in the tank would have been
possible without Jeff Koons?

            You say there are some
dogs in this show. I say there are a few pussy cats. I take some credit for
writing the first review of Jenny Saville, in the London Times , which
brought her work to the attention of Mr. Saatchi. I'm also on record as a fan
of Fiona Rae, and even have a soft spot for Keith Coventry, irritating though
he is. But the cats' gentle purring is drowned out by the dogs' hysterical
yapping. At least that was so in the way the show was packaged in London. I'm
ready for a miraculous transformation at the Brooklyn Museum, however. And to
be converted by your enthusiasm.

            
Best,

            
David

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Shot From the Pews

            
               Cross Check
            

            I agree with most of Steve Chapman's conclusions in
"." I will say unashamedly that I am a "born-again" Christian. But I will also
say that you are very correct in pointing out the basic statistical mistake of
implying causation from correlation. I think it is naive to think that simply
posting copies of the Ten Commandments is going to solve the nation's crime
problem.

            I also think it is damaging to the faith to try and
"use" religion to solve social problems. God becomes a means to an end instead
of an end in Himself. He is not a magical potion that you can sprinkle on your
problems to make them go away. I do think that genuine faith and a relationship
with God will cure violence and murder and such; however, imposing religion on
people is not the answer. I think one of the reasons there is a positive
correlation between religion and crime in the States is because large portions
of so-called "Christians" in this country are nominal at best.

            Also, I think that the
number of churchgoers in a given area is relatively inconsequential in this
whole equation. If someone could prove that it was the Christians committing
all the crimes, then we would have an interesting situation. But if that is not
the case, then it makes no difference how many Christians there are. The real
issue then becomes the motivations for the population of criminals, which are
things such as the social structure and the justice system.

            -- Jonathan
Minter
            

            
Lynchburg, Va.

            
               In Order To Form an
Imperfect Union
            

            It is wrong, I think, to suggest, as William
Saletan does in "Frame Game" (""), that our current health-care crisis is
caused by the unreasonable expectations of the people who seek medical care.
The reason "patients expect better care than they're willing to pay for" is
that they have already paid for it. Medical advances are made through
government subsidy: directly, through tax-supported universities, or
indirectly, in the form of tax write-offs for private-sector research and
development. The hospitals that we go to and our doctors practice in
essentially all receive some level of governmental funding. Our doctors
attended medical school with the aid of federally guaranteed student loans or
outright grants. We paid for the ability to provide the best care in the world,
and we continue to pay far more, in terms of percentage of gross average annual
individual income, than any other Western society.

            Most of the doctors I know are hard-working,
compassionate professionals. They certainly provide an essential service. They
all make a ton of dough, and I don't know anyone who begrudges them that. The
current medical payment scheme in the United States makes the very best medical
care available but is also an active barrier to many who seek basic care and
cannot afford it. Radical reform is clearly called for but will never happen as
long as free-market principles control access to this service. Our current
dilemma has come about because we tried to shift cost control away from the
service providers. This has had the effect of driving many capable physicians
out of their own practices and into exactly the kind of alienating, impersonal,
bean-counting HMO setting that has caused the American Medical Association to
try and become a union.

            It is sad that the best
technical health-care system in the world is delivered so poorly that the
professionals charged with caring for us feel compelled to sacrifice their
independence in this way. Unionization is a bad idea that will only make things
worse.

            -- William C.
Altreuter
            

            
Buffalo, N.Y.

            
               Mistaken
Condemnation
            

            Eric Alterman's in your letters column of June 30
that my colleague Harvey Klehr and I felt the need to "condemn" a Jacob
Heilbrunn article in the New Republic is mistaken. We disagreed with a
judgment Heilbrunn advanced in his essay, but disagreement is not condemnation.
Indeed, that one disagreement aside, we have a very high regard for Heilbrunn's
writings. In view of the fact that in the letter to which Alterman referred, we
clearly expressed our appreciation of other remarks Mr. Heilbrunn made in his
essay, no responsible commentator could use the characterization used by
Alterman.

            
-- John Earl Haynes
            

            
Kensington, Md.

            
               
                  Eric Alterman
replies: I dunno. This seems a semantic issue at best. Heilbrunn's article
attacked Yale's Annals of Communism series and the decision by its editorial
director, Jonathan Brent, not to offer Heilbrunn's old professor, Vladimir
Brovkin, to edit a series of books about the Gulag. He then accused Brent and
Yale of having "caved" in to the ethos of "historical correctness" governed by
"revisionists who dismiss as cold war humbug the notion that the Soviet Union
was a totalitarian country."
            

            
               Klehr and Haynes wrote a strong letter in
support of Brent's "editorial leadership" and of Brent himself. They maintained
that he had "steadfastly insisted on the academic integrity of the series and
staunchly defended [their] work." In other words, virtually everything
Heilbrunn wrote about Brent and his alleged cowardice--as well as his many
criticisms of the Yale series--was wrong. Haynes says this does not constitute
a "condemnation." Fine, I'll grant it if he feels the distinction to be an
important one. I only hope no one ever decides to demonstrate his or her "high
regard" for my writings in this peculiar fashion.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Nuclear Terror in Japan

            Japan's major nuclear
accident was the world's top story Friday and reignited the debate about
nuclear safety. In Japan, Asahi
Shimbun painted a picture of great confusion and official incompetence,
prominently reporting the government's admission that it reacted too slowly and
that there wasn't enough staff at the site to handle the crisis. In one report,
Asahi Shimbun said villagers close to the Tokaimura uranium processing
plant heard on television they had been told to stay indoors when in fact they
had received no instructions whatsoever. When they telephoned local government
offices in a panic, asking to be checked for radiation in the homes they had
been ordered not to leave, they were told the checks were being done only at
the village community center.

            
In another story, the paper said the disaster would deal "a serious blow" to
the nation's much-criticized nuclear energy policy. It quoted officials as
saying that the Tokaimura plant wasn't equipped to handle a critical mass
accident and lacked automatic controls over the flow of nuclear fuel. In an
editorial, Asahi Shimbun noted that Japanese civilians had never before
been exposed to such radiation from a nuclear facility. Calling for an
exhaustive inquiry, the paper said, "The future of the nation's nuclear energy
program now rests in large measure on how the government responds."

            
In European comment, it was often recalled that Japan is the only country to
have suffered the effects of an atomic bomb. In La Repubblica of Rome, the
paper's Washington correspondent, wrote: "The Japanese century ends with the
return of Hiroshima ... to undermine the dominant belief of Japanese culture,
the certainty that it's enough to obey one's mother and one's superiors for
everything to turn out all right. It crushes the heart of someone who knows
Japan a little and loves it a lot to see technicians and workers from the
Tokaimura plant come out of the building infected by the out-of-control chain
reaction, bowing and apologizing for their betrayal of their company, like the
soldiers abandoned on Pacific islands for 30 years who asked the emperor's
pardon for having lost the war."

            
The 50 th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was the
world's second story Friday. In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post
said China has changed beyond recognition over the past
half-century: "A backward and semi-feudal nation has been transformed into the
world's fastest-growing economy, and is well on the way to achieving superpower
status." But the paper deplored the country's continuing "intolerance of
dissent" and said that until it reverses its official verdict on the Tiananmen
massacre "it will be hard for China to take its place among the ranks of the
world's great nations." Calling for political reform and free elections, the
paper said: "Standing still is not an option. China has achieved much in recent
years. The challenge now for the leadership is to build on these achievements
and prove that it can win a popular mandate through the ballot box."

            
In Australia, the Sydney
Morning Herald led Friday with the death of a 5-year-old East Timorese
boy after he was hit by a U.N. food parcel. He was struck during the same
emergency aid drop that caused a 3-year-old boy to have his leg amputated.
Airdrops to refugees were cancelled after these incidents, and the United
Nations has started taking food into remote regions by road, the paper
said.

            
A claim by two scientists--one French and one American--to have found proof
that Neanderthal man was a cannibal was fronted in Le Figaro of Paris Friday.
In a cave in the Ardeche near Valence, Alban Defleur of the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseilles and Tim White of the University of California at
Berkeley discovered 100,000-year-old human bones mixed up with those of
animals, all of them looking like the leftovers from dinner. Searching for
meaning in this discovery, the Times of London concluded in an editorial that "[a]t the very
least the wary Brit might understand the feral roots of French cuisine--of the
steak tartare seeping blood onto the Limoges, of ortolans devoured in one
bone-shattering mouthful. One might even dare at last to enter a Paris
restaurant and order a waiter."

            
The Independent reported the launching at Cambridge University of a student
campaign to fire the duke of Edinburgh from his position as the university's
chancellor on the grounds that he is a "bigot and racist." He caused outrage
during a factory visit last August when he said that a defective fuse box "must
have been installed by an Indian." In India, the Asian Age fronted
Forbes magazine's disclosure that three American entrepreneurs of Indian
origin have achieved billionaire status.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Grandma

            As spy
fever once again gripped Britain after the confession of an 87-year-old
great-grandmother that she had given British nuclear secrets to the Russians,
the Times of
India said Monday that "[l]ike diamonds, it seems, spies are forever."
The paper said in an editorial: "Any hope of some respite for the world from
the brigade of 'trench-coats and snoopers,' especially after the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, have been dashed. The world's
secret service agencies have apparently merely shifted their emphasis to the
new 'growth area' of industrial spying." It quoted Pierre Marion, a former head
of the French secret service agency, as saying, "Post-Cold War spying is happy
spying--no ideology is involved."

            In
Britain, however, it was back to the Cold War as the press raked over new
revelations of Communist treachery. They came thick and fast, starting Saturday
in the Times
of London, which disclosed that Melita Norwood (code name "Hola") had passed
atomic secrets to the Soviet Union for 40 years while she worked as a secretary
for the Tube Alloys project, a deliberately anodyne term for Britain's nuclear
weapons program. The Times linked her to the notorious "Cambridge coven"
of five male spies--Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and
John Cairncross. "The 'sixth man,' we now know, was a woman," it said.

            On
Sunday its sister paper, the Sunday Times , revealed that a former Scotland Yard
officer--John Symonds, 64 (code name "Scot")--had been paid by the KGB to
seduce and recruit women working for Western embassies. Symonds had been hired
in Morocco, where he fled in 1969 after being named as part of a ring of
corrupt metropolitan police officers who had taken bribes. The Sunday
Telegraph 's spy
scoops: The KGB ran a "dirty tricks" campaign to persuade Americans that
President John F. Kennedy was murdered by the CIA; the agency planned to maim
Russian ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalya Makarova for defecting to the
West; it launched a series of plots against Pope John Paul II; and it planted
KGB agents as assistants to three successive secretaries-general of the United
Nations. All this information was contained in "the Mitrokhin archive"--a vast
haul of documents smuggled out of Russia by Vasili Mitrokhin, 77, a former KGB
archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. His book The Mitrokhin Archive:
The KGB in Europe and the West is being serialized in the Times this
week.

            The
main question in British press editorials was whether Melita Norwood should be
prosecuted for her treachery. The liberal Observer
wrestled Sunday with the logic of applauding the arrest of 83-year-old Chilean
Gen. Augusto Pinochet (as the paper had done) while objecting to the
imprisonment of an 87-year-old woman. But it said that "Mrs. Norwood's betrayal
is more than 50 years old and was conducted in a paranoid Cold War world whose
ideological extremism now seems antique and all but incomprehensible."
Furthermore, she "killed nobody" and "was fired by ideological commitment
rather than malevolence." It went on: "Memories of Pinochet's mass killings and
tortures, by contrast, are all too fresh, and the precedent of his arrest has
international ramifications." Monday's Daily Telegraph , however,
ridiculed the "predictably forgiving" opinion of the
Observer . "Now that Mrs Norwood ... has confessed, without remorse, her
betrayal of her country to the century's most brutal dictator ('Old Joe'),
should she be tried, condemned and jailed?" it asked. "Of course, and the
sooner the better."

            But in
most of the British press, as around the world, the main story Monday was
Indonesia's capitulation to international pressure by agreeing to allow a
foreign peacekeeping force into East Timor. This was generally welcomed, but
with qualifications. The Independent of London said the West had responded too slowly.
"Not until torching and killing had spread throughout East Timor did President
Clinton act," it said in an editorial. "As for Tony Blair, crusader for
universal values, theologian of the just war in Kosovo, he has been conspicuous
by his silence." In Paris, Le Figaro said Monday that the U.N. peacekeepers would arrive
so late in East Timor that they wouldn't be firemen--just gravediggers.

            The
Jakarta Post focused on the proposed establishment of
an international tribunal to investigate "the alleged involvement of the
Indonesian military in very serious human rights violations in East Timor." It
quoted Mary Robinson, the U.N. commissioner for human rights, as saying that
the international community must hold Indonesia accountable for atrocities
committed there. In an editorial, the Jakarta Post called the
international outcry against Indonesia justified. "The Indonesian government,
which has been entrusted with the task of maintaining peace and order, did
virtually nothing as pro-Indonesia militias in East Timor launched a massive
terror campaign against their own populace, killing pro-independence
supporters, forcing hundreds of thousands to leave their homes, and destroying
buildings and other property," the paper said. In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald warned,
"[T]he evil that is done in East Timor cannot be hidden, at least not for long"
and that "ultimately there will be a calling to account for the rape of East
Timor."

            In New
Zealand, where world leaders have been discussing the crisis at the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, the Press of Christchurch put
some of the blame on Australia. The country should have anticipated the
opposition President B.J. Habibie would face after the vote for independence in
East Timor. "Indonesia, disastrously, was allowed to provide the only security
in the territory after the vote," the paper's editorial
said. "Australia should have seen the inevitable consequences of this and
ensured an armed UN force was in place."

            In
Germany, the top story Monday was Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's latest setbacks
in state and local elections, where his Social Democrat Party was thrown out of
office Sunday in the eastern state of Thuringia. In Italy, La Repubblica described
Schröder's series of electoral defeats--another is predicted next month in
Berlin--as his Via Crucis and "a black page for German social
democracy, the lynchpin of the European Left." In Britain, where former Defense
Secretary Michael Portillo gambled on his political future in the Conservative
Party last week by admitting to youthful homosexual experiences, the Mail on
Sunday published an opinion poll showing that "seven out of ten voters
would accept a prime minister who had been homosexual in the past, and six out
of ten would accept one who was openly gay."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            G.W. Bush vs. gwbush.com

            The
slogan on George W.
Bush's Web site is "Prosperity With a Purpose." The slogan on Zach
Exley's parody of George W. Bush's Web site, gwbush.com , is "Hypocrisy With Bravado." Exley means
to mock the contradiction between Bush's presumed use of drugs and his support
of harsh prison sentences for drug offenders today. But he might have an even
better case based on the way the Bush campaign has harassed him. Bush and his
lawyers are demanding the meticulous enforcement against Exley of minor
campaign finance rules--rules they themselves consider dated and
ridiculous.

            In
May, a Bush campaign lawyer named Benjamin Ginsberg filed a complaint against
gwbush.com with the Federal Election Commission. In it, Ginsberg contends that
the parody site constitutes an "independent expenditure" under federal election
law. In other words, Bush is arguing that Exley's Web site--a one-man operation
started on a lark--should fall into the same legal category as the Willie
Horton ads run against Michael Dukakis in 1988. The intimidating letter further
warns that if Exley, a free-lance computer programmer in Boston, has spent more
than $1,000 on his site, he must register it as a "political committee," which
means filing an even more elaborate disclosure. For a Web site run by a private
individual in his spare time, meeting these requirements would constitute a
substantial burden.

            The
complaint is hypocritical on a couple of counts. The first is that G.W. Bush
himself has bought his own way out of some of the more onerous FEC disclosure
requirements. Because his campaign is forgoing federal matching funds, it
doesn't have to file quarterly disclosure statements electronically. That means
that Bush's contribution reports remain essentially useless raw data for
several weeks while those of his rivals are available for database searches.
Bush also thinks that limits of $250 and $1,000, fixed in 1971, are
anachronistically low and should be raised. Yet he is using these pre-inflation
thresholds as the basis for his complaint. Even Bush's lawyer seems to question
his own assault. "It's a fair question to ask whether the rules should cover
him," Ginsberg says of Exley.

            In his
response to Bush's
complaint Exley rehearses the history of Bush's antagonism toward his
site, citing W.'s infamous statement that "there ought to be limits to
freedom." He points to a number of absurdities about his situation. "I appear
to be caught in a catch 22; so far I have not spent over $250 per year on the
Web site," he writes. "However, paying for legal advice would put me
immediately over the FEC spending threshold, thereby validating Bush's
complaint against me."

            This
is a clever point. In fact, though, legal fees don't count toward the
disclosure limits. What Exley's response misses is a much better argument for
why the FEC should leave him alone: He's press. gwbush.com is one of the kinds
of new media made possible by the Web. In fact, Exley instinctively thinks of
it this way. "This is my private little magazine," he told me. If he wants to
put his non-disclosure on a firm legal footing, Exley could ask the FEC for an
advisory opinion to that effect--something the FEC has to rule on within six
weeks instead of several years. And Exley would have a good case, since his
site isn't anti-Bush propaganda so much as a wacky, Bush-averse take on the
news. It links to Gore parody sites as well.

            The
FEC will probably not be in any hurry to settle the matter if it can avoid
doing so. The narrow issue of whether Exley's Web site constitutes an
independent expenditure opens a much larger can of worms. It points to the
reality that many of the old campaign finance laws simply don't make sense in
cyberspace. Should someone who starts a site stating his views have to disclose
where his money comes from in the way someone who buys a newspaper ad does? If
a Web site itself counts as an in-kind contribution to a candidate, as an
earlier FEC ruling indicates, a $1,000 spending limit may apply. And if
hyperlinks count as contributions, as the FEC has also indicated, then
corporations, labor organizations, and foreign nationals cannot legally link to
official campaign sites. Many, if not most, of the key distinctions of campaign
finance law simply dissolve when immersed in the Internet.

            The ethos of the Web
argues against regulating private, individual activity in any way. And indeed,
because the Web does much to create an open and level playing field for
political expression, restraining it in the name of fairness seems
counterproductive. The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published
an excellent report on this topic, titled "Square Pegs and Round
Holes: Applying the Campaign Finance Law to the Internet." It doesn't settle
any of the specific questions about how campaign finance law should work in
cyberspace. But it does make one thing damningly clear: The FEC is utterly
unequipped to deal with them.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Road to Beverly Hills

            West Side of Beverly Hills, Calif.

            Just when I was planning a somewhat self-pitying
final entry (Working title: "Next Time, Less Stuckey, More Nookie"), Elizabeth
showed me a side of her I hadn't seen before, a warm, affectionate side. Out of
the blue last night, she asked if we could go out drinking, and--well, let's
say I think I finally broke through to her. It began with a point I made about
urban sprawl--how when you drive across the country, you realize the issue is
to a large degree phony. There's plenty of space! We should stop worrying! E.
seemed to loosen up right away. She even put her hand on mine. I always heard
you could score if you talked policy to her. Not that we had sex. But I will
say I have high expectations for the future. If only the trip had lasted one
more day.

            On the final drive across the desert into Los
Angeles, E. seemed as if she had blossomed. Suddenly, after wearing sweatpants
and T-shirts for five days, she put on this skimpy little black dress. Perfume,
too. We sped across the desert, the futon on the roof threatening to blow off,
in order to make an appointment she'd made at a ritzy hairdressing salon. She
said, "I feel so sad this is ending. I'm going to miss you so much." We even
had a road-trip bonding moment. She said she was tired of being an elusive
commitment-phobe, and was ready to start a long-term relationship.

            We pulled up to 2 Rodeo Drive only five minutes
late. E. didn't want me to use the valet, because, as she diplomatically put
it, "with all this stuff, we look like the fucking Clampetts." I told her I'd
see her later that night to unload her things. She said that "didn't work" for
her, but we arranged to see each other tomorrow morning--"late." I mentioned
again that I'd probably be driving back in a week or so, and that it would be
fun if she could come. She smiled. I think she may say yes.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Sibling Rivalry

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               A recent inquiry regarding replacing the has
prompted me to seek your assistance. I asked my younger sister, age 20, to be
my MOH. But she is making the planning of my wedding a nightmare. I had thought
it would be a kind gesture if I asked her to pick out the dresses for the
bridesmaids. We visited three bridal salons, and she made a veritable scene in
each one. She was unspeakably ugly to both my mother and me, as well as the
staff (swearing, sarcasm, and just plain rudeness). I was deeply embarrassed,
and she apparently doesn't understand that this is not going to be "her
day."
            

            
               I asked her to help
address envelopes and other little things that need doing, and she refused:
"Not in the mood." The icing on the cake is that when she asked if the MOH is
supposed to make a toast at the reception and I said it was traditional, she
flat-out refused. Both my mother and I have tried speaking with her, but that
just unleashed foul behavior. I am sick of her antics and fed up with her. I
realize that asking her to relinquish the "title" may jeopardize our
relationship, but I don't understand her behavior at all.
            

            

               --T.H.
            

            Dear T.,

            Prudie does. The little sister is competitive with
you, and there's a chance she wishes the bride and bridesmaid roles were
reversed. Acting out in stores and "foul behavior" are indicative of emotional
problems, deep hostility, and no self-control. By all means withdraw the
"title," and tell her you do not wish to burden her with MOH chores, nor do you
wish to have your dream day spoiled. There is not a reason in the world that
you should have to tolerate this pill of a sister. In fact, suggest that she
not attend the wedding. You need not be the victim of her neuroses.

            As for "jeopardizing the
relationship," with all due respect, it sounds as if it's already on life
support. Just because she is your sister doesn't mean she gets to behave less
well than a friend. Sometimes a relative is just an annoying person courtesy of
DNA (or, if you're religious, a punishment from God).

            
--Prudie, proactively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               My question also
concerns , but this time in an office setting, in a bathroom with many stalls.
If you think you recognize the feet of the user in the stall next door and you
have a question or a comment, should you start talking?
            

            

               --Wondering, too
            

            Dear Won,

            If this is a same-sex
bathroom, not an Ally McBeal unisex setup, Prudie would say it's OK. (She is
not exactly sure why, though.) Do begin, however, by verifying it's the person
you think it is so that you are not having a conversation with the wrong pair
of shoes. You might also want to edit your conversation for whoever else might
be listening. This would entail, Prudie guesses, checking for more shoes.

            
--Prudie, loquaciously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I thought your
response to the about telemarketers was wonderfully done. Would you run for
president? Better yet, would you spearhead a tasteful anti-telemarketing
crusade? I am thinking of an Internet movement. Can you imagine thousands of
people answering telemarketers by singing one line of "Alice's Restaurant" and
then hanging up?
            

            

               --D.C.
            

            Dear D.,

            Prudie cannot run for
president because she is having such fun working at 
                  Slate
               . She
is, also, alas, out of the crusade business. Your idea, however, about singing
and hanging up is now being read by tons of people, so telemarketers
beware.

            
--Prudie, melodically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Thanks for all your
good advice. Here's my problem: I broke off a relationship with a delightful
man who lives two houses up the street. We were together for nearly four years.
I'm starting my own business and just don't want to be in a committed
relationship right now--but I would like for us to be friends. He is having a
great deal of trouble letting go of the more physical aspects of our past and
spends a lot of time begging for "just one more time." How can I make it clear
to him that breaking up means losing that physical connection? He's prone to
pouting, and it's driving me nuts.
            

            
               --Thanks,
            

            

               TOO MUCH LOVE IN VT.
            

            Dear TOO,

            Prudie is going to give
you the exact language. This is what you say: "The last time was the last
time." And if you have broken up, how is it that you are subject to the
pouting? By the way, it seems quite clear that your current neighbor/former
beau is not looking to be "friends."

            
--Prudie, definitely

            

               
                  Prudence,
               
            

            
               When taking my seat
in a crowded movie theater, do I say, "Excuse me" to those already seated
before, while, or after I step on their feet?
            

            

               --R. Smith
            

            Dear R.,

            Prudie always says it before.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Clinton's Poverty '99 Tour

            

               President Clinton finished his poverty tour. He spent four days visiting
poor areas such as Appalachia, Watts, and the Mississippi Delta to "shine the
spotlight on places still unlit by the sunshine of our present prosperity."
Critics on the right dismissed the tour as a simplistic photo op, and Peter
Edelman, a former Clinton official who quit to protest the 1996 welfare reform,
called it cosmetic, arguing that Clinton "cannot admit the extent of the
problem because his Administration has a vested interest in the notion that
welfare reform has been a success." But the New York Times ' Jason
DeParle chides politicians and the press for their "Skepticism and Indifference," and the Washington
Post interprets the tour as a plug for a "Third Way" strategy of using tax incentives for businesses
to help the poor.

            

               Hillary Clinton endorsed Israel's claim to an "indivisible" Jerusalem.
She said this in a letter to a conservative Jewish group. This comes several
months after she antagonized some Jewish groups by endorsing the idea of a
Palestinian state. Cynics suspect she's reversing course to curry favor with
Jewish voters and organizations for New York's Senate race. The Washington
Post faults her not for reversing course but for endorsing what it deems an
unwise position . Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune

               applauds her for "breaking the mold" by running for
the Senate, and the New York Times 
               complains that both her campaign travel and that of her
Republican rival, Rudolph Giuliani, "are being subsidized--by the taxpayers in
Mrs. Clinton's case and by private jet owners in Mr. Giuliani's." (Hillary's
campaign will probably end up paying for the subsidized travel says a

                  Slate
                ".")

            

               Serb rallies against President Slobodan 
               Milosevic are
growing. Unpaid Yugoslav army reservists have reportedly
joined the rallies. A news article in Thursday's New York Times played
up expectations "that Milosevic's survival in power might now be measured not
in years, but in months," but Friday's Times editorial throws
cold water on that hope.

            

               Tobacco companies lost another big liability case. A Florida jury found
them liable for damages for conspiring to conceal how addictive and harmful
cigarettes are. This increases the chances that the companies will have to pay
for treatment of smokers' health problems. The Chicago Tribune observes
that smokers, too, are responsible for knowingly
endangering their health. But the Washington Post argues that if the
companies don't pay for smokers' medical care, taxpayers will .

            
               ABC
Radio hired Matt Drudge. His weekly talk show, which has been running on
ABC's New York radio station for a year, will now be syndicated. ABC's spin is
that Drudge's show is part of ABC entertainment, not ABC news. But according to
the Washington Post , even ABC News President David Westin isn't buying that .

            

               Hillary Clinton 
               formed a 
                     a U.S. Senate bid from New York and
announced plans for a "summer-long listening tour" of the state. An
experienced Democratic fund-raiser sounded
the lonely note in a New York Times op-ed that star-struck local
pols have chickened out of the race in deference to a carpetbagger. Political
analysts noted that whatever her drawbacks, she appeals to soccer
moms.
               
            

            

               Ehud Barak was sworn in as Israeli prime minister after taking seven weeks
to assemble his government, which comprises two-thirds of the parliament.
Israeli Arabs complained that they were not included in the new Cabinet. The
ousted Likud Party, which tried to form a coalition with Barak but was rebuked,
accused the former general of being autocratic. In his inaugural speech, Barak
reached out to Palestinians and Syrians. The American press, including the
Washington Post editorial page, received Barak warmly. (For more on
Barak's reception, see ".")

            
               The
suspect in the Chicago-area racist killing spree committed suicide.
Benjamin Smith (who had changed his name to August because he thought Benjamin
sounded too Jewish) allegedly killed a black man and a Korean-American man and
wounded two other Asian-Americans and six Orthodox Jews before shooting himself
as the cops closed in. The media found plenty of racism and anti-Semitism in
Smith's past but little history of violence. The shooting spree has made the
World Church of the Creator, the hate group to which Smith was linked, the new
poster child of American racism.

            

               George W. Bush's military record is under fire. The Los Angeles
Times reported that he got "favorable treatment and uncommon attention" when he was admitted
to the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, thereby avoiding being drafted to
fight in Vietnam. However, the Times found "no evidence of illegality or
regulations broken to accommodate Bush's entry." The Dallas Morning News
reported that Bush nearly flunked the Air Force pilot aptitude test but "scored high as
a future leader." Bush says he "served my country" and got no special
treatment. Pundits and Bush's Republican rivals are largely blowing off the
story.

            

               Pete Sampras won Wimbledon. He has now set the record for
Wimbledon singles titles in this century (six) and tied the record for most
Grand Slam victories (12). Sports pundits likened him to Michael Jordan and
Jack Nicklaus. "In a
League of His Own," gushed the New York Times . However, the
computer that ranks tennis players by their recent
performance in tournaments elevated Andre Agassi, who lost the Wimbledon final,
to the top rank, with Sampras third. Lindsay Davenport won the women's title,
inspiring much chatter about American dominance on the Fourth of July.

            
               The

               U.S. women's soccer team advanced to the World Cup finals , beating
Brazil 2-0. The team now faces China, which crushed defending champion Norway
5-0. While soccer writers remain emotionally attached to the U.S. team, some,
such as ESPN's Jamie Trecker, fault their sloppy play and predict a
Chinese victory.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Babbling Brooks

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  The
               
               
                  Muse
                (October Films). Albert Brooks'
new film--which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in--is "good but not great
Brooks" (Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times ). The plot: A screenwriter
(Brooks) has lost his edge, and he enlists the aid of a muse (Sharon Stone) to
inspire him. However, Hollywood being Hollywood, this muse requires a suite at
the Four Seasons and gifts from Tiffany's to keep her going. Janet Maslin (the
New York Times ) positively glows for the film, calling it a "mordantly
hilarious cri de coeur ." But most critics aren't so enchanted: Although
"there are lots of punchy lines," the "one-joke movie doesn't have all that
much to say" (Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today ). (Click for David Edelstein's
review in 
                  Slate
               , and here to
find out more about Brooks.)

            

               
                  Dudley
               
               
                  Do-Right
                (Universal Pictures).
Indifferent reviews for the second live-action version of a Jay Ward cartoon to
star Brendan Fraser (the first being George of the Jungle ). It's a
"genial" film with "lots of broad slapstick humor that kids like and adults
wince at" (Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times ). A few critics are outright
irritated--it "disappoints in every way possible," says Kenneth Turan (the
Los Angeles Times )--but most are just mildly annoyed. Maslin, however,
gives the film a surprisingly upbeat review, admiring its "appealing
try-anything spirit" and noting that it "works well as family entertainment"
(the New York Times ). (Click here to
visit the film's official site.)

            

               
                  The
               
               
                  Astronaut's Wife
                (New Line Cinema).
The final entry in a week of blah movies is one Universal wouldn't preview for
critics, presumably to postpone the bad reviews for a few days. Now that it's
in theaters, the pans are pouring in for this "ridiculously derivative" movie
(Maslin, the New York Times ) about an astronaut (Johnny Depp) who
returns to Earth after a strange, and possibly alien, encounter in space. His
wife (Charlize Theron) is now pregnant--and sporting the same hairdo Mia Farrow
wore in Rosemary's Baby --and must determine what has happened to hubby
and what to do about it. "Instead of a movie about aliens, The Astronaut's
Wife seems like a movie made by aliens" (Andy Selier, USA Today ).
(Click here to find out more about Theron.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Headlong
               
               
                  : A Novel
               , by Michael Frayn
(Metropolitan Books). Strong notices for the British novelist and playwright's
latest, a story that "engagingly combines a comedy of manners with elements of
farce and art-historical detective story" (Matt Seaton, the New York
Times ). The main character, a philosophy professor, stumbles on what he
believes to be a lost Bruegel painting and becomes obsessed with both obtaining
it and determining whether it is genuine. Along the way the reader gets a
"fascinating tour through the intellectual thickets of Bruegel scholarship"
that manages to be "as entertaining as it is intelligent, as stimulating as it
is funny" (Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times ). Publishers
Weekly finds all the art history tiresome, as it has the side effect of
"entirely halting [Frayn's] promising frolicsome narrative." (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               
                  Faster
               
               
                  : The Acceleration of Just About
Everything
               , by James Gleick (Pantheon). Gleick, whose two previous
books were nominated for National Book Awards, gets positive but passionless
reviews for his rumination on the speed of contemporary life. Although
Faster is full of interesting details of how the brain perceives time
and how technology both steals and adds minutes to our lives, several critics
note that Gleick never makes a definitive conclusion about the data he has
collected. "[W]hy is it that whenever humans are given the choice, we opt for
faster? Mr. Gleick fights shy of this big question. That is disappointing, if
only because we have such high expectations from this author" (Jim Holt, the
Wall Street Journal ). It's "as if Gleick couldn't quite make the short
leap from being merely a superb reporter to an astute social thinker" (Henry
Kisor, the Chicago Sun-Times ). (Click here to find out more about the author.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Picks of the Litter and Catcalls

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            Prudie would like to say
a word about the and the $2,000 veterinary bill. That word is oy . Never
has so much mail descended on Prudie, if you don't count the handicapped stall
imbroglio. Prudie wishes to report that there was a boatload of comment ...
some supportive of the advice, some ... well, catcalls. Herewith are the picks
of the litter, pardon the expression, and a very unexpected, though satisfying
resolution.

            

               
                  Prudie,
               
            

            
               Are you nuts? You
say the cat-sitter should be reimbursed for the vet bill of $2,000 when the
owner specifically told him not to incur any expense? No rational person would
pay two grand for a cat (a dog, perhaps, but not a cat). And letting an animal
die from natural causes is not and never has been a crime. If you think I am
heartless, think about all the charities that could use $2,000, including the
SPCA, which would not dream of blowing it on one animal.
            

            

               --As Indifferent to Cats as They Are to People
            

            Dear As,

            You make some valid
points, though Prudie detects dogist sentiments in your saying one might
understandably lay out two big ones for a dog, but not for a cat. You are
fortunate in not having a column of your own, since the dog favoritism would
surely invite much correspondence from the cat people. But do read on.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               From the time our
cat Chappaquiddick (don't ask) was 19 until she died at 20 or 21, we took her
to the vet twice a week for dialysis. This wonderful, magical cat raised all
four of our sons (with some help from my wife, but not much in my judgment),
and she became as much a part of the family as any of us. Because of kidney
problems she had accidents from time to time, but we always overlooked them.
"ZM" performed a saintly act in the eyes of anyone lucky enough to ever share
space with man's noblest companion.
            

            

               --C.K.
            

            Dear C.,

            What a lovely tribute to
your cat, the feline Mary Poppins, but Prudie suggests you hide this letter
from your wife. Please keep reading for another point of view--probably not the
cat's.

            

               
                  Prudence,
               
            

            
               I usually enjoy and
agree with your advice, but I have to take issue with your reply to the
cat-sitter who loved too much. I am not a cold or cruel person (and I am
actually a cat lover), but I think the owner's wishes about managing the health
of the cat should have been heeded. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money to
most people, and I think the financial sacrifices people are willing to make
for their pets are their decisions. Who knows, the owner might have had
children who needed shoes (though since the owner was in Europe, I doubt it).
Or maybe the owner thinks the two grand would be better spent as a donation to
UNICEF to help save starving children (again unlikely, but possible). The point
is, people can't be forced to spend big bucks on pets.
            

            

               --Respectfully,
            

            

               Dan D.
            

            Dear Dandy,

            Prudie cannot quibble
with you.

            
               Dear
Prudence,
            

            
               My first reaction to
this letter was to wonder if the cat could be taken away from such an
indifferent owner. My second was to admire ZM for compassion and tenacity. If
there is no satisfactory legal solution to reimbursing ZM, I'm sure there are
many animal lovers among your readers who would be happy to contribute toward
replacing some of the money ZM spent. I would certainly like to.
            

            

               --A.C.
            

            Dear A.,

            You are admirably
generous, but Prudie does not pass the hat, feeling certain that Messrs. Gates
and Kinsley would frown on such a practice. However, the following
letter--from ZM himself--provides us all with a most interesting
denouement .

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Thank you for
replying to my letter about the sick cat. Your advice was, as expected,
good--and I'm not just saying that because you were on my side. I thought you
might like to know that I did begin legal proceedings in small claims court,
but the cat's former owner and I settled. I say, "former owner" because in the
process of working out an agreement, I demanded and got the cat in question.
The owner was only willing to pay half the vet expenses, so I said, "Well then,
the cat will be half mine." He said, "You want it so bad, you can have it." I'm
not fond of cats in general, but I feel a bond with this one--he's very smart
and well behaved--and I certainly feel he's better off in my care. So, we have
a happy ending.
            

            
               --Regards,
            

            

               ZM
            

            Dear, dear Z.,

            Amen. And on behalf of
all those who feel as you do, Prudie categorically thanks you.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Mr. Jiang Goes to Europe

            
President Jiang Zemin, the first Chinese head of state ever to visit Britain,
arrived in London Monday to find the Daily Telegraph describing
him in a profile as an "insipid man who inspires indifference." But
not for everyone. The Telegraph also said that his visit "is likely to rank with those of
Nicolae Ceaucescu and Emperor Hirohito of Japan as among the most controversial
of the Queen's reign." It said it would be "the focus of large demonstrations
against China's suppression of human rights and its occupation of Tibet." The
paper noted that "British officials still have no idea whether he will be
furious and cut short his program, or whether he will ride out the protests as
he did in America last year."

            In
Hong Kong, the South China
Morning Post reported that Falun Gong, the spiritual cult recently
banned by the Chinese government, planned to carry out spiritual exercises in
London throughout the president's visit to show him how peaceful the group is.
"We hope to be able to practise all five of our exercises," one of the
organizers told the paper. "If it is raining, we may not be able to do all of
them because some require us to sit on the ground." Falun Gong is seeking
permission to hold a candlelight vigil in the center of London Tuesday night
while the queen is hosting a banquet for Jiang at Buckingham Palace. The
SCMP said, however, that larger demonstrations were expected in France
when Jiang goes there at the end of the week. It quoted Shui Li, chairman of
the British branch of the Federation of Democratic China, as saying, "France
will be a key country to hold protests because there are a lot of Chinese
dissidents there and a larger Chinese population."

            
Improbably, China
Daily 's main angle on Jiang's visit to Britain was that it would
"bring brighter prospects to the British financial service industry." This was
how the official government newspaper introduced an interview with the British
ambassador in Beijing, who said Britain was "very keen" that China should join
the World Trade Organization before the end of the year. The ambassador
overenthusiastically described the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese as "the
most successful joint venture we have ever done with China or anybody else." In
an editorial Monday, the Financial Times of London also supported China's renewed bid
to join the WTO but said that Europe should speak more firmly to Jiang about
security and human rights.

            The
FT said that since "the US consensus behind its role on the global
stage is weakening," Europeans should no longer be content "to let the US take
the lead in handling China." The SCMP ran an article by its Washington
correspondent saying that the next few weeks would be "pivotal" in U.S.
relations with Beijing. "If successful, working visits to Beijing by US
Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Under-Secretary of State Thomas Pickering
could go a long way in getting day-to-day links back to the level they were
before Nato's bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade," the paper said. But it
quoted senior administration officials as saying that the situation was still
"highly fragile." One said, "In some ways we feel like recovering alcoholics.
We are taking everything just one day at a time."

            
President Jiang told the Times of London in an interview that his recent meeting in New Zealand with President
Bill Clinton had been "positive and constructive" and "very important for the
improvement and development of China-US relations." But he said the United
States "must take further action to remove all the severe negative effects of
the bombing" and must "stop its arms sales to Taiwan, and refrain from creating
new obstacles on the question of Taiwan." (On Sunday, the Observer of
London reported that NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade because it
wanted to send a signal to the Yugoslav army. It said that the embassy was
originally on a list of prohibited targets but was removed after NATO forces
discovered it was operating as a Yugoslav army re-broadcasting station.)

            In the
same interview with William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of the Times ,
Jiang claimed to have been a "good friend" of the former Panchen Lama of Tibet
and, after his death, said he went to his temple there and--"despite the thin
air"--spent an hour meditating about his life. But this didn't prevent him
taking an unyielding line on the Tibet issue. Another subject broached by the
Chinese president was the future of the Internet. He described it has having
great advantages for a country the size of China, but said he hoped that this
generation would be able to protect its grandchildren from things on the
Internet that "are not good." He also said that "no matter how quickly the
internet develops, it can never take the place of the relationship between
people ... computers are machines, and machines don't have feelings."

            These
themes were also debated Sunday night in an interview with Bill Gates on BBC
television. Questioned by Jeremy Paxman, one of Britain's leading TV
interviewers, Gates said that "none of the work being done on software today
holds the potential to create a truly intelligent device," but he was less
reassuring about protecting the young against stuff that was "not good." While
he wanted Microsoft's software to be used for things that are "positive and
good," he admitted that he didn't "have control over exactly how that's done."
(But what's "not good"? Paxman was talking about pornography; Jiang may well
have been thinking about Falun Gong.) In an article for the Sunday
Telegraph on the day of the interview, Paxman wrote that he found it
"quite impossible to reconcile this public Gates [fabulously rich, powerful,
and therefore an object of much hatred] with the awkward, shy, nasal character
I found seated opposite me."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Fray of Light

            
               
                  A note from
the Fraymaster: Welcome to the first installment of "Best of the
Fray," a weekly column featuring the sharpest posts from our new reader
feedback forum. If you'd like to comment on a Slate article, we
encourage you to do so in "The Fray," and if it's especially good, we'll
excerpt it here (though we may edit it for length). You might also get a reply:
Many Slate writers visit the Fray to read the posts about their stories,
and some respond there. (For instance, Robert Pinsky, our poetry editor, will
be participating in The Fray's "Poem "
topic at 12 p.m. PST, Friday, Oct. 29.)--Michael Brus
            

            
               SUBJECT: Love Diary
... but it's not edgy enough

            
               FROM: Will Juntunen

            

               DATE
               : Thu Sept 9

            This is purely an opinion. I really like reading
the diary feature. But I see the writing of high
achievers, but I'm not seeing people who are on the edge. For example, you had
a great feature on a real estate agent. But she was a very successful real
estate person. Likewise, the lawyer who went to China was a very successful
lawyer.

            Now in the Lewis and
Clark diaries, the possibility of disaster always loomed. Could we read the
diaries of a man or a woman who is a little closer to the edge?

            (To respond, click
here .)

            
               SUBJECT: Tabloids
and Baloney Sandwiches

            
               FROM: King
Arthur

            
               DATE: Fri Sept
10

            I would like to take a moment to put Tabloids in
perspective, and challenge anyone to make a different observation.

            My job takes me to dozens of grocery stores, which
distribute a great number of these offensive babble-on-ion manuscripts, and
where a large number of employees read them in the break room. Not once in my
37 years have I heard anyone admit that they believe in the content.

            Why read this crap,
then? Well, why read any type of fiction? I believe it is because there is a
time for rape, murder, hurricane, political treachery-types-of-reading, and a
time to just amuse yourself while you're scarfing down a baloney
sandwich-type-of reading.

            (To respond, click
here .)

            
               SUBJECT: Response
from the author

            
               FROM: Jennifer
Mendelsohn

            
               DATE: Mon Sept
13

            Thank you to everyone in the Fray who's taken the
time to comment on this month's "" ["Enquiring Minds in Slovakia"].

            I've enjoyed all your comments immensely,
especially Mr. Heaney's suggestions that I am "used to wallowing in this
type of pigslop" and that I should return my fee for writing the column. As to
the former, while I'll confess that my office is a huge mess, I'll have to
steadfastly disagree that it's quite reached the pigpen level; the latter I'll
just politely overlook.

            There seems to be a huge misunderstanding
underlying many of your posts, though, and I'd like to clear it up. "Enquiring
Minds in Slovakia" is not meant to be an essay on the socio-cultural
implications of the use of the National Enquirer in a Slovakian
classroom. Nor is it a serious critique (or celebration for that matter) of the
tabloids, or a Hollywood gossip column lazily cribbed from the pages of other
magazines. The article you saw was this month's edition of Keeping Tabs, a
lighthearted monthly column I write for 
                  Slate
                that sums up--and
pokes fun at--what the supermarket tabloids have been writing about for the
previous month. (Get it? We're trying to have a little fun here.)

            I'm sorry to disappoint all of you who've
complained that I haven't done anything but sum up what's in the tabloids, but
that's precisely what I'm here to do every month. I don't do any independent
investigation of the veracity of the tabloid stories, I just let them speak for
themselves, in all their ludicrous glory--hopefully in a way that's as amusing
as the tabs themselves. (But that's why I'm not at all surprised that the
poster calling him or herself "Too Embarrassed I Read This Crap " didn't find "rumpology" in
the dictionary.)

            You can read back issues of "Keeping Tabs," which
might help give a little perspective, by clicking here . Next month's column, covering the best (and
worst) of September's Globe , Star , and Enquirer , will be
online around Oct. 5 or so.

            Thanks again for all
your insight.

            All best,

            
Jennifer Mendelsohn

            (To
respond, click here .)

            
               SUBJECT: Bradley
speech

            
               FROM: maureen

            
               DATE: Tues Sept
14

            Sure, "a young girl's
smile, the pleasure of helping someone in need, friendship," etc., etc., may be
both hard to measure and extremely corny, but let's not get carried away. There
is no doubt that those things are all indirectly but absolutely affected by
those who govern, via economic and social policy. If elected, Bradley might
even use (unlike Clinton) the bully pulpit to remind us of the critical
importance of those intangibles in creating responsible and compassionate adult
citizens. It is more than empty rhetoric.

            (To respond, click
here .)

            
               SUBJECT: you think
this is a joke?!

            
               FROM: outraged

            
               DATE: Thu Sept
9

            A few things to say about the ["Trippin' at the
GNC"]:

            1. If you don't have an illness, say depression or
arthritis, why on earth do you expect to feel any effects from a drug which is
intended to treat said illness? Side effects, sure, but I would doubt any
primary effects would be felt.

            2. Depression is a serious illness. Why must you
treat anti-depressants as party toys?

            3. If you think herbal products are necessarily
safer or have less side effects than commercial pharmaceuticals, where do you
think those pharmaceuticals came from in the first place? Many, if not most,
common drugs were originally a substance that occurred in nature, such as
various plant extracts.

            4. Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or the
placebo effect? The author could conceivably have convinced him/herself that
because a product is supposed to make one feel less depressed (and therefore
happier??!!), he/she will therefore feel better. The mind is a powerful thing,
and sometimes may be as effective or even more effective in treating a physical
or mental malady, than pharmaceuticals (herbal or otherwise).

            5. Anti-depressants are not meant to make one
happier , per se, but rather to make one feel normal and better able to
deal with everyday details that most people take for granted. (I suffered
clinical depression for several years; I know.) So why should it be a big
surprise if a non-depressed individual does not notice any effects from taking
an anti-depressant medication?? Put another way, anti-depressants don't make
you happy, they just help lift you to a plateau from which you are able to seek
your own happiness, whatever that may consist of.

            6. Severe depression is
not a joke. Why must the treatment of this illness always become one? Don't
treat it so lightly unless you've been there.

            (To respond, click here .)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Elephants in Pinstripes 

            The kids page on George W. Bush's campaign Web site
explains that "Running for president is a lot like playing baseball. ... There
are two divisions in professional baseball--the American League and the
National League. In politics there are two large parties, the Republicans and
the Democrats." The Ames, Iowa, straw poll, the site advises, is like
baseball's regular season, the primaries are the playoffs, and the general
election is the World Series. (The Federal Election Commission, apparently, is
the umpire.) The implicit message of all this seems to be that because Dubya
was president of baseball's Texas Rangers, he certainly can be president of the
United States.

            If politics is like baseball, baseball can be a lot
like politics. This week's World Series, for example, is a political contest:
The Bronx Bombers are, well, the Yankees--the original Republicans. This begins
at the top with owner George Steinbrenner, who is the very model of the
Republican businessman. Steinbrenner recoils at the socialistic demands of the
poorer, small-market teams of Major League Baseball that want rich teams such
as the Yankees to give them a cut of their revenue. Steinbrenner loathes this
redistribution of wealth: He considers it a welfare program that rewards bad
teams for not trying and robs successful teams of their hard-earned riches.
Like all good Republicans, Steinbrenner's Yanks buck regulation: When other
owners tried to stop Steinbrenner from signing a separate endorsement deal with
Adidas, arguing it would undercut the entire league's endorsement plan, he told
them to get lost. It is no accident that the Yanks wear pinstripes. The
business of the Yankees is business. (Steinbrenner's Republicanism runs deep:
He funneled illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon in the early '70s,
winning himself a two-year suspension from baseball in the process.)

            Steinbrenner may be a
righty, detesting all who might intervene in his business, but he's happy to
bat lefty when it comes to government aid: He has eagerly petitioned New York
City to spend $500 million or more to build him a new stadium.

            The Braves, by contrast, are Dixiecrats. The Yankees' most
famous fan is New York City's Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Atlanta's No. 1
fan is left-wing icon Jane Fonda, owner Ted Turner's wife. Steinbrenner's
charitable contributions go to orchestras; Turner is giving $1 billion to the
United Nations. (The Braves' Web site devotes almost as much space to the team's
community service projects--"Straight A" Program, the Atlanta Braves
Foundation, Opportunity Through Baseball, Neighborhood Revitalization Program,
Weekend of Caring, etc.--as it does to triumphs on the diamond.) Steinbrenner
spent the last years of the Cold War bidding on Navy contracts for his (now
defunct) shipyard. Turner spent those years organizing the Goodwill Games, his
squishy plea for Soviet-American friendship.

            The Braves are democratic
in their recruiting efforts. They reintroduced the "open tryout" to baseball,
an audition where any schlub has a chance to make the squad. They endorse an
open-door immigration policy. The Braves have eight foreign players on their
roster, compared to the Yankees' five. The Braves' foreign players hail from
the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. The Republican Yankees, by contrast, have
Cuban refugee Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, the anti-communist, anti-Castro
pitcher, and Hideki Irabu, who comes from wealthy, capitalist Japan.

            The GOP Yankees, like all good Republicans, favor an
extremely strong defense: They are among the best fielding teams in the majors.
The Braves, who represent former Sen. Sam Nunn's state, are equally strong on
defense.

            The teams mimic their
parties' greed. The Yankees, like the GOP, brazenly take enormous
"contributions" wherever they can be found (fans, cable TV operators, Adidas,
etc.). The Yankees pull in close to $200 million a year, more than any team,
and own baseball's highest payroll, $87 million in 1999. Like the GOP, they
exhibit no shyness about raising and spending record amounts of cash to ensure
victory. Like the Democrats, the Braves are as rapacious as their rivals, but
subtler. The Braves collect tens of millions from their nationally broadcast
games and strong ticket sales, and they pay lavishly for players. They raise
and spend more than all but a handful of teams. As the Democratic Party claims
to speak for the little guy while dunning Fortune 500 companies, so the Braves
hold themselves out as a modest, small-market underdog.

            The Braves and Yankees resemble the Democrats and
Republicans in one more important way: In this World Series, as in most
American elections, too little separates the contestants. Elections match
corporatized, moneyed, and ideologically similar parties: The World Series
matches corporatized, moneyed, and athletically similar teams. Both the Yankees
and the Braves play highly competent, professional baseball. They rely on
careful teamwork and role-playing, eschewing superstars and flash. They are
impossible to dislike. (Here, again, the Yankees mirror the Republican Party.
Yankee-haters used to despise Bombers such as Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and
Reggie Jackson, just as the American left abominated hard-core conservatives
such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Gradually, that conservatism has
been accepted and embraced by America. So too have the Yankees, who are no
longer the villains of the Bronx. Today's Yankees have assuaged the
Yankeephobes with their skill and modesty.)

            This similarity of style and talent between the
Yankees and the Braves flattens the World Series as it flattens politics. The
regular season and playoffs have eliminated more quixotic teams: The Donald
Trump-like Baltimore Orioles, willing to spend endless millions to prove their
incompetence; the Alan Keyesian Chicago Cubs, hopeless but mesmerizing; the
Reform Partyesque Boston Red Sox, erratic, crazy, but with just enough
brilliance to be dangerous. We are left with the wealthy, talented, mainstream,
likable achievers: George W. Yankee and Albert Brave.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Online Political Advertising: Our Salesman Reports 

            Over
the past few years, the advertising business as a whole has moved from a mood
of hostile skepticism toward the Internet to an almost euphoric embrace of its
possibilities. In my new job as manager of political advertising for the
Microsoft Network, I'm experiencing what feels like a warp-speed repetition of
the same process. For the moment, buyers are still resistant to the new medium.
But I suspect that their doubts will melt as the 2000 campaign demonstrates the
open-ended potential of political advertising on the Web.

            The
basis for skepticism about Web-based candidate advertising is that few have
ever seen such a campaign, let alone one that had a demonstrable result. Peter
Vallone, the Democrat who ran against New York Gov. George Pataki last time
around, was one of the few candidates to make significant use of banner ads in
1998. Vallone ran negative ads about Pataki on the New York Times Web
site, among other places. While one study suggests that these ads diminished
Pataki's favorability rating among those who saw them, the negligible boost to
a losing campaign didn't quite make the case.

            A year
from now, we'll have better data about the effectiveness of candidate ads. What
we can say in the meantime is that Web advertising is capable of doing things
no other kind of political advertising can. Here are some of the advantages I'm
touting to political consultants and campaign managers this election
season.

            

               Targeting
            

            When
you advertise on television or radio, you base your spending decisions on
viewer and listener surveys, but you can't target precise groups of swing
voters that might matter to you. With the Web, you can strike at them
surgically. There are thousands of niche sites on the Web as well as Internet
service providers, network portals, and free e-mail services. These sites pride
themselves on collecting highly specific information about users, through
registration, subscription, and the use of "cookies" (for more on cookies, see

                  Slate
                article by Michael Kinsley). Banner ads can be directed at
precise demographic groups defined by age, ZIP code, income, and various other
characteristics. What's more, several of the larger portal sites are able to
"merge and purge" their user data with voter lists. This means that Bill
Bradley can target not just middle-aged basketball fans but also middle-aged
basketball fans who are registered Democratic voters in New Hampshire. Of
course, the more precise the targeting, the more expensive the ad. Reaching
generic New Hampshire citizens might cost $20 per thousand impressions. For a
specific category of registered voters, the price might rise as high as $70 per
thousand.

            

               Activization
            

            The
Web can serve as a tool to motivate those that are passionate about issues. A
recent campaign hosted by the Juno Advocacy Network shows this potential. Juno
sent an e-mail on behalf of Heritage Forests Campaign to more than 1 million
subscribers. In response to this, 171,000 users sent e-mail messages to Vice
President Al Gore asking him to help America's forests--without cutting down
any trees. That's a 17 percent response rate. With more expensive conventional
direct mail, a 4 percent to 5 percent response is considered highly
effective.

            

               Measurability
            

            Data
returned from user interaction with Internet ads far outweighs what you can
discern from television, radio, or direct-mail campaigns. Thanks to the miracle
of cookies, clients know precisely how many of the individuals they targeted
interacted with their ad in a number of ways. A banner ad that contains a
streaming video version of a 30-second spot can tell you not only how many
people viewed the commercial but also where in the commercial they got bored
and clicked out.

            The
first banner ads were relatively obvious appeals for a "click-through." Now
they are becoming interactive in ever more imaginative ways. Think of a banner
ad as the Internet on a bumper sticker. It can do just about anything with
video, sound, or animation. But first it has to grab your attention from a
three-quarter inch space on the computer screen. The most popular forms at the
moment include:

            
               Active

               Information Banners
            

            The
AIB delivers real-time information in the banner. The ad displays information
in a format similar to a stock ticker. Advertisers control the text in the
banner and can target it by demographic or issue group. Advertisers might also
use the AIB to respond to a recent news event they're taking a position on or
for any other rapid-response need.

            
               E-Mail

               Manager Banners
            

            The
e-mail manager banner ad gives advertisers an opportunity to collect e-mail
addresses from Web users. The advertiser may then use the information to
distribute e-mail messages, create user demographic profiles, and gather
information. For users, this banner provides an easy, convenient way to
subscribe to e-mail announcements from a candidate or campaign of choice.

            
               Expanding

               Menu Banners
            

            The
expanding menu banner contains four buttons that activate menus. Users then
choose from a menu and navigate to different locations on an advertiser's Web
site. This allows a campaign based on four key issues to "drill down" on each
of them in great detail. Once the user has found the issue he wants more
information about, a click of the mouse takes him directly to the page that
interests him.

            
               Streaming

               Video Banners
            

            Most
of the political/issue campaigns that will advertise on the Web will have
already produced TV ads. Those TV spots can now be compressed and delivered to
Web users from a banner ad: "Click here for my stance on free air time for
candidates!" This option becomes more attractive when combined with the
capability to deliver specific messages to targeted audiences or geographic
locations.

            Come November 2000, I
expect the question will no longer be whether Web-based political advertising
works, but whether it works too well.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 315: &quot;Cool, Calm, Rejected&quot;

            
               "They're taking
something that's about as likely to happen as a meteorite falling on your head
and telling everybody that it could happen any time," said Dr. Merlin D.
Tuttle, about those worry warts at the New York State Health Department. Name
that exaggerated (or not) danger.
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
314)--"A Chaucer, Not an Echo":
            

            

               
                  Fill in the blank as David Mixner, a gay rights advocate,
praises President Clinton at a black-tie fund-raising dinner in Los Angeles:
"Ever since The Canterbury Tales --strange crew that was--people have
been judged by their ____________. And we picked a good one in
1992."
               
            

            "Grete
horses buttokes."-- Daniel Radosh ( Ellen Macleay and Floyd
Elliott had similar answers, but in modern English.)

            
"Ability to accept specious Pardoner's Tale s."-- Adam Bonin
            

            "Sely
instrument. Hey, look, I made a dirty joke in Middle English! My college
English professors would be so proud of me, if they weren't all dead or
senile."--Floyd "Loving the Tavern Better Than the Shop" Elliot
            

            
"Pandering. No, wait, that's Troilus and Cressida . Hey, somebody call
Vernon Jordan and find out where the hell that girl is with the
pizza."--Alison Rogers
            

            
"Ability to say one thing while doing the exact opposite. (HELLO?? Gay people??
He signed the Preservation of Marriage Act! Christ on a crutch, what does he
have to do to lose your support, stab David Geffen with a kitchen
knife??)"-- Eric Berlin (similarly, Chris Thomas )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            It is astonishing to see a public figure at a
political event refer to any work of literature written before 1985 or, in the
case of George W., written. In her best column in years, in which she reverts
to actual reporting, Maureen Dowd had a fascinating talk with G.W. about his
cultural tastes. It turns out he has none. He is a man of unflappable ignorance
who, despite the round-the-clock presence of his librarian wife, remains all
but illiterate. " 'I've always liked John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you
pronounce his name. I'm mainly a history person.' He's just finished Isaac's
Storm , a history of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and reads Robert
Parker's detective-for-hire stories." It's one thing to be a deeply ignorant
man with a satin-skinned complacency, a cheek unwrinkled by self-doubt. But
when you declare that you'd like to be president, shouldn't everyone just mock
you with a lot of snooty literary references that you don't get?

            "Classical quotation is
the parole of literary men all over the world," said Dr. Johnson, I
note, quoting Dr. Johnson, who, while not actually classical, was not all over
the world either, although he once took a very nice tour of the Hebrides. He
found it to be a lot like Galveston or Galvoostoon or however you pronounce
it.

            

               Angwissous 
               Answer
            

            "Ever since The Canterbury Tales people have
been judged by their traveling companions ."

            Mixner, a Clinton friend for 30 years, paid tribute
to the political gains the president has made for gay and lesbian Americans and
encouraged their continued support of the president.

            In 1992, gays and lesbians raised $4 million for
Clinton-Gore, and the Democratic ticket received 80 percent of their vote. Or,
to put it more weirdly, 20 percent of lesbians and gays voted Republican.

            While acknowledging his disappointments--Mixner was
jailed in 1993 while protesting the president's position on gays in the
military--he applauded Clinton's many victories.

            As John Broder describes
it in the New York Times , the president responded with appropriate
modesty and--if I can read between the lines or simply make things up,
important things, things that should have happened--brushed away a tear, " 'I
wish I could have done better,' Mr. Clinton said wistfully. 'But we've done
pretty well, and we're a long way from where we were.' "

            
               Joy

               Nolan's Fun With Canterbury Tales Extra
            

            "Ever since The Canterbury Tales , people
have been judged by their stunning ability to have their careers summed up
by the A, B, and C entries in the glossary for The Canterbury
Tales
               .

            Check this out--a "coverchief" is a head-dress.
(Think it over.) Fuck's sake, Randy, flyppe through these! It's like Chaucer
was in, like, pre-cahoots with Ken Starr or somethynge.

            Plus, you toss in a
little punctuation, and some consecutive entries read like excerpts from
Starr's Ouija board, or last year's Times :

            

               "Aleyes alkamystre, al speke he, 'Amor vincit omnia,' angwissous ape
aperteneth areste." (Translation: Garden-paths alchemist, although he may
speak, 'Love conquers all,' anxious fool befits stop.)
               

               "Asterted, astoned, aswowne avowtier, bauderye." (Translation: Escaped,
astonished, aswooned adulterer, pandering.)
               

               "Bigileres biknowe, bille bitook, biwreyed blent, bleynte, boghte."
(Translation: Liars confess, formal charge, entrusted betrayed, turned pale,
redeemed.)
               

               "Clerk clippeth cokkow." (Translation: University student embraces
cuckoo.)
               

            

            So anyway, here are
selected A, B, and C words from the CT glossary. I'm telling you,
though: coverchief = head-dress is the best. (Get it? Head dress? Coverchief?)
That David Mixner clearly has his planchette on the pulse.

            aleyes: garden paths

            angwissous: anxious

            ape: 1. fool, dupe; 2. monkey

            assoillyng: absolution

            asterte, asterted: escaped

            astoned: amazed, astonished

            aswowne: in a swoon, aswooned

            avowtier: adulterer

            bauderye, bawderye: pandering

            bigileres: liars, deceivers

            biknowe: reveal, confess

            bille: petition, formal charge

            biwreyed: 1. revealed, exposed; 2. betrayed

            blent: deceived, blinded

            bleynte: turned pale

            bord bigonne: sat in the place of honor

            bour: bedroom, private room for lord and lady

            briberyes: ways of stealing money

            brike: trap, plight

            brotelnesse, brotilnesse: insecurity, instability,
fickleness

            buxom: obedient

            capul: nag

            chaped: mounted

            chastitee: chastity, abstinence from sexual
intercourse

            chidyng: scolding

            clippeth: embraces

            cokewold: cuckold, husband of an adulteress

            conseil kepe: keep secret

            contricioun: the state of being contrite, affected
by guilt, feeling

            remorse or penitence

            coom: came

            corage: 1. heart, feeling; 2. (sexual) desire,
ardor

            corrumpable: corruptible

            costlewe: very expensive

            countrefeted: imitated

            coveitise, coveityse: avarice, greed,
covetousness

            coverchiefs: head-dresses

            covyne: treachery

            crekes: tricks

            culpe: guilt

            cure: charge,
jurisdiction

            
               Chris

               Kelly's Ongoing Amour-Propre Extra
            

            "My novels ... explore the mysteries behind love
and hate, the darkly amusing, deeply disturbing and ultimately unanswerable
questions that they inspire."--writer Warren Adler takes a long hard look at
his work, including Random Hearts , and likes what he sees.

            Participants are invited
to submit similar authentic examples of rigorous self-assessment. Replies to
run Thursday.

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Penises and noses, which, incidentally, scans
beautifully when substituted for the refrain in "Lollipops and Roses," the 1962
Grammy-winning Jack Jones hit written by Tony Velona. Let's sing it together
right now! Everybody!

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Capital Control Freaks

            I didn't want to go to Malaysia. The Malaysian
government would surely expect me to deliver a stronger endorsement of its
heterodox economic program than I was prepared to offer. And, of course, it
would try to use me politically--to provide a veneer of respectability to a
regime that has lately developed the habit of putting inconvenient people in
jail. But sometimes an economist has to do what an economist has to do. Since I
had been the only high-profile economist to advocate the economic heresy that
Malaysia had put into practice, sooner or later I would have to face the music.
And so last month I agreed to spend a day--including a 90-minute "dialogue"
with the prime minister--at the Palace of the Golden Horses, a vaguely Las
Vegas-style resort outside Kuala Lumpur.

            Some background here:
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been the wild man of the Asian
crisis, blaming all his problems on manipulations by Jewish speculators,
denouncing the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund as part of a
Western conspiracy to recolonize Asia, and so on. In the early days of the
crisis, his position seemed absurd, and it was easy to make fun of him--which I
did, right in 
                  Slate
               . But eventually it stopped being so easy to
dismiss Mahathir's views. For one thing, the crisis turned out to be worse than
anyone had imagined possible, and anyone with an open mind began to suspect
that the IMF's initial policies had been misconceived. For another, while the
vast conspiracy Mahathir envisaged was a figment of his imagination (I know the
supposed conspirators, and they aren't that smart), a few hedge funds really
did engage in concerted manipulation of Hong Kong's markets in the summer of
1998. Mahathir still has a distorted view of the way the world works--more on
that below--but then so do the free-capital-market faithful.

            Where do I fit in? In the summer of 1998, I began to
reconsider my own views about the crisis. The scope of global "contagion"--the
rapid spread of the crisis to countries with no real economic links to the
original victim--convinced me that IMF critics such as Jeffrey Sachs were right
in insisting that this was less a matter of economic fundamentals than it was a
case of self-fulfilling prophecy, of market panic that, by causing a collapse
of the real economy, ends up validating itself. But I also concluded that the
threat of further capital flight would prevent Asian economies from simply
reflating, that is, increasing public spending and cutting interest rates to
get their economies growing again. And so I found myself advocating temporary
restrictions on the ability of investors to pull money out of crisis
economies--a curfew, if you like, on capital flight--as part of a recovery
strategy.

            Now, it turned out that
just at the time that I went public with those views, Mahathir and his advisers
were secretly working out a plan to impose capital controls as part of a
recovery strategy. According to what I have been told, my own public statement
played a small role in the final decision; essentially, some of Mahathir's
advisers were worried by the absence of any support for such controls among
mainstream economists, but the appearance of my August manifesto in
Fortune silenced the doubters. Almost surely, Malaysia would have gone
ahead with the plan anyway; but I had, inadvertently, found myself one of the
few outsiders to express any kind of support. I quickly put out an open letter
to Mahathir warning that the controls should not be abused, used as a cover for
; but I know from friends in Washington that people started referring to the
"Krugman-Mahathir strategy" of recovery via capital controls. And so I really
could not avoid going to Malaysia to discuss those controls, a year after they
had been imposed.

            I  arrived at a moment of celebration. When the controls
were put on, many Western analysts predicted disaster: a collapse of the
economy, hyperinflation, rampant black markets. It didn't happen. Two days
before I arrived, the latest statistics had confirmed that Malaysia was in fact
experiencing a fairly strong economic recovery. The actual implementation of
the controls had been careful and selective, and important economic
reforms--such as strengthening the banking system--had, if anything,
accelerated after the new policy was introduced. A few days after my visit,
restrictions on removing money from the country were eased and hardly any money
was pulled out. So, I guess the Malaysians expected me to join them in a mutual
admiration society. Surely they were disappointed when I expressed some
skepticism about the payoff from the controls.

            But the truth is that
while Malaysia's recovery has proved the hysterical opponents of capital
controls wrong, it has not exactly proved the proponents right. For there is a
recovery in progress throughout Asia. South Korea, which did not impose
controls (though it did get an early and crucial rescheduling of its foreign
debt) has bounced back with stunning speed; Thailand is growing, too; even
Indonesia has bottomed out. In general, the market panic of 1997-98 was, it
turns out, coming to an end just about the time that Malaysia decided to make
its big break with orthodoxy. You can argue that the controls may have allowed
Malaysia to recover faster, with less social cost, than it would have
otherwise. But the vindication that Mahathir probably imagined for himself--a
triumphant recovery in Malaysia, while its more orthodox neighbors continued to
languish--hasn't quite played out.

            What, then, are the lessons of Malaysia's recovery? In our
staged "dialogue"--which was played out in semi-public, in front of a
disturbingly obsequious audience of a hundred or so businessmen--Mahathir
continued to sound a minor-key version of the conspiracy theme, insisting that
capital controls were necessary to protect small countries against the evil
designs of big speculators. That's an unfortunate emphasis: While there are big
speculators, and they do sometimes make plays against vulnerable economies,
they are not the main reason that controls sometimes make sense. In general,
controls should be imposed to prevent panic rather than conspiracy, and the
investors who panic are, if anything, more likely to be respectable bankers and
wealthy domestic residents than nefarious rootless cosmopolitans. (Indeed, even
the occasional market manipulation by big speculators wouldn't be possible if
it weren't for the possibility of generating a panic among other investors; it
is a familiar point in the academic literature that Hong Kong-type speculative
plays can work only if the economy is vulnerable to self-fulfilling crisis in
the first place.) And the emphasis on big foreign speculators may encourage
Malaysia to control too much for too long. Panic is a sometime thing, but hedge
funds ye will always have with you.

            Nonetheless, Malaysia has
proved a point--namely, that controlling capital in a crisis is at least
feasible. Until the Malaysian experiment, the prevailing view among pundits was
that even if financial crises were driven by self-justifying panic, there was
nothing governments could do to curb that panic except to reschedule bank
debts--part, but only part, of the pool of potential flight capital--and
otherwise try to restore confidence by making a conspicuous display of virtue.
were the watchwords. The alternative--preventing capital flight directly, and
thereby gaining a breathing space--was supposed to be completely impossible,
with any attempt a sure recipe for disaster. Now we know better. Capital
controls are not necessarily the answer for every country that experiences a
financial crisis; sometimes confidence can be restored without the need for
coercive measures, and even when calming words fail, "burden sharing" by banks
and other lenders will often be enough. But it would now be foolish to rule out
controls as a measure of last resort.

            Mahathir can therefore claim a partial vindication for his
economic heresies. That is not a political endorsement. Some right-wingers have
claimed that anyone with a good word for Malaysian capital controls (me in
particular) is also in effect an accomplice in the imprisonment, on what
certainly sound like trumped-up charges, of Mahathir's former heir apparent
Anwar Ibrahim--an advocate of more conventional policies. Well, I still
remember the days when left-wingers used to claim that anyone with a good word
for Chile's free-market reforms had bloodstained hands, because he was in
effect endorsing Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The point is that economics is not a
morality play. Sometimes bad men make good policies, and vice versa. And the
job of economic analysts is, or ought to be, to assess the policies, without
regard to who makes them.

            The objective fact is that whatever you think of
Mahathir, Malaysia has gotten away with its economic apostasy. You can question
whether that apostasy was necessary, but you cannot claim that it has been a
disaster--and you cannot disguise the fact that those who predicted disaster
were letting politics and ideology cloud their judgment.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Art Giuliani Was Spared

            
Although the election of the Islamic leader Abdurrahman Wahid as Indonesia's
new president came too late to be reported in any of Wednesday's papers, the
ballot process was seen as giving hope for democracy. An op-ed in the
South China Morning
Post of Hong Kong said that "despite all the mess, the killing, the
corruption and deceit, Indonesia is engaging in a more open and competitive
political process than ever before." The Guardian of London
said in an editorial that the ballot by parliament marked "a crucial turning
point" for Indonesia since it was the country's first contested presidential
election.

            
However, there were worries about the potential consequences of the defeat of
the nation's most popular presidential candidate, Megawati Sukarnoputri. The
Australian ,
Rupert Murdoch's national daily, said Wednesday that if she failed to win, the
Indonesian economy could be halted by strikes and popular unrest. This was a
warning made Monday by Gen. Zen Mulani, head of the country's national
intelligence agency, in a briefing to economists and presidential advisers. He
said that banks and capital markets are expected to be the main targets of
industrial action. In an editorial, the Age of Melbourne criticized Australian Prime Minister
John Howard for publicly backing Megawati's candidature on the eve of the vote.
"Australia would be better served if he kept his own counsel on who should lead
another nation," it said.

            In an
editorial, the Daily Telegraph of London
condemned as "disgraceful" the treatment meted out by the British police to Wei
Jingsheng, China's leading democratic dissident and a former nominee for the
Nobel Peace Prize. The police seized and held him Tuesday as he tried to unfurl
a banner in front of Queen Elizabeth and Jiang Zemin as they processed in a
royal carriage up the Mall to Buckingham Palace during the Chinese president's
state visit to Britain. "This country is increasingly seen by dissidents as an
accomplice of the Chinese Communist Party," the paper said. Noting that the
Chinese authorities had let it be known in advance that Britain would pay a
penalty if it tolerated public protest during Jiang's visit, it commented, "The
Government may have been right to invite President Jiang to Britain, but it
should not kowtow to repressive demands." Wei himself told the press: "We think
the police behavior is without reason. We thought it was only in China that
freedom of expression was forbidden." The Times of London said the
police operated a policy of "zero tolerance" toward all demonstrators except
for 40 Falun Gong practitioners who were allowed to practice their spiritual
exercises opposite the prime minister's office.

            On
Tuesday, Izvestiya of Moscow noted an alarming new tendency in Russia:
In the absence of effective enforcement of property rights, people simply grab
what they think should be theirs. It gave the example of the Barrikady
agricultural cooperative in the Volgograd region, where peasant shareholders,
claiming a combine harvester and a herd of cows as their own, seized them from
a neighboring village. "This is how bloody slaughters have started in Russian
history, leading in the end to two revolutions and the placing of Russia
outside the civilized world for the entire 20 th century," the paper
said.

            The
Moscow Times
ran a comment by Yulia Latynina Wednesday on a rise in the approval ratings of
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin because of Russian successes in the Chechen war.
The writer said Putin is bound to slump again in the polls, though, because
Russia will lose the war. "To win it requires money that is not in the budget,
sober-mindedness that Russian leaders don't have, and a readiness to fight to
the end that too frequently is absent in Russian soldiers. It is funny to think
that our army--in which 'surgical strikes' are useless because enlisted men
shake the TNT out of the bombs and sell it--could consider fighting a country
in which war is considered the one worthy male occupation."

            The
Independent
of London reported Wednesday from Moscow that TNT isn't the only thing
being sold by the Russian military. It said the Russian navy is selling off the
kamikaze dolphins it trained to blow up enemy ships by carrying mines to them.
"There is a general disposal of surplus military equipment, old trucks, tanks,
armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers, which the impoverished Russian
military no longer needs or can maintain," the paper said.

            The
Independent also reported from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that the death of
former President Julius Nyerere is generating "the biggest outpouring of
collective grief that southern Africa has ever seen." Madeleine Albright is
among world leaders due to attend his funeral there Thursday amid "a 48-hour
non-stop orgy of tears for Baba wa Taifa--the father of the nation." The paper
described a tearful child on television singing "You did more in your life than
all the water in the sea." This included running the economy into the ground
and at one point having more political prisoners than South Africa, but his
work in the cause of African emancipation was celebrated in a poem by Kenneth
Kaunda, the former president of neighboring Zambia. That country's Post
quoted from the poem: "I am sure you know of all those successes ... in
Namibia, South Africa. Why then, Julius, do you leave Burundi unfinished?"
Kaunda told the Post that he would present another poem to Nyerere's
widow at the funeral.

            In
Israel Wednesday, Ha'aretz led its front page with a report
from Washington that Congress' refusal to include funds to implement the Wye
agreement in the foreign aid bill it approved this week "could throw a monkey
wrench" into both a final-status agreement with the Palestinians and a deal
with Syria. The Clinton administration had specifically pledged $1.2 billion in
aid to evacuate residents, relocate industries, and establish military
facilities, the paper said. It added that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
remains confident that the $500 million dollars of aid slated for this year
will eventually be approved because "Congressional Republicans say they do not
object to the aid in principle--it is merely a tool in their power struggle
with the White House."

            A
strange development occurred this week in the Australian referendum campaign on
the abolition of the monarchy. On Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald
reported that the Buckingham Palace Web site had quietly changed its
description of the queen's constitutional position in Australia from "head of
state" to "sovereign." This apparently delighted many Australian monarchists
who have been countering the Republicans' "resident for president" slogan with
the bizarre claim that Australia already has an Australian head of state in the
person of the governor-general, the queen's representative there. Buckingham
Palace, while claiming to be aloof from the campaign, admitted to the Daily
Telegraph Wednesday that it made the change to its Web site--calling it "an
appropriate amendment"--but wouldn't say why. The Herald said monarchist
Prime Minister John Howard was under suspicion and linked the change to the
monarchists' strategy of pretending the queen doesn't exist or, at any rate,
doesn't matter. The latest Herald opinion poll has supporters and
opponents of an Australian republic at 43 percent each.

            It
will only be known after the vote of Nov. 6 if the queen will go the way of a
species of dinosaur just discovered in Australia. The Australian
reported Wednesday that scientists have discovered a dinosaur the
size of a small gray kangaroo and have curiously named it "Qantassaurus
intrepidus" after the Australian airline, Qantas. They say it is 115 million
years old and should contribute to the paleontological debate about whether
dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded.

            A piece of modern British
art which New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has fortunately been spared is
My Bed , by Tracey Emin, one of five artists short-listed for the annual
$30,000 Turner Prize. Featuring prominently in an exhibition at the Tate
Gallery in London, it is said to be the bed in which the artist spent a week
contemplating suicide after breaking up with a boyfriend. The Daily
Telegraph said Wednesday that the bed "is covered in urine-stained sheets
and torn pillows and is surrounded by the detritus of her sojourn. This
includes half-smoked cigarettes, condoms, packets of contraceptive pills, empty
vodka bottles, a pregnancy testing kit, sanitary towels, nylons and three pairs
of her dirty knickers." The paper's art critic compared the exhibit to
"unprocessed sewage" and said that if Emin wins the prize, as she very well
might, "her victory will testify not to the vitality of British art but to a
campaign of promotion so brazen that it has left even the cynical London art
world awestruck."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Florida Juice

            I still have my notes from that morning, May 4,
1990, in the Q Wing of Florida State Prison: steak, broccoli, hot Lipton tea
for the last meal. The lights go off, throwing the prison into darkness, as the
prison switches to its own generator. At 7 a.m., the door in the back of the
death chamber opens, and there's Jesse Tafero--slender, bald, white--standing
between two guards and looking at the chair like he can't believe it's real.
I'm attending his execution as a witness and covering it for my employer, the
Miami Herald . The guards make Tafero sit down and tie him to the chair
with leather straps. He says his last words and then stares out at each of us,
one by one, as the guards stuff a gag into his mouth. "He is defiant," my notes
say, as if I can read his mind. The guards slip a black leather hood over his
face and screw the head electrode, with its circular sponge, down onto the top
of his skull. Ready, set, go. At six minutes past 7, the electricity hits Jesse
Tafero and his head bursts into flame.

            Some things you can't
escape--can't burn them, can't box them up, can't run far enough or fast enough
away. I thought of Jesse Tafero earlier this month when I read about the
execution of Bud Davis in the Florida electric chair. Davis started to bleed
when the electricity hit him, soaking his shirt bright red, scaring the
assembled witnesses. "The chair functioned as it was designed to function," is
what Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's press secretary said.

            And in a way, that's absolutely true. If tidy executions
were the point, Florida could have switched over to lethal injection a long
time ago. Pretty much all the states have. But Florida has been insistent about
keeping its lethal furniture, even though three times in the last nine years,
beginning with Jesse Tafero, the chair has gone awry. Fire in 1990, fire in
1997, and now blood. Meanwhile, Florida continues to fend off legal challenges
to its right to electrocute, behaving as if death itself weren't punishment
enough.

            It's no coincidence that
modern Florida was born of electricity--without air conditioning, none of it
would be possible, not those golf course condos or tall beach hotels or trailer
parks or malls spreading across the shallow limestone shelf that separates
Florida soil from the sea. Down there, more than in other places, electricity
is power, the fine bright line between life and no life, which is the same
thing as between life and death.

            The electric chair came to the state in the middle of the
first great Florida land boom, when Florida was conjuring itself up out of the
sea of grass. Back then, Florida executed by hanging, which wasn't a foolproof
way to kill people either. Some of the noosed choked to death in those dusty
jailhouse courtyards, but that wasn't what bugged Florida about the method. The
problem was that hangings were popular and sometimes drew huge, raucous,
picnicking crowds, an image that didn't quite mesh with the orange-blossom
gentility the land barons were trying to create. In 1924, the Florida
legislature moved death indoors to the chair, away from the curious and the
mayonnaise-smeared.

            Somehow, the electric throne made death seem
civilized. But those carefree days when frying someone was a sign of progress
are long gone. The chair has become an anachronism, an unpleasant physical
reminder that the death penalty involves death . One by one, starting in
Texas in 1982, states switched to lethal injection. Only four states still
electrocute, and of them, Florida is by far the most enthusiastic.

            You see, Florida
likes the chair. Its collective blood-thirst hasn't changed much since
the days of public hangings. Following Davis' bloody demise, Gov. Bush
proclaimed that the execution let everyone know that Florida was against the
murder of innocent people. After the chair misfired in 1997, Attorney General
Bob Butterworth similarly explained that if people didn't want to burn up while
being electrocuted, then they should commit their capital offenses somewhere
else. Burn 'em up and warn 'em off: The only thing unusual about the chair,
Florida thinks, is that it isn't used often enough.

            Outsiders think the Florida executioners are sadistic
morons. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, they're
frustrated home economists. Consider for a moment the "science" of
electrocution at Florida State Prison. When flames erupted from Jesse Tafero
during the execution I witnessed, prison officials blamed the fire on the
water-filled sponge attached to his head that was placed there to conduct
electricity from the electrode. The sponge, purchased by maintenance workers at
the local five-and-dime, was highly flammable because it was synthetic ,
they determined. To demonstrate their theory, they bought another synthetic
sponge and stuck it in a kitchen toaster, where it caught on fire. A simulated
execution was conducted with a fire-resistant sea sponge: a tub of water
standing in for a human body and a colander for a human head. After that, only
sea sponges could enter the death chamber.

            But when Pedro Medina's
head caught fire during his March 1997 execution, the Florida Supreme Court
ordered the Department of Corrections to write down its electric chair
protocol, previously just a folksy word-of-mouth operation in Q Wing. The
ruling came out of a 1997 lawsuit filed by condemned inmate Leo Alexander
Jones, who argued that the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment. The
state, by way of saying thank you, ordered Jones to watch the chair's next
trial run. This time, a metal salad bowl played the role of the human head.

            In 1997, the Florida Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to keep the
chair, with the dissenting justices comparing the chair to the guillotine.
Since then, three justices have left the court, two of them from the pro-chair
side. It's hard to imagine that this latest "incident" won't have an impact on
the court, which is currently reviewing another legal challenge to the
chair.

            Heavy use of the chair--43 executions in the last
20 years--has put some wear and tear on the device. In 1999, the Department of
Corrections, which had previously told the court that the chair was in good
shape, up and called a structural engineer and paid him $4,000 to inspect the
chair. The inspector reported that the chair itself, the wooden part, needed
replacement. It just so happened that the Department of Corrections had another
electric chair, a full-size replica that it had had manufactured and then
placed on display at the department's tiny and strange museum in Tallahassee.
While still in the death chamber, the inspector had snapped a few quick
pictures of himself sitting in the chair, and he is planning to use them as
Christmas cards this year. According to the inspector, the state's concern
wasn't the condemned: The guards were worried that if the chair broke apart
during an electrocution, the thick, black, high-voltage wires screwed to the
inmate might rip loose and electrocute everybody in the room.

            
               Flames , my notes say, about Tafero's
execution. Flames and smoke. It is impossible to put into words. What
does it look like when someone catches fire while strapped to a piece of wood?
The flames are nearly a foot high, they arc out from underneath the black
leather hood; there is smoke, the huge buzzing sound of the electricity, there
are white walls and Venetian blinds and linoleum underfoot. There's ash falling
on Tafero's shirt and he's nodding his head, he's heaving his chest in and out,
tied down with those thick leather straps. The executioner turns the power on
and off, three times in all, and in between the jolts Tafero is moving, he's
nodding, his chest rises and falls. He looks like he's still alive. Then the
electricity hits him again, and the fire rises from his head, from the black
leather mask, and he shudders forward and is slammed back against the chair. It
takes seven minutes before the prison doctor pronounces him dead, seven minutes
of heaving, nodding, flame, and smoke. You can't see his face because the mask
covers it, but as you walk past him on your way out you notice his hands there.
There's a sore on his right pinky finger, a raw spot, flesh rubbed off to blood
against the oak, from where he was clawing the chair.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Fisherman and the Dryad

            He
drank from a bottle and waded in the river.
He waded near the bank and watched the light
Drain through the trees and set on the water
That told his fortune with floating sticks and leaves.
He saw his place arranged there before him,
A dinner service set on a table of glass
That he, the thrown rock of himself, might break,
His own reflection, the gray shadow of a fish,
Its murky back twisting through stumps and weeds.

            Then
he heard her step through the forest, the sound
Of the steps preceding her through the leaves
Like the calling card of a doe approaching the water,
Trying her footing across newly covered ground.
Backpacker, he thought, and put away his bottle,
Not wanting it a stranger's first sight of him,
Cheered it might be someone who liked a line of chatter,
He, not having spoken to anything but a worm
All day in the forest instead of at work.

            He had been changing a
flat, a roofing nail
Pried from the tread with the edge of a dime,
Rolling the spare when he first heard the river
On the other side of the road when his breathing slowed.
Having heard it, he wanted to see it at once,
To wade in his boots and drag a cast line
In the flat current moving toward him,
When she stepped into the clearing above the river,
Yellow leaves on her arms and birds in her hair.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 291: &quot;Ocelots&quot;

            
               Researchers in
Dallas tried ocelot scent and rat feces but neither worked as well as Calvin
Klein Obsession for Men. What were they trying to do?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 290)--"Fighting Crime ... With Science!":
            

            

               According to the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department, the list includes
Mexican-Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Cajuns. List of what?
            

            "Those
who are looking to 'whup Don Rickles' ass' after his last-minute substitution
for the Indigo Girls at Lilith Fair."-- Tim Carvell
            

            
"Little brown people who dance around naked in your face, while ranting like
imbeciles, just to get you to shoot a squirt of pepper spray at them. Because,
you know, they eat it for breakfast. Or is that Tom Green I just
described?"-- Molly Shearer Gabel
            

            
"People who cannot be subdued with pepper spray alone, but require repeated,
severe beatings. Lamar Alexander is also on this list."-- Charles
Star
            

            "
'Native speakers of an Indo-European language. Some forget the large number of
Dravidian language speakers in India. Grade: B-.' Signed, 'Prof. Chomsky.'
"-- Matthew Singer
            

            
"Minorities to be cruelly caricatured in Star Wars: Episode II ."-- Ted
Barlow
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Chris'
Wrap-Up
            

            It's hard to know where to draw the line when
you're making a joke about race, especially when it comes to those shifty,
no-good Cajuns. I have nothing against them myself, but you know what happens
when they move in next door. First they turn all the washboards and jugs into
musical instruments, and the next thing you know all the neighborhood crawfish
start to disappear. Dennis Cass was not the only New Quiz entrant who suspected
he was being tricked into saying something he'd regret later. But that's not
why I'm here. That's not what I'm all about. What kind of person would write a
question about race and then get all shirty on people who were just trying to
have a little fun? Not yrs. trly.

            The trick is to think of
me less as the new sheriff in town and more as one of the nannies the von Trapp
children killed before Maria.

            
               Spicy
Answer
            

            Ethnic groups with a natural resistance to pepper
spray.

            As Training Officer Frank Gutoski explained to a
reporter for the Cambridge Chronicle , "The people [pepper spray] doesn't
affect are people who have consumed cayenne pepper from the time they are small
children, and this generally breaks into ethnic categories. Mexican-Americans
tend to be pickers. So with Cajuns, Mexican-Americans, Pakistani, Indian ...
[w]hat happens is that [pepper spray] is effective for a much shorter
time."

            In an apology Friday,
Cambridge Police Commissioner Ronnie Watson admitted, "There is no scientific
evidence to support these statements." "We're not scientists, we're police
officers," added department spokesman Frank Pasquarello.

            
               Parallax
Answer
            

            The people at 
                  Slate
                remind
me that Randy never made anyone wait a whole day for the answers to the
"extras." Fine.

            The question, if you recall, was about Warren
Beatty's age as opposed to the age of some U.S. presidents and politicians who
you probably thought were older than Warren Beatty because they weren't as well
lit.

            The trick was to
rearrange the list by the age they were--or would be--when they became
president. Here's the solution:

            Orrin Hatch--66

            Liddy Dole--64

            Warren Beatty--63

            Pat Buchanan--62

            John Adams--61

            Warren Harding--55

            Calvin Coolidge--51

            Chester Arthur--50

            James Polk--49

            Teddy Roosevelt--42

            Did I have a point? Not really. I just wanted to
take a cheap potshot by pointing out how old Warren Beatty is, and how old
Liddy Dole is. Liddy really is old, you know; she just looks young standing
next to Bob. Of course, so do the Adirondacks. Lenny Bruce said his problem
with Eisenhower was that he wouldn't vote for a man who couldn't get life
insurance.

            The other charming thing
about the five presidents at the bottom of the list? Like FDR, Garfield,
Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley, and Grant, by the time they were Warren Beatty's
age, they were dead.

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            Pat Buchanan, doughnuts, Harvard.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            This Week's Shootings

            

               
                  
                     Congress approved the $792 billion tax-cut
plan.
                  
                "It's a happy day for the American taxpayer,"
beamed House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas. Rep.
Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Republicans are preparing to call President
Clinton "a Scrooge for vetoing this Christmas-in-July package of tax cuts." The
Washington Post 
               condemns the bill as "misshapen," "unaffordable," and
"a further mortgage on an already overburdened future." President Clinton,
comparing the negotiations to those over the 1996 welfare bill, signaled that
he will accept a compromise plan.

            

               Three people died in an Alabama office shooting. Alan Eugene
Miller opened fire at his current and former workplaces. In "," Scott Shuger
says the killings were underplayed because they came too soon after last week's
massacre, which was bloodier and involved wealthier victims.

            

               Mark McGwire hit his 500 th home run. Before hitting
No. 499, he announced that he had quit the performance-enhancing drug
androstenedione four months prior. The White House drug czar lauded McGwire's
decision. But a steroid expert told the Associated Press, "I would have
preferred he said it at the beginning of the season. ... That's four months of
kids who took andro because of him ."

            

               Richard Holbrooke was confirmed as ambassador to the United
Nations. His nomination had been held up for 14 months, first on
ethics questions and then because of spats between the GOP and the White House.
The Washington Post reports that the Republicans gained little for their stonewalling, and the New
York Times relays that the holdup made the United Nations feel even more
snubbed by the United States.

            

               The American Academy of Pediatrics told parents to restrict children's
television-watching. The doctors said to keep television away from
children under 2 and out of all youngsters' bedrooms. In "Culturebox," Judith
Shulevitz explains why television is an .

            
               The
Christian Coalition was cleared of improperly helping GOP candidates. A
federal judge said the group acted within the boundaries of election law when
it handed out Republican-boosting voter guides. The Wall Street Journal
spun it as a setback for the Federal Elections Commission and a possible boon
to special-interest groups. An election lawyer asked, "If they can't get these
guys, how the heck are they going to go after the AFL-CIO or the
environmentalists or the business coalitions?" Monday's New York Times
reported that the coalition is faltering and was never as powerful as it
appeared.

            

               Arbitrators priced the Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassination at
$16 million. The arbitration panel split over how much the federal
government should fork over to the Zapruder estate. Two members compared it to
President Kennedy's desk and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook. But the third
pointed out that the film is valuable mostly for its licensing rights, which
the Zapruders already own.

            

               Hillary Clinton discussed her marital problems. In Talk magazine,
she attributed President Clinton's philandering to childhood abuse. The New
York Daily News calls the revelations "remarkable ," but the New York Post says it's
psychological bunk . (
                  Slate
                decries the
excessive coverage in "," "," "," "," and ".")

            
               A
disgruntled day trader killed 12 people in Atlanta. Mark Barton bludgeoned
his wife and children to death, shot nine workers at day trading investment
firms, and then committed suicide. He had previously been suspected in the
murder of his first wife and her mother in 1994. This was the third shooting
spree in Atlanta in three months. "Pray for our city," urged Atlanta Mayor Bill
Campbell. Explanations: The Wall Street Journal tallies Barton's trading
losses; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution points to the trend of
workplace violence ; and the Washington Post
blames loose gun laws .

            

               President Clinton was fined $90,000 for his false testimony in the Paula
Jones case. Judge Susan Webber Wright called his perjury "a willful refusal
to obey this court's discovery orders." "We accept the judgment of the court
and will comply with it," said Clinton's lawyer.

            

               Linda Tripp was indicted for illegally taping telephone conversations with
Monica Lewinsky. Maryland law prohibits recording phone calls without the
consent of both parties. Tripp protests that she made the tapes to protect
herself because Lewinsky was pressuring her to lie in the Paula Jones case. The
Washington Post approves of the indictment in principle but says that
constitutional concerns should protect Tripp from "a full-dress felony prosecution ."

            

               Microsoft is going after America Online. It introduced its own
version of AOL's instant-messenger software and said it will offer similar
dial-up service for less or no money. The Wall Street Journal noted that
similar tactics helped Microsoft beat Lotus and Netscape. AOL countered that
Microsoft had already tried and failed to launch a proprietary online
service.

            

               Dow Chemical will buy rival Union Carbide. The Wall Street
Journal predicts the new company will rival DuPont, the largest U.S.
chemical maker.

            
               The
World Wrestling Federation is going public. "It's a collision of
two of the biggest pop cultural phenomena of the '90s ,
stock market mania and wrestlemania!" one commentator effused to the
Washington Post .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Total Eclipse of the News

            In the
absence of a unifying international story, most of the weekend's papers led on
domestic stories, with one notable exception: The European media devoted
gallons of ink to the Aug. 11 total eclipse of the sun, which should be visible
Wednesday from northern Europe to the Bay of Bengal. The Irish Times observed
that "[e]clipses used to be about soothsaying and portents of disaster. Now
they are about tourism and commerce." Indeed much of the coverage revolved
around anticipated traffic jams, tourist rip-offs, entrepreneurs' complaints that there are
fewer eclipse-tourists than they planned for, weather worries, and gloomy predictions of ill-prepared
spectators permanently damaging
their vision. (For comprehensive eclipse packages, see these Web sites from
England's Guardian , France's Le
Monde , and Spain's El
Mundo . The Irish Times will provide a live Web broadcast of the
eclipse from 1 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. PT Wednesday here.)

            In a
story of economic eclipse, Saturday's International Herald Tribune fronted a report from Kuala Lumpur about the Malaysian government's forced
mergers in the financial sector. The moves will consolidate the nation's
current roster of 21 commercial banks, 25 finance companies, and 12 merchant
banks into six institutions by the end of next month, with the government
forming the new alliances rather than allowing market forces to bring them
about. ''If you're suddenly told, 'Here's the person you're going to
marry'--and all this irrespective of cultural differences and without knowledge
of your partner's business practices--it's a bit of a shock,'' a top official
banker told the paper. Although the new structure has not yet been revealed,
the IHT reported that "the central bank has already said that four of
the banks would be controlled by Malays, who make up slightly more than half of
the population, and two by Chinese. Ethnic Chinese make up about a third of the
population but control a disproportionately higher percentage of the country's
wealth." There is no word yet on how current shareholders will be compensated
for their equity.

            The
saga of former Chilean President Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who has been under
house arrest in London since October 1998 when a Spanish judge requested his
extradition to face charges there, took still more turns this weekend when the
Spanish attorney general called on Britain to release Pinochet because the
procedure has taken so long that it is no longer legal. Many Spaniards,
including the judge who originally demanded Pinochet's extradition, protested
the move. Swiss, French, and Belgian authorities have also asked that Pinochet
be extradited to their jurisdictions, so it is possible that if the Spanish
request is withdrawn, the proceedings will continue with one of those countries
as the petitioner. Also, the conservative Sunday Telegraph of London
reported, it is possible that Pinochet could face trial in Britain if Spain
withdraws its request. In Spain, El País reported that Chile has tried to persuade the United States to
find an "extrajudicial" solution to the Pinochet problem, perhaps referring the
matter to adjudication. A surprising editorial Monday in the conservative Spanish daily ABC came out against such a
solution. "It isn't a question of political ideology or of bilateral relations
with a friendly country. It's a question of what is or isn't right. Spain is a
friend of Chile and this matter ... is having a negative effect on bilateral
relations. But if our country is a friend of Chile, it is an even better friend
of justice," said the paper.

            The
alarming lead story in Sunday's Observer
claimed that Britain's BSE (mad cow disease) epidemic "may have been caused by
a scientific experiment that went wrong. The blunder has cost the country £4bn
[$6.4 billion], claimed the lives of 43 people, and triggered fears that the
death toll could eventually reach several million." According to the story,
"Experts believe that hormones, taken from the brains of slaughterhouse
carcasses, were injected into cows in a bid to create a new breed of
super-cattle. But the experiment ... backfired. The hormones, extracted from
pituitary glands, were transmitted in an agent that spread mad cow disease and
eventually infected humans as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease." The
report received little attention in the other serious British papers.

            Both the Sydney Morning Herald and the
Age of
Melbourne gave prominent coverage Monday to aboriginal leaders' plans to use
the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games to bring global attention to the plight of
indigenous Australians. According to the Age 's story, "an Aboriginal 'embassy' will be set up in Sydney for the
duration of the Olympics to lobby visiting VIPs and media." This comes after
suggestions of an indigenous boycott of the games were rejected, in part
because several aboriginal athletes, such as track star Cathy Freeman, are
medal contenders, and after the Olympic organizing committee "did a back flip"
and decided to fly the indigenous flag at official venues. In an editorial, the Herald predicted that some Australians will
be angered by the "strategy of shaming ... Australian governments and
institutions in the eyes of the world for their mistreatment and neglect of
Aborigines" because "[t]hey will see it as calculated to tarnish the national
image at a time when all other efforts are directed towards polishing it and
showing Australia at its best." But, the paper claimed, "[s]uch anger is not
only futile but misdirected." The Herald placed hope in the
acknowledgment by some native leaders "that the presentation of Aboriginal
people as victims, though useful to win some political arguments, is ultimately
disempowering for Aborigines themselves. If international scrutiny shames white
Australia into necessary reappraisal of flawed policies, well and good. If it
also sharpens Aboriginal leaders' understanding of the need for greater efforts
on their part, even better."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 262: &quot;Wonder Bread?&quot;

            
               Michigan Gov. John
Engler says it "strengthens families, stabilizes neighborhoods, builds
communities, enhances self-sufficiency, and promotes personal well-being." What
does?
            

            
               (Q uestion
courtesy of Herb Terns. )
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 261)--"The Rules":
            

            

               
                  
                     Among the four pages of rules are these: women must
smile and wear makeup at all times, any woman caught chewing gum gets an $80
fine, and then there's the draconian Rule 29--"if any girl gets three
complaints, she must immediately resign." Rules governing
what?
                  
               
            

            "Poker
night at the Citadel."-- Ellen Macleay ( Norman Oder and Bill
Thomason had similar answers.)

            "The
utopian society described on the back of the Brave New Barbie box."--Peter
Carlin
            

            "And
Singapore wonders why its women's World Cup soccer team never does
well."-- Jay D. Majors (similarly, Aaron Schatz )

            "This
sucks. I thought working on Liddy's campaign would be better than working on
Bob's. I quit."-- Molly Shearer Gabel (similarly, Eugene Bryton ,
Angela Wilkes , Dee Lacey , Jay Framson , and Cebra
Graves )

            "Oh
man, I've got that list. I can't remember if it came from the tenure committee
or the gentleman's club where I used to lap dance."-- Julie "TA"
Anderson
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Comical misogyny, like that underpinning today's
question, comes in a variety of forms, none more impressive than The Man
Show , a beer-fueled, bikini-clad exercise in frat-boy reassurance that
debuts this week on Comedy Central.

            With a self-congratulatory smirk, the show presents
the most bullying reactionary ideas as if they were progressive . It's
the naughtiness of the privileged that runs something like this: Everyone says
it's wrong to club kittens with cinder blocks. Well, I'm no slave to
convention, I just beat the hell out of them. I'm a rebel, and only a prude
would complain. This bit of logical high jinks can justify anything from racism
to the flat tax.

            Offering up loutish claptrap used to require a
different sort of justification. The old method was to insist that it was
"satire." Applied today, the line would run that The Man Show is not the
thing but is a parody of the thing. (The thing being the social ideas of Frank
Sinatra around the time he was eating eggs off the belly of the hooker and
slapping around his girlfriends. Still a lively topic in philosophical circles,
apparently.) But satire requires a critical stance, while The Man Show
requires jokes about women drivers and farting monkeys.

            This justification devolved into the light irony
defense: Our show may be rubbish, but we know it's rubbish. Through a process
of Hollywood alchemy, self-awareness transforms rubbish into lucrative
nonrubbish.

            The most modern and
least demanding defense relies on the personal virtue of the producer. I'm a
good person, therefore anything that I do is, by definition, good. Thus, The
Man Show , produced by a good guy (and I know him, he's a nice fellow) is
OK, but if, say, Donald Trump had produced it, it would be vile. It's Borges
logic. It's Calvinism, with enormous breasts, bouncing on a trampoline.

            
               Orientation Week
Answer
            

            These are the rules for prostitutes working for one
Taiwanese bar owner in Tokyo's Kabukicho, or "entertainment zone." Rule 37,
incidentally, states, "When a customer sings karaoke, please, everyone
clap."

            Lately, Japanese
gangsters are finding it hard to compete with vibrant immigrant entrepreneurs.
"The Chinese gangs are taking business from us in every area--in prostitution,
in gambling, in fencing, in stolen goods," said one yakuza to New
York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof. "The difference between us is that
Japanese yakuza think of long-term business relationships, but the
Chinese mafia thinks just of the short term. Their only goal is money, money,
money."

            
               Greg Diamond's
"What Becalms a Legend Most?" Extra
            

            In yet another spasm of millennial list making, the
American Film Institute ranks the century's stars as "50 Legends." If only the
No. 1 actor and the No. 1 actress had made movies together! Well, actually
Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn did co-star in The African Queen ,
but few other equally ranked pairs ever worked together. Participants are
invited to rectify that.

            From the list, available on the AFI's Web
site, choose a pair other than No. 1 (or No. 11--Gary Cooper and Barbara
Stanwyck often appeared together) and come up with a TV Guide -style plot
summary of a movie in which they might have co-starred. Entries are due by 5
p.m. ET on Sunday, June 27; results will run Monday. Some samples: 

            

               No. 5 C'mon Get Happy --A happy-go-lucky bachelor (Fred Astaire)
tries to cheer up a neurasthenic cancer patient (Greta Garbo) by teaching her
the cha-cha.

               No. 6 Green Acres --A taciturn banker (Henry Fonda) forces his
beautiful but leery young wife (Marilyn Monroe) to live a simple life on a
farm. Later remade for television, but as a comedy.

               No. 9 Guess Who's Coming to Seder? --A World War II soldier (Spencer
Tracy) brings his German bride (Marlene Dietrich) home from Berlin to meet his
Jewish family.

               No. 10 The Great Dominatrix --The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) sneaks into
the house of a wealthy young widow (Joan Crawford) for shelter, plays
whimsically with her silver serving set, and is beaten nearly to death with a
fireplace poker when she discovers him. Later remade as Boudou Saved From
Spanking .

               No. 14 Old York, Old York --A brooding English writer (Laurence
Olivier) is fascinated, against his better judgment, by a wisecracking American
girl (Ginger Rogers) who scoots around his Yorkshire hotel lobby backward on
heels humming to herself with her arms splayed.

            

            Click
here for the AFI's list of Greatest American Screen Legends.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Elizabeth Dole, displacing Tom DeLay for Most
Sexist Public Figure; Singapore, displacing Saudi Arabia for Most Sexist
Nation.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Brandi's Bra

            
               What's the
Goal?
            

            Normally, I find William Saletan to be one of the
more intelligent journalists on the mainstream beat. However, his analysis ("")
of the "controversy" surrounding Brandi Chastain's removal of her jersey after
clinching the World Cup trophy is indulgent, quixotic, and utterly
aggravating.

            He dismisses the "men do it" explanation as
superficial, when it's the only one that makes any real sense. Does anyone, on
either side of this absurd debate, really believe that an athlete, upon scoring
the winning goal in an international championship game, was actually trying to
stage some kind of cultural coup? With adrenaline pumping, in the moment of
realizing the dream of being a hero, with memories of the soccer greats running
through her head, she did what soccer players do when they can't contain
themselves. Are the pundits of the world so conceited that they really believe
that she was acting to supply them with more fodder?

            I think it was the game against North Korea when,
in celebration of a goal, one of the players did a running flip-flop-flip, a
common soccer-player's celebration. The announcer called it gymnastics.
Apparently, to him, the only sports against which women would be measured were
gymnastics and figure skating. Regardless of which side of the sports bra
debate Saletan supports, or anyone else who considers Chastain's behavior in
light of its social commentary rather than its expression of athletic
competition and pride, it's the same kind of sexism.

            Soccer in America, for
the moment, is a woman's sport. That means that the culture of soccer, with all
its grace and skill, brutality and bravado, will be exhibited by female
American athletes. It makes me wonder what people would be saying if women's
baseball became popular, and the commentariat was forced to watch women chewing
tobacco and grabbing their crotches.

            -- Chad Levinson
            

            New
York

            
               Don't Devaluate
Now
            

            Paul Krugman has been for a long time a very
critical observer of Argentina's currency board; he has suggested a devaluation
many times in the past. Almost at the end of his article (""), he says that
given that the Brazilian devaluation didn't bring hyperinflation, it could be
expected that an Argentinian devaluation wouldn't bring hyperinflation. He
concludes that from the fact that the two countries have dismal economic
histories, but dismal doesn't mean the same. On the surface both countries
might look quite alike, but people's reaction to inflation and economic
measures has proved to be very different, so we shouldn't expect to see both
countries reacting the same way.

            I deeply admire Krugman, but if he wants to write
about Argentina or any Latin American country, he should dedicate some time to
trying to understand what each country is like. They all might look the same,
but they are different; people are very different and react in different ways.
Historically, what has been good for Chile (Argentina's neighbor) has been a
disaster for Argentina, and this works the other way around. If he had
dedicated time to studying Argentina, he would have found out that Eduardo
Duhalde is desperately trying to gain votes, relying on old clichés that he
expects will still be appealing to Argentinians, and trying to show how
different he is from Carlos Menem--in part because he is different and in part
to avoid the opposition attack. Krugman would also have found out that the
Buenos Aires Stock Exchange is not representative of the way things are: Bonds
are important, and what businessmen are doing is important.

            I agree that we have a
regular recession and that the currency board prevents us from applying the
usual recipe, but it's not clear that it would work, and at this point breaking
the peso commitment would be extremely onerous. Right now we have a recession
and an increasing fiscal deficit (a comment on the virtues of keeping balanced
accounts would be very appropriate); if we devaluate, chances are we would also
have an inflation outburst, a rush against the banking system, and a capital
flight. When analyzing Argentina, it's important to keep in mind that since
we've been cheated many times, we have learned how to beat the system.

            -- María Laura
Segura
            

            Buenos
Aires, Argentina

            

               
                  Paul Krugman replies:
                
               I was, of course, aware of the politics
that led to Duhalde's remark. And in case this wasn't clear, the article did
NOT claim that Argentina's currency board is necessarily a foolish idea--only
that its downside could not be ignored. But I will say this: One should always
be suspicious of arguments that claim that one country is utterly different
from others. Yes, every country is unique--but not all that unique. Anyway,
only a few months ago many people--including Argentine economists--were
claiming that the contrast between Argentine success and Brazilian crisis meant
that Brazil must emulate Argentina's currency board; you can't take that
position and then claim that the role reversal that has taken place since
doesn't teach a contrary lesson.
            

            
               Pilot Error
            

            I agree with James Fallows' warning ("") to
inexperienced pilots who may know how to fly under good weather conditions, but
who haven't much under the belt on a hazy night. We all mourn the death of John
F. Kennedy Jr., but at the same time, I will go beyond Fallows' opinion and say
that Kennedy's decision to fly on a hazy night in a new one-engine plane over
water is not risky--it's down right reckless . I have two daughters, and
if I knew that my two daughters were going up in a one-engine plane with a
husband who lacked sufficient experience, on a hazy night over the sea, I'd do
everything in my power to prevent it from happening. If the pilot wants to take
that chance alone, fine, but once he allows passengers, he has to be
responsible enough to make the right decision for not only himself but for
those two girls as well.

            My daughters' safety is
the primary concern. Unfortunately, John Kennedy wasted his own life and the
lives of two young and beautiful girls without thinking, This isn't worth
the risk , when he knew it could be dangerous under such conditions.

            -- Sandy Shapiro
            

            
Woodside, Calif.

            
               Governer Bush, in
Deed
            

            Regarding "": I have been in the title insurance
business for 27 years, and prior to that did my master's thesis on the field at
Wharton.

            It is not true that a person must include a prior
set of restrictions in a deed when he sells his property. He may simply refuse
to include them. It is up to the buyer--and the buyer's title company--to
discover them in the "chain of title" and to determine if they have any legal
force or effect.

            Bush did not have to do anything except direct that
the restrictions be omitted or stricken from the deed he granted to his buyer.
(The only circumstance in which he would need to seek the consent of other
landowners in the development would be if he wanted to petition to change the
restrictions or permit an exception to them.)

            As a lawyer, Bush should have been fully aware of
the language in this instrument, which both he and his wife had to sign, and of
his legal prerogatives. As the governor of his state, he should have had the
decency, fortitude, and sensitivity to recognize the importance of refusing to
include these restrictions in his deed.

            Incidentally, in
Pennsylvania, the presence of a racial restriction in a set of deed
restrictions makes all the rest of that set of restrictions (e.g., as to the
maximum height of fences, the prohibition of nonsingle-family residences, etc.)
null and void. (This was a result of a case involving the will of Steven Girard
and Girard College in Philadelphia that went to the U.S. Supreme Court in the
1960s and resulted in a landmark decision.)

            -- Robert C.
Dean
            

            Lancaster, Penn.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Stanley Steamed

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Eyes Wide Shut
                (Warner Bros.). Thumbs go up, down, and every
which way for the final film by director Stanley Kubrick, who died shortly
after wrapping the movie. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as a married couple
entangled in sexual jealousy, but the critics focus largely on Kubrick's work.
Roger Ebert (the Chicago Sun-Times ) labels it "a worthy final chapter
to a great director's career," and Janet Maslin (the New York Times )
raves that it's his riskiest film and "a spellbinding addition to the Kubrick
canon." Michiko Kakutani (the New York Times ) begs to differ,
complaining that the director's "meticulous, detail-oriented approach has
sucked all spontaneity and passion from the picture." Most reviewers pillory
the film's highly publicized group-sex scene, in which human figures were
digitally inserted to avoid an NC-17 rating: "the most pompous orgy in the
history of the movies" (David Denby, The New Yorker ), and "one of the
least erotic orgies ever filmed" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles
Times ). (Click for 
                  Slate
                critic David Edelstein's review
and for an "Explainer" on Arthur Schnitzler, who wrote the novella that
Eyes Wide Shut is based on. Click here to see the trailers.)

            

               
                  The Blair Witch Project
                (Artisan Entertainment). A big hit at
this year's Sundance Film Festival, this first feature produced by five
film-school graduates from Florida steals some of Kubrick's opening-weekend
thunder. Its mockumentary premise: Three young filmmakers disappear while
trekking through the woods of Maryland in search of a local witch; a year
later, their footage is found and presented as The Blair Witch Project .
The trio get increasingly suspicious of each other as they hear eerie sounds in
the night and find mysterious bundles of sticks hanging from trees, and by the
end they're running for their lives. With its tiny budget of $75,000, the film
cleverly keeps the evil off-screen: "Most of the time, it's what the three
witch-searchers don't see--but fear--that gets our petrified juices flowing or
curdling. This is low-tech inventiveness at its best" (Desson Howe, the
Washington Post ). BWP is "the new face of movie horror" (Peter
Travers, Rolling Stone ), and it ends with "as heart-stopping a climax as
any the genre has seen in years" (Jay Carr, the Boston Globe ). The
Los Angeles Times ' Kevin Thomas demurs, knocking it as "a clever,
entertaining stunt, no more, no less," but Joe Morgenstern (the Wall Street
Journal ) advises, "Don't see this ingenious first feature if you believe in
ghosts." (Click here
to see the movie's official Web site, with more back-story on the
mockumentary.)

            

               
                  Lake Placid
                (20 th Century Fox). Neither Kubrick nor
the first-time filmmakers from Blair Witch Project have much to fear in
the way of competition from this flaccid creature feature, written by David E.
Kelley ( The Practice , Ally McBeal ). At a fictional lake in
Maine--not the real Lake Placid in New York--Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman
take on a 30-foot migrant crocodile from Asia. (Movie critics seem to have a
hard time telling a crocodile from an alligator.) Maslin (the New York
Times ) does find bright spots in the dialogue, the "divinely cheesy"
special effects, and the supporting cast, which includes Oliver Platt and
The General 's Brendan Gleeson. But "since even the gator horror satire
is old hat (remember Alligator ?), there's no remaining way to make this
interesting." Or, as Harry Knowles ( Ain't
It Cool News ) neatly puts it: Placid is "the worst giant
alligator movie known to man." (Click here to play the official site's wacky Croc Drop game.)

            

               Book
            

            

               
                  A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern
America
               , by Mark Caldwell (Picador). No one argues that Caldwell is
the first historian to survey the origin and use of manners, but whether he
adds much to the discussion is another question. David Bowman (the Village
Voice ) calls Short History "an amusing but lightweight read" and
notes that "even Mick Jagger had a more rigorous take on the subject ... in
'Sympathy for the Devil.' " The NYT 's Richard Eder takes a harsher
line: "These broader subjects are treated in books and magazines and the slow
sections of newspapers." Most reviewers notice Caldwell's positive spin on the
much-maligned Martha Stewart--that she democratizes civilized living by making
it not a matter of class, but simply of good habits, which anyone can learn.
"It's difficult to recall a single book in which [manners] are discussed as
comprehensively and intelligently as in this one ... the definitive book on the
subject--at least for now" (Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post ).
(Click here to buy the book.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  
                     Significant Other
                  
               , by Limp Bizkit
(Flip-Interscope). The notoriously potty-mouthed rap/metal quintet matures a
bit on the follow-up to its 1997 debut, Three Dollar Bill, Y'All$ . The
band occasionally departs from its hard-core speed metal and ventures into
"melodic interludes, user-friendly grooves, and actual harmonious vocals"
(Lorraine Ali, Rolling Stone ). The lyrics, by singer Fred Durst (who
clambers out of a toilet during the band's stage act), are "still the stuff of
monochromatic dude talk," but sometimes they hint at something deeper--like
when "the formerly promiscuous singer confesses his shame for past recreational
nookie sessions" (Ali). "The unholy matrimony of metal and rap celebrates
another victory on this superb sophomore effort" (Amy Sciarretto, College
Music Journal ). (Click here to buy Significant Other and here to buy Three Dollar Bill, Y'All$ .)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Book
            

            
               
                  
                     Inside the
Oval Office: White House Tapes From FDR to Clinton
                  
               , by William
Doyle (Kodansha International). Doyle's look at the audio-taping practices of
10 presidents is a "valuable history and comparative survey" (Ron Rosenbaum,
the New York Times Book Review ). Doyle, a "master of crackling prose"
(Richard R. Roberts, the Indianapolis Star ), provides insightful
transcripts from key moments, such as the Cuban missile crisis and the final
days of the Nixon administration. (Click here to buy the book.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 258: &quot;Swiss Dis&quot;

            
               Fill in the blank
as Christian Levrat assesses Sunday's referendum on asylum seekers: "There is a
side to Switzerland that is very generous, giving millions to refugees, and a
stricter side that wants to make sure that people coming in are not
____________."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 257)--"Big 'n' Sturdy":
            

            

               
                  
                     Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan's team from the National
Science Foundation and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was surprised by
the extent, thickness, and persistence. Of what?
                  
               
            

            
"Deepak Chopra's toupee."-- Gina Duclayan
            

            "Jenna
Elfman's hips."-- Larry Amoros
            

            
"Rejection letters regarding grant requests."-- Herb Terns
            

            "The
belly lox at Barney Greengrass."--Bill Scheft
            

            "The
cloud of doom over Lamar Alexander's campaign."-- Daniel Radosh ( Peter
Carlin had a similar answer.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            The worst part about the sea, as Ramanathan and the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography must both lament when it comes time for
their annual talent show, is that nothing amusing ever takes place beneath it.
Which you certainly couldn't say about Errol Flynn. Which is why Noël Coward
set so few of his plays underwater. James Bond, on the other hand, is always
poking about in some villain's undersea lair, and his attempts at repartee are
just parody bait. When the diving suits go on, the witty banter stops.
Something to do with all those air hoses, like trying to be witty at the
dentist. It is impossible to name a single amusing movie that takes place
beneath the waves. Just look at dolphins, the very model of marine
sophistication, a creature whose intelligence we're always called upon to
admire like some horrible precocious child. They're frequently found at Sea
World, performing in shows whose dialogue will not be quoted later at dinner.
In some countries, they'd be the dinner. The dolphin, not the precocious child.
Although it's a thought.

            There are, of course,
many elegant and flirtatious scenes set on yachts. Clearly, wit operates best
on the surface.

            
               Vast Polluted
Answer
            

            Ramanathan announced the discovery of a vast haze,
3.8 million square miles, about the size of the United States, hanging over the
Indian Ocean. "It appeared as if the whole Indian subcontinent was surrounded
by a mountain of pollution," he said.

            The problem with this haze, blown over the water by
winter winds from the Himalayas, is that it blocks out sunlight, lowering the
temperature.

            The prevailing winds
reverse in late spring, blowing the haze north over the land, where its
particles combine with monsoon rains and fall to the earth, dissipating the
cloud. But that's bad too, because the haze-sodden precipitation is just the
sort of acid rain that plays havoc with both terrestrial and marine life.

            
               Entangling
Alliances Extra
            

            Below, a dozen putative
unions from this past Sunday's New York Times "Wedding" page. Which is
true, which is false?

            1. Dentist marries lawyer.

            2. Lawyer marries other lawyer.

            3. Law partner marries law firm chairman.

            4. Yale law school marries Yale law school.

            5. Princeton marries Princeton.

            6. Web designer marries other Web designer.

            7. Actor in Les Mis marries other actor in
Les Mis .

            8. Morgan Stanley marries ING Barings.

            9. Consultatio Asset Management marries Hicks Muse
Tate & Furst.

            10. Unit manager for VH1 marries line producer for
Great Performances .

            11. Psychotherapist marries ob-gyn.

            12. Aerobics instructor
marries funeral director.

            

               Answers
            

            All are true.

            
               Best
Career
            

            "The
bride, 31, is the special assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of Management
and Budget for the New York City Police Department. She is also a cabaret
singer."

            
               Worst
Career
            

            "She
is the assistant to the writer and comedian Al Franken."

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Comical foreign names, nautical penises.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Remnick's Progress

            The
Times of
London Monday was much impressed by Russia's "dash and daring" in sneakily
moving into Kosovo before NATO's troops. In an editorial titled "Who Dares
Wins" (the motto of the British SAS commandos), the paper said that the
Russians have won "not only Pristina and the initiative, but the secret
admiration of scores of NATO officers frustrated by an enforced wait on the
Kosovo borders." Their "coup de théâtre" has served as a reminder "that
dithering loses to derring-do," the paper said: "This may have been a
media-dominated war; but to halt and advance to allow the cameras to catch up
is a grotesque irresponsibility."

            But
this was a minority view in the British press. On the Left, the Guardian said the Russian
military "seems ever closer to being out of control" and that its behavior in
Kosovo is "proof that there is no longer one government in that vast country,
but rather several, held in loose, often hostile connection to each other."
NATO should continue to deny Russia its own sector in Kosovo, but should also
soothe its wounded pride by "admitting that the West has been cavalier in its
treatment of the former superpower and that it now has to be given a seat at
the commanding table."

            On the
Right, the Daily Telegraph criticized the United States for being too
accommodating to Russia. It is hardly surprising that a cardinal aim of Russian
policy is to counter NATO's influence in central Europe, "and the role of
honest broker between the West and Belgrade gave them an ideal opportunity to
do so," the paper said. "Trusting them with that task prolonged the air
campaign and has now seriously queered KFOR's pitch," it added. "NATO cannot
blame the Russians for making difficulties. The fault lies in giving them such
an opportunity."

            In
Paris Sunday, Le
Monde ran an editorial saying that the message of Russia's race to
Pristina was a "brutal" one: that the Russians are not willing to submit to
NATO's authority and that they want control of the northern sector of the
province to carry out a de facto partition of Kosovo. While the West had good
reasons to be considerate toward Russia (by delaying preparations for a land
invasion and seeking a solution to the crisis within the unusual context of the
G-8, only because Russia was a part of it), it also has the right to expect
Russia "to play the game," Le Monde said. The West was right to involve
Russia, it concluded, "but not at any price, and especially not at that of a
partition of Kosovo."

            
Another Paris daily, Libération , said Monday that Russia's dash into Kosovo
shouldn't be treated lightly because it's unclear "who pilots the Russian plane
today." Bill Clinton might well ask this question of Boris Yeltsin when they
meet in Cologne, Germany, on Saturday, the paper said, but "it isn't certain
that his answer will be very convincing." In Germany Monday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
called the move "Yeltsin's coup" but added in a front-page comment that the
next few days would show whether Yeltsin has only been acting on whim or
whether there's a strategy behind it.

            
Europe's Monday papers were generally dominated, however, by the results of the
weekend's elections for the European Parliament in Strasbourg that, on very low
voter turnouts throughout Western Europe, delivered heavy rebuffs to both
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Prime Minister Tony Blair of
Britain. Conservatives trounced the Left in Italy as well, where the party of
TV magnate Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister, came in first. But in
France, the Socialists triumphed. Le Figaro of Paris said, however, that the real winners of
the elections were the absentionists. In France, fewer than one elector in two
voted; in Britain, fewer than one in four did. The Financial Times of London said
the low turnouts threatened to undermine the effectiveness of the European
Parliament, and most British papers said the results might set back Blair's
plans to bring Britain under the European single currency, the euro.

            David
Remnick, editor of The New Yorker , told the Milan daily Corriere della
Sera Monday that his objective for the magazine was that it would be
said that "of the 100 best articles of the century, 25 were published in The
New Yorker --ideally, half of those under my editorship." Confessing to
interviewer Alessandra Farkas that The New Yorker was still in the red,
Remnick said he is pleased that it has been rechristened "the most
authoritative and prestigious weekly on the planet" because "when you're the
best in your field, it's inevitable that sooner or later you become
profitable."

            He
rejected a suggestion that The New Yorker was "elitist," saying that the
word applied better to the New York Review of Books --"a purely celebral,
if brilliant, undertaking." Asked if he agreed that the quality of the world's
press is in decline, Remnick replied: "We are the living proof of the opposite:
Investing in quality has and always will have a place in the market. Despite
our deficit, nobody tells me what to publish and what not to publish. And do
you know why? In a world of fast food, there will always be room for a
five-star restaurant."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 278: &quot;Interest Rate&quot;

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 278)--"Interest Rate":
Fill in the blank as Carleton S. Fiorina, 44, the newly announced CEO of the
$50 billion Hewlett-Packard company, meets the press: "My ________ is
interesting but really not the subject of the story here."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               Monday's Question (No. 277)--"Summerize":
Trent Lott, Ronald Reagan, and Steve Martin did it when they were young, and
this summer more than 400,000 people will attend camps to learn how to do it
better. Do what?
            

            "Let's
just say that somewhere Dr. Joycelyn Elders is smiling."-- Tim Carvell
( Daniel Krause , Chris Thomas , and Norman Oder had similar
answers.)

            "Liven
up a crowd, or a Klan rally in the senator's case, with the smooth, lilting
sound of a banjo."-- Brooke Saucier
            

            "Flirt
with Larry King."-- Barbara Lippert
            

            
"Ronald Reagan was young?"-- Alison Rogers
            

            "If I
remember camp correctly, surrendering completely to an arbitrary and irrational
authority under the threat of violence."-- Charles Star
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Largely ignoring Trent
Lott--good advice for all--many News Quiz participants assumed that shorthand
for Ronald Reagan is senility, and shorthand for Steve Martin is the old arrow
through the head bit, which he performed back when he was still--oh, cruel,
cruel participants!--funny. Martin has indeed been in many bad movies recently,
and he certainly benefited from Tina Brown's editorial policy of publishing
anything at all if it was written--or dictated over the phone--by a celebrity.
But there is another reason, more tragic and ironic, why this gifted and
imaginative guy seems less funny lately. Comedy relies on surprise. A joke sets
up a chain of logic, and then subverts it in a surprising and delightful way;
that's the punch line. A comic persona embodies an unexpected way of seeing the
world. But the more successfully a comic does this, the more familiar his point
of view becomes. And finally, after years of exposure to even the liveliest
comic mind--and Martin certainly has one--we can all make up our own Steve
Martin gag or Trent Lott denial or Ronald Reagan unworkable budget policy. His
way of seeing things is too familiar to surprise us, too predictable to be
funny. And so a comedian's success creates his failure. That, and appearing
with Chevy Chase.

            
               Give Me an "A," Give Me
an "N," Give Me ... Oh, Just Give the Damn Answer
            

            All three men were cheerleaders.

            There are more than 3.3 million active cheerleaders
in America--if they weren't active, they wouldn't deserve to be called
cheerleaders--97 percent of them are women.

            The network of training camps, competitions, and
uniform manufacturers that make up the "spirit industry" is described as "a
virtual circle of cross-marketing," by Jeffrey Webb, CEO of Varsity Spirit
Corp., a company big in all three areas.

            Maintaining a single
cheerleader can run $5,000 a year in equipment, travel, and entry fees--tough
on a parent, but far cheaper than the high-priced world of NASCAR racing, where
the cars can't even talk, let alone spell out mood-boosting words letter by
letter while leaping into the air. On the other hand, some spectators are
disappointed that cheerleading contests include so few fiery collisions.

            
               It's an Orderly and
Predictable Universe Extra
            

            "I
think I also have an obligation to deal with the hurt and the harm done to
these police officers who were put in a position where they had to kill your
son."-- Rudy Giuliani, on the radio, hectoring Margarita Rosario, the mother
of an 18-year-old, who was one of two men lying face down when the cops shot
them 22 times
            

            "Quite
sensitive and quite honest."-- Rudy Giuliani, evaluating his comments to the
dead boy's mother
            

            
"There's no point in moralizing whether this is a good or bad thing."-- Gene
DeWitt, advertising executive, on a whole other subject
            

            
               Ongoing Domain Name
Extra
            

            The domain name WebInvest.com is already registered
by Kenneth L. Riffle, but OneBornEveryMinute.com is still available.

            Participants are invited to submit a similar
pair--a domain name that is already taken along with an amusing and available
alternative.

            You can check the availability of domain names at
http://www.eHost.com/domain_reg/index.html.

            Replies due by noon ET
Thursday, July 22.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The old arrow through the head bit, the old
autoeroticism thing.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 294: &quot;Whose Tiara Is It, Anyway?&quot;

            
               Facing sinking
ratings, the producers of the Miss America pageant last week announced a change
in format, to make the telecast more entertaining for the home audience. Name
that change.
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 293)--"Sporting Life":
            

            

               This weekend, 6,500 Canadians will jam Montreal's Olympic Stadium to
share in a timeless spectacle involving bravery, farm animals, and Velcro. What
is it?
            

            "
'Timeless' they may be, but Sun Myung Moon's weddings are getting way too
elaborate."-- J.D. Majors
            

            "The
complete, uncut version of Carnie Wilson's gastric bypass, including the
little-known post-op scandal: the installation of the 'secret' velcro
flap!"-- Barbara Lippert
            

            "In
the height of corporate arrogance, Nike is putting its sweat-shop operations on
tour, marketing them as an 'extreme sport.' "-- Matt Sullivan
            

            "It's
Canadian football! The typical insular American probably doesn't realize just
how different a game it is up there. (The 'E-Z-2-Catch' brand Velcro football
is still controversial, though . )"-- Francis Heaney
            

            "Safe
sex."-- Olivene Hargrave
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Tim's Wrap-Up
            

            Quiz participant Harald
Amodt began his response with the observation, "It's the inclusion of farm
animals that makes one wonder if this spectacle involves sex or violence." As
dubious as that sentiment might at first appear, a cursory look through his
fellow participants' answers shows that he's quite right: As far as News Quiz
readers are concerned, those are the two activities associated with
livestock. (Which, I'm sure, must make this page especially attractive to
prospective 
                  Slate
                advertisers. I'm not sure if this means that
PETA ought to spend more on those banner ads, or if it means that they should
save their money. Probably the latter.) (Randy may be back a little sooner than
expected, folks.) The other notable thing about Amodt? His name looks an awful
lot, on first glance, like "Hannah Arendt," who, I'm fairly sure, never
advocated sex with or violence to animals, at least, not in her published
works. And what else did we learn from today's Quiz? A quick recap. Canadians:
dull, provincial, and oddly prevalent on U.S. comedy shows. Montreal: Frenchy.
Alan Greenspan's ass: still funny. Alan Thicke's ass: curiously
unmentioned.

            
               The Maple Leaf
Answer
            

            
               (supplied by Chris
Kelly)
            

            A bloodless bullfight.
Instead of stabbing the bulls, the matadors will tag them with velcro
banderillas . Or is it the banderilleros who use the
banderillas ? What about the picadors? Note to self: Must reread Death
in the Afternoon . On second thought, no.

            
               Ratings-War
Extra
            

            With the current furor
over the MPAA ratings system, perhaps it's time we turn to an alternative: the
CAP-Alert system. CAP (short for the ChildCare Action Project), located at
www.capalert.com,
offers detailed synopses of current releases for fundamentalist parents, along
with a traffic-light ratings system (red, yellow, or green). See if you can
match the current release with its CAP-Alert ratings and excerpts from its
review.

            1) The Iron Giant
            

            2) Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom
Menace
            

            3) An Ideal Husband
            

            4) Tea With Mussolini
            

            5) Tarzan
            

            6) Inspector
Gadget
            

            A) Red light; offenses include "strong focus on
nuclear warfare and the nihilistic desperation of it ... dangerous example of
risky medical assessment ... suggestive eye movement ... display of the yin
yang."

            B) Red light; offenses include "statue nudity ...
suggestive eye movement ... arrogance against father."

            C) Yellow light; offenses include "implications and
references to Darwinian evolution ... parental arguing ... skimpy dress
throughout."

            D) Red light; offenses include "flatulence ...
repeated exposure to adult underwear ... automatic gunfire with lustful
enjoyment ... a computer image of a champagne glass with an olive."

            E) Yellow light; offenses include
"levitation/psychokineses ... scant clothing ... statue nudity ... eating of
animals by animals."

            F) Red light; offenses
include "statue nudity ... anatomical reference ... attachment to a pet
endangering self or others ... expressing joy at husband's death."

            
               Answers
            

            
               1-A, 2-E, 3-B, 4-F,
5-C, 6-D.
            

            
               Weeklong Extra
            

            A headline from Monday
morning's Daily Variety : "Dutch regulators issue equal-access
guidelines." Participants are invited to find, in an actual newspaper or
magazine, a less enticing headline. Deadline is noon, Wednesday. Answers posted
Thursday.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Expos.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 255: &quot;Sorry, Right Number&quot;

            
               On Sunday,
Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and his wife, Frances, released a statement
that began: "Early this morning, we received a call that every parent dreads."
What did the caller say?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 254)--"Too True To Be Good":
            

            
               I give the New
York Times headline; you give a one-sentence summary of the story:
"Presidential Hopeful Displays Humanity."
            

            

               
                  (A tip of the Hatlo hat to Daniel Radosh.)
               
            

            "In an
unscripted campaign moment yesterday, Steve Forbes was seen taking a sip of
water."-- Scott Douglas
            

            "Steve
Forbes brought a small tribe of Pygmies to a press conference just because they
looked 'so brown and cute.' "-- Tim Rogers
            

            "Steve
Forbes was arrested Sunday for exposing himself during a Daughters of the
American Revolution luncheon."-- Neal Pollack
            

            "Steve
Forbes befriends a crippled child, predicts this Christmas will be 'the best
ever.' "-- Peter Carlin ( Mary Anne Townsend had a similar
answer.)

            
"Lyndon LaRouche to wed."-- James M. Frisby
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Like cartoon
superheroes, each candidate has but a single attribute, generally as useless as
the Green Lantern's illuminability, or greenability, or whatever freakish power
he had. Has? Had? Is he still running? Steve Forbes is rich. Pat Buchanan is
cruel. George W. is hollow. Al Gore is wooden. Elizabeth Dole lacks
spontaneity, which is a lot like being wooden only if you poured a few drinks
into her, she'd loosen up, but he'd dissolve in some hideous yet unspectacular
chemical reaction. But just as most comic book readers move on to other forms
of literature (despite Art Spiegelman's unconvincing plea that "they're really
illustrated novels"), most voters in a mature democracy demand more from
candidates than a packaged personality and a glib slogan. Wait, sorry, excuse
me--as it turns out, no, they don't.

            
               Albert
Schweitzerian Answer
            

            John R. Kasich stuck around after a meet-and-greet
to help his hostess bury a dog.

            Backing out of the driveway to go get ice for
supporters of the Republican long shot, Linda Kaiser ran over her Shetland
sheep dog, Magic. Not wanting to delay Kasich's march to the White House,
Kaiser put Magic's corpse in the barn.

            After the guests had
departed ... well, let Linda tell it: "I killed my dog and he buried him. He
said, 'If I ever told my wife I left without burying this dog, we'd be
divorced. Get a shovel.' He's human, a nice person. He revealed himself as a
real person. I can't imagine Elizabeth Dole or George W. Bush burying my
dog."

            
               Bedroom Farce
Extra
            

            All dialogue taken from
yesterday's White House Conference on Mental Health. All stage directions
unfairly imposed.

            The
vice presidential mansion. THE PRESENT.

            
COSTUME NOTE. The men all wear unattractive blue suits; the women wear
unattractive navy blue dresses, or vice versa. Everyone remains fully dressed
throughout.

            
(CURTAIN UP on Tipper Gore in a comically oversized bed, the sort of thing
you'd find in a Feydeau farce or on the Sonny and Cher Show . She looks
radiant. Something is moving beneath the bedcovers.)

            VOICE
(from under the covers): I don't want to monopolize this ...

            TG
(ecstatic): I'm happy to say that it worked.

            (MIKE
WALLACE emerges from under the covers, his "hair" tousled. He looks pleased
with himself.)

            MW: I
was lower than a snake's belly.

            TG: No
one could do that any better than the sunshine of all our lives, our first
lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

            
(Hillary Rodham Clinton emerges from under the covers, happily disheveled.)

            HRC:
If I had any voice, I'd break into "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and
dedicate it to Tipper.

            (Bill
Clinton emerges from under the covers.)

            BC:
It's been so long since we've come together.

            (AL
GORE emerges from beneath the covers. He looks a little uncertain.)

            AG:
I'm anxious to follow instructions carefully, but to depart from my destruct
... or, to depart from my instructions, I want to say I hope you can see how
proud I am of Tipper.

            
(TIPPER points to Bill's lap.)

            TG:
You might want to go over now.

            AG:
Yes, ma'am.

            (AL
GORE disappears back beneath the covers.)

            TG (to
AG): It's important. Because you're a man and you come forward and you can help
so many men.

            BC
(with rising delight): No couple in public life has ever done as much to try
and figure out how to help families.

            AG
(from under the covers): What I hear you saying is that anyone who talks about
how important it is for families to stay together and be strong ought to also
be supportive of families in this situation.

            BC: I
sort of feel like an anticlimax!

            (MIKE
WALLACE perches on the president's shoulders.)

            MW: I
feel better up here than ever in my life.

            BC:
How much did you weigh?

            (All
laugh affectionately and begin singing Stevie Wonder songs. )

            
CURTAIN.

            
               Merciless
Quibbling Extra
            

            " 'All
the world's Michael Jacksons now go by Mike, simply because of one
androgynously desiccated freak,' asserted M Pesca in his wrap-up yesterday. Or
not ... You'll notice on the front page of today's New York Times a
reference to Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson of Britain, commander of NATO's
Kosovo peacekeeping force."-- Gina Duclayan
            

            
"Another Michael Jackson who hasn't relinquished his name is a well-known Los
Angeles talk radio host."-- Richard A. DeCamp
            

             

            
               Mike Madden's Headline
Haiku
            

            Say hello to
Sucker for kissing.
Obsession with vacuuming
Has complex roots.

            
               Philadelphia
Inquirer , June 3, 1999 (Features only)

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            They'll show you theirs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Body on the Brain

            When the larva hit the
omelet pan,
Curling, warping, maybe even
Sizzling a bit, I wanted more
Data to connect my ruined home-
Fries to the moths I'd been applauding
All summer into dust. But when
I saw its kin threading up the collar
Of the Colavita Extra Virgin Olive Oil,
I scrubbed the cupboards with all
The Formula 409 to be found, finding
Larvae in the flour, in the corn
Meal last used in the late-eighties,
The creamy-style Skippy, the Basmati rice,
The sesame seeds and Aunt Jemima Lite.
I swabbed, I purged, I itched
The way I'm itching now to get this right
So you'll scratch too. Do you
Believe your body merely feels
When it blinks and recoils, figuring
It may have eaten grubs, or do
You think, as Freud did, that each
Twitch or catch in the throat
Constitutes a thought? I marvel
How the body we're wired to adore
Disgusts us when we cast it
Out into the world. Spit
Repeatedly into a juice glass, drink it.
Every day you drink a hundred times
This half-cup of saliva. We get
Our lessons in otherness where we can.
How else could I stare into the porridge
Of my daughter's diarrhea, swallowing
To keep from puking into it, yet grateful
She's still mine enough to let me check?
Or when we add our stink to a stranger's
Stink from the next stall, two stinks
Stink less than one, don't they?--and isn't this
How mind and body mate when we're in love?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hail to the King

            Henry VI was the Jimmy
Carter of the 15 th century: Ostentatiously pious, surrounded by
mediocrities, and oblivious to England's crumbling international prestige, he
managed to cripple the military and bankrupt the government simultaneously.
Contemporary accounts repeatedly emphasize his gullibility. Senior statesmen of
Henry's own Lancastrian party judged him an unworthy successor to their
previous standard-bearer, the legendary Henry V, identified in the popular mind
with the romance of chivalry and the tragedy of an early death.

            All London cheered when Henry VI was driven from
office by Edward IV, an almost unbelievably charismatic and handsome man whose
personal badge, the Sun in Splendor, evokes the image of a shining city on a
hill. The elegance of Edward's court contrasted sharply with Henry's drab and
simple style, and the implied promise of a brighter future proved spectacularly
true. After a rocky first few years in office, Edward shored up the military,
restored England's presence abroad, initiated serious economic reforms, and
presided over a decade of remarkable peace and prosperity. He was, however,
frequently distracted by attacks on his wife, who was seen as an extravagant
spendthrift and a sinister influence on the king.

            Edward was followed in office by Richard III, the
man who had been closer to Edward than any other. Though renowned for his great
personal courage, Richard was widely disdained as a man with no guiding
principles other than an instinct for power. Before long he had squandered his
predecessor's magnificent legacy. The general dissatisfaction with Richard
spilled over onto the Yorkist party, which had seemed so invincible with Edward
at the helm, and raised Lancastrian hopes of regaining the crown.

            Determined not to miss
this opportunity, the Lancastrians swallowed their distrust of relative
outsiders and turned to Henry Tudor. Henry was from the remote country of
Wales, but he looked like a winner. And so he was. After ousting Richard and
claiming the throne as Henry VII, one of his first official acts was to raise
taxes. It was Henry's tax collector, John Morton, who invented the notorious
policy known as "Morton's Fork": If you live extravagantly, then you can
obviously afford to pay more taxes. On the other hand, if you live frugally,
then you can obviously afford to pay more taxes.

            If history repeats itself, we ought to be able to
figure out who's destined to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House. Henry VII
was followed by Henry VIII, a man best remembered for his gargantuan appetites,
his dissipative lifestyle, his troubled marriages, and his rocky relationship
with the Catholic Church. The message is clear. Ted Kennedy, your time has come
at last.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 302: &quot;It's Back&quot;

            
               
                  "It's back, and
we used it this summer. But they don't want us to use it too much. It's not
going to be a big deal." Who said this about what?
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 301)--"Army Men":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              Fill in the blank as Professor
Charles Stevenson of the National War College assesses a new study of military
and civilian beliefs. It is "scary," he said, to have "an officer corps so
overwhelmingly
_____________."
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Made
up of people merely using the experience as a steppingstone for starting their
own militias."-- Matt Sullivan
            

            
"Unable to say the phrase 'humanitarian mission' without giggling."-- Matthew
Heimer
            

            
"Subscribing to the utilitarian beliefs of disturbing yet guilt-inducing
philosopher Peter Singer."-- Norman Oder
            

            
"Indebted to the Chinese government for loans to buy their homes."-- Eliot
Cohen
            

            "Prone
to sudden bleeding and speaking in scary voices!!! (Promotional fee paid by
Stigmata © 1999)."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Banana Republicans. If
Time magazine were half the trend-spotter it thinks it is, that's the
banner it would run to mark the triumph of Reaganism, transforming the United
States into the kind of South American nation we used to deride. We now have
the essentials--a huge army dominated by leaders far to the right of the rest
of society, a vast chasm between a tiny rich minority and everyone else, and
the proliferation of soap operas in prime time, despite the
counterrevolutionary snubbing of The Sopranos at Sunday night's Emmy
Awards.

            
               Fun 
               Facts:
            

            

               The wealthiest 1 percent earned as much after taxes as the poorest 100
million Americans.

               That ratio has more than doubled since 1977.

               The poorest 80 percent of the country now earns a smaller percentage of the
national income than they did 20 years ago.

               Ninety percent of America's economic growth has gone to the richest 1
percent of the population.

               Patricia Duff's first name easily substitutes for the name "Evita," making
it possible to do a new version of the musical without cluttering up the
elegant rhythm of the songs.

               Ricky Martin.

            

            If anyone wants me, I'll
be in the mountains--probably the Catskills--growing my beard.

            
               Right

               Face Answer
            

            It's scary to have "an officer corps so
overwhelmingly Republican ."

            Professor Stevenson was
commenting on a study conducted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies,
comparing the social and political views of the military elite with those of
prominent civilians. The study concluded that the soldiers are far to the right
of the general society.

            
               Scary 
               Facts:
            

            

               Sixty-four percent of the military officers but only 30 percent of the
civilians surveyed are Republicans.

               Sixty-seven percent of the military officers but only 32 percent of the
civilians call themselves "conservative."

               Forty-five percent of the military officers but only 17 percent of the
civilians would bar homosexuals from military service.

               Seventy-four percent of the officers but only 46 percent of the civilians
favor school prayer.

               Only 10 percent of the officers but 37 percent of the civilians think
capital punishment should be banned.

            

            "In the 19 th century officers frequently
had political alignments," Stevens said, "but they did not favor a single party
consistently."

            Defense Secretary
William Cohen said it would be a major challenge for him "to somehow prevent a
chasm from developing between the military and civilian worlds." News Quiz host
Randy Cohen, his wife of 35 years, said, "Too late. And, actually, no
relation."

            
               Other

               Quizzes, Other Rooms Extra
            

            So that none of you play
because of a lack of alternatives, here are actual questions found by looking
for "News Quiz" through various search engines, along with comments pointing
out how much better things are right in your own backyard.

            
               
                  Jacksonville
                        Times-Union
                     
                  
               
            

            The Jacksonville sheriff's office had to close
which park to vehicles after it filled to capacity on Memorial Day?

            Westside Regional Park

            Hanna Park

            Mandarin Park

            Metropolitan Park

            

               Comment : Questions may be overly local.

            
               KET
News Quiz
               
            

            True or false? The Newport Aquarium is home to
animals that live in and around water.

            

               Comment : Unless this is some kind of trick question, they're
talking to us like we're idiots. Are we going to take that?

            
               
                  Christian 
                        Science Monitor
                     
                  
               
            

            What is nicknamed the government's fourth
branch?

            The FBI

            NATO

            The U.S. Federal Reserve

            

               Comment : Admirable use of quiz form to slyly denigrate the
military-industrial complex, although the fourth choice might have been "Bill
Gates."

            
               
                  Topeka

                        Capital-Journal
                     's CJ KidsZone News Quiz (in coordination with
the public school system of Topeka)
               
            

            What is making the Gwinch'in tribe lose their
ancient ways?

            Laws

            Other tribes

            Money

            Television

            

               Comment : I can't prove it, but I suspect that an early draft
included fifth answer: "attacked by dinosaurs just 800 years ago."

            
               colorado .now
               
            

            Test your "NQ" with this week's array of questions,
dreamed up by the colorado.now staff.

            The Colorado Division of Wildlife wants to spend as
much as $8 million to fight "whirling disease," which afflicts what
species?

            Black bears

            Whooping cranes

            Deer mice

            Trout

            

               Comment : There's no such thing as "whirling disease."
(Although little whirling deer mice would look adorable.) Colorado.now staff
should have "dreamed up" ways to smoke less pot.

            
               The
Old, Pre-Java CNN Quiz
               
            

            Travel through the world of current events with
today's quiz!

            According to the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, at least how many children have choked to death on children's
products since 1980?

            17

            259

            753

            1,030

            

               Comment: If you read between the lines, it's pretty clear CNN
thinks the best answer is "not nearly enough." Heartless bastards.

            
               Philanthropy in the News
               
            

            This quiz is based on news articles abstracted in
this week's issue of Philanthropy News Digest . To view the full
abstracts, go to the Digest .

            Who narrates the "Learn & Live" film produced
by the George Lucas Foundation?

            James Earl Jones

            George Lucas

            Robin Williams

            

               Comment : Focus pretty narrow, but not narrow enough to exclude
reference to Robin Williams.

            
               Test Your
Pesach IQ
               
            

            At the Seder we drink four cups of ...

            Hot chocolate

            Wine

            Olive oil

            

               Comment : Author of quiz too insecure about his place in
American life to include possible answer "blood of Christian children."

            
               
                  Rochester 
                        Business Journal
                     
                  
                  , Dec. 27,
1996
               
            

            The Midtown Plaza B. Forman Co. store closed for a
second time. Name the store's owner.

            Kodak named this executive vice chairman; later in
the year, he announced his retirement. Name him.

            What Rochester Top 100 firm faced charges in a suit
filed under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act?

            In June, the Rochester Business Journal
ceased to be a weekly. Why?

            What Buffalo-based company says it lost $1 million
in RTS funds?

            Which leading area realty firm filed for
bankruptcy?

            Name the Kodak veteran turned consultant who was
accused of stealing trade secrets.

            What local family was rocked by a $225 million
legal feud?

            

               Comment : Most depressing set of questions I've ever read. The
quiz format may not be the ideal way to chart a town's economic collapse. And
couldn't they at least get out of bed long enough to update the thing now and
then? And shave? And put on clean clothes?

            

               Clarification
            

            The president's gun
buy-back plan does not include a proposal to eliminate the middleman and funnel
the $15 million directly to Smith & Wesson.

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Don't ask, don't tell, don't kvetch.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 268: &quot;Pyramid Power&quot;

            
               Today a 180-nation
conference is to present the U.N. General Assembly with an action plan to
reduce world population growth by employing the Cairo Strategy. Which is
what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 267)--"You Be the Playwright":
            

            
               I set the stage
for a script based on an actual current event.
            

            
               Setting: The
courtyard of a monastery in Florence.
            

            
               Prop: A briefcase
containing $50 million.
            

            
               Female Lead:
KAETHE, a young Russian woman wearing hot pants and a bikini top.
            

            
               Male Lead: FATHER
CHRISTOPHER, a priest wearing something priestly.
            

            

               Question: What is the opening line of dialogue?
            

            
"KAETHE: Daddy!"-- Floyd Elliot
            

            
"FATHER CHRISTOPHER: You know, Kaethe, even though you are my sister, and this
money was legitimately inherited from our parents, and I'm giving it to you in
order that you may pay for a lifesaving sweat-gland-transplant, which will
finally enable you to dress properly, I'd bet, to an outsider, this whole scene
would look awfully fishy."-- Tim Carvell
            

            
"KAETHE (Offering the briefcase): NOW can you ordain me?"-- Justin
Warner
            

            
"KAETHE: Father Christopher, your parish does not need more scandal. Therefore,
no, I will not tell you where I bought the hot pants."-- Merrill Markoe
( Justin Warner had a similar answer.)

            "FATHER CHRISTOPHER
(ripping off his mask): Ah ha! It is not Father Christopher, but I, Bill
Clinton! And here are my plans to invest the budget surplus of ... $1
trillion !

            KAETHE
(ripping off her mask): Not so fast! For neither am I a comely Russian woman
but rather Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. And we are interested in deeds not
words!"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            I'm no computer-porn sex-phone perversity
expert--well, not professionally--but the sex-crazed priest and the Russian
seductress seem an unlikely match. Father Sexpot is a stock character going
back to Rabelais, to The Canterbury Tales , and why not? If you're going
to have chastity, you're going to have jokes about the power of sex to
overthrow that ludicrous vow. Everyone enjoys a good hypocrite joke, and
everyone likes sex. (Note to Ben and Jerry: Humping Monk ice cream?)

            Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Red Hot Menace was not entirely persuasive. Ursula Andress made an unconvincing
Kremlin honey trap for Sean Connery in an early Bond movie. (Unconvincing as a
Russian; pretty persuasive as an object of desire.) But at least when those two
had sex across ideological lines they played out the traditional drama of Eros
as an anarchic force, tempting Bond from his vows of capitalism.

            The post-Soviet
seductress is unconvincing in a new way. This way: hot pants? Who wears hot
pants? Nobody wears hot pants. Hot pants and money. What she's really showing
off is all that creamy cash. This isn't sex as the irresistible life force that
mocks and demolishes vows of chastity; it's sex as consumer good. It's the kind
of thing Donald Trump would find appealing. It's profoundly conservative. I
don't know who Satan has doing his hiring, but no way you're going to take down
Father Christopher like that.

            
               Massive Insurance Fraud
Answer
            

            KAETHE: I've just flown in on the Concorde, Father,
in these tiny shorts with this huge bag of money. Want some?

            Or something like that. Kaethe Schuchter, an agent
for reclusive swindler Martin Frankel, flew to Italy to offer Father
Christopher a $50 million contribution to his Genesis Center if the priest
would use the charity to buy insurance companies on behalf of David Rosse, one
of Frankel's aliases. The priest rebuffed her. The briefcase, by the way, was
metaphoric; the money was to come from mysterious off-shore accounts.

            Frankel's scam,
involving prominent lawyers, businessmen, and church officials, has siphoned
off more than $300 million. Federal authorities have issued a warrant for his
arrest.

            
               Wild West/Wild Weasel
Extra
            

            Today in New York City, Will Smith's summer
blockbuster opens, and a new list of outlawed pets takes effect. Below, a
comparison of the newly taboo ferret and the just released Wild Wild
West .

            
               Ferret: Member of weasel family.

            
               
                  WWW : Product of Warner Bros.

            
               Ferret: Frightening features include
powerful scent glands and razor sharp teeth.

            
               
                  WWW : Frightening features include
Kevin Kline in a corset.

            
               Ferret: New law calls them part of a group
that is "wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous, or naturally inclined to do
harm."

            
               
                  WWW : Some guy on Fox TV that nobody
ever heard of calls it "the hippest, funniest action movie of the summer."

            
               Ferret: Fear of ferrets derived from
misleading predator clichés.

            
               
                  WWW : Role of co-star Bai Ling derived
from creepy racist Asian clichés.

            
               Ferret: Piranhas are not in this restricted
class.

            
               
                  WWW : Piranhas are not in Wild Wild
West .

            
               Ferret: "You have a ridiculous, biased and
skewered view of this animal," said one angry ferret fancier.

            
               
                  WWW : He has a "knowing, newly hunky
presence," said one lovesick Will Smith fancier. And it was Janet Maslin.

            
               Ferret: Last year, there were fewer than a
dozen reported ferret bites serious enough to require hospitalization.

            
               
                  WWW : Last year, there were fewer than
one reported Will Smith bite serious enough to require hospitalization.

            
               Ferret: "There have been attacks reported
nationwide, and those attacks have become notorious for their severity and
their capriciousness," said hysterical Giuliani appointee John Gadd, not
referring to the NYPD.

            
               
                  WWW : Will Smith gets attacked by some
kind of mechanical spider, probably not affiliated with the NYPD.

            
               Ferret: "In Europe people just walk around
with them on their shoulders and in little packs! What is this administration
going to do next, ban calico cats?" asked some other ferret fancier.

            
               
                  WWW : In Wild Wild West Kenneth
Branagh uses a steam-powered wheelchair and a phony baloney Southern accent,
which isn't, strictly speaking, a parallel, but does kind of make you sick when
you think about how great he was in Henry V .

            
               Ferret: "Ferrets pose a threat when confined
indoors," said mayoral spokeswoman Sunny Mindel.

            
               
                  WWW :
"Especially when confined indoors at movie theaters," Sunny Mindel did not
add.

            
               Eternal Triangle
Extra
            

            Andrew Silow-Carroll
invites participants to devise a sequentially trumping topical triad along
these lines: NATO, Milosevic, Albanian refugees. (NATO planes crush Milosevic,
Milosevic drives out refugees, refugees give NATO fits.) Replies due by
Thursday morning.

            
               Jon Zerolnick's
Headline Haiku
            

            Gay market
Greenspan rule
Washington's urging
Love it.

            
               --Wall Street
Journal , June 29 1999

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Concupiscent priests, selling indulgences.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Edward W. Said

            The game of biographical "gotcha" is a perennially
popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating
datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his
defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made
judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the
anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to
recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you
resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta
Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some
important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what
about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?

            To this list now add
Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated
article in the September issue of Commentary . The
article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends
that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has
over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and
amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things,
Palestinian.

            Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not "the
parable of Palestinian identity" marked by dispossession from a beloved
homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said "grew up not in
Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an
economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had
become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for
the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in
luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at
the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab
members."

            A similar account of
Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the
author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a
wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine
expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour
el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long
as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of
hand and speculates that Said decided to "spin" the story of his past--by
telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the
weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have
been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt
at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant
articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)

            Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate
holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary ,
not to mention three years of research by a scholar in residence at the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well
as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears,
know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of The
Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music.
Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as
the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the
membership of the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in
protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President.
Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and
Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular commentator on politics
and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar,
university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately
complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual,
aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with enormous passion and
expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and
endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.

            Most controversial--and
most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has
published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including
The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and
Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace
accords, which Said calls "the Palestinian Versailles." These writings, his
relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in
the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in
exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have
invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded
him "The Professor of Terror." New York magazine once called him
"Arafat's man in New York." And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in
The 
               New Yorker 's special "Money" issue as a well-dressed Columbia
don rumored to be "on the payroll of the PLO."

            Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for
Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's "Algiers Declaration" of
1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right to
exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state
would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his
indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let Arab governments--or
the Palestinian leadership--off the hook. He has assailed the corrupt,
authoritarian regimes that rule most of the Arab world, punctured the
ideological phantasms of Pan-Arabist nationalism and reactionary Islam alike,
and bemoaned the impoverished state of Arab cultural and intellectual life. He
has also, within the Palestinian camp, been a consistent advocate of
reconciliation with Israel and an opponent of terrorism. The Question of
Palestine called for a "two-state solution" at a time when the official PLO
ambition was total control over British Mandatory Palestine. The book,
published in Israel in 1981, had, as of the mid-'90s, never been translated
into Arabic or published in any Arab country.

            In 1978, in the wake of
the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would
recognize the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for
recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when
Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House
lawn, Said, who had been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton,
stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced
the "peace process," Said has bemoaned Arafat's "capitulation" and grown
increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over a few scraps
of occupied territory and with Israel's continued expropriation of Palestinian
lands. In the New York Times Magazine last spring, he wrote that the
Palestinian state toward which the peace process seemed, however pokily, to be
tending could not provide democracy and justice for the Palestinians. Instead,
he called for a single, "bi-national" state based on a constitution (something
neither Israel nor the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority currently
has), with "the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial
community, as the main vehicle for coexistence."

            But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political
figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and
foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad,
a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative
approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the
expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings:
Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a
bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal
analysis and displaying crushing erudition.

            But Said's fame outside
the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how
Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased
picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The
impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In
addition to laying the groundwork for "post-colonial" studies as an area of
inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to "the other"--to
groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical
location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl
Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) "must be represented" by those more
powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European
philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift
in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for
granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the
objects of ideological analysis.

            Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come
under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his
unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging
academic left, a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the
New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard
Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's
inflammatory tone and questioned his knowledge of history, philology, and
Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's
premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called In
Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western
intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further
questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of
self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline. Whereas Lewis
attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship,
Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said
to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him
altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that
Said possesses "a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its
structure."

            Lewis and Ahmad are both
right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and
Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read
them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go
to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past
quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of
the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has
done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side
of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play
over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting
in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching
and underargued. "He is easily distracted" the critic John Leonard remarked in
an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , "answering too many
fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol."

            O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are
unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of
late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so
much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they
remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate
of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return
to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's
Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and
more complicated than you had ever imagined.

            More than anyone else in his generation, Edward
Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the
intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism
over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that
fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages
of Commentary .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Royal Shenanigans

            A
scandal rocked the Belgian monarchy when it was revealed Thursday that
much-respected King Albert II has an illegitimate daughter working as an artist
in London. The revelation, made in a new biography of Belgium's Queen Paola by
a precocious 18-year-old Flemish student, Mario Daneels, shook the image of a
royal family famed for its moral rectitude. Le Soir of Brussels said Thursday in an editorial that
the king of the Belgians is "the incarnation of a unifying morality and of
proclaimed virtue." He presides over what Belgians regard as "the ideal family
... even the incarnation of the family." But the paper concluded that if the
king casts more light on the matter (he has so far refused to comment), the
long-term consequence might be no more than to make him seem more like an
ordinary mortal. Another leading Belgian paper, La Meuse , expressed
regret that "the last symbol of a united Belgium is sinking into the
bedclothes," but in general the press was less condemnatory of the king's
adultery than of the intrusion into his private life. Because of this, La
Libre refused to publish the name of his illegitimate daughter, Delphine
Boel.

            The
Times of
London splashed the story on its front page Friday, together with a large
photograph of Boel, 31, seated on one of her artistic creations, a multicolored
papier-mâché chair. It said she is the product of an affair between King
Albert, now 65, and a Belgian aristocrat--Baroness Sybille de Selys
Longchamps--during an early, troubled period in his marriage to Queen Paola.
Boel was raised by the baroness and her former husband, a Belgian
industrialist, after the queen refused to accept her as part of the royal
family. She now lives in Notting Hill but has gone into hiding since the
Belgian press descended on the fashionable west London district this week. The
Times quoted the landlord of a pub opposite her apartment as saying, "I
see her going out most days in quite wild clothes, like patchwork trousers.
She's often spattered in paint."

            The
Daily
Telegraph of London led its front page Friday with a boycott by Prince
Charles, the heir to the British throne, of a banquet hosted Thursday night by
Chinese President Jiang Zemin, because of his "contempt for China's human
rights record." The paper said the rebellious gesture will cause new tensions
between the prince and the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Although a
royal spokesman said later that Charles intended no snub to China but was bound
by an earlier engagement, the paper said the prince was "motivated by his
admiration for the Dalai Lama, whom he has met at least twice in defiance of
Government policy." It reported that the exiled Tibetan leader paid a private
visit to the prince's English country estate five months ago.

            In an
editorial, the Daily Telegraph favorably compared
Charles' behavior with that of Rupert Murdoch, who "was much in attendance on
the Chinese visitor, first at a Downing Street lunch given by the Prime
Minister, then at a British Museum exhibition of Tang treasures sponsored by
The Times , his flagship in this country. ... Murdoch has chosen to
flatter an odious regime in the hope of making a fortune from the Chinese
market. Prince Charles, at whose family Mr Murdoch's family constantly snipes,
has decided that supping once with the devil is enough" (the prince attended an
earlier banquet for President Jiang at which his mother, the queen, was host).
The Telegraph also said that a special report on Taiwan that the
Times had been due to publish Tuesday had been postponed until after
Jiang's state visit.

            The
liberal Guardian united Friday with the conservative Telegraph
in condemning the British police for its treatment of protestors against the
Chinese president. "The right to assemble and the right of free speech remain
two of the most fundamental rights in a democratic society," it said in an
editorial. "Yet little knots of human rights activists have been manhandled and
herded by the Metropolitan Police in a desperate attempt to keep them out of
sight and hearing of President Jiang." The Guardian said that one of
these manhandled protestors ought to bring a civil action against the police,
so as at least to identify "which officer was in charge and from whom he
received his instructions." In Italy, a country which the Dalai Lama visited
this week, La
Repubblica of Rome reported Friday that the Italian government has
decided to extend the same privileges to Buddhist lamas and Zen masters that it
allows to Christian and Jewish religious leaders, including tax breaks and the
right of access to hospitals and prisons.

            The
election of Megawati Sukarnoputri as vice president of Indonesia under
President Abdurrahman Wahid was widely welcomed around the world as improving
the prospects for order and democracy in the country. In an editorial Friday, the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong said peace
should return to the streets now that "the mother of the nation" had the vice
presidency. "Once little more than a symbolic position, the post must be
regarded as pivotal, given the five-year term of office and the poor health of
Mr Wahid, said sometimes to fall asleep in mid-conversation." But it said the
new government faced a difficult task in reducing the army's political role.
The Independent of London said that Megawati's appointment
"offers her bruised and fragile country its best hope of consolidating its
infant democracy." The Jakarta Post , however, reported that "massive protests" have
been taking place in eastern Indonesia by supporters of former President B.J.
Habibie, who withdrew from the election after losing a confidence vote. In
South Sulawesi, where Habibie was born, protestors took over the local radio
station and broadcast demands for eastern Indonesia to secede and become an
independent state.

            The Times of London
Friday published an interview with Tina Brown, who denied that her new
magazine, Talk , is failing. "I have the tremendous security of knowing
that our business picture is very strong and that takes a lot of stress off,"
she said. "All my stress now is getting the product accepted, getting it
better." Publisher Ron Galotti said Talk had "probably the most
successful launch in the history of magazines" and had sold more than 1 million
copies of its first issue in September. He also said advertising revenue--464
pages sold for just under $19 million--is "way ahead of budget." Brown said,
"At this magazine we have a five-year plan. No-one expects it to make a profit
within five years. We are on plan and on budget."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 287: &quot;First-Class Male&quot;

            
               When Fred
Fournier, a health insurance broker in Novato, Calif., goes to the post office,
the employees gather round: "They say, 'Boy, that's neat!' " What do the postal
workers admire?*
            

            
               (*a gun-free
question)
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 286)--"Supplies Party":
            

            

               Vinyl rope, magnets, large nails--what's the connection?
            

            "One
can only have so many face lifts."-- Colleen Werthmann
            

            "The
next three Russian prime ministers."-- Charlie Glassenberg
            

            
"Things used to prop up the Queen Mum for her birthday photo-ops?"-- Trey
Adams
            

            "Items
not on display at the check-out counter of my local CVS drugstore (except for
the magnets and vinyl rope)."-- Keith Kurtz
            

            "These
things are in such short supply in North Korea that they have to be smuggled in
in the stomachs of South Korean cows."-- Mark Myers
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            The rope, the magnet, and the nail comprise a fine
set of fasteners. Indeed, we live in the golden age of attaching one thing to
another thing--bolts, rivets, screws, glue, tape, Velcro, staples, giant rubber
bands, various forms of welding, some of which are practiced by cool robots,
suction cups, funtac--I could go on. But I'll tell you this: There is no
fastener--however great the tensile strength of its carbon fibers, however
powerful the chemical bonds of its space-age polymers--that can hold together a
marriage without love, without trust, and without communication.

            (This has been a News
Quiz/Lifetime Television Romantic Moment. Promotional fee paid.)

            
               Magic Beans
Answer
            

            North Korean authorities say autopsies turned up
all these items in the stomachs of dead cows, part of a charity herd trucked
north by South Korea's Hyundai group.

            Last summer Chung Ju Yung, Hyundai's billionaire
founder, donated 500 head of cattle to the famine-stricken North. Now about
half the cows are dead. The North accused the South of sabotage; the South
denied it, but North Korean vets still searched the cattle carcasses for
suspicious viruses and electronic devices. "It was absolutely untrue that we
planted any type of surveillance device on the cows," says a spokesman for the
South's intelligence service.

            Chung donated the cows
to honor a family debt. As a young man, he stole his father's cow, sold it, and
used the money to head south to make his fortune. He has since donated an
additional 500 cows; their fate is unknown.

            
               The Object of My
Reflection Extra
            

            Match each subject with
its object to complete the sentence and determine what is being reflected.

            
               Subjects
            

            1. Tina Brown, editor's note, Talk : "New
voices are everywhere. We would have a chance to bring some of them together to
reflect ..."

            2. Tina Brown, same magazine, same piece, same lame
figure of speech: "Of course, we needed a new format, one that would reflect
..."

            3. Xinhua news agency headline: "People's Daily
Says Li Hongzhi's Fallacies Reflect ..."

            4. Newsweek press release, announcing Susan
Faludi piece on Atlanta: "Recent Shootings Were Acts of Individual Madness, but
Also Reflect ..."

            5. Company Press Release: "LaunchPad Technologies,
an idealab! company that recently acquired PointCast, today announced it has
changed its name to EntryPoint to reflect ..."

            6. Company Press Release: "Neuron Data 'Blazes' Its
Way Into the Internet Self-Service Market. Changes Name to Blaze Software to
Reflect ..."

            7. Company Press
Release: "Maxnet, Inc.'s name has been changed to MaxPlanet, Corp. MXNT has
changed its name to reflect ..."

            
               Objects
            

            A. "... a point of view, a marriage of emotion and
ideas."

            B. "...the accelerated boom and flack of modern
American life."

            C. "... Dangerous Political Aims."

            D. "... Pressures of Changed Society on American
Men"

            E. "... its powerful new desktop 'EntryPoint' to
the Internet."

            F. "... Runaway Success of Its WebPersonalization
Engine."

            G. "... its diversified
Internet development and marketing business."

            
               Answers
            

            
               1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D,
5-E, 6-F, 7-G.
            

            
               Extra Credit
            

            Compare and contrast the
accelerated boom and flack of modern American life with the pressures of
changed society on American men. Illustrate. With photographs. Of
celebrities.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Cocaine-snorting presidential candidates.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 270: &quot;Crisis Management&quot;

            
               "I didn't even
want to talk about chocolate-chip cookies, really. I shaved my beard and
stopped wearing hats." Who said this about what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 269)--"Coaching Staff":
            

            

               
                  Sometime Thursday, Queen Elizabeth will take off her crown, put
on a purple and green dress in a thistle pattern, and step into her carriage.
Where's she going?
               
            

            
"Slumming?"-- Jack Defevers
            

            "Even
farther back in time."-- Larry Amoros
            

            "To
the guillotine."-- Keith Kurtz
            

            
"Another one of those suspiciously long 'lunches' with Sean Connery."-- Tim
Carvell
            

            "To
kick off her bid for a New York Senate seat. 'In my family, we've always rooted
for the Yankees,' said the queen. 'Well, except for George III.' "-- Ben "We
New Yorkers" Heller ( Adam Martin and Seth Mnookin had similar
answers.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Many responses pivoted
on the amusing contrast between uptown swells and downtown schlubs, but this
reliable device, the mighty comic engine that generated so many terrific
Depression-era comedies and dimwitted Lampoon movies--Snobs vs.
Slobs--is as false and anachronistic as the small town in a Capra movie. The
two distinct worlds of upper-class and lower-class culture have merged into a
single megaworld of pop culture. The millionaire's daughter doesn't yearn for
the violin virtuoso; she wants the rocker. It was not Pavarotti who sang at
Diana's funeral, it was Elton John. And even if it had been Pavarotti, he'd
have brought along the other two tenors, assuming they could get time off from
their PBS commitments and their stadium bookings. In the romantic comedies of
the '30s-- It Happened One Night , My Man Godfrey --the wan,
indifferent upper-class beauty is humanized by her contact with ordinary
working-class life, but those days are over. In modern romantic
comedy-- Working Girl to Pretty Woman --we're meant to applaud the
heroine's rise from working-class to First Class, with the confidence that she
can still listen to Garth Brooks. It's the new One World, and its
pseudosophisticated anthem is "You're the Top. Forty."

            
               Deeply Held Nationalist
Yearnings Answer
            

            Last week the queen went to the opening of the new
Scottish Parliament, that nation's first in nearly 300 years.

            Although the new Scots MPs took an oath of
allegiance to the queen, there was no singing of "God Save the Queen," but they
did sing Robert Burns' "A Man's a Man for A' That."

            An old hand at this sort
of thing, Queen Elizabeth opened the Welsh Assembly May 26. The opening of the
West 94 th St. Parliament will take place in my apartment as soon as
the beer arrives. We won't sing "God Save the Queen," we will sing Gershwin
favorites.

            
               Jew du Jour
Extra
            

            One of the nicest things about Judaism--along with
Uma Thurmond, knishes, and irony--is its traditional lack of proselytizing
zeal. But the arrival in the mail of a flier from the Society for the
Advancement of Judaism may force me to rethink my proselytizing position. Some
highlights:

            

               Reassuring words on the cover: "Community," "Meaning," "Tradition"--each,
as I recall, a particularly moving song in Fiddler on the Roof .

               Disconcerting words on the cover: "modern Jews," which, for my money, is
the next Tina Brown magazine, and "Jewish journey," which generally meant
stopping a lot so my Aunt Rose could reject another Esso station restroom for
falling short our people's traditional standard of cleanliness. Also, fruit. A
lot of fruit on a Jewish journey. You kids OK back there? You want another
peach or maybe a nectarine?

               Disconcerting jargon inside: Adults can "enhance their relationships to
Judaism in a dynamic community of learners." I'm no FBI agent, but they're
talking about some kind of group sex swingers cult thing, right?

               The SAJ is run by Rabbi Julie Schonfeld who, we are told, graduated from
Yale. Not just a rabbi, an Ivy League Rabbi--which, coincidentally, is next
summer's big teen comedy for Adam Sandler. And Barbra Streisand. (Some mix-up
over the rights.)

               Rabbi Schonfeld's most impressive credential: "taught playwriting with the
New York Shakespeare Festival." It's a Wendy Wasserstein rewrite of The Jazz
Singer . Which path will Julie Schonfeld choose--Broadway or God's way,
Cats or Katz?

               "Conflict Resolution in the Bible." Sounds good. One factor in the decline
of the labor movement is its unwillingness to use stoning as a bargaining
technique. No stoning and very little smiting. Except the Teamsters.

               The "Experiential Hebrew School" offers various programs for children, so
good that "Your kids won't want to leave!" OK, now I'm sure about that cult
thing. And I like it!

               Also for der Kinder , "Jewish Ethics through Science Fiction." Ah, my
people, and their rigorous traditions of scholarship. I smell Spielberg
money.

               Recent SAJ projects include "Jewish Environmentalism." Please make up your
own joke. ( You send 'em, I'll run 'em. )

            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Barney the dinosaur goes to Wimbledon, hell.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Chat

            Join us for the
exclusive, subscribers-only 
                  Slate
                Chat, with Michael Kinsley,
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                  Slate
               , as he gives us a look at the coming elections.
Mike will discuss the impact of the Internet on candidates' campaigns and how
elections may never be the same.

            
               A little
about Mike:
            

            
Michael Kinsley formed 
                  Slate
                in June 1996. Previously, he was
senior editor at The New Republic in Washington, D.C., and co-host of the
CNN's Crossfire , for which he continues to act as a substitute
co-host. He is a contributing writer at Time magazine and
has also been editor of Harper's magazine, managing editor of the Washington
Monthly , and American survey editor of The Economist in
London.

            Mark your calendars now,
because coming up every other Wednesday evening at 6:00 p.m. PT, you can chat
with other notable 
                  Slate
                editors, contributors, and
opinion-makers such as Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz, Margo Howard (Dear
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               Got a question for Michael Kinsley? Click here to post it in "The
Fray." We'll compile the best ones, and he'll answer them--as well as take live
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            Beauty, Eh?

            

               ARTICLE
               : : "American Beauty" is blooming but
rank

            
               SUBJECT:
"Nihilism"? Try Tragedy.

            
               FROM:
Dave Zimny

            

               DATE: Mon Sept 20

            The heart of Edelstein's
negative assessment (and "rank" seems to be a negative word indeed to summarize
a movie that draws a great deal of praise in the course of the review) seems to
be his assertion that "American Beauty" is:

            
               ... [S]aying
that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment
whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a
signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask
how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to
add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind
of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's
nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age
Nihilism.
            

            I suggest that Mr.
Edelstein take a closer look at the end of the movie. He might notice that ONLY
Ricky Fitts, a seriously damaged character, is shown regarding the body with
aesthetic detachment. The daughter is frozen in fear when she enters the room;
Lester's wife, who also apparently sees the body, is consumed with horror and
revulsion at her own murderous intentions. Other characters are only shown
reacting to the sound of the gunshot. Nor does the film suggest that Lester
shares Ricky's world view. The montage of Lester's memories at the end of the
film is hardly nihilistic: He remembers the closest relationships in his past
life with wonder and gratitude. At the moment of his death he is looking
lovingly at a photograph of his former self and his young family, not at a
plastic bag whirling in the wind.

            In short, I see no evidence that the filmmakers
wanted to endorse Ricky's nihilistic detachment. As a matter of fact, his eerie
self-possession is depicted as a tragic dislocation from life itself, a
pitiable response to his father's brutality. Edelstein, a critic of unusual
sensitivity and sophistication, simply fails to realize that the makers of
"American Beauty" show an appreciation of moral and ethical complexity that
equals his own.

            I hope he will
reconsider his harsh conclusion.

            (To
respond, click here.)

            

               ARTICLE
               : : Too True To Be Good

            
               SUBJECT:
Medical Science v. the Dismal Science

            
               FROM:
Robert Cook-Deegan

            

               DATE: Fri Sept 17

            There is a huge difference between a fast-moving
experimental science and a more theoretical field. In molecular biology, which
I know best, the editorial process is nothing like that described for
economics. An article cannot take more than several months to transit from
first writing until publication or it will be completely out of date, as there
are a half dozen groups working on closely related experiments who will have
reported *their* results. Moreover, new information is new; it does not have to
knock over a theoretical predisposition to be "news" and thus publishable.

            In the clinical literature, this kind of
examination of "hypothesis confirmation" is fairly common, and there is
certainly some wobble. A series of clinical trials can reach different
conclusions, and a meta-analysis that pools information from multiple trials
can lead to a conclusion different from a large "definitive" clinical trial.
But that's a signal for further empiricism, not a theoretical point that there
is no way to get better evidence or improve certainty that one is "right."
There is certainly publication bias in that the probability of publication is
higher for positive results (improved clinical outcome, for example) than no
results.

            But what has this got to
do with Alan Sokal? I can't make the leap from a largely rhetorical field of
analysis to experimental fields that report new data. The line of argument
seems to be that since hypotheses in academic economics have not been confirmed
means that the same would be true for all fields whether theoretical or
experimental, and therefore fields that rest on empirical evidence must be
castles in the sky. The analogies are not strong enough to allow leaps of faith
that long.

            (To
respond, click here.)

            
               ARTICLE:
Everyday Economics: Too True To Be Good

            
               SUBJECT:
"Reporting" Science

            
               FROM:
Edward Stein

            

               DATE: Thu Sept 16

            An interesting phenomenon related to that discussed
in Steven Landsburg's article concerns the truth of hypotheses published in
scientific journals that are then reported in daily newspapers, weekly news
magazines, and discussed on television news shows. Although I don't have any
systematic data on this, I suspect that the trend that Landsburg describes
would be amplified in the following way: if you read in the newspaper about a
theory that has been published in a prestigious scientific journal, it is even
more likely to be wrong than an article that is published in a prestigious
scientific journal that is not widely reported. Reporters and editors decide
what hypotheses are newsworthy and likely to evoke interest in their readers
and, for the same reasons discussed in Landsburg's article, this selection
criteria are not especially effective at selecting the true scientific
hypothesis.

            An example of this can be seen in the scientific
research program that I discuss in my book The Mismeasure of Desire: The
Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (Oxford University Press,
1999). Three studies concerning the origins of male homosexuality done in the
last decade garnered a great deal of attention in the media (LeVay's
neuroanatomical study, Hamer's genetic study and Bailey and Pillard's twin
studies). Together the three have been widely understood as establishing that
sexual orientation is genetically determined. However, LeVay's study was done
on a small and perhaps atypical sample and it has not be replicated, Hamer's
study has been disconfirmed by other labs, and Bailey's latest and more
systematic twin study undermines his early ones. Although the original studies
received a great deal of attention and are widely accepted, the serious
problems with them have not been discussed in the media.

            Although it is easier to
disconfirm a hypothesis than to establish one, disconfirmations are much less
likely to be deemed newsworthy. Readers of media reports of scientific
hypotheses need to read with especially critical and skeptical eyes.

            (To
respond, click here.)

            
               ARTICLE:
: Miss America

            
               SUBJECT:
"Miss Hip"?

            
               FROM:
shindorim

            

               DATE: Tue Sept 21

            You'll all have to
forgive me but I just don't seem to understand what is so "hip" about some
white woman with a name like "Heather Renee French," who comes from Kentucky
and works for charities based on a concern for her father. Kind probably,
average definitely, attractive moderately, but hip? I've been living in South
Korea for a few years now, so perhaps I'm not as on the ball when it comes to
such matters but if this woman is "hip" in the USA then I may seriously
consider citizenship right here where I am.

            (To respond, click
here.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Hollywood's Young Horrors</SPAN></SPAN>

            

               
                  New
               
               
                  York Times Magazine, Sept. 5
            

            The
cover story tracks four narcissistic young actors as they claw through
Hollywood's casting maw. They misrepresent their ages, dress the part of the
ingénue, and make sure to be seen at the right hot spots pledging dedication to
their craft. They all get cast, thanks to Hollywood's determination to
capitalize on the baby boomlet by churning out cookie-cutter teen dramas.
... An article forecasts that commercially available high-resolution
satellites will make the world safer by enabling watchdogs to monitor
troublemaking countries. Rogue nations will be cowed by the prospect of
surveillance. ... In an essay, Peter Singer argues that every yuppie
contributes to a child's death when he chooses foie gras rather than donating
to UNICEF (for more on Singer, see The New Yorker below).

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Sept. 4
            

            The cover story worries that earlier retirement and
reduced birthrates in the West will contract the labor force and reduce living
standards. Western nations should expunge pension incentives that encourage
workers to quit early and should create more "bridge" jobs to ease the
transition to retirement. ... An editorial laments India's failure to live up to its
geopolitical potential. Despite having a billion people and the bomb, India
attracts relatively little foreign investment and trade. If September's
elections lead to political stability, the next government could enhance
India's standing by harmonizing relations with Pakistan, liberalizing trade
policy, and privatizing industry.

            

               
                  Time
               
               
                  , Sept. 6
            

            The
cover story claims that Americans have embarked on "a
national orgy of thrill seeking." Bored Americans seeking the stimulation of
endangerment are participating in more adventure sports, sinking more money
into highly speculative stocks, and changing jobs with greater bravado than
ever before because traditional risks have been minimized by medicine and
government regulation. ... Republicans and Democrats have hauled in
record amounts of "soft money." In the first half of this year, the GOP raised
$29.4 million, and the Democrats raised $24.2 million. But the bumper harvest
might be both parties' last, according to an article. Donors are balking at
perpetual political dunning. About 100 large firms have formed a committee to
press for reform. Big companies such as General Motors have already spurned
overtures for cash.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Sept. 6
            

            The
cover story questions whether high-stakes standardized tests
are improving schools. Testing helps assess progress, but legislatures are
mandating that kids be held back for failing, and some states are sanctioning
schools for low scores. Schools are focusing their curricula on exams to the
detriment of long-term learning. ... A book
excerpt traces the roots of the SAT. Reformers seeking to create
opportunities for underprivileged students adopted the test to assess
scholastic aptitude. Rather than equalize opportunity, the SAT turns the
uppermost percentile into a privileged class and perpetuates the educational
disadvantage of other test-takers. ... An article rethinks the drug war. During the crack epidemic,
Congress and the states imposed draconian mandatory minimum sentences for drug
offenses. America needs to roll back these wrong-headed laws and treat drug
offenders more compassionately.

            

               
                  The
               
               
                  New Yorker, Sept. 6
            

            A
profile of Peter Singer, a proponent of ethical treatment of animals, pinpoints
the radical philosopher's inconsistencies. Singer argues that all sentient
creatures are equally valuable and that you should donate your income until
you're as impoverished as a Bengali refugee, but he lives in comfort. He
advocates euthanasia and condemns people for caring more about relatives than
strangers, but he provides his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother with
around-the-clock care. ... An article chronicles the aborted return of
offbeat television. Hoping to revive the taste for surreal television, ABC
hired Twin Peaks creator David Lynch to pilot a noirish program called
Mulholland Drive . After insisting that the director cut down on
cigarette-smoking characters and shots of dog poop, the risk-averse network
ditched the series and filled its time slot with another Friends
clone.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Students vs. Ayatollahs

            The
crisis in Iran was the top story across most of Europe and the Middle East
Wednesday, though in Britain and Ireland it was overshadowed by those two
countries' frantic efforts to save the Northern Ireland peace settlement, and
in Israel by Prime Minister Ehud Barak's imminent visit to Washington. In the
Far East, the big issue is the tension between China and Taiwan over the
latter's abandonment of the "one China" principle.

            The
student riots in Tehran were taken most seriously by the Italian newspapers,
some of which led their front pages with dramatic headlines--"A Day of Civil
War" ( La Stampa
of Turin), "The Fist of the Ayatollahs" ( La Repubblica of Rome)--and devoted several pages to
their coverage of the unrest. La Repubblica ran an interview with Reza
Ciro Pahlavi, the 40-year-old son of the last shah of Iran, who expressed
eagerness to return to his country as a constitutional monarch. He criticized
his father for understanding too late the Iranian people's yearning for
democracy, saying that this was the cause of his overthrow 20 years ago and now
of the student revolt against the ayatollahs. He called on the West to support
the pro-democracy movement and said that what matters most for Iran now is
"faith in secularism, the separation of religion and the state." He hopes that
Iran will "become the first Islamic country to embark on the road of
democratization."

            
Historical comparisons proliferated in the comments on Iran. Pahlavi compared
the reformist President Mohammed Khatami to Mikhail Gorbachev, saying he was
attempting an "Iranian perestroika." Corriere della
Sera likened the situation in Tehran to that of Prague in 1968. Several
Arab commentators referred to the repression of the student protests as "Iran's
Tiananmen Square," and the Pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi said Monday
in an editorial that the uprising was reminiscent of the student revolt in
Indonesia that led to the overthrow of the Suharto regime.

            In an
editorial Tuesday, Saudi Arabia's leading daily, Asharq al-Awsat , urged
Khatami to slow the pace of his political reform program rather than play into
the hands of the hard-liners. "The latest developments vindicate earlier
warnings that Khatami's opponents might resort to provoking acts of violence,
followed by a harsh crackdown on free debate and freedom of expression," the
paper said. "Iran's only chance of finding a way out of its current crisis lies
through institutional politics, not the politics of the street. It would be
better for President Khatami to play a long-term game and not let his opponents
dictate the pace at which he should implement his reform program."

            But in
Bahrain's Akhbar al-Khaleej , commentator Assayed Zahra wrote that
"reform, openness, and liberty" are now inevitable in Iran. The only way
widespread civil strife can be avoided is "by the conservative forces realizing
that time is not on their side and--should they decide to continue the struggle
through to its bitter end--they would be leading Iran to catastrophe." The
Lebanese commentator Joseph Samaha wrote in the Pan-Arab al-Hayat that
the events in Tehran show how much further Iran has gone down the road toward
democracy than the Arab world has, because in Iran the movement for political
reform apparently enjoys mass popular support.

            In
Israel, Ha'aretz reported Wednesday that, in the view of the Israeli
defense establishment, the Iranian theocracy is still not in serious danger of
being toppled, but that if it were overthrown, it would have enormous
implications for the entire Middle East. One defense source said, "We can only
hope that if the liberal forces gain the upper hand in Iran, they will manage
to do so before the ayatollahs get their hands on strategic weapons that could
harm Israel." On Tuesday, the daily Yediot Aharanot quoted Barak saying
in a private meeting that the events in Iran could change the face of the
Middle East in a "revolutionary" manner and might already have an impact on his
government's peace negotiations with Syria. Barak believes that, while there
will be no revolution in Iran in the short term, "changes will take place
faster than expected," the paper said.

            Both
Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post led their front pages Wednesday with headlines
saying there are "high hopes" in Israel for Barak's visit to the United States.
Ha'aretz said Barak wants "to connect with Clinton in a way that will
allow him to extract a promise that the U.S. will not intervene in
Israeli-Palestinian permanent status negotiations, nor make policy statements
without first coordinating positions with Israel." The Jerusalem Post
said he
hopes to "find a common language with US President Bill Clinton, a sympathetic
ear at the State Department, and a sense that the days of tense Israel-US
relations are over." The paper quoted a Barak spokesman as saying he was
seeking only "an exchange of ideas and positions" with Clinton and was not
intending to commit himself to any timetables on the Middle East peace process,
but it added: "The sense that there is no rush is something of a facade. In
fact, time is of the essence. The coming year is crucial for both Barak and
Clinton."

            In
China Wednesday, People's Daily , the official government newspaper, said
that Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui was "overrating his strength, like an ant
trying to topple a tree." As Beijing continued to threaten force to halt
Taiwan's pretensions to independent statehood, the South China Morning
Post of Hong Kong accused Lee of pursuing a "dangerous course." Saying it
was unclear what he hoped to accomplish by ending his one China policy, the
paper commented in an editorial that what he had done was "weaken the
constructive ambiguity which has marked relations across the Taiwan Strait for
two decades or more, and which has kept them essentially peaceful." It said it
hoped that the two countries (or bits of the same country) "may yet find ways
of maintaining the useful imprecision of recent years."

            The
Moscow Times said Tuesday that Republican front-runner George W. Bush is
missing an excellent opportunity to attack his leading Democratic opponent Al
Gore for the administration's policies toward Russia. "Washington under
President Bill Clinton began by embracing Boris Yeltsin, gushing about the
booming Russian stock market and bragging about the millions of 'property
owners' created by the dream team of Anatoly Chubais and his privatizers," the
paper said in an editorial. "Now, just a few short years later, the Clinton
team is defensively and guiltily struggling to ignore the world's largest
country, and top US officials disingenuously profess not to be worried by the
sight of Russian blackjack bombers flying over Norway in a nose-thumbing
gesture at the West." But Bush "so far does not seem to have the stomach for
what is really required on Russia: an American apology (of the sort Clinton so
loves to hand out for the long-dead practice of American slavery, for genocide
in Rwanda, and for other US moral lapses) and a rebuilding, from the ground up,
of this key strategic relationship."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             O Canada

            It's about time. Those of us who work on
international monetary theory have been wondering for a decade when Robert
Mundell would get his richly deserved Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences. Mundell's work is so central to that field, so "seminal"--an overused
term that really applies here--that on many disputed issues his ideas are the
basis for both sides of the debate. But a layperson might be confused
about exactly what Mundell and his prize are really about.

            The Wall Street
Journal editorial page, rather pathetically, has declared this a
"supply-side" Nobel. No surprise there: Editor Robert Bartley's attempts to
claim intellectual vindication have become increasingly desperate in recent
years. With eight years and counting of Clintonian expansion making Reagan's
"seven fat years" look positively shabby, and with supply-side heroes such as
Jude Wanniski looking loonier by the day, the Wall Street Journal will
take anything it can get. (Since when does Bartley care about what some Swedes
think, anyway?) For what it is worth, the citation by the Nobel committee
doesn't mention anything Mundell has written since he was adopted as mascot by
Bartley et al. some 25 years ago. It is the young Mundell, whose theories still
dominate the textbooks, who earned the prize.

            So if it isn't a supply-side Nobel, what is it? Well, how
about regarding it as a Canadian Nobel?

            I'm not sure why Canadian policy issues are
universally regarded as being dull--why the winning entry in the old
competition for most boring headline, "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative," still
seems so funny (yes, I think it's funny, too). Maybe it has something to do
with the way they talk, eh? But when it comes to international monetary
matters, Canada has often been a very interesting case--the country that defies
the trends, that demonstrates by example the hollowness of the conventional
wisdom of the moment. Right now, for example, Canada's ability to thrive with
an independent dollar is the best single argument I know against British
europhiles who insist that their nation must join the European Monetary Union
or die. And when the young Canadian economist Robert Mundell did his most
influential work, in the early 1960s, it was arguably the Canadian difference
that inspired him to think outside the box.

            Here's what the world
looked like in 1960: Almost all countries had fixed exchange rates with their
currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar. International movements of capital were
sharply limited, partly by government regulations, partly by the memory of
defaults and expropriations in the '30s. And most economists who thought about
the international monetary system took it for granted, explicitly or
implicitly, that this was the way things would continue to work for the
foreseeable future.

            But Canada was different. Controlling the movement of
capital across that long border with the United States had never been
practical; and U.S. investors felt less nervous about putting their money in
Canada than anywhere else. Given those uncontrolled movements of capital,
Canada could not fix its exchange rate without giving up all control over its
own monetary policy. Unwilling to become a monetary ward of the Federal
Reserve, from 1949 to 1962 Canada made the almost unique decision to let its
currency float against the U.S. dollar. These days, high capital mobility and a
fluctuating exchange rate are the norm, but in those days they seemed
outrageous--or would have seemed outrageous, if anyone but the Canadians had
been involved.

            And so perhaps it was
the Canadian case that led Mundell to ask, in one of his three most famous
contributions, how monetary and fiscal policy would work in an economy in which
capital flowed freely in and out in response to any difference between interest
rates at home and abroad. His answer was that it depended on what that country
did with the exchange rate. If the country insisted on keeping the value of its
currency in terms of other nations' monies constant, monetary policy would
become entirely impotent. Only by letting the exchange rate float would
monetary policy regain its effectiveness.

            Later Mundell would broaden this initial insight by
proposing the concept of the "impossible trinity"; free capital movement, a
fixed exchange rate, and an effective monetary policy. The point is that you
can't have it all: A country must pick two out of three. It can fix its
exchange rate without emasculating its central bank, but only by maintaining
controls on capital flows (like China today); it can leave capital movement
free but retain monetary autonomy, but only by letting the exchange rate
fluctuate (like Britain--or Canada); or it can choose to leave capital free and
stabilize the currency, but only by abandoning any ability to adjust interest
rates to fight inflation or recession (like Argentina today, or for that matter
most of Europe).

            And what choice should a
country such as Canada--where capital controls were not a serious option--make?
Should it explicitly or implicitly give up on having its own currency and go on
a U.S. dollar standard, or were the risks of a fluctuating dollar-dollar rate a
price worth paying for the ability to actively stabilize the domestic economy?
The debate over how to define an "optimum currency area" is an endless one, but
Mundell set its terms, suggesting in particular that a key feature of such an
area would typically be high internal mobility of workers, that is, the
willingness and ability of workers to move from slumping to booming regions.
(This is a criterion, incidentally, that Europe--whose single-currency regime
Mundell now enthusiastically supports--manifestly does not satisfy.)

            It's hard to appreciate today just how novel both Mundell's
statement of the issues and the way he tried to resolve them were at the time.
But if you look at the international monetary literature when Mundell was in
his glory days, you get the impression that he was 15 or 20 years ahead of his
contemporaries. They were still thinking in terms of a controlled world, a
world where money moved where and when the authorities told it to move. He was
thinking in terms of a world where money moved freely and massively to wherever
it could earn the highest return. At the time, only Canada, thanks to its giant
neighbor, lived in anything like the world he envisaged; today we all do. And
if you look at any major textbook in international economics--such as the
perennial best seller by Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld--you still find that the
monetary half of the book is very largely based on the papers Mundell wrote in
the early 1960s.

            So who is this economist that the Wall Street
Journal thinks is on its side? Well, economists do change their styles and
their views as they get older; Mundell changed more than most. Those seminal
early papers were crisp and minimalist; they looked forward with remarkable
prescience to the wild and woolly, out-of-control world of modern international
macroeconomics. By contrast, Mundell's writings since the early '70s have been
discursive, one might almost say rambling, and often reveal a sort of hankering
for the lost certainties of the gold standard. (And yes, he has said a few
things that can, with some effort, be construed as support for supply-side
economics.) The precocious theorist anticipated the 1990s; the elder statesman
has hearkened back to the 1890s.

            So you can take your pick as to which Mundell you
prefer; but the Nobel committee basically honored Mundell the younger, the
economist who was iconoclastic enough to imagine that Canada, of all places,
was the economy of the future--and was right.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

            

               
                  Economist , June 19
            

            The
cover story demystifies genetically modified food.
Europeans are skeptical because they believe genetic manipulation is unnatural,
dangerous, and bad for the environment. But nearly all produce is a product of
man-bred hybrids, genetically modified food isn't toxic, and genetic
manipulation reduces the need for chemicals. Americans are not bothered by the
food fuss because they're ignorant about what they eat, optimistic about
technology, and trusting of their regulatory agencies. ... An
article asks why stores, such as Wal-Mart, are
expanding abroad when most international retailers still get their highest
returns at home. Expectations of economies of scale encourage globalization.
But few suppliers can source globally, and retailing requires tinkering for
local tastes. ... An editorial decries the troubling turnout in European
Parliament elections. Even though the EU is adopting a new currency and
thinking of marshalling an army, only 49 percent bothered to vote. Low turnout
suggests that Europeans identify more with their nations than with their new
union.

            
               
                  National
Review , June 28
            

            The
cover story derides Hillary as beloved "First Doormat":
H.R.C. won't succeed as a solo politician because she has a tin ear for
politics and a likability deficit when not acting as Clinton's stooge.
... A piece offers a unique suggestion for avoiding school
shootings--remove the disincentives against dropping out. Forcing miscreants to
attend high school is pure folly, based on three untruths: 1) any kid can be
taught; 2) dropping out will turn a kid toward crime; and 3) without a
high-school education you can't get a decent job. Allowing rebels to quit
school would contribute to schoolhouse peace and classroom learning.
... Gore's environmentalism collides with his livability
agenda, according to an article. Activists, partially funded by Al's EPA, wage
war on roads being built or expanded by localities. Highway projects are held
up and commuters get caught in the constricted traffic.

            
               
                  Atlantic
Monthly , July 1999
            

            The
cover story claims that the ingratiating ways of dogs manifest an instinct for
survival, not a love of owner. Proto-dogs started hanging out with humans
because people produced an exploitable ecological niche filled with warmth and
garbage. Dog genome projects reveal that inbreeding for pedigree locks in bad
recessive traits. Maintaining genetic diversity is the best way to breed man's
best friend. ... A piece agitates for a progressive
pro-school-voucher coalition. Voucher programs currently cover only 0.1 percent
of students, so school choice is an untried solution to education's ills. A
500,000-student trial of publicly funded school vouchers, accompanied by an
increase in traditional school spending, could break the stalemate in the
education debate. ... An article laments the practice of
liberating Sudanese slaves by buying their freedom. Slave redeemers provide a
strong financial incentive for the continuation of the slave business, which
would otherwise be unprofitable, and have spurred an increase in the number of
Sudanese being enslaved.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , July 5
            

            The
cover story claims new technologies will revolutionize
political campaigns. The Internet, consumer databases, and sophisticated
software help candidates to identify the fattest fund-raising targets and to
customize their campaigns to individual voters through e-mail. Personalizing
politics might boost voter participation, but it could diminish candidate
accountability and threaten voter privacy. ... Despite the peace plan's
promise to demilitarize the rebels, the KLA is turning itself into a standing
army, according to a Kosovo dispatch . The rebels are manning checkpoints,
policing cities to show their force, and voicing their reluctance to disarm.
... An article explores the handiwork of Philip Christenson, a
foreign affairs consultant (and former Sen. Jesse Helms staffer), who digs up
embarrassing information on administration nominees and campaigns against them
with critical op-eds and by otherwise purveying damaging tidbits. His most
successful effort to date involves Richard Holbrooke, who has endured
confirmation limbo for a full year.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               
                  , June 20
            

            The
cover story on racial profiling by police presents the conventional wisdom:
Profiling is a blunt instrument; too many innocents are harassed solely on the
basis of race; and profiling poisons the citizenry's relations with police.
Profiling is also self-fulfilling: Pull over more blacks and you'll find more
guilty blacks. ... A Palestinian state is a certainty, according to an
article, but sovereignty will be a sham. West Bank settlements have been
inextricably integrated into Israel. Palestinians depend on Israel for
employment, and Israel will insist on controlling Palestine's international
borders. ... A profile of Steve Jurvetson, the 33-year-old venture
capitalist who seeds Internet startups, predicts he will prosper even though
Internet IPOs no longer promise exponential returns. Jurvetson's winning
formula is to back original ideas, not "Me Too" products such as
drugstore.com.

            

               
                  Time
               
               and 
               
                  Newsweek
               
               ,
June 21
            

            George W. Bush takes both
covers. The cover head shots reflect the stories inside. Time 's is
soft-focused and warmly lighted; Newsweek 's is much harsher.
Newsweek concentrates on the obstacles to Bush's much-touted candidacy. According to the
mag, one reason voters don't know much about the Texas governor is his
Clintonian penchant for sophistry. When asked what he stands for, Bush replies,
"Honesty, integrity, serving for the right reasons." When asked what those
right reasons are, he elaborates, "America and what America stands for." But
Newsweek 
               analysis suggests that Bush's Clintonian nature might help
him meet the "greatest expectation" for his candidacy: that he can bend the GOP
back toward the political center. ... 
               Time 's enthusiastic package echoes the familiar line about why Bush is
the Republican favorite: The breadth of his support among blacks and Hispanics
and his landslide re-election victory wowed the GOP. The party's "sheer hunger
for victory" overwhelms ideological concerns about a Bush candidacy.

            
               Time reports
that high schools in 40 states now offer marriage-education electives. The
courses, which often involve role play, teach "active listening" and "conflict
resolution." Florida mandates marriage ed and other states may soon follow
suit.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report
               
               , June 21
            

            The
magazine alerts readers to another disease they didn't know they had:
Social anxiety, formerly known as shyness, affects one in eight Americans.
Clinics invite victims for treatment, but many are too bashful to attend. The
treatment for those who do show up: learning to withstand embarrassment.
Therapists make patients spill drinks and walk through public places trailing
toilet paper from their shoes ... A piece says that the Louisiana Republican Party will allow
online voting in the January 2000 presidential caucus. Several other states
will let absentee voters cast online ballots next year.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker , June 21 and 28
            

            A
fin de siècle fiction issue prints stories by the country's "twenty best
young fiction writers" as well as glossy portraits of them. The introductory
essay reminds readers that a similar list compiled a century ago would not have
included Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, or Willa Cather because
all wrote their best work after age 40. The stories include: George Saunders'
mock reply to a customer-service complaint, Sherman Alexie's tale of a
hitchhiker, Jeffrey Eugenides' narrative of a sex anthropologist, and William
Vollman's imagined account of Lenin's wife.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , June 21
            

            A
piece warns about the popular culture's fixation with hairless men. To be buff
but shorn of chest hair is to manifest male vanity and the desire for prolonged
adolescence--two symptoms of male homosexuality, according to the
Standard . The proliferation of pretty boys without chest pelts signals
the degree to which gay values have distorted mainstream notions of manliness.
(No mention is made of Austin Powers' shag-rug chest.) ... An article
celebrates rhetoric about God as a political tool. Professing faith allows
Republican candidates to woo the religious right without being locked to its
agenda on abortion. Gore discusses God to distance himself from the Clinton
scandals. ... A Yale professor writes that there aren't many qualified
female scientists because women don't like science, just as they don't like
playing sports. Women are innately less aggressive, and affirmative action
supporters should abandon their "harangue against female tastes."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Kissinger's Comeback Tour

            Henry Kissinger, like an aging rock star who keeps
squeezing one more year out of the same old hits, has embarked on yet another
comeback tour. The former secretary of state has just released Years of
Renewal , a 1,079-page behemoth about his service to President Ford.
Meanwhile, Robert D. Kaplan has lionized Kissinger in this month's
Atlantic. This tribute--a bow from the great pessimist of the '90s to
the great pessimist of the '70s--revisits Kissinger's 1954 doctoral
dissertation and finds it "brave," a persuasive account of why realism keeps
the peace better than idealism. And Kissinger is popping up on TV screens with
alarming frequency, delivering his gloomy assessments of the Kosovo bombing and
the frost in U.S.-China relations.

            Kissinger, of course, has never gone entirely out
of fashion. His press savvy, charm, and resolute courtship of the rich and
powerful have ensured that he always remains plenty visible. Like Richard
Nixon--to whom he is eternally yoked--Kissinger has spent his years out of
power spinning, endlessly spinning, his record (and revising it when
necessary). Like Nixon, Kissinger has been trying to escape a black mark on his
career (Vietnam rather than Watergate). And as with Nixon, this spinning
occasionally produces vindication, as it has for the past few months. Kissinger
is back in vogue not because he is saying anything new. He's only saying what
he has been saying for 45 years. He's back in vogue because his doleful realism
frames the debate for Republicans who oppose Clinton's foreign policy,
especially Clinton's China and Kosovo policies.

            (Kissinger's vindication
isn't complete, because the current talk is silent on Vietnam. But Vietnam
vindication could be just around the corner. Click for more.)

            Much of the current fascination with Kissinger grows out of
the journalistic debate over Years of Renewal . Years of Renewal ,
it must be said, does not seem a promising start for any kind of debate. The
third and final (thank God) volume of Kissinger's memoirs, it drones on about
an entirely forgettable period in American history. The Mayaguez
Incident. Quick, can you tell me what that was about? Or "Basket III"? I didn't
think so.

            But beneath the welter of
details about Cyprus and Angola, Kissinger makes a surprising claim, arguing
that his tough-but-accommodating policy toward the Soviets in the mid-'70s led
directly to the confrontational Reagan tactics that won the Cold War in the
'80s. According to Kissinger, the breathing space created by détente gave the
United States time to recover from Vietnam without retreating into
isolationism, thus setting the table for Reagan.

            Many commentators, including Kaplan, have embraced
Kissinger's interpretation. But others, especially Robert Kagan in the New
Republic, have savaged Years of Renewal for its self-serving
revisionism. Now that the U.S.S.R. has collapsed, they say, Kissinger is
pretending that he was much tougher on the Soviets than he ever was. In the
most telling example, Kagan slams Kissinger for taking credit for the 1975
Helsinki human rights provisions. (That's "Basket III.") These provisions
became a key weapon of Soviet-bloc dissidents in the '80s. In fact, Kagan says,
Kissinger was skeptical of Basket III and had virtually nothing to do with
it.

            The fight over whether
détente helped win the Cold War is not simply academic. It especially matters
for current U.S.-China relations. If Kissingerian détente helped break the
Soviets, then presumably Kissingerian détente could help tame today's Chinese.
In the '70s, Kissinger downplayed ideological conflict with Soviet Communists
in favor of soothed relations, just as Sino-apologists (including Kissinger)
today ignore China's Communist authoritarianism, human rights violations, and
suppression of democracy. Idealistic conservatives such as Reagan despised
Kissinger's accommodationist policies during the '70s: The U.S.S.R. was an evil
empire, not simply a dance partner in the great geopolitical waltz. Likewise,
today's idealistic conservatives still despise Kissinger and detect in Years
of Renewal 's détente argument an excuse to coddle China. It is no
coincidence that Kagan, the sharpest critic of Years of Renewal , is also
the strongest China hawk around, author of many anti-Beijing articles for the
Weekly Standard .

            The Kissinger comeback wouldn't be possible without the
spectacle of Republican foreign policy confusion. Since the end of the Cold
War, the GOP has divided itself into Wilsonian idealists, such as the folks at
the Standard , who believe the United States should be the global
crusader for justice, and the rest of the party, which isn't sure what it
believes but loathes Clinton. Kosovo, where the idealists favored intervention
and other Republicans didn't, has deepened this divide.

            Kissinger seems an unlikely guide for the lost
Republicans. After all, he backed the Kosovo bombing on the grounds that NATO,
having started fighting, must win to preserve its credibility. But beneath
Kissinger's reluctant support was a larger principle: The United States has no
vital interest in Kosovo, so the United States never should have involved
itself there at all. U.S. interests, not U.S. ideals, should ultimately
determine our foreign policy.

            It is this gloomy but coherent vision that has made
Kissinger a favorite of floundering anti-Kosovo Republicans. (It is this same
vision that Kaplan so admires.) Kissinger offers them a stiff foreign policy
framework, a set of principles sharply contrasted to Clinton's ad hocism. He
gives the Republicans intellectual window dressing to what would otherwise be
just more incoherent anti-Clintonism. This is not as glorious as another stint
as secretary of state, but the 1999 Kissinger will happily accept the
assignment.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Big Sister, Big Brother

            

               
                  Note: Robert Pinsky, U.S. poet laureate and
Slate 's poetry editor, will soon be answering your Fray posts!
To join in the discussion, just go to "The Fray" 
               
                  poetry
thread Friday, Oct. 29 at 3 p.m. ET. And in the meantime, click
here to read excerpts from Pinsky's Fray appearance last
year.
            

            
               Subject:
Beware the Politics of "Common Sense"

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Sam Tanenhaus

            
               Date: Sat
Oct 16

            Interesting, clever piece but it seems wedded to
the premise that liberalism = moral virtue. But mightn't a columnist offer
sentiments wholly opposed to Anna Q's and seem to his/her readers the paragon
of homespun good sense? Don't Pat Buchanan's fans think he's simply talking
"horse sense"?

            Others might object
[that] Ms. Q's warm sentimentality is really smugness. I'm reminded here of a
column she wrote on William Kennedy Smith, which (if I recall it correctly)
made the argument--never established, save on the grounds of emotional
identification with his accuser--that his acquittal was proof of the flaws in
our legal system. At a time like this Big Sister sounds like kissing kin to Big
Brother.

            [Sam Tanenhaus is the
author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography .]

            (To reply, click
here.)

            
               Subject:
Anna Quindlen, Cultural Mandarin

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Edward Brynes

            
               Date: Sun
Oct 17

            Far from being a voice of common sense, Q is a
sophist who tries to make confused thinking look like common sense.

            In connection with Chris Ofili's painting [in her
first 
                  Newsweek
                column], she invokes Joyce
and Lawrence but fails to mention that neither was publicly funded. She
mentions banning and burning, but the painting is not being subjected to
either. The funding issue isn't supposed to matter because citizens don't have
control of every item in the budget anyway. Oh? Maybe they don't directly
oversee every item, but they have every right to complain about items they
don't like and demand that they be deleted.

            Q seems to think that the issue of what is or is
not offensive can be resolved by appealing to analogies in culture and history:
"medieval Catholic art, for example, is chockablock with sexual and
scatological imagery." Do the medieval artists use the imagery in the way Ofili
did? Would she apply the same reasoning to her issue of hate speech and say for
example that the n***** word shouldn't be offensive because it is widely found
in 19 th -century American literature and is sometimes used by blacks
in referring to each other?

            The Brooklyn Museum case isn't about free speech
but rather subsidized (i.e., privileged) speech. Most speech and artistic
expression are not subsidized by anyone. The museum is subsidizing the Ofili
painting because it is supposedly of exceptional value. But do our cultural
mandarins, in the name of "free speech" have the right to frivolous (and likely
self-seeking) judgments as to what speech is valuable and what is not?

            (To reply, click
here.)

            
               Subject:
Bradley's Missed Moment in Iowa

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Yellow Dog

            
               Date: Tue
Oct 12

            Campaigns have defining moments. Remember the
moment Ronald Reagan demanded that his microphone be turned on--after the media
moderator ordered it turned off [in a 1980 debate]--so that he could speak in
support of George Bush's whining disruptions to protest that he should be
included in a Nashua, N.H., debate? ("I paid for this microphone, Mr.
Breen!")

            Bill Bradley missed such a moment the other night
in Iowa, when Gore brayed at him from the stage Bradley had just relinquished.
"How about it, Bill?" Gore taunted, looking straight at Bradley. "If the answer
is yes, stand up and wave your hand."

            What if Bradley had risen from his chair, walked
over to Gore, and said, "Let me respond. As I just finished saying, let's
abandon the old politics of personal confrontation and have the kind of
reasonable discussion people want before deciding how to vote. Yes, Al, I agree
to debate--not on your schedule, not on your terms, but at mutually acceptable
times and places and in a format that lets people hear what we have to say. And
in the meantime, why don't you knock off the 'How about it, Bill?' stuff.
That's playground ball." Would Al have been ready to "Stay and Fight" under
those circumstances? We'll never know ...

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
Journalism, Post-Metabolife

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Theo Przybyszewski

            
               Date: Tue
Oct 12

            Chatterbox does a terrific job of pointing out the
essential lunacy of trying to control information in this era, where anyone
with a computer can read, watch, or hear something in the mass media, then get
onto the Internet, find 400 versions of the truth, and make up his own
mind.

            Access to all this data makes us all a little
crazier. On the other hand, it helps guarantee that the days of media moguls
and politicians controlling our thoughts and opinions ( Citizen Kane :
"People will think what I tell them to think!") are fading fast. Unlike my
parents, I won't buy a brand of cake flour or vote for a candidate just because
that lovely Mary Margaret McBride tells me to on her radio show. Not when I can
go to a cake flour chat room on the Web and get the real lowdown.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
The True Cost of Driving in Manhattan

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Richard K. Green

            
               Date: Wed
Oct 13

            Moneybox is likely correct about taxi medallions
and rent control. But I am not convinced about parking on two counts:

            The value of land in Midtown Manhattan is somewhere
in the neighborhood of $2,500 per square foot. This high land cost, along with
the high cost of constructing underground parking, means that more parking
might not be economically feasible (i.e., land might be used more profitably
for apartments, office space, and hotels).

            Even if new garage space were feasible under
current conditions, there is a good chance that it should not be built. While I
tend not to worry about market failure unless it is large, in the case of
automobiles, it is large. Edwin Mills of Northwestern University estimates that
the social costs of automobiles could be internalized with a $2 per gallon gas
tax in Chicago. In NYC, the tax would have to be higher than that. But there
seems to be little political will to impose rational gas taxes, so second best
solutions, such as regulating garage space, are likely better than allowing
unregulated garage space combined with subsidized auto travel.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
Your Diary, My Marriage

            
               Re:
""

            
               From:
Anne Marie Fenton

            
               Date: Mon
Oct 11

            Today, I have been in a verbal communiqué with my
husband, Captain Robert E. Fenton, USCG (Ret.) regarding his desire to travel
to a mini-reunion of the USCGA Class of '63 in Orlando, Florida, next week.
Having just returned from a week in San Diego at an FAA convention, I feel less
than enthusiastic about these plans. After all, we still have two teenagers at
home to care for! This morning, I telephoned him (at his office) asking, "Why
do you want to go on this dumb trip?" After all, we have been married for
nearly 33 years, and we have seen some of the classmates within the past
year.

            His reply was that it will be wonderful--we shared
so much together and went through so much, I want to see them. He then
forwarded this article written by the at-sea Coast Guard commander. Is this a
coincidence? My husband served as a commanding officer of a CG cutter, 1980-82.
He claimed it was the best time of his life. His personality does not allow him
to express emotion or sensitivity. After reading this article, I know why he
has always felt so close to the Guard (as I have), and why he wants to share a
few days with his former classmates. Thanks for the great article. We will
forward it to as many classmates as possible. No doubt I will be on that plane
to Orlando next week. I will send you a follow up as to how it went.

            (To reply, click here.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Party of Buchanan

            Before Republicans toss Pat Buchanan for saying
that the United States should have stayed out of World War II, they should
listen to some of their own rhetoric about more recent foreign policy
controversies. No one but Pat is saying in 1999 that we were wrong to help stop
Hitler, but leading Republicans are saying things today that lead you to wonder
what they would have been saying in 1939.

            Buchanan's new book, A Republic, Not an
Empire , chronicles how generations of woolly-headed idealists repeatedly
dragged the United States into pointless overseas conflicts. Buchanan contends
that Nazi Germany posed no real threat to America's vital interests after 1940
and that Franklin Roosevelt either bumbled his way into the world war or
deceitfully conspired to get the country embroiled in a war it need not have
fought. (Click for 
                  Slate
               's assessment of the book's historical
accuracy.)

            Sen. John McCain of
Arizona declared that "anyone who repudiates our involvement against Nazi
Germany obviously does not reflect the views of America, much less the
Republican Party" and invited Buchanan to leave the GOP. Elizabeth Dole said
she was "appalled." Over the past week or so, many Republicans have concluded
that Buchanan's threat to join the Reform Party was no threat at all: His views
are too extreme and unconscionable for him to remain a Republican. (George W.
Bush believes Buchanan's views are extreme and unconscionable but thinks he
should stay in the party anyway.)

            What's really striking, though, about Buchanan's ideas is
not how different, but really how very similar they are to the foreign policy
thinking that dominates the congressional Republican caucus. If you start with
the foreign policy assumptions held by most Republicans on Capitol Hill,
Buchanan's central argument--that Nazi Germany didn't threaten America's vital
national interests after 1940--is not that far off the mark.

            What Buchanan actually
says is this: By the end of 1940, after the worst of the Battle of Britain, it
had become clear that the Germans would not be able to mount a cross-channel
invasion of Britain. If the Germans couldn't invade the United Kingdom,
Buchanan asks, how could they credibly pose a threat to the United States
thousands of miles across the Atlantic? FDR, who had a broad conception of his
country's national interests, did not have much trouble answering that
question. But if you agree with Buchanan's highly constricted view of the
national interest, it's not a bad point.

            Buchanan's premise is as a continental nation America has
few vital national interests beyond our own shores and still fewer outside our
own hemisphere. A corollary is that America's membership in international
organizations imperils the national interest by threatening to drag the country
into needless conflicts overseas. Another corollary is that mere humanitarian
considerations should play little or no role in decisions about when to
intervene in faraway places. America can't be the world's policeman or its
"911."

            All this sounds a lot
like what congressional Republicans have been saying since the end of the Cold
War. Just a few months ago neo-isolationist Republicans were arguing that the
United States should stay out of Kosovo because we had no vital interests in
the peace and stability of southeastern Europe. Texas Sen. Phil Gramm insisted
that the Kosovo war "should not have been fought [because] the President [had]
never made a convincing case for putting the lives of Americans at risk in a
war where we have no vital national interest at stake." House Majority Whip Tom
DeLay of Texas fulminated on the House floor that "NATO is starting to resemble
a power-hungry imperialist army," and he claimed that "the crisis in Kosovo
poses no security threat to American people, our territory or our welfare."
Many of these same legislators routinely declare that American liberties and
"sovereignty" are being stolen by bow-tied bureaucrats at the United Nations
and the World Trade Organization, and even by foreign generals in NATO.

            Beyond situational sound bites, Buchanan and the Republican
leadership share the same underlying theory of the nation's foreign policy.
Liberal internationalists believe that there is a moral dimension to our
leadership in the international community. They also believe that international
organizations, on balance, reduce future threats to our vital interests. This
often means anticipating future threats at one or two stages of remove and
recognizing that our values and our interests, though not identical, are not
wholly separate either. But many prominent Republicans prefer a policy of
avoiding international commitments and keeping a robust national defense in
store for any power that directly threatens our territory or our citizens.
Genocide in another part of the world may be tragic. Regional instability on
some other continent may be something to keep an eye on. But unless our access
to strategic natural resources is threatened or bullets actually start flying
our way, it's simply best not to get involved.

            As Buchanan's book
accurately notes, this isolationist mentality has deep roots in the Republican
Party. Sen. Robert Taft tried to keep the United States out of World War II in
the late 1930s and then sought to restrain America's overseas commitments in
the early Cold War years. Before the advent of modern weaponry, one of the
central tenets of the isolationist catechism was that America's status as a
continental nation, flanked by two great oceans, gave us the luxury of doing
without all the treaties and alliances that countries such as France or Great
Britain had to bother with. At mid-century, when internationalism was at its
zenith, it was commonly thought that a mixture of technology and America's
great power status had made such thinking obsolete. But the impulse remains. It
is actually one of the key motivators behind the conservative obsession with a
national missile defense--a technological fix that would conveniently replace
the oceans in allowing the United States to avoid a lot of pro-active foreign
involvement.

            The case for not acting until you have to was put most
vividly by Senate Assistant Majority Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma, in a
remark that also captures the hard-nosed attitude regarding humanitarian
concerns. During Kosovo, Nickles said publicly that he had told President
Clinton, "I don't think that we should begin bombing unless and until the Serbs
really begin a very significant massacre."

            Isolationist sentiments
don't prevent DeLay and Co. from saber-rattling; and given the belligerent
stands they often take toward countries like China or Cuba, "petulant
unilateralists" might be a better term for them. Whether or not this attitude
is morally vacant and ultimately self-defeating, as its critics charge, it's
hard to see how anyone who seriously holds these views, whatever you call them,
could really have had much to argue about with the America Firsters in the late
1930s.

            Not all Republicans think this way. The Weekly
Standard has been eloquently critical of Republican neo-isolationism and is
pushing something called "National Greatness conservatism," a program of
muscular American engagement around the globe. The mainstream GOP foreign
policy establishment (Eagleburgers and Scowcrofts and the like) still espouses
a trimmed-down, "realist" variant of internationalism. And some of the GOP's
increasing anti-interventionism can be ascribed to hysterical dislike of
President Clinton, rather than to principled belief, and is likely to wane when
he is gone. But as of now, the majority of the congressional party--the
Republicans who actually run for office and get elected--embraces a theory of
national interests that is very similar to the one in Buchanan's new
page-turner.

            The main difference between these congressional
Republicans and Pat Buchanan is that none of them have been thoughtful enough
to apply their beliefs to World War II, or politically foolish enough to
mention it if they have.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 260: &quot;A Touching (and Smelling) Tale&quot;

            
               "You're telling me
I have to touch anyone who comes in here, even if I don't want to? I have to
get up really close to them and smell their perfume, smell their breath?" asked
an incredulous Michael Damico. As it turns out, yes, he does. And what does he
have to do after that?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 259)--"Even Educated Fleas Do It":
            

            

               Millions of retirees and middle-aged women do it, and officials say
that's fine, as long as they do it for "health purposes" and not to "promote
superstition, spread rumors, engage in sedition, destroy social order or hold
mass assemblies." Do what?
            

            
"Golf?"-- Eddie Haskins
            

            
"Dissident bingo, every Wednesday night at Beijing Methodist!!!"--Ananda
Gupta
            

            
"Oprah's banned book club."-- Beth Sherman ( Tim Carvell had a
similar answer.)

            
"Santería. Or menopause. It's one or the other, I'm fairly sure."-- Tim
Carvell
            

            
"Die."-- Dan Simon
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            It's not what you do,
it's the purpose for which you do it. Twenty-five years ago, Pennsylvania
pinball machines displayed this warning: "for entertainment purposes only."
Apparently the legislature was concerned that they might be used for gambling
or, as I recall, Jewish ritual. Since then, Reform Judaism has changed a lot;
the Pennsylvania state Legislature, incidentally, has not. Men's room condom
machines of that era were marked "for prevention of disease only," lest someone
seek sexual pleasure, i.e., have sex for entertainment purposes only. Even now
ads for stocks are tagged "for information purposes only," i.e., this ad is not
an ad: It's René Magritte. For suckers. It is not foolish to consider intent,
hence the distinction between murder and accident and serious dieting. If a
stranger rendered you unconscious and went at you with a knife, it would mean
one thing if it were O. J. Simpson--or any other former NFL great--but
something else altogether if it were a surgeon. Or an old-school Reform rabbi,
performing a relevant bris atop a pinball machine.

            
               Sect Crimes
Answer
            

            Millions of Chinese join the group Falun Gong
(Buddhist law).

            Fearing government
harassment, the group's founder and leader, Li Hongzhi, moved to the United
States last year. In a letter to followers, he accused China of trying to pay off the
United States to extradite him. Denying rumors of an imminent crackdown,
Chinese officials told representatives of the sect that as long as they stick
to group breathing and meditation exercises in public parks they face no
repression. They are, however, forbidden to "stir up chaos and destroy social
stability."

            
               Kids' Corner
Extra
            

            George W.'s official state Web site offers this fun activity for kids: "The Governor enjoys
sending and receiving letters. If you would like to receive an on-line letter
from the Governor, type your name, choose a question and select submit!" That
is: You can receive a reply the governor didn't write to a question you didn't
write that he didn't read. Easy to see why the governor enjoys that.

            Which of the following
are actual prewritten questions from G.W.'s official list, and which are merely
crude attempts to mock and deride him?

            

               What are you doing for children to make Texas a better place to live?

               What would you like to say to young Texans considering a career in politics
or public service?

               What makes a good leader and a successful person?

               How did you get to be so handsome?

               What has your business experience taught you?

               Have you ever heard an actual kid use the term "business experience"?

               Why doesn't your official bio mention your Connecticut birthplace? Trouble
with the cops?

               Is it true that exploiting your family's political, business, and social
connections will only get you through the door, and after that you've got to do
a fairly good job much of the time?

               Did that previous question seem too smirky for a kid? 'Cause I could, you
know, ask more stuff about your business experience.

               Your official slogan, Prosperity With a Purpose--what purpose? Could it be
killing space aliens? Or the poor?

               Your prep school isn't in your bio. More trouble? Stealing from another
kid's locker?

               Your supporter J.C. Watts Jr. said: "Governor
Bush has the vision to see all Americans as they can be and not as they are."
But when I don't see people as they are, my folks get my urine tested. Is that
fair? (You mean when they, like, turn into monsters, right?)

            

            
               Answers
            

            Actual Prewritten Questions: 1, 2, 3, and 5.

            Crude Attempts To Mock
and Deride: 4, 6-12.

            
               Janice Zazinski's
Headline Haiku
            

            Gain off Fat Pension

            Fridge full of beer

            Immigrants on the job

            Busy factories in
Tokyo

            
               --Wall Street Journal , June 15, 1999

            (Front page only)

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            AARP and sex.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Is the Holocaust Literary?

            
               SUBJECT:
Günter Grass' "Political" Art

            
               RE:
""

            
               FROM:
Trevor
Butterworth

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            Though the critic Adorno admonished that poetry was
impossible in the wake of Auschwitz, in a different context he also argued that
art was more effectively political the less overt its politics-- pace
Brecht.

            Now, given the emotional and critical
persuasiveness of both positions, the question of how one might produce art
"adequate" to the Holocaust is fraught with incommensurability. How can art be
both authentically free and at the same time totalize the experience of
genocide?

            And so Grass, like Michel Tournier in The
Ogre and D.M. Thomas in The White Hotel
               , charts an oblique
course as far as historical engagement is concerned (though Thomas cuts loose
in his shocking denouement).

            If this is, as far as Grass is concerned, a moral
failure of literary process, then Ms. Shulevitz, and a notably resentful Jacob
Heilbrunn in the Wall Street Journal , need to make sense of their
criticism by showing how art can measure the Holocaust and still be art (and
not history or politics or philosophy).

            (To reply, click here.)

            

               SUBJECT: Shulevitz's Political Criticism

            

               
                  RE
               : ""

            
               FROM:
Roy Edroso

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            The Politicization of Nearly Everything (Literary
Division) proceeds apace. First the right-wingers attack the Nobel committee
for giving the Lit Prize to a commie--all the while admitting that he might in
fact be a good writer (presumably they'll get around to reading him sometime,
if they can ever get through that big, fat Tom Wolfe book). What's art, after
all, compared to conservative correctness?

            Then Ms. Shulevitz gets on Grass for presuming to
use an artistic technique, specifically irony, in the context of the
Holocaust--for what is art compared to a Holocaust? Shulevitz doubts Grass
"saved German literature." I say anyone who writes a masterpiece does a service
to literature, just as anyone who tries to make a work of art grist for their
political mill does it a disservice.

            (To reply, click here.)


            
               SUBJECT:
Nixon, the Jews, and Vietnam

            
               RE:
""

            
               FROM:
John Taylor

            
               DATE: Thu
Oct 7

            I'm the director of the Nixon Library and thus the
promulgator of the analysis of the tape opening that Timothy Noah quotes.

            Here's what I noticed about the NY Times
article: It neglected to mention a principal source of RN's frustration about
the Jewish community, which is plenty clear in our analysis and the tapes
themselves. Many of the same folks who wanted the U.S. to support Israel
against her aggressive foreign enemies did not particularly want the U.S. to
support South Vietnam against hers.

            Do you or do you not believe this is a legitimate
reason for a commander-in-chief in the middle of a war he inherited to be
frustrated, particularly when he was still signing 30-40 letters a week to the
families of KIA? Add that to the fact that he'd gotten about 20% of the Jewish
vote in '68, and what you have is a politician and a President who basically
viewed the Jewish community as predominantly liberal, Democratic, and anti-war.
He didn't just think they were against him; they were against him.

            And that's fine. Blocs of ethnic or religious
voters are frequently against certain politicians, and maybe all those
politicians get frustrated about it. That's fine, too--except when it's
captured on tape. But here's the bottom line: Words are words, and actions are
actions. When RN says "Jews" on the tapes, I hear "damn liberals," and I
understand it. This is why the points that he saved Israel in 1973 and that his
inner circle included Kissinger, Stein, Safire, and Garment are more than
aspects of a "some of my best friends ..." defense. These colleagues were
politically simpatico! And this was a politician! It's not complicated! Also,
find the tape in the new batch where he talks about how impressed he was after
a meeting with Arlen Specter--then, I believe, a tough young prosecutor from
Pennsylvania.

            Anyway, back to the NYT omission. In a
whole article about RN and Jews, why leave out the bit about Vietnam and
Israel? Doesn't he have the right to have the most immediate source of his
frustration even mentioned? Does the NYT want people to think these
feelings sprang from him totally unprovoked?

            Here's what I think: We're all still tiptoeing
around the Vietnam War. We post-Vietnam elites all tend to think that Ellsberg
was a great hero and that the war was immoral. We all tend to think that it was
okay to be for Israelis' freedom from aggression but to be indifferent toward
that of South Vietnamese. And so we still scapegoat RN for all the sins of the
era to avoid having to ask tough questions about what really happened to
Indochina, and to America, when Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge were permitted to
have their way with people whom we'd pledged to protect (and almost succeeded
in protecting). Check out Lewis Sorley's new book about Vietnam, for instance.
[Read more about the book in this "."]

            Revisionism about the war is inevitable;
revisionism about the toughest and best Vietnam commander-in-chief will come
next. And the tapes won't stop it. More likely, the tapes will fuel it. Maybe
it's a good thing he didn't burn them after all.

            (To reply, click
here.)

            
               SUBJECT:
In Defense of the Torah Codes

            

               
                  RE:
                ""

            
               FROM:
Michael Drosnin

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            Your article that posted late yesterday about the
Bible code would not have been published if your reporter, or your editors, had
taken the time to check out the facts.

            As author of The Bible Code , I've spent
the past seven years checking out all the claims and counter-claims. Here are
two basic facts your article ignores:

            a) The data for the original Bible code experiment
were chosen by an independent scholar, Dr. Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan
University, who did not know how the data would affect the outcome of the
experiment. That alone absolutely refutes the new accusation that the data were
"tuned" or "fitted to the tests."

            b) The original Bible code experiment was
replicated by an American codebreaker, Harold Gans, for more than 25 years a
senior National Security Agency crypto-analyst. He not only re-did the
experiment from scratch, but also confirmed the code using entirely new
data.

            That alone absolutely refutes the new claim that
the results of the Israeli experiment can't be replicated. I understand your
reporter's false relief in not having to believe in the Bible code any longer.
I'm also secular.

            But this new attack by the same old critics does
not let Wittes off the hook. He, in fact, has done what he accuses those who
believe in the code of doing--he has taken on faith the false claims of the
critics.

            Had he actually checked the facts, he would know
the critics have not "solved the Bible code puzzle"--they told a lie.

            They knew that the esteemed scholar who chose the
data had stated in writing that he did not know how the data would affect the
experiment. They knew that the NSA codebreaker had publicly confirmed that he
replicated the experiment. These critics even lied about the results of their
own experiments--which did not "debunk" the Bible code.

            In fact, the critics' first experiment confirmed
the Bible code. So they ran a second experiment rigged to fail, and then hid
the positive results of their first experiment by lumping them together with
the fixed experiment.

            All of us who are not religious think we know that
the Bible code simply cannot be real. When I first heard about it, that was my
entire reply--"I'm not religious."

            But then I learned Hebrew, obtained a copy of the
computer program used by the world-class mathematician who discovered the code,
and worked with it myself every day for years. And then I found in the code a
warning that Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated, and told the Prime
Minister--a year before he was killed.

            I still don't believe in God. I'm still not
religious. But I can assure you that the code is real. Your reporter perhaps
too quickly, too easily embraced the Bible code--and has now, like many a
disappointed convert, too quickly, too easily embraced the critics.

            I'm surprised that you and your editors have
followed him without even trying to check out the facts.

            (To reply, click
here.)


            
               SUBJECT:
Re: In Defense of the Torah Codes

            
               RE:
""

            
               FROM:
Benjamin Wittes

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            Both Professor Havlin's role in assembling the data
for the rabbi's experiment and Mr. Gans' work on the codes are discussed at
length in the rebuttal paper. In fact, the central point of that paper, as I
noted in the article, is that the criteria Prof. Havlin applied in creating his
list of appellations was insufficiently well-defined before the dataset was
assembled to be scientifically valuable. Far from ignoring this, I described it
as "the core of [the] critique."

            While my article does not discuss Mr. Gans'
experiments, that is chiefly because they were never published in a prestigious
peer-reviewed journal to begin with. The fair-minded reader will agree that the
McKay paper devastates the Gans experiments completely.

            It is also false to say that I ever embraced the
Bible Code or am now a disappointed convert. Rather, I always believed--and
still do--that the codes would, if demonstrated to be real, propel a
scientifically minded person towards Orthodox Judaism. I have, at the same
time, also always believed they would ultimately be debunked. Hence, they did
not change my religious convictions at all, though they shook them.

            Consider, by contrast, Drosnin, whose work
constitutes the least scientific and most intellectually shallow end of the
Torah codes discussion. He regards the codes as a proven fact, yet somehow
still professes non-belief. How is it possible that such a future-predicting
code embedded in such an impenetrable form in an ancient document could be the
work of something less than God? How can one believe in the codes and not in
God?

            It is not McKay and his co-authors who "told a
lie." That dishonor, rather, belongs to Drosnin himself for publishing a work
that grossly transcends even the now-discredited science on which it was
purportedly based.

            (To reply, click here.)

             

            
               SUBJECT:
The "Math of God"

            
               RE:
""

            
               FROM:
M. Didaktikos

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            Faith means that you don't have to have proofs of
the existence of God, oh ye of little faith. Anyone whose faith depends upon
mathematical letter sequencing in War and Peace or any other inspired
writing is grasping at straws.

            (To reply, click
here.)

            
               SUBJECT:
Re: The "Math of God"

            
               RE:
""

            
               FROM:
Reader

            
               DATE: Fri
Oct 8

            Benjamin Wittes says that the loss of the Torah
codes is a relief. But would it not be sensational to find proof, by way of the
rational mind, for a God with continuing interest in our well-being? 

            (To reply, click here.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Richard Nixon Is Still Dead

            This week, 25 years after Richard Nixon resigned
the presidency, the conventional wisdom seems to hold that his once-abysmal
reputation has been largely rehabilitated. It's a familiar story: On Aug. 9,
1974, Nixon leaves Washington with a 24 percent public approval rating, facing
a possible prison sentence; by Aug. 9, 1999, he has been transformed into a
foreign-policy visionary, a domestic-policy liberal, and no worse a scoundrel
than lots of other presidents. "What had seemed impossible in the summer of
1974 had happened," his biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote (10 years ago
already). "Nixon was respectable, even honored, certainly admired."

            The historical irony is
delicious--and spurious. Pundits and historians talk as if Nixon has already
been rehabilitated, and that's flat wrong. To be sure, there are favorable and
critical views of him, simple and complex ones. But the most vivid and enduring
remains the image of Nixon as our national political villain. Tricky Dick lives
on.

            Even in his early career, Nixon had a reputation as a
comeback artist. In 1952 he salvaged his spot as Dwight Eisenhower's running
mate with the famous "Checkers" speech. He did it again when he won the
presidency in 1968, six years after ABC aired The Political Obituary of
Richard Nixon . And we've been hearing about Nixon's latest rehabilitation
practically since the resignation itself. Yet too often, it has turned out to
be all hype and little substance.

            Take his prime-time TV
interview with David Frost in 1977. Nixon believed that Frost's softball
questions would allow him to tell the public his side of the Watergate story
for the first time. While the broadcast drew some 45 million viewers--the same
as an episode of the top-rated Happy Days --Nixon won few converts; after
the show, more people lowered their opinions of him than raised them. He
remained, Newsweek wrote in a typical review, "careless of the record,
heedless of the proper limits of power, unable to plead guilty to anything much
worse than 'screwing up' and coming no closer in history to that final
absolution in history he seeks."

            Nine years later, though, it was Newsweek 's turn to
pronounce a return to respectability, splashing Nixon's photo on the cover with
a six-page article, a three-page interview, and a dozen photographs inside. The
former president, the article noted, had advised President Reagan, written
several books, and made Rolling Stone 's list of "Who's Hot." But, again,
what the large print gave, the fine print took away. Those who took the time to
read the article learned that Nixon's support came mostly from Republican
circles and that die-hard critics scoffed at his alleged foreign policy
expertise. An accompanying poll found that six in 10 Americans wished him to
remain in exile from public life. With the cover line--"He's Back"--the
magazine's editors unwittingly helped create the very phenomenon they were
supposedly just observing.

            In the years following, various episodes served as
occasions for one pundit or another to declare Nixon's reputation restored.
Nixon would visit Capitol Hill, or criticize George Bush's Russia policy in a
strategically leaked memo, or meet with President Clinton; each time he was
pronounced rehabilitated, even as polls showed that he remained unpopular. His
death on April 18, 1994, brought a new zenith of revisionism: an outpouring of
praise from President Clinton and other public figures. Television and radio
networks aired a relentless parade of fond reminiscences about Nixon, news
anchors drummed home the now-familiar lines about his comeback (again creating
the fact they were ostensibly just reporting), and the eulogies at the funeral
itself never once mentioned Watergate.

            Yet even this final
rebound proved illusory. No sooner had the tributes subsided than an equally
vociferous chorus spoke up to denounce the media's kid-gloves treatment. Many
of the nation's most esteemed political writers--including Russell Baker, David
Halberstam, and Garry Wills--chastised their peers for soft-soaping Nixon's
life in death. The publication of The Haldeman Diaries a month later,
with its reminders of Nixon's scheming, sinister side, confirmed that Watergate
would hardly be forgotten soon.

            Those proclaiming Nixon's return miss the subtext of their
own proclamations. Implicit--and sometimes explicit--in every story about
Nixon's comeback has been the underlying story of his calculated efforts to
come back: He authored foreign-policy books, wined and dined journalists, and
waged court battles for control of the White House tapes. These stories don't
dwell on any glorious new achievements on Nixon's part. Rather, they underscore
his campaign for rehabilitation and the public's alleged willingness to grant
it. In his book The Image , historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term
"pseudo-event" to describe events that have no intrinsic news value but get
treated as if they do. Nixon's comeback is a classic pseudo-event, erected
almost entirely on self-fulfilling punditry--a series of interviews, a magazine
cover, a cascade of adoring eulogies.

            This doesn't mean that no
one is rethinking Nixon's achievements. He continues to keep historians busy.
(I'm writing a book about him myself.) And most of the recent major Nixon
books--by Herbert Parmet, Jonathan Aitken, Joan Hoff, Tom Wicker, and (this
month) Irwin Gellman--have been quite sympathetic. Yet they haven't made much
of a dent in his overall reputation among scholars. In the latest ranking of
presidents by professional historians, conducted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
(admittedly no Nixon fan), RN finished in the bottom tier, alongside Andrew
Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover. Twenty of 32
historians surveyed judged Nixon's presidency a "failure"; none called it
"great."

            Besides, even more telling than the views of academics are
the images of Nixon in popular culture, where he remains resentful, paranoid,
and ruthlessly power-hungry. On The Simpsons , for example, Nixon has
appeared in caricature at least 20 times (according to the "Simpsons
Archive" Web site). He's almost always portrayed as the dark, suspicious
figure circa 1974. On various episodes he is a member, along with Bluebeard and
the Grim Reaper, of "the Jury of the Damned"; he takes part in a
snake-bludgeoning (in a scandal exposed by a Bob Woodward book); his enemies
list is used for dastardly purposes; even his dog Checkers is said to be bound
for hell.

            Nor do Hollywood movies show any sign of revising
Nixon's image. In 1995, Oliver Stone's Nixon gave us the familiar,
shadowy president, emphasizing his most savage and conspiratorial qualities.
"He's the darkness reaching out for the darkness," Howard Hunt tells John Dean
in the film. "Look at the landscape of his life and you'll see a boneyard." The
recently released Dick portrays the president, as Stephen Holden wrote
in the New York Times , "with his hunched shoulders, darting paranoid
gaze and crocodile grimace ... the quivering, skulking embodiment of a single
word: guilty." For now, that remains the most vivid and pervasive image of
Richard Nixon in the American mind. And it's not likely to fade any time
soon.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Constitutional Coup

            

               Dawn , Pakistan's
main English-language daily, ran three
editorials Wednesday--about literacy, rural health care, and an initiative
by 14 women foreign ministers, including Madeleine Albright, to halt
international trafficking in women and children--but none about the country's
military coup. In its main front-page story Dawn said there had been
signs of division within the army after Pakistan's military chief Gen. Pervaiz
Musharraf seized power Tuesday but that he quickly imposed tight control. The
paper, noting that Musharraf didn't talk about martial law or of any new
constitutional arrangements in his address to the nation, cited reports that
the United States has been in direct contact with the Pakistani military urging
it to desist from doing anything unconstitutional. It said the four-hour delay
before the nation was told the outcome of the coup attempt may have been caused
by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's refusal to resign as the army looked for a
constitutional way to remove him. In a profile of the country's new leader,
Dawn said Musharraf was an army commando for seven years and served in
"several self-propelled artillery regiments"--a phrase from his official
biography.

            The
paper's Washington correspondent noted U.S. reluctance to condemn the army's
seizure of power, or even to characterize it as a coup, apparently because it
hoped to avoid the automatic triggering of new sanctions against Pakistan. In
New Delhi, the Times
of India reported "growing disquiet" among Indian officials about
the prospect of a nuclear Pakistan being controlled by a general. "A coming
together of the hardline army and religious right-wing political groups may be
the perfect recipe for disaster in South Asia," it quoted one unnamed official
as saying. As the Indian army went on full alert, the paper said, "New Delhi is
aware that the military regime in Islamabad will mean more trouble in Kashmir.
Cross-border terrorism will naturally also be stepped up."

            In the
rest of the world, the coup provoked different reactions. The Times of London almost
welcomed it. "[I]n almost every way, the fault for Pakistan's latest crisis can
be laid squarely with the Prime Minister himself," it said in an editorial.
"Seldom has a politician so frivolously squandered the goodwill that originally
brought him victory against the tainted Government of Benazir Bhutto. ... The
outside world, like Pakistan's frustrated voters, may feel that a new
government, even one brought in by the army, might be less bad for Pakistan
than the distorted democracy it has endured until today." But London's liberal
Guardian
called the coup "a blow to democracy, a blow to Pakistan's image abroad, and a
blow to those who hope for peace in the subcontinent."

            In
Australia, the Sydney
Morning Herald , pointing out that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is now "under the
immediate, direct and absolute control of the military," said the risk was "not
that the unthinkable--the use of nuclear weapons--will suddenly be thought
about seriously by Pakistan's generals. Rather, it is that without even the
pretence of civilian control over its nuclear arsenal, Pakistan's armed forces
may feel more confident about flexing their conventional military muscles in
pursuit of their own objectives. ... General Musharraf has acted in an illegal
and indefensible way. He must not be allowed to compound that with
recklessness."

            In
Canada, the conservative National Post warned that the world may be faced "not only
with a military regime but, more worryingly, with the possibility of the
Talibanisation of Pakistan." It added in an editorial, "In these circumstances--which may of course
change quickly--the West is right to cut off aid and to withdraw diplomatic
support. A Taliban-friendly coup can only add a further element of instability
to an already unstable region."

            
Marking the official arrival in Sarajevo of the world's 6 billionth inhabitant,
China Daily
quoted Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji as saying that his government would
continue to make family planning "a fundamental state policy." Meanwhile,
according to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post , a Chinese court has declared that homosexuality is "abnormal and unacceptable
to the public." It is the first time a Chinese court has ruled on the nature of
homosexuality, and it did so in awarding damages for psychological damage to a
man described as gay in the best-selling book Homosexuals in China . The
court ruled that the man had suffered "depression and psychological pain" and
damage to his reputation by being described as gay. The author of the book,
Fang Dang, said he might appeal. "It is for doctors, not judges, to say if
homosexuality is abnormal," he commented. "The court says that it is considered
abnormal, but by whom--all 1.2 billion Chinese? The most authoritative
definition is by the World Health Organisation which has removed it from its
list of illnesses."

            The
Independent of London's
Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, reported Wednesday that the United States has extradited to Saudi
Arabia a man who will almost certainly face the death penalty within a few
weeks. The man is Hani el-Sayegh, wanted for a 1996 bombing in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, in which 26 people died. "The country's 'justice'--regularly criticised
by the US State Department for its routine denial of access to lawyers and
trials which fail to meet any international standards--is likely to send Hani
el-Sayegh to death whether or not he protests his innocence," Fisk wrote. He
said executions in Saudi Arabia have increased threefold this year: "At least
91 people--including three women--have been publicly beheaded in 1999,
including foreign nationals from Pakistan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, India,
Thailand, Indonesia, Syria, Jordan, Chad, Ethiopia and Yemen. The three women,
all Nigerians, had their scarves ritually stripped from their heads before
being put to death by the sword in front of crowds of men beside Saudi
mosques."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tina Across the Pond

            In the
absence of any major international story to dominate the press, newspapers
around the world tended to focus Monday on domestic issues. Holiday stories
were big in Europe. The Italian papers reported vast traffic congestion in the
peninsula and 38 fatalities on the roads. Both La Repubblica of Rome and
La Stampa of
Turin gave dramatic front-page treatment to the heat wave in the United States,
describing its effects as a "massacre." Both papers quoted the pope as
advocating vacations in monasteries and convents. Corriere della Sera of
Milan reported a row at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, where the authorities
have imposed a ban on under-16s attending an "erotic" edited version of
Shakespeare's tragedies. The 12-hour theatrical marathon in German is titled
Schlachten! ( Battles! ) and is said to include scenes of
masturbation and oral sex.

            In
Britain, a flood of interviews with Tina Brown heralded the launch of her new
Hearst-Miramax monthly, Talk . In one article, amid many cravenly
anonymous predictions of disaster, Michael Kinsley of 
                  Slate
               
warned people not to bet on her failing. In Monday's Guardian ,
Talk 's publisher Ron Galotti says, "You can never, never underestimate the fundamental level
of interest there is in Tina," by which he presumably meant the opposite. Brown
herself said that during her last six months at The New Yorker she had
"begun to miss the theatricality of photography, to be able to use pictures in
ways that were really free and uninhibited" and that she "wanted to create a
new form for a magazine without the institutional history of any publication
before me, or on my mind."

            The
piece described the first issue of Talk as more closely resembling "a
postmodern version of Life magazine or Paris Match than a
Vanity Fair retread." Brown said Talk was printed on thin paper
to have "a roll-it-up-and-put-it-in-your-pocket, European feeling." The
Sunday
Times of London said Talk has "a strangely dated feel." It said,
"Brown wants to give Talk the feel of the best 1950s magazines, such as
McCalls and Look , as well as Paris Match . Those magazines
have all been widely admired, but it is a long time since they were considered
at the forefront of the market."

            In the
Sunday Telegraph , interviewer Helena de Bertodano said that her first meeting with Brown had been "tense"
because a "PR magnate, an elderly man with a cut-glass English accent" had
insisted on sitting in on their conversation but that Brown subsequently
arranged a one-on-one meeting for the next day. "I'm sorry about yesterday,"
she said when they reconvened. "It was embarrassing. ... I didn't expect it."
On the hostility she was said to have generated, Brown said: "The dogs bark and
the caravan moves on, right? That's just life at the top of the media world."
Brown acknowledged a link between her departure from The New Yorker last
summer and the death of her mother from cancer six days beforehand: "[S]he kept
telling me that I didn't have enough fun. I think she was right and I just felt
this job would be tremendous fun." What if Talk fails? "It won't," Brown
said. "Already the commercial signs are such that it won't." Asked where she
sees herself in 10 years' time, she replied: "Sitting in a café in Paris. This
is definitely the last big roll of the dice as far as I'm concerned."

            The
Sunday Times led with Talk 's first scoop--its interview with
Hillary Clinton blaming her husband's infidelities on a "weakness" caused by
childhood abuse. The same paper carried on its front page an interview with Bill Gates' father, who manages the William
H. Gates Foundation. The paper said that, according to Gates Sr., the
foundation will announce a number of new funding programs during the next three
months that will go a long way toward its ultimate aim of becoming the largest
private charity on Earth. "My son is going to have critics all his life because
of his wealth," Gates Sr. said. "But I'm optimistic now that we have put to
rest any criticism on the basis of his not being sufficiently generous. We've
pretty much drowned that out."

            The
Sunday Telegraph led with the news that the brain of Iris Murdoch, the
British novelist who died of Alzheimer's disease earlier this year, is to be
used by research hospitals to help find a cure for the disease. Her widower,
Professor John Bayley, said Murdoch long ago expressed a wish for her body to
be given to science. "We were both happy about it in the days when she could be
happy about anything," he said. The Times of London led Monday on a
Newsweek revelation that the British NATO commander in Kosovo, Gen. Sir
Mike Jackson, refused an order by NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark
forcibly to stop Russian troops from occupying Pristina airport when the war
ended. "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you," Gen. Jackson was
quoted as saying.

            The
Mail on Sunday of London reported that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have
purchased a $3 million, five-story, 18 th -century house in the
southeast London suburb of Dulwich, where they are thinking of sending their
3-year-old son, Connor, to one of London's most prestigious private schools,
Dulwich College. The paper also ran a feature on a "svelte and clearly
self-assured" Louise Woodward, who posed this month for the women's magazine
Marie Claire against the background of an English courtroom. Woodward,
who was convicted in Boston of the manslaughter of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen,
is studying law at a university in London and maintains a close friendship with
celebrity lawyer Barry Scheck (he defended both Woodward and O.J. Simpson), who
sometimes takes her out to meals in fashionable restaurants and in whom she
confides "about all her problems," the paper said.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>What's Wrong With Human Rights?</SPAN></SPAN>

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , Aug. 8
            

            An
essay argues that the human rights movement is in trouble, despite its triumph
in Kosovo. Some of the movement's frailty stems from the failure to tame China
and from general compassion fatigue, but the biggest weakness is that activists
make no effort to generate popular support for human rights causes. This
elitism could backfire against the movement, just as affirmative action's
elitism undermined it. (The author is David Rieff, whose human rights views
were recently dissected in this 
                  Slate
                ".") ... An article
examines J.D. Power, the consumer research firm that uses public opinion polls
to rate products. J.D. Power's populist method challenges the more established
Consumers Union, which pays experts to rate products. (The article is by

                  Slate
               's Chatterbox, Timothy Noah.) ... The author of the
cover story, a former child prodigy, describes his return to piano-playing
after a decadelong hiatus. He makes the finals of a prestigious amateur
competition. ... A piece notes a bizarre Internet phenomenon. Players in
the online role-playing game Ultima now auction their virtual gold pieces for
real cash on eBay. The exchange rate is about 1,000 to the dollar, making
imaginary gold pieces worth twice as much as the Italian lira.

            
               
                  Talk , Premiere
issue
            

            On the
back page, Editor Tina Brown writes that her sprawling new magazine will end
the " 'disconnect' between literary and domestic culture." ... An
interview with Hillary Clinton suggests, among other things, that she is
responsible for the recent economic boom in Ireland, that her husband is a sex
addict, and that running for the Senate will save her marriage. ...
Former UNSCOM head Richard Butler blames Kofi Annan for the collapse of
weapons-inspection efforts in Iraq. Annan failed to understand the most basic
inspection rules and permitted the Iraqis to introduce gaping loopholes in the
process. ... A safari guide narrates how he and his tourist charges were
kidnapped by machete-wielding Hutu rebels in Uganda. Only half the captives
survived. ... The magazine includes many lists: "The Hip List" (snow
cones, blimps, scabby knees), an index of the "50 Best Talkers in America"
(Alec Baldwin, Arianna Huffington, Harold Bloom), and a reading list (Bob
Woodward's Shadow , pocket-sized guides to European design).

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek , Aug. 9
            

            
               Newsweek 's
cover story notes the resurgence of cosmetic surgery,
especially among younger patients. New surgeries are safer, less invasive, and
more varied. Still, the anecdotes are cringe-worthy: the 31-year-old man who
brags about his pectoral and butt implants, the 24-year-old waitress who took a
loan from a "cosmetic loan company" (!) for laser resurfacing.

            
               Time 's cover story reconstructs the Atlanta massacre and blames it
largely on America's gun culture. A related essay contending that Americans have run out of tolerance for
the "barbaric era" of guns predicts that we could be "rid of the damned things"
in five or 10 years. (The essay seems to ignore the previous story, which notes
that 39 percent of American households own a gun.) ... 
               Newsweek 's
Atlanta package focuses more on the day trading angle, noting that 90 percent of day traders lose money.

            
               Newsweek says that rising house prices nationwide have benefited more
families than rising stock prices. Homeowners have $1.2 trillion in unrealized
gains tied up in their houses. Loan companies are permitting buyers to borrow
more than ever before--5 percent down payments are common--so many overextended
buyers could be devastated when the economy slows down.

            
               Time tours the
loopy, genial world of Art Bell, who draws 9 million listeners weekly to his
late-night, UFO-conspiracy, Martian-happy radio broadcast. Even if it's all a
crock, it's "great radio."

            
               
                  U.S. News &
World Report , Aug. 9
            

            The
cover story attributes teen-agers' mercurial behavior
to underdeveloped brains. Pubescent brains are flooded with aggression-inducing
sex hormones and aren't sophisticated enough to refer to past experience when
making judgments. ... Microsoft is reaching out to computer
novices , says a piece. To keep growing, it will have to win over new
users who may be tempted by easier-to-use hand-held devices and specialized
e-mail and Internet machines. Microsoft is monitoring selected families for
weeks to learn their hardware habits.

            
               
                  The New Yorker ,
Aug. 9
            

            A
piece describes how women in their 20s "donate" eggs to infertile couples for
thousands of dollars. The sellers are currently solicited through
advertisements ("Pay your tuition with eggs") but will soon be able to offer
their services on a specialized Internet auction site. Hopeful parents often
seek out donors who are athletic, Ivy League-educated, animal-loving, or
acne-free. ... A report from Iowa repeats the conventional wisdom that
the Ames straw poll is a sham. The minor candidates are spending vast amounts
of time and energy vying for second place, but the poll is irrelevant to the
actual nomination process.

            
               
                  Weekly Standard ,
Aug. 9
            

            The
cover
piece makes fun of the Reform Party convention, whose attendees
included a woman who framed the crumbs of a piece of cake Ross Perot ate in
1992 and a presidential candidate who claims he controlled exactly what
President George Bush said by sending faxes to a Secret Service agent.
Conclusion: Party members are so obsessed by process they will never get
anything done. See the New Republic below for more. ... A piece
urges the United States to recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state. China won't
dare go to war over Taiwan, and America's firm stance will cow Beijing, which
caves at any show of U.S. strength.

            
               
                  New Republic ,
Aug. 16
            

            The
cover story sneers at conservative doves.
Neo-Isolationists oppose interventions abroad because they despise Bill Clinton
and believe that American culture is debased. Just as left-wingers did during
Vietnam, they argue that "coercive diplomacy" is wrong because the nation is
morally unfit to impose its will on other countries. ... A piece counsels against discounting "compassionate
conservatism." George W. Bush's campaign theme represents a vision of
government that balances compassion against self-interest, just as Bill Clinton
evoked individual responsibility as a counterweight to government benevolence
in 1992. ... A dispatch reports that the Reform Party has turned into
an umbrella organization for fruitcakes. Activists grasp for another flamboyant
mogul--Donald Trump, perhaps--to replace Ross Perot, while a bunch of
delusional nuts promote their own candidacies for the party's presidential
nomination.

            
               
                  Economist, July
31
            

            The
cover editorial supports multilateral interventions to
halt belligerency. Violence in Kosovo, Kashmir, and Congo was quelled by
outside interference. The world is morally obliged to intervene and prevent
atrocities, even if this intervention does not resolve the underlying
conflict.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Kosovo Killing Fields

            In a
report picked up by Canada's National Post to lead its front page
Monday, the Observer of London said Sunday that hundreds of documents
discovered after the Yugoslav retreat from Kosovo prove that the ethnic
cleansing there had been "meticulously planned and ordered from Belgrade." "The
papers provide crucial evidence linking massacres that claimed an estimated
14,000 lives to Serb army generals and police commanders all the way up to
President Slobodan Milosevic," the Observer reported from Pristina. It
said most of the documents are now in the hands of the intelligence service of
the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has claimed that "nothing happened in Kosovo
without it being planned and organised in Belgrade."

            
Several British papers led with pictures of the eccentric young British
violinist Nigel Kennedy performing a "concert for peace" at the Sava Concert
Hall in Belgrade Monday. The Guardian of London said several members of the government,
including Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, attended the concert Sunday--the
first in Yugoslavia by a leading Western musician since the war--but were
barred from visiting the musician backstage by his staff "who wanted to avoid
an embarrassing photo-opportunity." But Kennedy told his ecstatic audience that
the Serbs were "a warm, friendly people who did not deserve to be bombed." "I
came to Belgrade to see if you were all right and succeeded in staying alive,"
he added.

            With
regard to the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, the Times of India reported
Monday from Srinagar that nearly 500 "personal bodyguards" of America's most
wanted terrorist, the Saudi billionaire Osama Bin Laden, were fighting in
Kashmir on the Pakistani side. They had fled to Kashmir from Afghanistan as the
United States began to close in on their boss, the paper said. The whereabouts
of Bin Laden himself is not known. The Times of India said U.S. agencies
believed he could be in the Kargil area of Kashmir but added there was not any
concrete evidence of this.

            The
Hindu ,
another Indian daily, reported India's concern about its future relations with
China after the state-owned China Daily called Saturday for an "immediate ceasefire" in
Kashmir. The Hindu said this was clearly a pro-Pakistani comment and a
departure from China's neutrality in the dispute. It suggested that Beijing
might be changing its tune because of growing fears of United States' meddling
in the region. But the paper added: "If China is really worried about possible
American gains from the Kargil crisis, it should hardly be advocating a
ceasefire. Instead it should be demanding that Pakistan withdraw the armed
aggression and remove any excuse for Western intervention."

            The
crisis in Northern Ireland led the front pages Monday of several European
newspapers, including Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . With British Prime Minister
Tony Blair having set midnight on Wednesday, June 30, as the "absolute"
deadline for agreement on implementing the Ulster peace deal, British papers
were pessimistic. The problem has been a refusal by the loyalist Protestant
leadership to allow the republican Catholic Sinn Fein party a role in the newly
developed government of the province unless its military wing, the Irish
Republican Army, starts handing in its weapons.

            The
conservative Daily Telegraph of London said Monday in an editorial that the
decommissioning of arms has not begun because Sinn Fein "knows that its power
derives from violence and the threat of violence, and so it does not want to
sacrifice that power." The paper strongly supported the loyalist refusal to
share power with Sinn Fein under these circumstances. "If Sinn Fein come into
the executive this week, something new in the history of our parliamentary
democracy will have taken place," the Telegraph said. "An armed group
will be taking part in government. The power of a private army will, for the
first time, be exercised through out institutions." The paper reported,
meanwhile, that republican and loyalist terrorist groups are both preparing for
new violence.

            The
Times of
London took the same view, saying that a power-sharing executive without an IRA
commitment to disarmament "would be less a democratic political body than
bureaucratic cover for a protection racket." The Independent , however,
criticized Blair for setting an unreal deadline for the peace talks. The
situation was not like Yugoslavia, where a compromise between NATO and
Milosevic would have been a disaster, the paper said. If the republican and
loyalist leaders haven't reached agreement by midnight Wednesday, "[t]he sky
stays where it is," the paper said. "They simply have to keep trying, and Mr.
Blair will have lost an important modicum of credibility."

            In an
editorial Monday, the Guardian urged Bill Clinton to stand by Hillary during a New
York Senate campaign that would see "the dirty laundry of the past eight years
recycled," new tensions in the Democratic camp, and "a hot reception, no
punches pulled" from New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Feeling betrayed and
humiliated by the Monica Lewinsky business, Hillary had considered a
separation, but "in the end she stayed and supported her husband when he needed
her most." "Message to Bill: as Hillary heads for New York, it's payback time,"
concluded the Guardian .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Proxy War

            In Brent Staples' memoir Parallel Time , he
recounts a game he used to play while a student at the University of Chicago.
Staples, who is black, would pace the streets surrounding the campus after
dark. When he spied a white couple strolling toward him arm in arm, he would
walk directly at them, at a normal pace. The couple would first tighten their
grip on each other. Then, as Staples continued to head toward them, they would
panic, release their grip, and scurry apart. Staples would breeze between them,
without losing a step, without looking back. He called it "scattering the
pigeons."

            The "pigeons" feared
Staples because of his blackness--they were using his race as a proxy for
potential criminality. Using superficial traits to infer deeper characteristics
in people is common and need not be racist. Generalizing from what is easily
and quickly knowable to something that is hard to know for sure is what
economists think of as minimizing information costs. If the clouds turn dark
and ominous and it starts to thunder while you're out for a stroll, you can
find a phone and call the weather service, or you can ignore them on the
grounds that predictions about the weather are often wrong, or you can take
cover under the assumption that it's probably going to rain. But using race as
a proxy is sensitive, for good and obvious reasons.

            If skin color as a proxy for criminal intentions were a
precise tool--that is, if every young black man strolling the sidewalks were a
mugger--it would be hard to criticize. And if the implied generalization had no
validity--if a young black male was no more likely to be a mugger than anyone
else approaching on the sidewalk--it would be easy to label as racist. But,
like most such generalizations, it is valid but not perfect. A young black man
is more likely to be a mugger than a young white man--but the assumption that
any particular young black man is a mugger will usually be wrong. So is using
race as a proxy racist?

            This is what the current
"racial profiling" controversy is about. Racial profiling is when police use
race as a reason to search someone's car or to frisk a pedestrian. Almost all
black men have tales of being stopped by a cop for no reason other than their
skin color. It's derisively known as "DWB": the crime of driving while black.
Earlier this year the governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, fired the
state police superintendent for telling a journalist that blacks were more
likely to commit crimes than whites. But she has since admitted that state
police systematically stop cars simply because the driver is black. And racial
profiling has many defenders who say it is sensible, hard-nosed policing of the
sort that has led to a dramatic drop in the nation's crime rate.

            O ne generalization that can be made about racial
profiling--a valid but not perfect generalization, of course--is that
conservatives tend to support it, while liberals tend to regard it as racist.
In another controversy, the one over affirmative action, the opposite
generalization holds: Liberals tend to support it, while conservatives tend to
regard it as reverse racism.

            And yet affirmative
action and racial profiling are essentially the same. Affirmative action
amounts to the use of race as a proxy for other, harder-to-discern qualities:
racial victimization, poverty, cultural deprivation. Few critics of affirmative
action are against compensating victims of specific and proven acts of racial
discrimination. And the critics often positively endorse programs giving a
special break to people who've overcome economic or cultural disadvantage. What
they object to is generalizing these conditions from a person's race. Defenders
of affirmative action say, in essence, that as policy-making generalizations
go, this one is overwhelmingly valid--and that more justice will be lost than
gained by insisting on scientific precision.

            Defenders of affirmative action and defenders of racial
profiling even resort to the same dodge in defending their cause against
colorblind absolutists. They say they, too, think it's wrong for a person to be
promoted and/or arrested just because of his or her race. But, they say, it's
OK for race to be one factor among many.

            Here is Gov. Whitman,
quoted in the New York Times Magazine last month, explaining the
difference between profiling (good) and racial profiling (bad):

            

               Profiling means a police officer using cumulative knowledge and training to
identify certain indicators of possible criminal activity. Race may be one of
those factors, but it cannot stand alone. Racial profiling is when race is the
only other factor. There's no other probable cause.

            

            
This precisely echoes Justice Lewis Powell's
famous explanation of permissible affirmative action in the 1978 Bakke
case:

            
               Ethnic diversity is only one element in a range of factors a
university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous
student body. ... In [a constitutional] admissions program, race or ethnic
background may be deemed a "plus" in a particular applicant file, yet it does
not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the
available seats.
            

            The factor fudge
satisfies some critics, but it doesn't solve the racial proxy dilemma. Stopping
and frisking a driver or admitting a student to Yale is a yes-or-no decision.
As legal scholar Randall Kennedy wrote in his book Race, Crime, and the
Law , "Even if race is only one of several factors behind a decision,
tolerating it at all means tolerating it as potentially the decisive
factor." When it's the decisive factor, it might as well have been the only
factor. If it's never decisive, it's not really a factor at all.

             

            The main difference between affirmative
action and racial profiling is that one singles out blacks for something
desirable and the other singles them out for something undesirable. Reasonable
people can differ about whether using race as a proxy is OK. Obviously it
depends on how valid the generalization is in any given case, and how costly or
impractical it would be to get alternative information. When you fear a man
approaching you may be a mugger, you may not be able to find out in the next
five seconds whether he happens to be a University of Chicago intellectual
headed for the New York Times editorial board. On the other hand, race
is not just any proxy, and probably should be used more sparingly--especially
by the government--than the narrow logic of probabilities would justify.

            Racial proxies are a tough call. But it's safe to
say that anyone who is outraged by racial profiling but tolerates affirmative
action, or vice versa, has got it wrong.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 299: &quot;What Would Jesus Sue?&quot;

            
               In England, a
group of 40 independent Christian schools plans to petition the European Court
of Human Rights to have the ban lifted. Ban on what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Monday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's
Question(No 298)--"Fair Play":
            

            

               
                  
                     "I'm so excited!" hairstylist Richard Ferris said
Monday at the Syracuse, N.Y., State Fair. "This is the most exciting thing that
has ever happened to me." What happened to
Ferris?
                  
               
            

            "He
invented a ride to sell to the fair that involved stationary painted horses
that revolve on a circular platform to calliope music. He called it the Ferris
Go Round."-- Merrill Markoe
            

            "He
won a blue ribbon for best hairdresser. Nobody has the heart to tell him that
this simply means he'll fetch a higher price at auction, where he'll be sold
off to a rendering plant."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "A
representative of the news media asked him a question and wrote down his answer
and his name in a spiral notebook."--William Considine
            

            "Doing
a wash and comb-out to a stick of spun sugar."-- Sean Fitzpatrick ( Ben
Heller had a similar answer referencing the bearded lady's beard; as did
Ian O'Henley referring to the Ape Woman from Borneo)

            "He
was touched by a Hell's Angel."-- Francis Heaney (similar, but less
tender, Floyd Elliot )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            "And Jacob said to Rebekah, his mother, 'Behold,
Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man, so maybe I should take
him to a good stylist who would no doubt be, as so many of them are, gay. And
attending a state fair.'" (Genesis 27:11)

            All well and good, but what really intrigued News
Quiz participants was the coincidence of names between a certain hair stylist
(no doubt gay; they all are) and a giant amusement park attraction. And
because, refreshed by my vacation, I want only to please you, here is the
uncharacteristically melancholy entry from the 1960 edition of the World
Book Encyclopedia describing the invention of the popular ride:

            "The first Ferris wheel was the largest of all. It
was much larger than wheels seen today. It was built by G. W. Gale Ferris, a
mechanical engineer of Galesburg, Ill., for the World's Columbian Exposition in
Chicago in 1893. The wheel was 250 feet in diameter and had 36 cars. Each of
the cars could carry 60 persons. After it was used at the exhibition in St.
Louis in 1904, the wheel was sold for scrap metal. By heartless bastards
without an ounce of poetry in their souls. You pour your guts into something,
trying to create a little beauty and wonder--250 feet tall!--and they just use
you up and throw you away. Why try? Why live?" Last few sentences added by an
autumnal News Quiz, if it matters, which hardly seems likely, so ephemeral are
the works of man, as transient as the mood-lifting effects of a vacation.
"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." (Ecclesiastes 9:2)

            Hey, I'm back from Bible
camp. Did you miss me?

            
               Fair
               ,
Fairer, Ferris Answer
            

            Richard Ferris kissed the right hand of Hillary
Clinton, who was not an official exhibit at the fair but was, rather, a
visitor, in the sense that someone working the crowd for money and votes is
visiting. "And I want to do her hair!" exclaimed the giddy Ferris, "I've always
been mad about corporate lawyers, especially when they're pro-death penalty,"
he did not add.

            Accompanied by her
husband, Mrs. Clinton took in an exhibition of quilts but skipped the
Freakathon.

            
               Augmented

               Quotations Extra
            

            (Final sentence added by News Quiz.)

            

               "There appears to be every reason to believe that the police officers acted
in accordance with police procedure and acted in a responsible way to save
human life. And of course by 'save human life,' I mean 'shoot some idiot.'
"--Unapologetic New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responds to the fatal
shooting--12 bullets from six cops--of a mentally ill man armed with a hand
tool.

               "It is almost as if she never existed. If we are not very careful, there is
a real danger that she will disappear. Although, as Mayor Giuliani said, the
police were right to shoot her; she might have had a gun."--Amusingly named
British social scientist J. Mallory Wober assesses his country's reaction to
the late Princess Di on her two year deathaversary.

               "The conclusion I've reached is that no one is doing what I believe needs
to be done. I refer, with my trademark belligerence, to gay-bashing and
encouraging the police to gun down the mentally ill; well actually, I suppose
Mayor Giuliani is doing one of those."--Pugnacious presidential hopeful Alan
Keyes explains why he enjoys being a losing candidate in the Republican primary
race.

               "It makes me nervous, because I've seen what these things can do. It is as
if Mayor Giuliani had sent over a boatload of New York City policeman to patrol
our streets and shoot us."--Homeless Turkish carpenter Yusuf Okul, who often
wields a hammer, reacts to recent aftershocks.

               "These judges have their heads in the sand. Thank goodness they don't have
to govern a city because things would be really dangerous. There'd be cops
gunning down the mentally ill--you know, in accordance with police procedure
and in a responsible way to save human life; is that my phone?"--Puffed up New
York Mayor Giuliani disagrees with a federal appeals court judge's decision
that even those expressing unpopular views have the right to speak in New
York.

            

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            The Wheel.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Perils of E-Fund Raising

            The
pitch arrived by e-mail, and it was a direct appeal for money.

            It
appeared to come from Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, whose
e-mail would be eagerly read by anyone interested in the financing of
technology businesses. But this message wasn't about funding technology: It was
about funding the next president of the United States.

            "Dear
Friend," it began, "Please send $1,000 and call five friends to join us in
support of George W. Bush for president." The e-solicitation, dated Sept. 4,
gave out Draper's office phone number at the firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson,
his e-mail address, and a place for checks to be sent.

            
Contributors who raised $5,000, the e-mail said, could "be listed as a cohost
and be invited to the VIP photo reception" at an event in Redwood City, Calif.,
Sept. 30. The final line said: "P.S. Forward this e-mail on to your address
list and get some viral marketing going."

            Many
recipients did, but at least a few questioned whether this was an authorized
request for money, or a hoax. "Obviously, someone is out to get him," said Dave
Alexander, executive vice president of VirtualFund.com, shortly after receiving
the e-mail. Alexander predicted that Draper would be flooded by angry
complaints from people "who don't know who he is and who think he really did
spam them."

            In
fact, Draper did spam them. "The e-mail was real," Draper later confirmed. "I'm
happy about it because I happen to think George Bush is the best man for the
job."

            
Welcome to the murky world of e-mail fund raising.

            As
more Americans and more political campaigns get on the Internet, e-mail is
replacing many of the campaign tasks traditionally handled through telephone
and direct mail. About $3 billion will be spent on all political direct mail in
the current four-year electoral cycle, according to Ron Faucheaux, editor in
chief of Campaigns & Elections magazine. In many cases, direct mail
represents a campaign's single largest expenditure (although presidential
campaigns have a different spending mix, because of their lopsided use of TV
advertising).

            As a
fund-raising device, e-mail has powerful advantages over direct mail. For
starters, it's essentially free. It's also self-replicating: One enthusiastic
recipient can easily send e-mail along to dozens of others, without the
campaign having to rent an additional donor list.

            But as
the Draper incident shows, the process can also create some unexpected
headaches. A traditional direct mail solicitation usually contains legal
reassurances that the solicitation is authorized (and the cost of postage makes
an unauthorized mailing an expensive proposition), which some e-mail
solicitations currently lack. Also, most individuals do not screen their e-mail
address books politically, meaning that a solicitation sent out to all a
person's contacts may well end up in the hands of someone who doesn't want
it--which could turn into a public relations problem.

            That's
what happened when Anthony Perkins, editor in chief of Red Herring
magazine, sent out an invitation to the same Bush luncheon as Draper. He used a
list from Red Eye, one of the e-mail newsletters that Red Herring
publishes. Using a pun on Red Herring 's name, Perkins' note appeared to
imply that a Bush donation would enhance readers' relationship to the
publication. "If you want to be a really big Fish, you can become a cohost of
this event by committing to raise $5,000, which will get you into a special VIP
reception with the governor," the e-mail said.

            The
message confused some of Red Eye's subscribers, and Red Herring rapidly
began a damage control campaign. (Perkins did not respond to several requests
for an interview.) First, the publication took the position that the e-mail
pitch mistakenly went out under the guise of a Red Eye editorial product, when
in fact it was a paid political advertisement.

            A few
days later, Perkins sent out a letter to Red Eye subscribers, apologizing for
the blurring of journalistic and political lines. "As you know, I have strong
political ties to presidential candidate George W. Bush, however these are not
the opinions of Red Herring Communications nor do they influence the
journalistic ethics of any of the editorial properties of Red Herring
Communications," Perkins wrote. "I apologize for the miscommunication and hope
it did not cause any irritation or confusion."

            
Perkins has said that he will personally pay the $900 cost of the list rental
to Red Herring Communications (which to some degree is the same as paying
himself, since he is the company's largest shareholder). Moreover, Perkins told
the New York Observer that he would record the expense as an in-kind
contribution to the Bush campaign. His apology e-mail, however, did not mention
this contribution, and as of Sept. 21, it had yet to show up on the Bush
campaign's online daily roster of campaign donations. The Bush campaign did not
respond to a request for comment.

            
Perhaps to avoid such sticky situations, some of Bush's presidential rivals are
steering clear of the e-fund-raising path--at least for now. Steve Forbes'
campaign accepts donations through its Web site and sends out thank you notes via e-mail to those
who contribute online--but that's all. "We haven't done any e-mail fund raising
at all," says Ben Gettler, a spokesman for the Forbes campaign, "and we don't
have any plans to do so. We believe our Internet presence is good enough." Of
course, Forbes is spending significant sums of his own money on the
presidential campaign, making his fund-raising urgency arguably lower than that
of other candidates.

            Ultimately, says
Campaigns & Elections ' Faucheaux, the electorate will become
accustomed to unwanted e-mail solicitations, just as it is to political junk
mail. "As long as donors are comfortable with it being there, I don't see that
[e-mail solicitations] have any particular problems," Faucheaux said.
"Remember: It's really in an experimental stage right now."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Tiger's Tale

            There had been many years of success, of rapid
growth fueled by the money of international investors anxious to get in on a
good thing. But then, with startling suddenness, things went sour. The leader
admitted that some bad investments had been made and that even good investments
had been financed with too much debt and too little equity. But much of the
problem, he insisted, was other people's fault: investors who pulled out their
money at the first whiff of difficulty, forcing a sudden financial
restructuring that aggravated the losses; hedge funds that, seeing his
weakness, speculated against him. And so, to the shock of many, he suddenly
changed the rules, imposing new restrictions on the ability of short-term
investors to withdraw funds. "If we had been smart," he declared, "we would
have tied up these guys for a long, long time when we were kings of the world
rather than excrement."

            No, this isn't another
article about Malaysia and its fiery prime minister. The individual in question
is Julian Robertson, manager of--yes--a hedge fund, Tiger Management, until
recently the largest such fund in the world. In its heyday in the summer of
1998, Tiger had more than $20 billion under management, considerably more than
George Soros' Quantum Fund, and was reputed to be even more aggressive than
Quantum in making plays against troubled economies. Notably, Tiger was perhaps
the biggest player in the yen "carry trade"--borrowing yen and investing the
proceeds in dollars--and its short position in the yen put it in a position to
benefit from troubles throughout Asia. But when the yen abruptly strengthened
in the last few months of 1998, Tiger lost heavily--more than $2 billion on one
day in October--and investors began pulling out. The losses continued in
1999--from January to the end of September Tiger lost 23 percent, compared with
a gain of 5 percent for the average S&P 500 stock. By the end of September,
between losses and withdrawals, Tiger was down to a mere $8 billion under
management. And a furious Robertson, blaming flighty European investors for
aggravating the problem, announced that henceforth the privilege of quarterly
withdrawals would be revoked. (As my wife declared, after reading news reports
on the move, "Julian Robertson just imposed capital controls!")

            Of course, everyone makes mistakes, although Mr.
Robertson's difficulties may inspire a bit more Schadenfreude than your
ordinary, average business disaster. The large, loud, tough-talking Robertson
has none of Soros' intellectual veneer or social graces; he might have been
deliberately cast to play the role of Ugly American. And while he does not
share Soros' ambition to be seen as a sort of philosopher-speculator, his
prominence does constitute a sort of bully pulpit--with the operative word
perhaps being "bully"--from which he has not hesitated to lecture nations on
their failings. The irony of his current situation no doubt pleases many.

            But the really
interesting thing about Robertson's problems is the way they highlight the key
role played in the recent travails of the world economy by hedge funds--or, to
use the terminology preferred by the IMF, "highly leveraged investors." (Yes,
HLIs. In the world of international organizations such as the International
Monetary Fund--IMF--and the World Trade Organization--WTO--everything seems to
have a three-letter abbreviation--TLA?) Never mind the allegations of
conspiracy, the claims that hedge funds profit from countries when they are
down. Where hedge funds really get important is when they don't make
profits, when they themselves are in trouble. Indeed, the troubles of hedge
funds played a remarkably large role in the financial instability of the world
over the last few years.

            The reason for this crucial role is that in the 1990s a
handful of highly leveraged investors became key, even dominant, players in a
number of financial markets. In the international arena, Tiger and a few other
funds became the key conduit, via the carry trade, for the export of capital
from Japan--that is, hedge funds came to play a central role in the exchange of
yen for dollars. In the domestic U.S. arena, Long-Term Capital Management
became a key purchaser of a number of crucial if slightly obscure financial
instruments such as commercial-mortgage-backed securities. Exactly how central
these hedge funds had become was not clear until they got into trouble. But
then it turned out that without them the markets could barely function.

            Why were these funds so
important? Even the $20 billion that Tiger managed at its peak is not a large
sum in the world financial scheme of things (the total wealth of the United
States alone is in the tens of trillions). And Long-Term Capital Management,
which nearly brought down the U.S. financial system, had less than $5 billion
under management. What was different about hedge funds was, first, their
ability and willingness to leverage up the money they managed--in effect, to
use their limited wealth to buy or short-sell much larger values of assets on
margin; and second, their willingness to play outside the mainstream markets.
Hedge funds were never important in the market for Microsoft stock or U.S.
Treasury bills; but when it came to the secondary market in Danish mortgages or
the forward market in the Thai baht, it was a different story.

            Underlying the ability and willingness of hedge funds to
take huge positions in obscure markets was the belief, both by lenders and by
the hedge fund managers themselves, that they had special expertise. In the
case of Long-Term Capital Management, that expertise was technical: The
sophisticated financial models implemented on their computers were supposed to
allow them to diversify away risks. In the case of Tiger and Quantum, it was
more a cult of personality: People believed in the ability of Messrs. Robertson
and Soros to outsmart markets--and so did Robertson and Soros. Indeed, you
probably can't become the manager of a really large hedge fund unless you have
a slightly irrational faith in your own judgment; when success depends on being
able to convince other people to let you take huge risks with their money, it
is not the paranoid but the megalomaniac who survive. That is, until reality
catches up with them.

            When reality did catch
up, it had unanticipated consequences both for the funds and for markets. Look,
for example, at what happened to that yen carry trade last fall. Tiger and
other funds had borrowed heavily in yen, betting on a decline in the yen
against the dollar. When the yen started to rise instead, they suffered losses.
Since the funds were already leveraged to the hilt, this reduction in their
capital forced them to reduce their exposure, which meant paying off some of
those yen borrowings. But that created a fresh demand for yen and supply of
dollars in the foreign exchange market, which led to more losses, forcing even
more repayment, pushing the yen still higher. The result in a short period of
time was a drastic appreciation of the yen and billions of dollars in losses
for Tiger. A similar process of self-reinforcing movement in asset prices when
Long-Term Capital Management got into trouble drove interest rates on virtually
everything except the most plain-vanilla of U.S. securities to dizzying
heights, or in some cases led markets simply to close up shop. And more was at
stake in these asset-market collapses than the money of hedge-fund investors:
The sharp rise in the yen last fall threatened to send Japan into a
deflationary spiral, the drying up of liquidity in the United States briefly
seemed to threaten a general financial collapse.

            Which is why, in a perverse way, Tiger's current problems
are good news--for they take place against a background of a generally calmer
world, one that has learned to live with a greatly reduced role for investors
such as Mr. Robertson. Tiger and LTCM are still around, but they are no longer
as central to the world financial picture as they were--which means that the
particular sort of vicious circles that brought the world to the brink a year
ago are less likely to happen today.

            Some of my friends in the financial industry think
that hedge funds were not just a , but the source of instability
in the late crisis. In that case, the clipping of those funds' wings is a
fundamental change in the situation. The world is really a much safer place now
than it was three years ago. I think this is a bit too optimistic; there are
unfortunately many other ways for a global financial system to get into trouble
(and the yen, as it happens, is once again dangerously overvalued). But
anything that makes the new global economy a bit more stable is to be
welcomed.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Living the Greek Way

            
               Rush to
Judgment
            

            All this sorority
bashing is getting so old (see the "," by Alison Spurgeon, sorority
sister). Ironically, those who spout off the most about Greek life and
conformity are just as guilty of it. Do people who are covered with piercings
and tattoos really believe they are expressing their individuality? They are
just as conformist; humans naturally gravitate toward groups and chances to
belong to a larger whole.

            Having been in a
sorority and then working in government, nonprofits, and the corporate world, I
find that Greek life was very representative of the "real world." Every house
has idiots, sluts, social climbers, and alcoholics. Every house also has
geniuses, philanthropists, and varying kinds of campus leaders. There are
brown-nosing and backstabbing and viciousness. There are also kindness and
loyalty and real bonds that are developed between people. For someone like me,
who hadn't had very many close friendships with women, it was a truly
beneficial experience, even if I hated a lot of what went on.

            -- Michelle
Honald
            

            
Denver

            
               Leave It,
Levitt
            

            Steven Levitt is being extremely disingenuous when
he claims that he takes no position on the public policy implications of his
research (""). Obviously crime is a bad thing, so if your research indicates a
correlation between a social practice--abortion--and a reduction in crime, you
are at a minimum implicitly advocating that practice with the minimum of legal
restrictions.

            Your analogy to global warming research points up
the deceit. The impetus for research on global warming has come from those who
believe that fossil fuel consumption is out of control and who reinforce their
beliefs with global warming research, given everyone's understanding that major
man-made climatic change is a bad thing. No one is out there advocating global
warming. Maybe your research is right, maybe it is wrong, but you undermine
your credibility when you claim to be oblivious to its implications. You had to
have a thesis going in when you started your research, and given that we
already knew crime rates were falling, it is hard to believe you weren't
looking for a correlation between abortion and falling crime rates. Life is too
short to use one's career wandering in the dark, and no one is going to believe
that's what you did.

            By all means, fight back
on the eugenics attacks. That's below the belt. I think it is perfectly
respectable for you to use your results to say that all those who have been
pointing to overall demographic shifts, or changing police tactics, or
increasing incarceration rates are missing a key factor. But you are just
waving a red flag to a bull when you cast attacks on others for supposedly
misreading you altogether.

            -- Ken O'Brien
            

            Los
Angeles

            
               Malleable Lamar
            

            Lamar Alexander's campaign never got off the ground
because the American people can recognize a phony (""). Alexander can and will
mold himself into anything. As Bush's secretary of education he was for
"Break-the-Mold" schools. Earlier he had favored comprehensive schools. Now
that people have turned against large government interventions, he wants to
make every school a "charter school" with power vested in the parents and
teachers. He says this will make our system the best. When Linda Wertheimer
asked him, "How would we know?" there was a moment of glorious dead air.

            Michael Lewis,
interviewed about his book Trail Fever , observed that Alexander "did
something I didn't think possible in this campaign. He proved you could be too
phony. This is why Clinton feared him most of all the candidates. He was so
malleable. He even looks a little like putty."

            -- Gerald W.
Bracey
            

            Alexandria, Va.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Getting Personal

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               Re your asinine
column, are you always such a self-righteous snob?
            

            

               --VP
            

            Dear V,

            Pretty much.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I thank you! No
matter how heavy the cares of the day, your witty responses evoke hearty
laughter in most instances, and thus a lighter spirit. You are positively a
riot and a good counselor to boot!
            

            

               --Michael, honestly
            

            Dear Mic,

            There's a small
difference of opinion here ... but Prudie, in her wisdom, has decided you are a
more reliable critic than VP.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Marry me! Well, not
really, because I already am. But really, the was stellar. Oh well, if we're
not destined for matrimony in this lifetime, perhaps circumstances will someday
allow me to buy you a beer or Dr Pepper or something. Your job must be fun, and
all the more so because you do it so well.
            

            
               --Biggest Fan on the
Block,
            

            

               Mike C.
            

            Dear Big,

            Oh, stop guys ... and
both named Michael! Prudie is blushing.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Do you make this up,
or do people actually write to you about stupid, everyday concerns? Prudie must
tear her hair out every day dealing with the petty moral dilemmas your clueless
devotees experience. God love ya!
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Fan From Ohio
            

            Dear Fan,

            Pause for a moment and
contemplate the possibilities for chaos in the human condition, then question
no more the authenticity of Prudie's correspondents. How wonderful that you are
not beset by stupid everyday concerns and petty moral dilemmas. Prudie's
readers no doubt wish they had all your clues.

            
--Prudie, with all her hair

            

               
                  Prudence,
               
            

            
               You are getting
older by the minute and one day soon you will be looking at men as old as Bob
Dole (see the "" column), and it may be your husband, so don't lose the
information, dearie. You will want it soon.
            

            

               --Snowtop
            

            Dear Snow,

            So noted.

            
               
                  Hey,
Prue,
               
            

            
               Please pass along to
"Ricespring" my deep appreciation of the sentiment expressed and my full
agreement, along with bemusement. I believe the most unsettling image currently
extant in popular culture is that of Bob Dole under the influence of Viagra. I
don't believe children should be allowed to view this ad. The craggy old
pervert is just plain scary, particularly when he smiles that
beyond-the-grave--and now sexually aroused--smile. No wonder Liddy spends so
much time hoofing it on the road.
            

            

               --Wolfman
            

            Dear Wolf,

            Many readers checked in
to say that they applauded the former senator's forthright approach to a real
problem. The following writer, however, was not one of them.

            

               
                  Prudie,
               
            

            
               Not to belabor the
point, but I have often thought Liddy Dole had better put a pillow over Bob's
head if she expects to be elected president. I am so sick of his whining and
sniveling over his ED. You know, there are a lot of single women and widows in
this country who manage to stay happy without the constant focus on erections.
Time for you to get a life, Bob. Try reading ... or chocolate cake. Prudence,
sock it to 'em!
            

            

               --Scott W.
            

            Dear Scott,

            Prudie is going to
change the subject, though to stay in the moment, the next letter is political,
as well.

            
               
                  Prudence, oh,
Wise One,
               
            

            
               What's up with that
Neanderthal Jerry Springer having contemplated running for the Senate? (The
Senate!) I was shocked that such a thing could even be a possibility. I share
the sentiments of the chairman of Ohio's Republican Party who said, "Was Howard
Stern busy?" Say it's all a goof.
            

            

               --Poor Resident in Ohio
            

            Dear Poor,

            It is, indeed,
dispiriting that someone with Mr. Springer's history might have been considered
simply because of name recognition. There is precedent, however, and it is
regrettably recent. "Dubya," Texas Gov. George Bush, has no particular
qualifications aside from being merely appealing and the son of a president.
Mr. Clinton was elected when he was known to be irresponsible. And don't forget
Mr. Reagan, of whom it could be said he wasn't really a president but played
one on television. We are seemingly suckers for "charisma" and exercising an
electoral death wish.

            --Prudie, resignedly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Naked and the Dead

            Late in Stanley Kubrick's
final film, Eyes Wide Shut , there's a harsh bit of piano music by the
Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti: one high note plinking over and over,
first slow, then hard and fast and cruelly untranscendent. The camera,
meanwhile, rests on the face of Kubrick's protagonist, a New York doctor called
Bill Harford, who's only just comprehending the horror of what he has witnessed
over the previous 24 hours--the bestial evil under the waltzing façade of
civilization. (The early part of the movie is scored with waltzes.) This moment
is meant to be soul-churning for both the character and the audience, but
Harford is played by Tom Cruise, who is not, to put it gently, a thoughtful
actor. Cruise's brow is preternaturally low, and when he tries to simulate
brain activity he looks like a Neanderthal contemplating his Cro-Magnon
neighbor's presentation of fire: What this orange snake make finger feel
hot? That the emotional climax of Kubrick's last movie is Tom Cruise
screwing up his face and feigning a tragic awareness while a piano goes
plink ... plink ... plink-plink-plinkplinkPLINK is enough to make you
cry, but not the way the filmmaker intended. Like Kent in King Lear we
must ask, "Is this the promis'd end?"

            It is certainly the end
toward which Kubrick labored. The director reportedly discovered Arthur
Schnitzler's 1926 Traumnovelle ( Dream Novella , although it has
been translated as other things) in the late '60s, spent several years on the
updated and Americanized but otherwise faithful script (he shares the credit
with Frederic Raphael), and shot and reshot it for an eyes-wide-opening period
of a year and a half. (Only after principal photography was finished did he
replace actors Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh with Sydney Pollack and
Marie Richardson.) Eyes 
               Wide Shut , for better or worse, is the
movie Kubrick wanted to make--the fever dream that haunted him and that he
trusted would haunt us, too. But as usual with late Kubrick, the aspirations
seem more haunting than the plinking. The movie is a somnolent load of
wank.

            It's easy to see what drew the director to Schnitzler's
narrative. The hero yields to a best-repressed impulse (the urge to be
unfaithful to his true love) and gets launched on a dark odyssey, which
culminates in his near death and a vision of society's most ferociously
psychosexual underpinnings--civilization and its discontents and all that. The
movie couples sexual obsession with an epochal fear of sex: It says, "Don't go
there, you won't like what you see." The ingenuous Harford and his wife, Alice
(Nicole Kidman), attend a lavish Christmas party thrown by the magnate Ziegler
(Pollack), in which both are sexually propositioned. After a bout of jealous
banter, the doctor declares a smug faith in his wife's fidelity, whereupon
Alice--who has been smoking dope and quietly simmering--wallops him with the
news that she once came this close to abandoning him and the couple's
daughter for a soldier she locked eyes with at a resort hotel.

            His domestic stability
more precarious than he ever dreamed, Harford is eaten at by fantasies of his
wife and the soldier, and emerges from his apartment into a kind of
Walpurgisnacht . The daughter (Richardson) of a dead patient blurts out a
wish to leave her fiance for him. A prostitute (Vinessa Shaw) picks him up. He
visits a costume shop in which the voluble proprietor (Rade Servedzija)
discovers his pubescent daughter (Leelee Sobieski) in flagrante with a pair of
customers. The film's centerpiece is a sequence in which the doctor perilously
crashes an ornately choreographed orgy in which the rich and powerful wear
cloaks and Venetian masks and ogle long-legged women as they're marshaled and
disrobed by attendants. That he isn't supposed to be there dawns on him about
the time the masks turn his way and the conversation stops.

            Although Schnitzler wrote Traumnovelle when he was
partially deaf and had withdrawn from the world, he chose to set the novella a
quarter-century earlier, at the fabled Viennese fin de siècle , when
Freud was spinning out NC-17-ish interpretations of dreams (he and Schnitzler
were correspondents) and Schnitzler himself was attempting to beat Casanova's
record for the most orgasms with the most women. Steeped in Expressionism
(Strindberg's A Dream Play had been mounted in Germany only a few years
earlier), Traumnovelle has a paranoid dream logic that feels inexorable
and a tone of breathless intimacy that smoothes out many of its
absurdities.

            That tone would have
been a snap for Kubrick in the days of The Killing (1956), Lolita
(1962), and Dr. Strangelove (1964), and a stretch after 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968), when his storytelling acquired an all-purpose
lugubriousness. But by the end of his life Kubrick had little stretch left: He
didn't extend himself to fit his material, he contracted his material to fit
his turgid tempos. That wins him points as an auteur but not as an
artist--someone who at least needs to make a show of finding his subject more
involving than his own voice. In Eyes Wide Shut , Kubrick can't manage to
get past his sour detachment and enter into the movie. He keeps the characters
at arm's length: When the doctor treats a half-naked woman who has overdosed in
Ziegler's commodious commode, the shot is another of those fisheye specials
that makes the space seem cavernous yet oppressive; Kubrick seems more alert to
the color scheme--the towel that covers her breasts matches the turquoise of
the shower--than to the woman's suffering (which will later be of more than
passing significance). 

            How many takes did Kubrick force his actors into to get
performances this flamboyantly bogus? The early scenes are the most maladroit.
A Hungarian (Sandor Szavost) who whirls Alice around on the dance floor while
purring suave come-ons is like Dracula out of a Mel Brooks parody, and Kidman's
giggly responses (she's supposed to be drunk) recall Melanie Griffith at her
most airheaded. The pair of models who try to pick up Dr. Harford have dialogue
so stilted that it could have been written by David Mamet. The unease Kubrick
generates is a little like Mamet's: You can't tell if everyone sounds so phony
because they're all part of a scheme to hoodwink the protagonists or because
Kubrick has forgotten how human beings talk. Or maybe it's all a--woo
woo--dream.

            
               Eyes Wide Shut has
a timeless feel, and I don't mean that as a compliment: It supposedly takes
place in New York in the present, but it's estranged from any period I
recognize. Who are these people played by Cruise and Kidman, who act as if no
one has ever made a pass at them and are so deeply traumatized by their
newfound knowledge of sexual fantasies--the kind that mainstream culture
absorbed at least half a century ago? Where do these heroically
self-sacrificing prostitutes come from? Who are these aristocrats whose limos
take them to secret masked orgies in Long Island mansions? Even dream plays
need some grounding in the real world. There might have been a way to
make the movie work if the characters hadn't been so abstracted, so generic.
But in an evocative (if self-serving) piece in The 
               New Yorker ,
Raphael notes that his original script was ultimately "blanched of all the
duplicity that made it alive" for him, that at every turn Kubrick took out
details of personality in pursuit of an underlying archetype. I don't know how
a director whose central theme is the loss of humanity can be so uninterested
in the minutiae of human speech and behavior.

            Posthumous tributes have emphasized Kubrick's
unkempt-Jewish-teddy-bear warmth and blamed the myth that he was "cold" on
entertainment journalists determined to make him pay for his (sensible)
decision to remove himself from their orbit. But the coldness that has become
synonymous with Kubrick's name has little to do with his life, and everything
to do with the clinical distance he maintained from his own characters. The
stripping (to a waltz) that Kidman does in the first frames of Eyes Wide
Shut serves only to display her high, tight buttocks and long thighs--the
first of many high, tight buttocks and long thighs in the movie--and has
nothing to do with who she is. Where's the drama in her husband's (and our)
realization that she's fundamentally unknowable when she has been photographed
from the outset as a blank, leggy doll?

            The movie's lone masterful sequence is the one that
features a batch of blank, leggy dolls, along with people whose faces are
hidden behind expressive masks. As Cruise moves past the fornicating satyrs and
satyrettes to the euphonious dronings of Jocelyn Plook's music, one feels
Kubrick, at last, is in his element. He doesn't need to force his actors to
caricature their behavior in the name of some "archetypal" truth because those
masks are already so marvelously archetypal. The most vivid moments in
Kubrick's films in the last 30 years have come when he has turned his actor's
faces into masks: Think of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange
(1971), Jack Nicholson in The 
               Shining (1980), and Vincent
D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket (1987). Maybe Kubrick would have made
nothing but masterpieces if he'd put big Greek or Venetian masks on all
his actors. You can stare at Cruise's mask as he takes in the orgy and swear
you see the wheels turning in his head. Tom Cruise thinking is the year's most
startling special effect.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Last Word

            The book is done.

            How long I've waited to write these words. It was a
decade ago this summer that I began my biography of Saul Bellow--or rather,
signed a contract with a publisher declaring my intent to write it. Last week I
turned in 700 pages of manuscript to my beleaguered copy editor, Virginia
Avery, a kindly, white-haired woman with a handsome New England face and
reserves of patience that run deep.

            From the beginning, the issue of duration loomed.
When my agent asked me how long I thought it would take to write the book--he
was negotiating the delivery date--I answered cheerfully, "Ten years."

            "You can't say that," he informed me. "No one will
sign up a book that's going to take that long."

            "Why not?" I trotted out
the legendary biographies known to every practitioner of the trade--biography
lore: Leon Edel's 20-year labor on his five-volume Henry James ("How long,
Leon, how long?" a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement had
importuned after the appearance of the third volume); Richard Ellmann's 17-year
labor on James Joyce. And to say that Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St.
Vincent Millay is long-awaited would be--as James himself might have
said--putting too fine a point on it. Milford is already well into her third
decade on the project, with no end in sight. Sally Fitzgerald has been at work
on a biography of Flannery O'Connor since I was in college, and I graduated in
1971. Lewis Dabney signed up to write the biography of Edmund Wilson that I
jettisoned in the early '80s, and there's no trace of it. Some of my best
friends are biographers, and they've been in no hurry to deliver: Jean Strouse
devoted 15 years to J.P. Morgan, and Judith Thurman's Colette is
forthcoming this fall after 16 years. Edmund Morris, finishing his
Reagan after a dozen years, is considered a model of punctiliousness. A
decade's nothing.

            Still, the general reader may be permitted to wonder: Why
is biography such a protracted affair? Novelists seem able to turn out a book
every year or two. Historians, as burdened by footnotes and data as
biographers, seldom devote more than five years to a book. What's our problem?
Is it some congenital defect of biographers? A laziness or dilatory habit of
mind? My guess is that our failure of promptitude has to do with the unique
relationship we establish with our subjects, dead or living. Unlike the
novelist, who invents (supposedly) his characters, or the historian, who
grapples with a populous cast, the biographer enters into a curious intimacy
with the person being written about, a relationship charged with ambivalence,
resentment, love, dependency, and all the myriad other emotions that crowd in
whenever we allow ourselves to become intimate with another. That the
biographer doesn't actually live with, or in many instances even know, his
subject; that the relationship may be involuntary (an unauthorized biography);
that it's by its very nature unequal, one person focusing attention on another
with no hope of reciprocity, in no way diminishes the intensity of the
experience. As any biographer will tell you, the act of writing a biography is
all-consuming. The abject acknowledgments pages tell the tale: "To my wife, who
endured my obsession with grace ..." "To my children, who grew up hearing about
X at the dinner table ..." It's a wonder we don't all end up living alone in
boardinghouses.

            In my case, the equation
was infinitely more complicated than I could have fathomed when I embarked on
my biography of Bellow in the summer of 1989. It was in many ways an almost
inevitable project for me: I am from Chicago, Bellow's turf; my first
biography, of Delmore Schwartz, had closely paralleled Humboldt's Gift ,
Bellow's novel about Schwartz; I was steeped in the Jewish immigrant world he
wrote about. My subject, wary by nature, had, after a year of elaborate
equivocation, arrived at the point where he would grant me access to his
papers--subject to his approval--and consent to be interviewed from time to
time. I didn't want him to authorize the book; I wanted my freedom. And for his
part, Bellow maintained that he "wasn't finished yet, wasn't ready to be summed
up"--a reasonable stand for a robust man in his 74 th year. In the
end, the book was, as Bellow took to describing it, "neither authorized nor
unauthorized."

            Over the next decade, I made my biographer's rounds, like
the postman deterred neither by sleet nor snow--nor by occasional emanations of
reticence or frostiness from my subject--from the routine (often a fascinating
routine) of poring over his unpublished manuscripts in the rare book and
manuscript division of the University of Chicago Library; lugging my laptop all
over America in quest of high-school classmates, cousins, friends, and lovers
of my famously peripatetic subject; driving Avis rental cars into the remotest
suburbs of Los Angeles and flying into Buffalo, N.Y., in pursuit of letters in
private hands. Biography is no vocation for old men; it requires physical
stamina. By the time I'd filled up my cupboard with the building materials for
my book, I was, to borrow one of Bellow's favorite words, bushed.

            Then there was the labor
of composition, year after year of struggling to assemble these materials into
a coherent narrative form without getting bogged down by the facts--the
downfall of so many of the bloated biographies that now weigh down the shelves
of Barnes & Noble for their three-week window before being shipped back to
the publisher. By the end of nine years, I'd "written through" to the end,
amassing 1,200 pages of typescript. Even my father, who might as well have been
reading the story of his own life, so closely did he identify with Bellow's
Chicago origins, complained that the book was too long.

            The trouble is that you've gone through so much pain to
collect the damned junior-high-school transcript or the quote from Bellow's
landlord in Paris in 1948 that you feel you have to put it in--just to get
credit. Only after you have a completed manuscript does your confidence build
to the point where you can go through the top-heavy pile of pages and,
encountering the third reference to Bellow's occasional book reviews for the
New York Times Book Review , decide: Who cares? and slash it with the red
pen. On my second go-round I cut 200 pages, dipping below the laminated Page
1,000 I'd presented in 1996 to Katy Medina, my editor at Random House, as
evidence of my progress. (Did she smile, or was that a wince?) On the third
pass, recalling Proust's admonition to one of his correspondents that if he'd
only had time he would have written a shorter letter, I managed to cut another
200 pages.

            At last it was clear that
I had to give up my decadal work-in-progress. My patient publisher was weary of
waiting; my friends were beginning to taunt me with the prospect that I'd never
finish; I was ready, as the self-help literature counsels, to "move on." The
cover had been designed, the catalog copy written. I was still revising the
copy-edited manuscript, tearing the whole thing up, finding, at the last
possible moment, my voice. And how to end it? At last I found a way (since,
happily and thanks to Bellow's physical vigor, I wouldn't have to write a
deathbed scene): a conversation he'd had with Martin Amis for a BBC documentary
on Bellow's life. He was ruminating about death, and about possibly meeting up
again with his parents and his brothers in the next world. I thought of ending
the book with his quote, but then some other stuff happened in his life (you'll
have to buy the book--$24.95 at your local bookstore, arriving in April--or at
least read the reviews to find out what). And Bellow, too, is putting the
finishing touches on a novel titled Ravelstein , about his late friend
Allan Bloom, so I had to mention that.

            After turning in the manuscript Thursday, I spent the
weekend revising the last four chapters, and Monday afternoon I wrote the last
sentence on the last page: "His reunion with the dead would have to wait." Then
I dropped off the last pages at Random House and rushed off to Penn Station to
catch the late train to Albany, an hour from my farmhouse in the country.

            Depleted and drained, I stared out at the Hudson
River in the summer dusk, drank two miniature bottles of Zinfandel, and fell
asleep. My reunion with the living would have to wait.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            In Horsegrazing Siena

            Down the botanical
garden's terraced slope
following where the path
led us among tagged specimens
assembled in neat plots
by family

and ecosystem, local plants and exotics
--even a young sequoia
from my native California--
each with its skirt of shade
underneath

gathered close in the solstice midday heat,
with sometimes a single leaf
in outline emerging from the tangled
mass of shadows cast
on the level dust,

its boundary describing the unique
silhouette peculiar
to its kind, and all the leaves above
outspread, reveling
in the common sunshine ...

we strayed into a cool alcove, lingering
where the pharmacopeia
detained us--ephedra, belladonna,
one small gray-barked tree
without a label,

a glossy red-orange globe on a long stem
smooth as a persimmon
suspended from a skinny branch
head high, a tin sign
enameled white

hanging on a silver chain beside it
with prim black lettering:
VELENO    NON TOCCARE.
Further on, where the slope
flattens out

and widens as the field sweeps gently down
to meet the towering
medieval wall--a sprawling acre
of tall grass and wildflowers,
thistles, vines,

undifferentiated pagan weeds
promiscuously nestled
against the fortification's brickwork,
the whole expanse of ground
let run wild

as if the circuit of the city wall
were a permeable membrane
admitting the wilderness inside,
wild and tame inter-
penetrating,

this city's trust in its identity
secure enough to allow
its opposite a place and share.
Just so, the visitor
who climbs slowly

back from the outskirts along narrow lanes
of sun-warmed brick emerging
into Il Campo senses the spreading
plaza's vast expanse
widen around him

the way a mountain meadow greets a hiker
in the wilderness who follows
the thin stripe of a trail through forest
shadows when suddenly
a clearing opens

and gathers him into the broad embrace
of high altitude
cerulean. But ah, Siena,
you are luckiest in the root
and stem whence

your hospitality flowers: each and all
your children trust that within
the encircling shelter of your wall
they will always have a place
at the table, a bed.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            William Buckley Quotes Himself in Self-Defense

            

               Last week, William F. Buckley Jr. read a Slate "Book Club"
about his latest novel, The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life and Times
of Senator Joe McCarthy , and decided enough was enough. One of the
Clubbers, Eric Alterman, had called Buckley's book "a lumbering, themeless
pudding of a novel that forces one's eyelids shut like an invisible vise." The
other, Ronald Radosh, had described it as "heavy and plodding, without any real
juice to it." Buckley weighed in, defending his work against all charges
aesthetic, historical, and ideological, and quoting a critic writing in
Buckley's own National Review who deemed the book "wonderfully
readable ... a witty, fast-moving yarn." Now Buckley has asked
Slate to run the following excerpt from the book, so that
readers can judge for themselves. We are delighted to oblige.
            

            
Chapter 45

            
Acheson Collects McCarthyana

            Dean Acheson was cutting up newspapers in his law
office at Covington and Burling. However fastidiously he discharged his duties
as a practicing lawyer, his mind was on other things, not least his reputation
as Secretary of State during the last four years of Harry Truman's presidency.
His daily stimulant--"If you can call it that," he remarked to his partner and
close friend, Harold Epison, "--the daily ingestion of poison I inflict on
myself"--was what he referred to with some scorn as "the McCarthy page" in the
morning's newspaper. He had been reluctant to evidence a formal interest in the
unspeakable senator. But in fact he read all references to him and, though only
out of sight, collected voraciously choice items. He had taken to scissoring
out clippings from newspapers (when his secretary wasn't in the room), and
tossing them into his briefcase. But after a few weeks he decided that it would
be better to undertake his project in a more orderly way. That was when he told
his secretary, "Miss Gibson, it is possible that when I do my memoirs I shall
have in them a chapter on the ... grotesqueries of Senator McCarthy. For that
reason, I shall ask you to clip out of the papers those articles or editorials
I designate with the initial 'M.' These are to be clipped and put in a manila
folder, in the bottom drawer"--he pointed down from where he sat--"over
there."

            Day after day, week after week, month after month,
the folder grew in size. The methodical Mr. Acheson took to classifying the
entries according to his estimate of their ranking. "M-O-3" parsed as
"McCarthy-Outrageous-At 3rd level." "M-P-1" parsed as
"McCarthy-Preposterous-1st level." He had other categories, including T (for
Treasonable ) and L (for Laughable ). He also reserved a
classification for criticisms of McCarthy that he especially savored. His very
favorites earned, as one would expect, a "1," whence "M-C-1." Such a discovery
in a morning paper would put him in a very good mood and sometimes he would
even drop a quick note of commendation to the author. When Senator Benton said
of McCarthy that he was a "hit-and-run propagandist of the Kremlin model," Mr.
Acheson had filed the remark as an M-C-2, and dropped a note to Benton, "Bill,
nice score today on McMenace. Well done."

            This morning's reference to McCarthy by Drew
Pearson in his column had caused him to glow. "What he is trying to do is not
new. It worked well in Germany and in Russia; all voices except those
officially approved were silenced in those lands by intimidation." But he
decided against dropping a note to Pearson. He would not wish to run the risk
of Pearson's quoting him. He could hardly countenance any public appearance of
an ongoing contention between Dean Gooderham Acheson/ Yale/ Secretary of
State/ and Joe McCarthy/ Chicken Farmer/ Marquette --wherever
Marquette was--/ Junior Senator from --a state that had lost its
senses.

            He had dined the week before with defeated
Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Dean Acheson enjoyed the
company of Stevenson but thought him indecisive. Acheson relished the story
Adlai had told him, over drinks at the Metropolitan Club, about the dinner with
President Truman. The President was then living across the street at Blair
House, while the White House was being rebuilt. Truman had summoned him when
Stevenson was still governor of Illinois.

            "I walked in the door and the President said, I
mean just after barely saying 'Hello,' he said, 'Adlai, I want you to run for
President. You should announce the third week in April'--this dinner was in
January, 1952, Dean--'and say that you will seek a leave of absence as governor
of Illinois.' "

            "I told him I was very flattered by the suggestion
but that I was committed to run for re-election as governor of Illinois--"

            "What did he say?"

            "He didn't even acknowledge what I had said.
He went on and talked about this and that but at dinner repeated exactly
the same instructions--I was to run for President, announce the third week in
April, etc. I gave him the same answer. After dinner he walked me to the door
and, you guessed it, said the identical thing one more time, and I gave back
the identical answer. Then you know what he said, Dean? 'The trouble with you,
Adlai, is you're so indecisive !' "

            They both laughed.

            Then Acheson had looked up.

            "You know, Adlai, the President was quite correct,
you are indecisive."

            But at least Adlai wasn't equivocal about McCarthy.
Acheson had given an M-C-1 to Adlai's designation of McCarthyism before the
press club as a "hysterical form of putrid slander" and as "one of the most
unwholesome manifestations of our current disorder."

            When Harold Epison came in to the office of his
senior colleague, just after five, it was in order to spend an hour on the
appeal he was shepherding to the Appellate Division on behalf of their client,
the Kingdom of Iran. But he began by asking Dean whether he had seen the
reference to McCarthy--"I caught it in the New York Daily News , which I
sometimes see. It wasn't in any of the Washington papers"--by Owen
Lattimore?"

            No, Acheson hadn't seen it.

            "Somebody apparently asked Lattimore after a speech
what he thought of McCarthy. He said--I have this in memory, Dean!--McCarthy is
'a base and miserable creature.' "

            "That is a thoughtful summary," Acheson said. He
then paused. "Rather a pity it was done by Owen Lattimore. He is not exactly a
disinterested party on the McCarthy question. As a matter of fact,
Harold--obviously to go no further--it hurts me to say this--I think that
miserable creature was substantially right on Lattimore. ... But that hardly
vitiates the soundness of Lattimore's summary on McCarthy." He made a mental
note to write down Lattimore's characterization and slip it into his
folder.

            "You may be interested to know, Harold, that a few
Republicans, who are well situated, think McCarthy has gone far enough."

            "Surely the question is, What does Ike think?"

            Acheson turned his heard slowly, as if to say that
the words he would now say were sacredly confidential.

            "He is, I am I think reliably informed, prepared to
move. ... That is enough on that subject."

            "I agree, Dean. How're you getting on with your
book?"

            "I write every night, five times a week, I try to
do five hundred words a day."

            "Have you got a title for it yet?"

            "Yes. I'm going to call it, A Democrat Looks at
His Party . We've lost a lot of spirit in the Democratic Party, in the two
years since Ike came in. Of course there's a lot of disequilibrium in the
country. You will find, Harold, that this is always so after a society
completes a major effort--in this case, winning a world war. Churchill's defeat
was a symptom of that kind of--letting your breath out. The surprise here was
that Mr. Truman defeated Dewey. But that also meant that the opposition never
got a chance to exercise its muscles. Not until Ike's victory in 1952."

            "So your book is intended to do what?"

            "To put the Democratic Party back on its feet, as
the civilized party, the intelligent party. A worthwhile project, wouldn't you
agree?"

            "Of course. But you know, Dean, I hope you will
confront head-on the foreign-policy problem. I agree with everything you say
about Senator McCarthy. You know that. But it is a fact that we had to fight a
war in Korea that President Eisenhower ended--"

            "Yes. The war ended officially five months after
Eisenhower was elected--and three months after Stalin died."

            "Dean, you are being the advocate now. We Democrats
did get into that war, we did--I know hate that word, 'lose' China--"

            "You are correct that we have to focus very
carefully on what is happening in the Soviet Union. We don't know what the
triumvirate that's in power now, Khrushchev, Bulganin--I continue to refer to
it as a triumvirate though they executed Beria a week ago, good riddance. What
the successors to Stalin are going to do we don't know, but there are no signs
they are giving up their commitment to rule the world. But yes, I am
ready to say this, with great care: I will show you the draft of that chapter.
I will say that it is correct that the Communists can't be allowed to go any
further. Well, didn't Mr. Truman say that? By engaging them in Korea?

            "But the challenge will be to distinguish between
the right kind of anti-Communism and McCarthy's anti-Communism. A big
difference. Harold, did you see what Henry Reuss said about McCarthy the other
day? Reuss was a Democratic contender against McCarthy in 1952. I think I may
just have a copy of the clipping."

            Acheson leaned over and pulled out the bottom left
drawer on his desk. "He said, 'Senator McCarthy is a tax-dodging,
character-assassinating, racetrack-gambling, complete and contemptible liar.'
"

            Acheson's face brightened. He gave the closest he
ever gave to a giggle. "I wish I had said that, Harold."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Douglas Brinkley

            Douglas Brinkley is the William Ginsburg of the
Kennedy death circus. Before the crash, the boyish, gap-toothed Brinkley was
known primarily as a Michael Beschloss-in-waiting, a telegenic historian
fielding calls from the cable news networks. Now the University of New Orleans
professor has parlayed a contributing editorship at George and a
friendship with Kennedy into a job as a necropublicist. Between Saturday and
Tuesday, Brinkley appeared on MSNBC, Late Edition , Meet the
Press , Good Morning America , Dateline , Today (twice),
and NPR (twice). He also penned columns about his relationship with Kennedy for
Newsweek and the New York Times , and was quoted everywhere else
ink touches paper.

            According to the Washington Post , Brinkley
cut a $10,000 deal with NBC for a week of exclusive Kennedy commentary, but
then agreed to provide it pro bono. Editors at George are reportedly so
annoyed about Brinkley's death punditry that they have dropped him from the
masthead.

            Even amid this week's staggering hyperbole,
Brinkley's emotional profligacy has distinguished him. He is, as he rarely
fails to remind his audience, 38 years old like Kennedy, a vegetarian like
Kennedy, and a Sagittarius like Kennedy. That identification with Kennedy
accounts in part for Brinkley's tenuous proposition: that Kennedy's death is
the signal event of his generation, the moment Gen X lost its innocence. In the
opening paragraph of his New York Times op-ed, Brinkley opined: "It's as
if suddenly, an entire generation's optimism is deflated, and all that is left
is the limp reality of growing old." Kennedy's death may have affected his
friend Brinkley this way. I am not sure anyone else outside Kennedy's circle
was so moved.

            Brinkley has also
mounted his thanatic pulpit to tell and retell anecdotes about Kennedy's
decency: how he declined an honorary doctorate because he felt he didn't
deserve it, how his racial compassion sparked him to visit Mike Tyson in jail.
(Brinkley has grown comfortable enough with Kennedy-family talk that he no
longer limits himself to John Kennedy. In his second Today jaunt, he
opined about would-be bride Rory Kennedy: "It's the activist and the feminist
in Rory Kennedy that I think is her greatest contribution to American
life.")

            It's a historical truth, handed down from Mark Antony to
Jesse Jackson to Earl Spencer, that celebrity death is a fabulous marketing
opportunity, but Brinkley is not cynical about his prolific Kennedy comments.
"I have been in a deep, deep depression, and my way of responding was to be
proactive," he says. "I could have shut up about this and not done anything,
but I really believe that this is someone who matters ."

            Brinkley's belief that
Kennedy is someone who matters--matters enough for two op-eds and countless TV
gigs, in fact--is a good starting point for understanding the young prof. He is
an appropriate eulogist for Kennedy because they shared a vision of American
culture and politics. Kennedy's worthy democratic instincts inspired him to use
entertainment to teach politics. Brinkley's worthy democratic instincts inspire
him to use entertainment to teach history. In Brinkley's case, as in Kennedy's,
the results have been both inspiring and awkward.

            Brinkley (who is not David Brinkley's son--that's Columbia
history prof Alan Brinkley) stands at the intersection of academia, serious
journalism, and TV punditry. He is striving for a place in the pantheon of
popular historians such as Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger. Brinkley
abhors the narrow academic history that has dominated universities. He scorns
scholarly monographs and favors a democratic, populist history. As history grew
more and more abstruse in the '60s and '70s, historians ceded the role of
public intellectual to journalists. Brinkley wants to take it back. (Kennedy
himself admired Brinkley's approach enough that, according to Brinkley, he had
been trying to land Brinkley an appointment at Harvard's Kennedy School.)

            Brinkley first came to
prominence as America's leading neo-beatnik, a believer that the best way to
learn history is on the road. In 1992, he led 17 students from Hofstra
University (where he then taught) on a six-week history road trip, from the
Grand Canyon to Route 66, from Ken Kesey's farm to Jack London's ranch. He
turned this "Majic Bus" trip into a popular book. He now guides a civil-rights
bus journey for inner-city high-school kids every spring. The Majic Bus also
inspired C-Span to start sending its own buses around the country.

            The Majic Bus illustrates both the charms and flaws of
Brinkley's notion of public history. Brinkley is the kind of professor freshmen
love, because he is a kind of Überfreshman himself, wildly enthusiastic and
infatuated with popular culture. He believes Jack Kerouac and Hunter S.
Thompson are the giants of American literature. He quotes Ramones lyrics. He
loves the word "troubadour." He refers to Lou Reed as "poet Lou Reed." The
Majic Bus is full of passages like this: "How could I be a great bop
wanderer, a mystic in search of ecstasy, a hobo scribbler of haiku and jazz
poems, somehow discovering, in Kerouacian terms, how to 'dig' life in the
divine world to the fullest?"

            Brinkley is a cheerleader
for American history. Everything is a celebration. He likes to cite Kerouac's
"I am not anti-anything" (except "racists" and certain big corporations). The
civil rights movement was great. The Beats were cool. Dylan is amazing. He even
wrote a kindly biography of Jimmy Carter. Brinkley skirts the arguments against
his rosy vision. When his Majic Bus students encountered a couple of
belligerent Buchananites spouting nativist claptrap, Brinkley's immediate
reaction was to treat the pair as loonies and hustle his students back onto the
bus. His America is conflict-free. Here, too, he resembles Kennedy, who was a
cheerleader for politics, publishing a magazine that detached politics from
ideology.

            The Majic Bus brought Brinkley minor fame. Blessed with
preternatural gregariousness, good humor, and a love of attention, he's been
tireless about pursuing both celebrity and the cause of popular history ever
since. "The word that is used around Doug is 'operator.' That is said
scornfully or dismissively," says historian and Brinkley mentor Ambrose, who
tapped Brinkley to succeed him as director of University of New Orleans'
Eisenhower Center. "He is an operator, and I think that's wonderful.
He's entrepreneurial and enthusiastic. It's very American."

            It's hard to find anyone
who knows Brinkley and dislikes him. It's also hard to find anyone who knows
Brinkley and doesn't worry about his obsession with fame. "His name-dropping is
almost pathological," says one friend. In my conversation with Brinkley, he
touched on a dozen famous politicians and artists he knows. His writing is full
of sentences that begin something like, "As John Cage once asked me ..."

            Brinkley worked assiduously to join Beschloss and Doris
Kearns Goodwin on the air. "TV is the most important medium for conveying
history. For historians not to reach out smacks of elitism," he says. He will
happily decorate any TV or radio story with a veneer of American history.
Recent months have seen him comment on the Kosovo bombing, ground troops, Rosa
Parks, Independence Day, impeachment, and Al Gore's military service, to name a
few topics.

            Meanwhile, he has pursued
a writing career that would fell a less industrious man. On the same day his
Newsweek and New York Times Kennedy pieces appeared, Brinkley
published a sweet article in The New Yorker about a 50-year
correspondence between Ronald Reagan and a member of his fan club. Brinkley
publishes in the Atlantic , Newsweek , American Heritage ,
and George. His work ranges from routine commentaries on the day's
political news to celebrity puff profiles. He writes more journalism than most
hacks, and certainly a lot more good journalism than most hacks. At the
same time, he has managed to write or co-write eight books in the past seven
years, including three full-scale biographies and a lively 600-page history of
the United States. (Brinkley's oeuvre demonstrates his genius for
endearing himself to all kinds of people: He has done books with the widow of
Dean Acheson, the ultimate establishment figure; with Hunter S. Thompson; and
with Carter.) He is currently working on a profile of Gore, a biography of Rosa
Parks, and a biography of Henry Ford.

            Brinkley's sunniness and ardor are appealing, but his
public history has its shortcomings. His idols, Ambrose and Schlesinger, have
won the admiration of the academy and the public. Brinkley has won the public
but has not wowed the academy. Some of his colleagues' dismay is simply
jealousy of his entrepreneurship, but some is more substantive. His books read
like good journalism--and that's no insult--but they are not great history. "He
has made no analytical contribution at all," says one Ivy League historian who
professes to like Brinkley.

            Arthur Schlesinger went on television to mourn the
death of President John Kennedy. Douglas Brinkley goes on television to mourn
the death of celebrity magazine editor John Kennedy Jr. This is why his
ambition to be a public intellectual may falter. A public intellectual resists
the frivolous. Brinkley does not resist the frivolous. As his mentor Ambrose
says, "I wish he would spend less time on John Kennedy and more time on Henry
Ford."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Go to Hell

            In his current 
                  Slate
                "" column, David
Greenberg compares George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams. John Q.--as he was not
known--is the only president's son so far to become president himself.
Historian Greenberg finds many parallels but some differences. For example, Q.
suffered a "lifelong case of clinical depression," whereas W. has come to
"believe that all Jews are bound for hell." While the parallel is unclear,
these are certainly two different things. As someone who has (based on
circumstantial evidence such as his bar mitzvah), I found this latter datum
especially interesting. And, of course, it is remarkable to learn that George
W. has actual opinions on any subject, let alone strong and controversial
ones.

            Unless you're a political junkie, or live in Texas,
you may have missed this story. The press have reported it, but not with the
neurotic intensity you might expect. Why not? Conservative press critics often
complain that the media ignore the importance of religion. This may be a case
in point, though not one those critics are likely to complain about. Second,
there is the inoculation phenomenon: Once a story has "been done," editors and
producers don't want to do it again. So, getting it done small is protection
against finding it done big. Finally, there may be a feeling among journalists
that the whole thing's a bum rap. Which it is and it isn't.

            There's no evidence that
George W. is an anti-Semite. After college he was even engaged briefly to a
half-Jewish woman. Some have suggested that Bush may have dumped her because
her father was Jewish, but there's no reason to think he didn't know that all
along, if he cared, so the episode weighs in against the anti-Semitism charge,
not for it. Bush has had many Jewish business partners and friends. If he
believes they're all going to hell, he hasn't held it against them in this
life.

            So what does he believe? Like the Gospel tales themselves,
the story of Bush's views on Jews has several variants. In 1993, discussing his
decision around age 40 to accept Christ as his personal savior, Bush told a
Houston Post reporter that--as the reporter paraphrased it--"heaven is
open only to those who accept Jesus Christ." So at worst, Bush never condemned
Jews specifically to hell specifically, but rather condemned most of humanity
(anyone who doesn't accept Christ) to what may be, depending on your point of
view, a wider geographical area (anywhere outside heaven). I'm not sure if
that's better or worse.

            Here's where the gospels
differ. According to Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard , Bush says his
mother then called Billy Graham to straighten him out. Graham advised him to
"never play God" by ruling on who gets into heaven. But according to Sam Howe
Verhovek of the New York Times , Bush says Graham's intervention occurred
earlier, during an informal theological discussion at the Bush Sr. White House.
And according to Ken Herman of the Austin American-Statesman , Bush
actually made his 1993 comment in the course of recounting the Graham episode.
In this version, the evangelist's advice was slightly different: "Graham
generally agreed with the theory but cautioned against spending much time
worrying about it, Bush said."

            So, where does this leave us? If Billy Graham actually
convinced Bush long beforehand that we don't know who gets into heaven, then
the Houston Post report of 1993 was flat-out wrong and Bush didn't
believe Jews were shut out of heaven even at the time. But Bush has never
denied the accuracy of the reporter's paraphrase. Nor, needless to say, has he
adopted Version 2 of Graham's advice by declaring that Jews won't get into
heaven, but he's too busy to care. Bush now answers all questions on the
subject of heaven and its admission requirements with this catechistic
formulation: "It is not the governor's role to decide who goes to heaven. I
believe that God decides who goes to heaven, not George W. Bush."

            This won't do, I'm afraid. It was good enough to
get him a kosher certification from the Anti-Defamation League, but it makes no
sense. No one is asking Bush to "decide" or "rule on" who gets into heaven. We
can stipulate that God decides. (Some people--most Jews, for example--believe
in God, but not in heaven. Few, if any, people believe in heaven, but not in
God.) The issue is whether God has an admissions policy that excludes Jews and
whether George W. has an opinion about what that policy might be.

            Surely he does. "My
faith tells me that acceptance of Jesus Christ as my savior is my salvation,
and I believe that," Bush says. Does he think that this principle only applies
to him? Does he think that it's possible for others to achieve salvation
without accepting Christ? Even nonrecruiting religions such as Judaism claim to
be more than just a personal taste or preference. Born-again Christianity
claims to be the right answer to the most fundamental questions. So how can
Jews possibly get into heaven without converting? Only two ways that I can see.
One is if God allows exemptions. But to avoid offending any religious or
nonreligious group, the exception would have to be that anyone who does not
accept Christ need not accept Christ, which would destroy the rule. The other
way out would be if the entire belief system permits doubt about itself--for
example, if it's only 50-50 that accepting Christ is mandatory for salvation
for anybody, including George W. himself. Neither of these conditions applies
to George W.'s faith, as he describes it.

            And so what? Why should anyone care whether he or she will
achieve salvation by the terms of someone else's religion? What difference does
it make if you can't get into a heaven you don't believe in? As a nonbeliever,
I find the conventions of ecumenism baffling. I don't want to tell you people
how to run your religions. And obviously we want to avoid an outbreak of
religious war, or even lesser forms of intolerance, if possible. But why does
tolerance require people to pretend they don't believe what they do? Wouldn't
tolerance be easier if it only required agreement to disagree peacefully rather
than demanding actual sharing of religious doctrines at some level of
abstraction? After all, if Bush really believes that accepting Jesus is the
only path to salvation, he is pulling a pretty dirty trick on Jews by telling
them otherwise. Putting votes before souls: Talk about political
expediency!

            George W. is lying either
when he professes his faith or when he denies its implications. Or he hasn't
really thought it through, which itself would cast doubt on the depth of his
faith. But I doubt this particular dishonesty will keep him out of heaven,
since it is imposed on every politician--and even every clergyman with
ambitions.

            To be sure, there is a certain joy in watching a pol caught
in pandering gridlock. Bush plays up his born-again faith to the religious
right. He uses it even more than bona fide Christian-right pols do, as Fred
Barnes points out, in order to allay suspicions that he may be moderate or
indifferent on social issues. Then he has to fudge his faith so that people who
don't share it won't take it seriously.

            And if he gets this balancing act wrong, he must
pander even more furiously to make it up. Going for a twofer a couple of years
ago, Bush "confided" to Washington political columnist Andrew Glass that "he
enjoys hanging out with country music singer [can you guess? well, obviously
...] Kinky Friedman, who wrote [uh-oh] 'They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus
Anymore.' " Does W. agree with this sentiment? Does he have some problem with
the quality of Jews being produced in America today?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Rotten Eggs

            

               The Yankees won their 25 th World Series. Pitcher
Roger Clemens shut out the Braves into the eighth inning, leading the Yanks to
a 4-1 win. Commentators agreed that the Yanks performed even better than they
did last year and that the Braves did even worse than in recent post-seasons.
(David Plotz what baseball and politics have in common.)

            

               The Republican presidential candidates met for their second
forum. George W. Bush, who did not attend, still managed to draw more
attention than any of the candidates who showed up. (Click for Jacob Weisberg's
account of Alan Keyes' deranged performance.)

            

               Former Sen. Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore held their first
debate. Pundits awarded victory to: 1) Gore, who started early, stayed
late, and showered questioners with declarations of heartfelt warmth; 2)
Bradley, whose low-key manner made Gore look desperate; 3) the Yankees, because
nearly everyone watched the game instead. (See "" for a full assessment.)

            

               Armenia's prime minister and several other government leaders were
killed. Dozens of others were hurt when gunmen opened fire on
parliament during a speech by Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian. The assailants
finally surrendered after a day, claiming that they had only meant to scare
members of parliament and that shooting by government security guards had
forced them to fire back. The motives of the assailants, who yelled that they
were staging a coup and demanded to meet with the president, are unknown. The
Armenian government downplayed the incident, claiming that "the city and
country are quiet and the only events are taking place around the parliament
building." Western analysts suggested it further underscored the instability of
the Russian Caucasus region.

            

               The House ordered a 1 percent cut in federal spending. The
bill also provides $85 billion for labor, health, and education. Its Republican
drafters claimed that it doesn't use Social Security monies to fund federal
agencies. Congressional auditors disagreed, finding that the bill depends on
$43 billion in "creative accounting" and that the budget would have to be cut
by 4.8 percent to be balanced without Social Security funds. Democrats gloated
over the findings, and President Clinton threatened to veto the measure.

            

               The House voted to ban doctor-assisted suicide. Senate
approval is expected, but the president has not yet said whether he'll veto the
measure. If ratified, the bill will overturn an Oregon law that allows doctors
to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients. Pro-euthanasia
advocates warned that this would make doctors wary of prescribing painkillers
to any patients, for fear of being accused of assisting a suicide.

            

               The online auction of models' eggs may be a fraud. Five of the
eight models have already dropped out, and journalists who tried to place bids
received no response. The proprietors' explanation: We're inundated with
responses and will be up and running shortly. The journalists' explanation: The
site is a sham, intended only to drive traffic to the owner's porn sites.
(William Saletan dissects the ethics of the sale in ".")

            

               Golfer Payne Stewart died in a plane crash. The Learjet
carrying him and five others lost contact with air-traffic controllers shortly
after takeoff from Orlando, Fla. It traveled on autopilot for 1,400 miles
before crashing in South Dakota. Investigators suspect that a sudden loss of cabin pressure caused the passengers to lose
consciousness or die early in the journey, but they say they are unlikely to
ever find the definitive cause. Stewart, a two-time U.S. Open champion and
member of five Ryder Cup teams, was recognized for his unconventional golfing
uniform--knickers and a tam-o'-shanter hat. The Orlando
Sentinel said Stewart's charisma, charm, and emotional play were his
true legacy.

            

               The Dow Jones industrial average is changing four of its 30
stocks. In: Home Depot, Intel, Microsoft, and SBC Communications. Out:
Chevron, Goodyear Tire, Sears Roebuck, and Union Carbide. Dow Jones' spin: The
new index reflects that the economy's future is in
high-tech . Investors' spin: Duh --what took you so long?

            

               Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump joined the Reform Party. After
criticizing the GOP openly for weeks, Buchanan announced that he would seek the
Reform presidential nomination, which would bring him $12 million in federal
funds. Trump, who said he would decide by March whether to run for president,
would likely spend $100 million to $200 million of his own money on a campaign.
Buchanan's spin: The Democrats and Republicans have become 
too similar and bland. Trump's spin: The Democrats and Republicans have
become too
polarized and extreme. Pundits debated whether the candidacies would: 1)
take votes from Republicans; 2) take votes from Democrats; or 3) create a
self-destructive battle for the soul of the Reform
Party. ("" outlines how the Reform Party selects its presidential nominee.)

            

               President Clinton signed a $268 billion military spending
measure. He has threatened to veto the five remaining appropriations
bills in the 2000 budget because of Republicans' proposed cuts in social
programs. Clinton criticized the military bill for including budget gimmicks
and pork-barrel projects but said that he could not "allow our national
security needs to be held hostage by this budget battle." Skeptics said the
president simply realized that contesting defense spending would be unpopular.
Republicans' spin: We're winning the budget fight by convincing Clinton to
compromise. The White House spin: Now it's your turn to compromise.

            

               Russia continues to bomb Chechnya. Hundreds of civilians have
died and at least 160,000 have fled the breakaway republic since Russia began
military operations there in the wake of Moscow terrorist bombings. Russian
troops are gathering near the Chechen capital of Grozny, though they have not
announced plans to invade the city. Chechen leaders called for peace talks, but
Russia rejected the offer, saying that Islamic militants would use a cease-fire
to rebuild their forces. The Chechen spin: Russia is trying to take us over
again. The Russian spin: No, we're simply preventing terrorist attacks on our
people. The American spin: Either way, Russia risks restarting a bloody
and futile war.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            I'm OK, Euro K

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I'm a grad student
at a large research university in the Midwest. A cutie from Germany--also a
grad student, in another department--caught my eye this past year, and I am
positively smitten. Although I've made my affections for her very clear, she
has turned me down for dates because she prefers the company of her
"Euroclique," a group of grad students also from "The Continent." Frankly, I
find most of them annoying and downright dorky. Thus, it seems clear that my
Midwestern roots turn her off. What can I do to win this girl's
affections?
            

            

               --R.S.
            

            Dear R.,

            Tell her your
grandfather was Kaiser Wilhelm? Only kidding. As a fellow Midwesterner, Prudie
feels special kinship with you. The thing you must do in a situation like this
is accept that people's attractions are hardwired. (Have you noticed how often
the second spouse resembles the first?) There is a slim chance that this young
woman is just not interested in you (with no consideration of nationality
involved) and is trying to let you down gently. Prudie's rule is an old
retailing maxim: Your first markdown is your cheapest. Do not wait around for
this girl to change her mind. Just accept things as they are and cast your eye
elsewhere. Prudie bets you a euro you will find another woman about whom you
will be smitten.

            
--Prudie, romantically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I was raised in a
family where we were never big gift-givers. On special days we each give a
meaningful gift and mainly focus on having a nice meal or an outing together.
My husband's family, on the other hand, sees Christmas and birthdays as
occasions for major asset transfers. In other words, they are more into dollar
value than my family. (My dear husband was horrified last Christmas with my
family when all he got was a shirt and tie.) I worry that my husband's family
does not see our carefully chosen gifts as the sincere expression of love and
affection that they are. Sometimes I feel trapped in a Polynesian cycle of
humiliation by gift giving. Any tips?
            

            
               --Yours
humbly,
            

            

               Daughter-in-Law
            

            Dear Daughter,

            You obviously march to a
different drummer than your husband ... one who is not high-stepping through
Neiman Marcus. The first thing is for you and your spouse to agree on an
underlying philosophy of gift giving. The ideal, Prudie thinks, is choosing a
gift with some real thought behind it that does not break the bank. Since your
husband is used to lavish gifts, the two of you should probably make a budget
for presents. It really is the thought that counts, and Prudie hopes your
in-laws will come to appreciate your thoughtful choices.

            
--Prudie, selectively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               I am 25 years old and have a wonderful
boyfriend who is thoughtful, kind, understanding, etc. I have nothing bad to
say about him (here it comes), but I don't feel a real connection to him. If I
look at him from a logical standpoint, he would be a perfect person with whom
to spend the rest of my life. I am physically attracted to him, and I care for
him deeply, but I just feel there is something missing. I think all this has
been exacerbated by the fact that I recently had a conversation with a stranger
to whom I felt more drawn than I do to my own man. (Nothing happened ... just
great conversation and what I felt was a real connection.) We've only been
going out five months, so maybe I should give it more time. I don't want to
throw away something very good just because of some need that may be foolish
whim. Help!
            

            

               --Hopelessly Confused
            

            Dear Hope,

            Love is not logical, so
forget that. You may, however, have Immature Woman Syndrome intensified by The
Handsome Stranger Phenomenon. Sometimes an inexperienced woman--a young
one--will be turned off when a guy is too nice. And sometimes it's just
not the right guy. As you point out correctly, five months is not enough time
to give you the answer. Your need for connection is not a foolish whim. Just
because you can't put your finger on what's missing doesn't mean it's not
missing. On the other hand, for many people real caring along with physical
attraction makes for a pretty pleasing situation. Prudie suggests, without
chucking your current relationship, you try to arrange another encounter with
the Handsome Stranger to see what happens a second time. (Assuming, of course,
you didn't meet him on the subway and have no inkling of how to find him
again.) Life is choices, and Prudie hopes you make a good one.

            
--Prudie, thoughtfully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               A friend of mine
from high school is getting married in the fall and has asked me and some other
women in our circle to be bridesmaids. Financially we are all OK, but by no
means rich. Her parents and her fiance's parents are footing the bill for a
very elaborate wedding and a honeymoon to Europe. Her dress costs around
$2,000, to give you an idea. The bridesmaid dresses she has picked out are
$400, which we are supposed to buy ourselves, plus shoes, plus special
undergarments. So it's basically about $500 that she is asking each of us to
spend. Is it rude of her to expect us to do this? It seems so to us. But ... we
feel like we can't really say "no" to being her bridesmaids, either. How should
we handle the situation? Can we ask her to have her dad pay for a portion of
the dresses so it's not a financial hardship for us?
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Dis-dressed
            

            Dear Dis,

            Prudie is a long way
from her bridesmaid days, but interestingly enough, your dilemma was faced by
someone on whose birth certificate Prudie's name just happens to be. The
numbers involved in that situation were roughly double the ones you mention.
What happened there was that the bride's dad paid half of each of the girls'
dresses. Afterward, however, one of the bridesmaids was so annoyed by the
costly selections that it ruined her friendship with the bride. Prudie believes
that if a family of means picks attendants' dresses that are out of the normal
price range, they should foot the bill. (For some unknown reason, bridesmaids'
dresses are often worn only once ... maybe because they are usually ugly. This
is just one of life's little oddities.) As for your question about whether or
not the bride is rude in asking you all to shell out hundreds of dollars, she
is not rude, simply thoughtless. Because your letter indicates that all you
girls have the same views about the expense, one of you should speak to the
bride on behalf of all the bridesmaids and say that her selection is a little
steep for everyone and perhaps her dad might pay for half. Prudie guesses she
will say yes.

            --Prudie, hopefully

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 275: &quot;Symbolic Logic&quot;

            
               
                  A federal
judge has ordered Republic, Mo., to make a change in its official city seal.
What change?
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question (No.
274)--"Chants Taking":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    Over the past
few days, these demonstrators shouted: "Down with the dictator," "Oh Great
Leader, shame on you!" and "Jerks!" Who was protesting
what?
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "The
few disappointed members of 'John Kasich for President.' "-- Beth
Sherman
            

            "Wait,
has The Nation 's annual cruise left already?"-- Greg Diamond
            

            "Let
me guess: Cineplex Odeon has raised prices another quarter, hasn't it?"-- Tim
Carvell
            

            "Off
the Bermuda coast, student dolphins angrily picketed their corrupt undersea
government, before turning violent and eating the minister of
plankton."-- Steve Bodow
            

            "Wow,
I knew that Texas fans were upset about Juan Gonzalez not starting the All-Star
game, but they really have to chill out."-- Aaron Schatz ( Charles
Star had a similar answer.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Other people's chants,
particularly when chanted in translation, sound a little silly. But some of our
own anti-battle cries have been a little lazy, perhaps because of the too-easy
rhyming of "four" and "war"--as in "one, two, three, four/ we don't want your
stinking ..." well, you know. Indeed, anything that employs counting seems
cheap. As comfy as it is to be led from "two, four, six, eight" to "smash the
state," it is kind of the "Roses are red, violets are blue" of crowd inciting.
Disappointing, really. "No justice, no peace," barks out a fierce equivalency,
although to the uninitiated it may sound like a list of the two things the
crowd is rejecting: justice and peace. Paired phrases do have rhetorical vigor,
particularly in the call and response of "What do we want?" (something good!),
"When do we want it?"--there's the problem; the answer is so predictable. It's
not like we want it by mid-February. There was a briefly popular in-group
incantation (if by in-group we mean me), an acknowledgement of how crowded a
demonstration could be: "La Raza Unida Is Standing on My Feet-a!" but when I
chanted it--and I did--it was thought to denote a lack of seriousness, which it
did not. But I should have known better. If airy persiflage went down well at
street demonstrations, Noël Coward would have had a whole other career.

            
               Off the Pigs, Well
Maybe Not "Pigs," but Definitely Off Answer
            

            Pro-democracy student demonstrators at Tehran
University are calling for a faster movement of the government toward democracy
and the rule of law but still within the framework of an Islamic republic. And
they're not too happy about being beaten and killed by police and
vigilantes.

            Other chants included:
"Army brothers, why kill brothers?," a cry of the Islamic revolution two
decades ago, "Filthy Swine!" "Death to America!" "People are miserable! The
clerics are acting like gods!" and, if my Farsi is any good (and it's not),
"Giuliani, although uninvolved in Iranian affairs, sucks."

            
               Live Free or Lightly
Salted Extra
            

            A senator bolts the
Republican Party and a beloved advertising character is recalled to duty. Two
unrelated stories? Perhaps. Or maybe a single story about a place called
America and a company called Planters. OK, that's two things again, but the
challenge remains: Which of these remarks refer to Sen. Bob Smith of New
Hampshire, and which refer to Mr. Peanut?

            
               The Comments:
            

            1. He is "a leverage point to talk about the
quality, taste, and fun that separates us from other nuts."

            2. "There is a certain integrity to him, as amusing
as that sounds."

            3. Believes that Ronald Reagan's critics "weren't
qualified to kiss the hem of his garment."

            4. "Our research shows [him] to be seen as a
regular guy, everyman."

            5. His grandfather was "a died-in-the-wool
Republican. He said he'd vote for a gorilla on the Republican ticket if he had
to."

            6. He is considered "a party animal, but
dignified."

            7. "People, especially young people, realize that
his appearance is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, with a fun edge."

            8. At age 11, "bet a friend who lived down the road
and had a farm, a dollar versus a chicken that Eisenhower would win the
election."

            9. Makes frequent references to Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington .

            10. Thinks Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are
"probably gay" but looks forward to seeing them have sex in Eyes Wide
Shut .

            11. Received letter from
GOP Chair Jim Nicholson and found it "petty, it's vindictive and it's
insulting."

            
               Their subjects:
            

            1. Mr. Peanut.

            2. Mr. Peanut.

            3. Sen. Smith.

            4. Mr. Peanut.

            5. Sen. Smith.

            6. Mr. Peanut.

            7. Mr. Peanut.

            8. Sen. Smith.

            9. Sen. Smith.

            10. I believe that was me.

            11. Sen. Smith.

            (Note:
All Mr. Peanut comments from some ad guys quoted in the Times . All Bob
Smith comments come from his speech Tuesday in the Senate.)

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The Katzenberg settlement.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Crime of Wine

            As Internet companies spin into the financial
stratosphere, Wall Street and the business press speak with awe of the
revolutionary implications of the Web. Issue after issue of Forbes ,
Fortune , and Business Week detail in awe-struck tones the
hundreds of millions (sometimes even billions ) raised by Net companies.
A new staple is the interview with the Internet expert (call him the I-guru).
The editors will ask meekly, "Dr. Chopra, what industries do you think will be
affected by the Internet?" To which the I-guru sighs, pauses, and explains,
"The real question, Charlie, is what industries will not be affected.
Frankly, I can't think of a single one."

            Well, I can--wine. The booze business might well
end up being one of the few areas of American life undisturbed by the great
Internet revolution. The buying and selling of wine across state borders is
still illegal in 28 states, including New York, where I live. It's a pity
because the wine business is perfectly suited to e-commerce. No store could
possibly stock even 10 percent of the 10,000-odd wines produced by America's
1,800 wineries, not to mention the vineyards of France, Italy, and Australia.
It would be a godsend if wine buyers could do a Web search for bottles of, say,
Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, a hard-to-find $16 world-class white wine from New
Zealand. In my mind's eye, I see myself using a search engine similar to the
Advanced Book Exchange,
which allows readers to track down secondhand books at hundreds of shops across
North America. I can just see myself clicking the mouse to comparison shop and
then score a bottle from a San Francisco store, four from a Texas shop, and 12
from a New York outlet.

            I'd settle for being
able to buy wine from mainstream Internet merchants such as 1-800-WINE-SHOP or Wine.com
(which used to be Virtual Vineyards). Alas, only 12 states--most of them in the
West--have completely legalized such acts of capitalism between consenting
adults. The laws regulating direct wine sales were rarely enforced until
recently, but a new zeal is in the air. Buying a single bottle of wine from
out-of-state is a third-degree felony in Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida and is
punishable with fines of up to $2,000 and jail time. And Orrin Hatch, senior
senator from the parched state of Utah, has introduced a bill that would allow
federal courts to prosecute offenders. Indeed, Hatch was moved to federalize
this crime precisely because new technologies like the Internet make it easier
to buy wine nationally (horrors!). Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., introduced a
similar bill in the House--which passed by a hefty margin.

            At the risk of making a one-way trip to Rikers Island ("I
must take the Fifth about my wine purchases, senator"), I spent a couple of
weeks this summer surfing the Web for vino. Some wine stores keep their lists
online, but none of New York City's big operations--Sherry Lehamn, Zachy's, and
Morrell's--do. Many of the Web wine lists I browsed were so outdated that 20
percent of the wine I wanted to order was out of stock. One major California
wine merchant I spoke to said that the Internet isn't having much effect on his
business because people from most big states can't use it to order wines. If
Internet wine buying was uniformly decriminalized and there was a genuine
nationwide market, on the other hand, the system would be more creative and
efficient.

            I had better luck ordering from two shops outside
New York, the Corkscrew in Springfield, Ill., and K&L Wine Merchants (a widely
known and well-regarded place) of San Francisco, as well as Wine.com, an
online-only store in Napa. The sites are pretty well run but, again, they
simply don't compare with those selling books, CDs, clothes, and baby wares.
The wines were shipped to a friend in Washington state, one of the enlightened
places where e-wines are legal. Precisely how I obtained the wines is a matter
of "don't ask, don't tell."

            I deliberately chose
wines that could travel badly--delicate white Bordeaux, Champagne, Pinot
Grigio--and also some harder-to-find wines such as Californian Italian wines
(Sangioveses). The wines were received in Seattle within a week of ordering.
They were all very well packed in special thermacol wine molds. As a result,
almost miraculously, most of the wines held up even though they were shipped in
90 degree weather. The Champagne (Billecart-Salmon's special K&L bottling,
$26.99) went slightly off (losing fruit and gaining acidity); the cheaper white
Bordeaux, Pont de Brion Blanc ($13.99), was a decent steely Sauvignon Blanc
that stood up to the trip nicely. The more expensive Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafite
($22.95) was superb, delicate, flowery, and yet crisp. But in an hour or two it
began fading; signs of jet lag. The Sangioveses were the most pleasant
surprise--Shaffer ($15) and a Virtual Vineyards special bottling ($13): Both
were delicious, with the pointed flavors of Italian Chianti and the ripeness of
California's clime mixed together. American Chianti-style wines are going to be
the next trend in Californian winemaking.

            Back to the puritans. Why do the new prohibitionists oppose
Internet wine? They claim two concerns: First, like most new legislation in
America, it has been passed for the benefit of the children. "States need to
ensure that minors are not provided with unfettered access to alcohol," Hatch
explained. He trots out the usual anecdote masquerading as evidence--a
13-year-old boy once ordered beer off the Internet. In fact, there is little
danger that teen-agers are going to order unusual wines from distant wineries,
wait days for them to arrive, arrange to have their parents out of the house
when they do, and then ... what? Throw a Claret keg party? California's State
Bureau of Alcohol has received exactly one complaint of an Internet sale to a
minor in recent years.

            Second, it's for the
Constitution. The 21 st Amendment, which repealed prohibition, allows
states to regulate the transportation of "intoxicating liquors." Indeed,
Hatch's bill is titled "The 21 st Amendment Enforcement Act." But the
protections of the 21 st Amendment are actually quite thin. The
language of most state laws would seem to violate the Constitution's interstate
commerce clause, which facilitated the creation of a national economy. Judges
are increasingly coming to this view. At the very least, it means that the
restrictions do not have the halo of constitutional protection.

            The 21 st Amendment's intent was to give the
states the power to prosecute the Mafia's involvement in the liquor trade. But
because much of the Mafia's interest in booze died with the repeal of
prohibition, what keeps these laws alive is politics. Liquor regulation is a
case study in the manipulation of politics by powerful lobbies. The regulations
in force are maintained and strengthened because distributors, wholesalers, and
large wineries benefit from them, and they are organized and politically
powerful. Over the years, their lobbies have been effective at working with
local cranks to regulate the minutiae of the wine business. In 15 states in
America, grocery stores can't sell wine. In Colorado, half-bottles of wine are
illegal, but in Florida oversized bottles are illegal. And so on. (The single
most bizarre law, which banned giving wine to dogs in Chicago, has recently
been repealed.)

            Those who lose out are small and up-and-coming
wineries, specialty producers and, of course, consumers who would have more
choice and lower prices. The entire setup has an anti-competitive,
anti-entrepreneurial flavor that rewards political lobbying rather than good
business practices. Sen. Hatch seems to recognize this when he says, "If there
is a problem with the system we need to fix the system, not break the laws."
For the moment, however, the fix is in for the consumer.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Raising a Stink in Cologne

            Food
was fundamental in European newspapers this weekend. An item in Britain's
Observer Sunday reported that world leaders meeting at the
G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, designated genetically modified food as one of
the "greatest threats facing the planet"--along with AIDS and the millennium
bug. The topic of GM food has been widely debated in Europe but is seldom
raised in the United States, where, according to the Observer , "some 70
million acres of modified soya beans, tomatos, wheat and cotton are now grown."
(For more on national attitudes to GM foods, see the Economist 's
cover story.) Saturday's Guardian
featured a long piece about GM crops in India and reported that a group of 500
Indian farmers went to Cologne to protest what they see as Monsanto Co.'s
attempts to make farmers dependent on genetically modified cotton crops.
Meanwhile, all over Europe there were reports of increasing consumer anxiety
about the safety of foods ranging from poultry to cooking oil to Coca-Cola.

            The
Kosovo conflict was not forgotten, as papers around the continent encouraged
NATO to maintain a stiff spine regarding the demilitarization of the Kosovo
Liberation Army--a matter apparently resolved Monday morning. Spanish
conservative daily ABC
said, "The KLA, which has not been a military arm of the alliance during the
campaign, cannot now be its political partner. As just one of the parts of the
conflict, the KLA should subject itself to the authority of KFOR and disarm
itself." In Germany, Tagesspiegel of Berlin said, "It is understandable that the
KLA wants to remain armed in case of possible Serb attacks in the future. But
Nato in its military movements can't consider that during these critical days,
as they work to prevent a security vacuum with the Serb withdrawal. ... If the
principles of the G-8 states are to be believably achieved and the chance of a
multiethnic Kosovo, at least at the starting point, is to be retained, then the
KLA must also let itself be disarmed."

            Also
on the subject of Kosovo, a leader in Saturday's Independent of London
counseled against analogy creep. It said, "There have been rather too many
emotive analogies drawn with the Nazi Holocaust, which are in danger of
clouding the truth rather than illuminating it. ... Language is important and,
although the Serbian state pursued a policy of vilification, expulsion and
murder against the ethnic Albanians, it did not amount to genocide. ... If
there are 10,000 dead in Kosovo that is a terrible crime, but it is not the
same as the hundreds of thousands that were once feared. There is a parallel
between Hitler's ambition for a racially pure Greater Germany and Milosevic's
ethnically homogenous Greater Serbia, but Milosevic was not working towards a
Final Solution; he did not aspire to world domination; he did not espouse an
ideology of eugenics."

            
Returning to a still-unresolved earlier conflict, an editorial in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post came out in support of an
Anglo-Dutch proposal designed to ease the West's "economic stranglehold" on
Iraq. As the SCMP observed, although it was "[r]ecently overshadowed by
the conflict in Kosovo," for 10 years now the West has used "tough sanctions
and low-intensity bombing, which has taken place on average once every three
days" to battle Saddam Hussein's regime, without "having the required effect."
The new proposal would set strict conditions under which the West would lift
the economic embargo and foreign companies would be allowed to bid on contracts
to rebuild "the country's shattered oil industry." According to the
SCMP , "[I]t is now time to break the deadlock by pushing forward with
this humane proposal." Nevertheless, the plan was denounced in the Iraqi press,
where the government paper al-Jumhouriya said, "The vicious British
draft has even exceeded the unjust and cruel resolutions by the Security
Council against Iraq."

            In
other media matters, intervention by Canada's ruling Liberal Party has delayed
conservative newspaper magnate Conrad Black's elevation to Britain's House of
Lords. Black, a Canadian who owns Britain's Telegraph newspapers,
Israel's Jerusalem Post , and most of Canada's dailies, had been advised
by Canadian officials that he would be able to accept a lordship, for which he
was nominated by Conservative Party leader William Hague, if he took out dual
British-Canadian citizenship. With the intervention of British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, Black received a British passport, but the week before the honors
were announced, Ottawa reversed its position and declared that a 1919 law
prevents Canadians from receiving peerages. Black told his Canadian flagship
the National
Post that "as a Canadian citizen I find the conduct of our government
slightly embarrassing." The London Times ,  the Telegraph 's main rival, said that
by this fall Canadian legal reforms should make the peerage possible and noted
rather archly that "[t]he prestige of a noble title is now within Mr Black's
grasp, but ... he must wait, until the autumn, before the prize is securely
his. The delay should not, however, prove too trying. Mr Black has, after all,
been anticipating the pleasure of a peerage for almost a decade."

            The
last British royal wedding of the millennium--Saturday's marriage of Queen
Elizabeth's youngest son Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones--was the occasion for the
recently installed poet laureate's first official ode. Andrew Motion's poem
"Epithalamium" (read it here--free registration for the Times site
required) was described as "safe" and "traditional" in the Independent ,
but novelist J.G. Ballard told the Times , "The poem proves that it's
time to discontinue the office of Poet Laureate in the hope that the Royal
Family will follow soon after."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 266: &quot;Booed and Hooted&quot;

            
               Fill in the blank
as Jimmy Riordan, an organizer of yesterday's Gay Pride parade in New York
City, explains why Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was heckled the length of the march.
"Nobody is barred from being in the parade. It's completely open to all people.
He's just not ______________."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            

               Thursday's Question (No. 265)--"Serfs Up":
"In England, the rule was well established that 'no lord could be sued by a
vassal in his own court, but each petty lord was subject to suit in the courts
of a higher lord." This surprisingly relevant bit of medieval lore turns out to
be the philosophical foundation of what?
            

            "All
video games."-- Evan Cornog
            

            "It
means that Sean 'Puffy' Combs is free to beat up any producer who doesn't sell
as many records as he does."--Peter Carlin
            

            "Uh,
why my wife complains about me to my mother?"--Sean Fitzpatrick
            

            "It's
the reason why my sexual harassment suit against Sen. Dianne Feinstein had to
be termed 'ludicrous' and 'a travesty' in a federal court, instead of a state
one."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "Orrin
Hatch's bid for the presidency. (No, it doesn't fit the question, but I laugh
every time I think about it.)"--Alex "I Hate It When Kennedy Gets It Right"
Pascover
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Saturday in
Massachusetts, just off I-91, in a restaurant, in the men's room, on the red
plastic screen that covers the urinal drain, were emblazoned these words: "Say
No To Drugs." Oh yes--you are now meant to take in social policy while you
piss. But isn't this ubiquitous propagandizing what we mocked and derided when
the Soviets did it? (And by "we," I of course mean, me, George Orwell, and the
gang up at Chiatt Day.) Perhaps this was a subversive act, the
urinal-drain-guard manufacturer inviting us to piss on the United States'
failed drug policy. Is that still a legal form of protest? Like Supreme Court
Justice Kennedy, I have only a tenuous grasp of constitutional law, but won't
this sort of thing be taboo once that flag-burning amendment passes?

            
               Articles of
Confederation Answer
            

            This is the legal underpinning of Justice Anthony
Kennedy's nostalgic embrace of states' rights.

            Writing the decision in the first of three 5-4
cases that undermine the rights of the individual to defend himself against a
state government, Kennedy argued that when a state violates a federal law, the
federal government can sue, but the individual victim cannot. "Our federalism
requires that Congress treat the states in a manner consistent with their
status as residuary sovereigns," he wrote, with a quill pen dipped in the blood
of Thomas Jefferson, or maybe it was a word processor.

            Writing the dissent,
Justice David Souter argued that this goofball invocation of states rights (Was
it "goofball"? No one has decent penmanship anymore.) leaves the individual
with little recourse when he's been wronged by sovereign Albany or that bastion
of liberty, Harrisburg. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, Souter wrote: "If
he has a right, and that right has been violated, do the laws of his country
afford him a remedy? The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in
the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws when he
receives an injury."

            
               Greg Diamond's
Cast Masters Extra:
            

            Participants were
invited to deflate the AFI's Greatest
Legends List of movie stars by devising a brief plot summary of a movie in
which any equally ranked pair--for instance Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford
are both rated No. 10--should have co-starred.

            

               No. 7 It Happened Every Night for a Week --Velvet (Elizabeth
Taylor) runs away from jealous father and must accept the help of a horse named
Pie (Clark Gable), really an out-of-work reporter looking for a big story.
Either Velvet trains him for the Grand National, or he'll tell Velvet's
father.-- Eric Nelson
               

               No. 8 White Sheet --A self-taught nightrider (James Cagney)
seeks increased stature by literally dancing on the shoulders of his Jewish
landlady (Judy Garland). Highlight is a musical number set in the tenement
basement where Cagney dances and screams, "Top of the girl, Ma!"-- Steven Davis
               

               No. 10 Modern Mommies --A bitter, alcoholic mother (Joan
Crawford) abuses her lovable scamp of a son (Charlie Chaplin) by trapping him
in comical machinery. --Justin Warner
               

               No. 13 The Gowns of Navarone --Marine Sgt. Buck Skidmore (John
Wayne) falls in love with a glamorous female general (Grace Kelly).-- Neal Pollack ( Matt
Sullivan had a similar submission.)

               No. 16 Citizen Scarlett --After Rhett (Orson Welles) dumps her,
Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) decides to run for president. Wealthy media baron and
Dick Morris-like campaign manager John Beresford Tipton (Welles) advises her to
change her name to Liddy. (Remade several years later as A Touch of Tara , with Chris Farley and Mary Elizabeth
Mastrantonio as the leads.) --Juris Odins
(similarly, Chuck Lawhorn )

               No. 18 Love Child --There is sure to be controversy as the
revisions of Lolita continue. Pederasty is just
a different form of love in this version of Lolita , starring James Dean and Shirley
Temple. --Charles Star
               

               No. 18: Rebel Without a Lollipop --Confused, rebellious teen
(James Dean) receives life lesson from poor orphan girl (Shirley Temple); the
teen's later, tragic death inspires girl to life in foreign service.-- Al Petroksy (similarly, Jordan Kroop , Doug Mose ,
and Francis Heaney )

               No. 20 The Luckiest Jews in the World --Three sisters (Rita
Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, and Sophia Loren) who have never before laid eyes on a
man, stumble upon a troupe of vaudeville performers (the Marx Brothers) after
escaping from a convent in Switzerland.-- Neal
Pollack
               

               No. 21 El General --During the Spanish Civil War, a dedicated
engineer (Buster Keaton) keeps his train running despite the distractions of
his gorgeous assistant (Sophia Loren). Great physical comedy when Sophia
mistakenly assumes Buster is dead and tries to tie him to the cowcatcher to
inspire the troops (well, it's funny if you've ever seen El Cid , which you probably haven't if you're like most
people).-- Cindy and Eleanor ("Proud To Be From
Eastern Kansas, Birthplace of Buster Keaton") Rivera
               

            

            
               New Ongoing
Extra--Andrew Silow-Carroll's News Roundelay
            

            Devise a trinity of
people or phenomena that trump one another rock-paper-scissors style. Example:
Rudy Giuliani, Tina Brown, Hillary Clinton (Rudy cancels Tina's party, Tina
trashes Hillary in magazine, Hillary beats Rudy in Senate election); or NATO,
Slobodan Milosevic, Albanian refugees (NATO planes crush Milosevic, Milosevic
drives out refugees, refugees give NATO fits). Replies due by Thursday
morning.

            
               Charles Star's
Vaguely Pornographic Headline Haiku
            

            Police at Orphanage

            Waits for Motions

            With Snake Oil

            Making it Harder

            
               New York Times ,
June 25, 1999

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The Microsoft trial.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Gross Conduct

            
               
Movies
            

            

               
                  American Pie
                (Universal Pictures). Mixed reviews but a
boffo box-office turnout for this teen sex comedy about four high-school
seniors determined to lose their virginity. Critics take one of two positions.
1) The gross-out scenes (one youth shtups an apple pie; another drinks
a beer laced with semen) are just "sucker bait to entice teenage audiences into
the tent to see a movie that is as sweet and sincere at heart as anything
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland ever experienced" (Kenneth Turan, the Los
Angeles Times ). 2) Grossness is the film's essence: "[D]irty jokes are
inserted at regular intervals like pop songs to perk up the action ... an
upper-middle-class Porky's , American Pie is unable to transcend
its own dirty mind. Among this year's bumper crop of teenage movies, it is the
shallowest and most prurient" (Stephen Holden, the New York Times ). The
most positive take comes from the Washington Post 's Michael O'Sullivan,
who writes that it's a "warped, hysterical and--believe it or not--sweet little
gem of a movie." (Click to read David Edelstein's review in

                  Slate
                and here to see the
trailer that includes footage of the teen-pastry union.)

            

               
                  Arlington Road
                (Sony Screen Gems). Most critics are
unimpressed by this thriller starring Jeff Bridges as a professor who becomes
convinced that his new neighbor, played by Tim Robbins, is a domestic
terrorist. Roger Ebert (the Chicago Sun-Times ) speaks for most critics
when he complains that the film "begins well and makes good points, but it
flies off the rails in the last 30 minutes. The climax is so implausible we
stop caring and start scratching our heads." The New York Times ' Janet
Maslin departs from the pack, calling the film a "crackerjack thriller ... well
paced and cleverly constructed." (Click here to watch the trailer.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  True at First Light
               , by Ernest Hemingway, edited by
Patrick Hemingway (Scribner). Critics heap scorn on this edited version of an
unfinished "fictional memoir" left behind by Hemingway and crucify the writer's
children for their now routine desecration of their father's reputation (see
the line of furniture, eyeglasses, and shotguns licensed by Hemingway Ltd.).
The prose in this "literary violation" reads "like a parody of Hemingway"
(Deirdre Donahue, USA Today ). It "reflects a marvelous writer's
disastrous loss of talent" (Kenneth S. Lynn, National Review ); a "sad,
bloated, inert so-called book" (L.S. Klepp, Entertainment Weekly ). The
New York Times ' Michiko Kakutani, after opening her review with an
embarrassing parody of Hemingway's style, writes that "his angular language has
turned maudlin and flabby." The most positive review comes from James Wood in
the Times Book Review : "The famous style occasionally flares into
fineness ... the book is never quite uninteresting." (Click to find out about
the legality of publishing a dead person's unfinished work, here to read the first chapter of this book, and here to check out the New York Times ' special on Hemingway
including photos, interviews, and essays.)

            

               
                  The Metaphysical Touch
               , by Sylvia Brownrigg (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux). Positive reviews for this philosophical novel about an
e-mail romance. Although the plot seems ripped from You've Got Mail , the
novel is far more sophisticated in its execution--a Milan Kundera-like inquiry
into ontology, the uniqueness of e-mail communication, and human existence in
general. Brownrigg's forte is her ability to emulate the "curiously banal,
clever-clever, quasi-poetic style that seems to afflict so many inhabitants of
cyberspace" (Geoff Nicholson, the New York Times Book Review ) in the
many epistolary sections of the book, and she "wonderfully captures the ghostly
dance of presence and absence that can characterize digital relationships"
(Erik Davis, the Voice Literary Supplement ). (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               
                  A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of
America's Last Years in Vietnam
               , by Lewis Sorley (Harcourt Brace).
A retired CIA official and Army officer, Sorley posits a new theory on the
Vietnam War: The United States won, but the military victory was immediately
undercut by diplomatic backtracking and congressional cowardice. The New
York Times Book Review assigned Jeffrey Record to review the book, which
seems an odd choice considering that Record just published a book titled The
Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam . Record predictably refutes Sorley's
thesis ("How does one explain Saigon's fall when, according to Sorley, we had
won the war by late 1971?"), but he concedes that "A Better War is a
comprehensive and long-overdue examination of the immediate post-Tet offensive
years, perhaps the most fascinating years of the war." Other reviewers praise
Sorley's research and writing: "A first-rate challenge to the conventional
wisdom about American military performance in Vietnam" ( Publishers
Weekly ). (Click here to buy the book.)

            

               
                  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
               , by J. K.
Rowling (Scholastic Trade). The third installment in the British children's
series went on sale in England last Thursday, resulting in after-school
stampedes on bookstores. Although not available in America for another two
months, advance orders have already placed Prisoner of Azkaban at No. 6
on the Amazon best-seller list--and positions one and two are held by the other
Harry Potter titles. (The New York Times list has the two available
Potter books at positions three and four.) The subject of the new volume is the
same as the rest of the series: the life of young wizard Harry Potter, who
attends a boarding school for sorcerers. The critics call this one the best
Potter adventure yet: It "blends the banal and the fantastic, the everyday and
the magical, all with a devilish humour and a timeless sense of style.
Spellbinding, enchanting, bewitching stuff" (Paul Davies, the Daily

               Mirror ). A few gripe that the series is just a formula boys'
boarding-school adventure story gussied up with magical trappings (see last
week's discussion in 
                  Slate
               's ), but young readers don't
seem to care: According to Bloomsbury, the book's U.K. publisher,
Azkaban broke an opening-day sales record--16,853 copies in the first
100 minutes on sale. (Click here to order an advance copy.)

            

               Music
            

            
               
                  Friendly
Fire
               , by Joe Lovano and Greg Osby (Blue Note Records). Excellent
reviews for the collaboration between two of the '90s' most acclaimed jazz
saxophonists. "The telepathy flows on this much-awaited meeting. ... Both men
are noted risk-takers and cutting-edge improvisers whose penchant for the
maniacal makes them ideal partners" (Karl Stark, the Philadelphia
Inquirer ). Gene Seymour writes in Newsday that "there's a sense of
play between the two that's almost kinda sweet. Both are assertive. Neither
gets in the other's way." The only sour note comes from Don Heckman in the
Los Angeles Times , who objects not to the music so much as to the
structure: "[T]he basic jam session format ... simply fails to sustain interest
for the entire album." (Click here to find out more about Lovano and here to find out
more about Osby.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            R-E-$-P-E-&cent;-T

            Once
the terms of Russia's involvement in the Kosovo peacekeeping force had been
agreed Monday, the Russian press started to worry about the financial effects
of the country's participation. Segodnya pointed out that the
3,600-strong Russian presence in Kosovo--along with its 1,200-member contingent
in Bosnia--will cost about $500 million per year--for which "there is no money"
in the 1999 budget. (The paper also noted that the Kosovo mobilization will
leave the Chechen war in the hands of "untrained drafted soldiers with broken
weapons.") The "respect" shown to Russia at the weekend's G-7 summit could also
prove costly. Izvestiya said
that "the G-7 leaders only pretended that everything was OK in Russia's
economy. ... One thing is to write off a poor country's debts and quite
another--to write off the debts of a member of the club of elite states."

            
Regarding the G-7's decision to write off much Third World debt, as long as the
money is redirected to social programs such as health, poverty reduction, and
AIDS education, the Nation of Pakistan said, "[E]conomic good conduct
that requires tightening of belts and good governance is something that the
Third World was badly in need of. The fact that Russia has been denied any
further debt relief until it has implemented the necessary reforms should be
enough to convince the Third World debt relief seekers that the G8 means
business." The Economic Times of India struck a contrary note,
however, when it pointed out, "[A]s with all loan write-offs, the move is
unfair to those nations that have repaid their loans."

            With
less than one week to go before British Prime Minister Tony Blair's "firm" June
30 deadline for a breakthrough on last year's stalled "Good Friday Agreement"
on Northern Ireland power-sharing, newspapers in Britain and Ireland are
showing concern. Since the Irish Republican Army refuses to decommission its
weapons before representatives of Sinn Fein, its political wing, are seated in
the new Northern Ireland executive, and since the Unionist leader refuses to
call the assembly to order before the IRA gives up at least some of its arms,
the current stalemate seems fairly intractable.

            
Ireland's Sunday
Business Post
                called for the British prime minister to apply his
Kosovo spirit to Northern Ireland, saying, "[I]t's time for Blair to assert his
position and power to effect change, demonstrated so clearly in the Balkans in
recent weeks." Britain's Independent took a similar tack, observing, "The situation is far from precisely parallel, but it
is still a chastening thought that the Kosovo Liberation Army is, under
conditions of vastly greater duress, handing in its guns at a rather faster
rate than the Provisional IRA seems able to arrange." An op-ed in Wednesday's
Turkish Daily
News suggested that this might not be such a good thing, however. The
piece drew on the experience of Cyprus in the 1950s (or, at least, one rather
skewed view of that experience) to argue against the disarmament of the KLA. "A
time will come," the authors argued, "when the people of Kosovo will have to be
protected from new attacks and atrocities of the Serbians. At that point, NATO
forces will not be able to provide this protection."

            Back
in Kosovo, the Guardian of London reported Wednesday that returning ethnic
Albanians are targeting gypsies for reprisals. The story says that the gypsies
are perceived to have "sided with the Serbs during the war and the 10 years of
repressive direct rule which preceded it." Meanwhile, gypsies trying to leave
Kosovo are being turned back by Serb officials. A "clear sign," according to
the Guardian , "that despite his defeat, President Slobodan Milosevic is
still trying to ethnically engineer the future of the devastated province." The
"justice minister" of the KLA told the paper, "This is a tragic turn of events.
The gypsies were always the most oppressed members of the community, but they
have been manipulated for so long by Belgrade that it has destroyed much of the
feeling of social solidarity between them and Albanians."

            An editorial in Thursday's
Japan Times
speculates that "pique seems to have figured prominently" in the selection this
weekend of Turin, Italy, as the site of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. The
paper reports that after scandals surrounding Olympic venue selections, the
procedure was reformed so that International Olympic Committee members are
prohibited from visiting potential locations. Instead, a 15-member selection
panel narrows the field of possible venues to two final contenders, with the
final selection being made by the IOC. For the 2006 games, Sion, Switzerland,
was the "clear favorite" of the two finalists, offering good venues, a "strong
tradition of winter sports," and "the political and economic security that the
Olympic Games need." However, according to the Japan Times , "the
grandees of the IOC resent being given a fait accompli and voted against the
recommendation to remind the world just who makes the final choice." Another
"ugly" motive was anger at the Swiss, the paper claims, since Swiss IOC member
Marc Hodler was largely responsible for exposing the IOC corruption. The
article concludes, "Even the mere perception of bias or unfairness undermines
the Olympic ideal. The only question is how far the movement must go to rid
itself of the taint it has acquired. Clearly, it [ha]s not yet gone far
enough."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Double <EM>Dutch</EM></SPAN>

            
               
                  New
Republic , Nov. 15
            

            An
article traces the similarities between Edmund Morris'
Dutch and a 1994 short story by Daniel Voll. In both works, a drowning
narrator is saved by lifeguard Ronald Reagan. Both narrators eroticize Reagan
and reveal their secret debt to him on the final page. … The cover book review scoffs at the misplaced sympathy for
men in Susan Faludi's Stiffed . Faludi's poorly written tome ignores "the
resurgence of male bravado," which is evident in the candidacy of Donald Trump
and the popularity of Howard Stern. Her assertion that women have the upper
hand in the porn industry is laughable.

            

               
                  Economist, Oct. 30
            

            The
cover story says that corporate boards are firing CEOs
more often than they used to. Institutional investors insist upon sacking
nonperforming bosses, and board members fear that lackluster leadership will
damage their own reputations. … An editorial warns that the bombardment of Chechnya could
ignite a war in the Caucasus. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia are convulsed by
internal political turmoil. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe should press Russia to cease fire and grant Chechnya autonomy. …
An article tells what movies are popular in which
countries. Japan and Mexico dig thrillers. The United States, Sweden, Germany,
and South Africa crave romances.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , Oct. 31
            

            The
cover story investigates the quest for justice by the survivors of school
shootings. The parents of Columbine victim Isaiah Shoels are suing the killers'
families for $250 million. The Shoelses have no sympathy for the perpetrators'
parents because, as Isaiah's father says: "Who else do we blame? I taught my
son right from wrong. My son wasn't shooting people up." Parents of West
Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark., victims are also suing killers' parents.
… A writer takes consumer advocate Ralph Nader for a spin in the
$135,000, 3-ton Mercedes-Benz Gelaendewagen. Nader says the SUV is for
"knuckleheads." Arnold Schwarzenegger owns two of them. (For more on overgrown
cars, see 
                  Slate
               's for the Godzilla SUV.)

            
               
                  Time ,
Nov. 1
            

            The
cover story gives a mixed review to low-carbohydrate diets,
the latest weight-loss trend (Atkins, Sugar Busters, and Carb Addicts are the
best-known diets). Eating lots of fatty meat and few carbs forces the body to
meet its energy needs by burning fat. Many dieters have lost weight, but
doctors warn that low-carb, high-fat diets cause dehydration, constipation,
heart disease, and bad breath. ... In an interview Al Gore claims that Bill Bradley's health-care plan
would eliminate Medicare, drive up insurance premiums for federal employees,
and fail in its aim to insure all kids.

            
               
                  Newsweek,
Nov. 1
            

            The
cover story examines how the biblical story of the
Apocalypse catalyzed important historical events. The Crusades were launched to
prepare for the Revelation; the Reformation was inspired by Martin Luther's
identification of the papacy with the Antichrist; and Christian fundamentalists
support Zionism because they believe that Christ will return to earth only when
the Jews return to Israel. ... A related article reveals that 18 percent of Americans
expect the world to end during their lifetime. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay
has a plaque in his office that reads, "This could be the day." ... A
column questions the value of an Ivy League education.
Research indicates that after adjusting for SAT scores, parents' income, and
race, graduates of elite universities do not earn more than other college
grads.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report , Nov. 1
            

            The
cover story says 17 million workers are expected to change
jobs this year, 6 million more than five years ago. The piece attributes the
record job-jumping rates to the overheated economy and the ease of finding work
online. ... An article contrasts the "lost years" of George W. Bush and Al
Gore. Bush supported the war in Vietnam but signed up for the National Guard.
Gore opposed the war but enlisted in the Army. After his service, Bush lived
off his savings, lounged around a singles apartment complex, and drank to
excess. Gore, by contrast, smoked pot, worked construction, attended divinity
school, and muckraked at a Tennessee newspaper.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker, Nov. 1
            

            An
article condemns the Department of Justice's handling of the Waco controversy.
Justice fueled conspiracy theories by limiting access to Waco evidence and
stubbornly denying embarrassing facts. The FBI continues to deny it fired at
the Branch Davidians, despite videotapes that appear to show gunshots.
... In a column that stops just short of endorsement, Joe Klein admires
Bill Bradley's ability to disarm crowds and praises the candidate's
authenticity and "amiable cleverness." Al Gore is portrayed as "severely
synthetic." (For a different perspective, read 
                  Slate
               's ".")
... "Talk of the Town" drafts George W. Bush's inaugural address: "It is
time that we recognize that we are all Americanians, whether we be Caucastic,
Africanoodian, Asiadontic, or Hispanicky."

            
               
                  The
Nation , Nov. 8
            

            The
cover story draws parallels between the rejection of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the impeachment crisis. Both issues were
driven by right-wing Republicans over the opposition of the American people.
Republicans are turning their backs on arms control because of the mistaken
belief that a pumped-up American military can unilaterally guarantee
international stability. ... An article calls George W. Bush "Big Tobacco's Best Friend." His
political guru, Karl Rove, worked for Philip Morris while advising Bush on tort
reform, one of the industry's top priorities. Bush, who backs tobacco price
supports, has already accepted about $300,000 from pro-tobacco donors.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , Nov. 1
            

            The
cover story welcomes the defeat of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty. Arms control is an illusion. The strength of America's
military and nuclear arsenal ensures global stability, treaties can't.


            
               
                  Business
Week , Nov. 1
            

            The
cover story examines the revival of religion in the workplace. There are 10,000
workplace prayer groups, and the Dalai Lama's Ethics for the New
Millennium is a business best seller. Marketplace Ministries provides
workplace chaplains to firms such as Taco Bell franchises, which welcome
religion in the kitchen because studies show that spiritual programs increase
productivity and reduce turnover. ... An article explains why businesses
are not opposing a proposed minimum-wage hike. Republicans decided that passage
was inevitable and resisting a hike might hurt them in the next election. To
make the bill palatable, the House leadership loaded it with tax breaks,
including increased deductions for business meals.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Of Dictators, Benevolent and Otherwise

            Ehud
Barak, who took office Tuesday as Israel's new prime minister, was heralded
Wednesday in the Jerusalem
Post as the country's most powerful leader since the old days of Labor
Party dominance, which ended two decades ago. Barak has "artfully protected his
freedom of movement," the paper said in an editorial.
"He has built a government that cannot be brought down by any single party,
surrounded himself with a deliberately weak cabinet, and left outside his
government a demoralized and confused opposition of less than a third of the
Knesset. In short, the newly launched Barak era has the makings of the
democratic version of a benevolent dictatorship." Ha'aretz , which led
its front page Wednesday with a report
that Barak is planning to seek détente with Israel's "enemy number one," Iran,
against strong objections by his own military intelligence, also pointed out in
its Wednesday editorial that Barak has "achieved his fundamental goal--a
government unthreatened by a sword of Damocles over its head." It said that the
hopes and expectations of "the entire public" are with him.

            
Abroad, the Times of London said Barak's overtures toward Israel's
neighbors will be "widely welcomed" but warned that he needs to get a move on.
Although he now enjoys "a formidable amount of individual political authority,"
it is unlikely that he will "be able to retain such power on a permanent
basis," the paper said in an editorial. "It will not be long before the Labour
Party starts to resent its semi-detached leader, before secular and religious
parties find cause to conspire against each other within the Cabinet, and
before the voters demand immediate action on other domestic issues." A comment piece in the Independent of London Wednesday said that Barak has
come to power "with the immense advantage of succeeding Benjamin Netanyahu,
who, in three years, became the most widely detested Israeli leader at home and
abroad since the formation of the state. Mr Netanyahu is now expected to
disappear, unlamented in Israel, on to the American lecture tour circuit,
though there are no signs of anybody offering the $60,000 he is asking for a
single speech."

            In
Paris, Le Figaro ,
which led its front page with Barak's advocacy of a "peace of the brave"
between Israel and its Arab neighbors, published an interview Wednesday with
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who described Barak as a "promising" prime
minister who will "probably adopt the same line as [assassinated Prime Minister
Yitzhak] Rabin." Mubarak also said he hopes to arrange an Arab summit
meeting--the first since 1996--in the autumn, with the inclusion of Iraq "at a
level of participation still to be determined." Asked why Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic caved in to American military pressure while President
Saddam Hussein of Iraq has not, Mubarak replied, "One lives in Europe, the
other in the Middle East." In Italy, Corriere della
Sera of Milan published an interview with Rabin's widow, Leah, who
warmly praised Barak as a brilliant man who will push the peace process forward
and finish the work her husband did until his murder in November 1995. Barak
will create a completely different climate from that of the past three years,
during which Netanyahu "continually went back on his word with the Arabs and
nurtured the culture of distrust," she said.

            In
Russia Tuesday, Izvestiya published a rare interview with President Boris
Yeltsin in which he said he will retire next year when his current term of
office ends and hand over power to a successor elected by the people. While
this disclosure failed to excite those observers who think that the main issue
is whether Yeltsin will live to see out his term, it was described in the
Moscow Times
as "noteworthy" in view of the speculation that has been going on in the
Russian media for years that he will never voluntarily give up power. The
president told Izvestiya that he has a successor in mind but will not
identify him because "as soon as I name him, he won't be let live calmly, he
will be henpecked." But he warned against this person being regarded as "a
successor to the throne," since the next head of state will be chosen not by
Yeltsin, but by the Russian people.

            
Yeltsin also confirmed that the body of Lenin will eventually be removed from
the mausoleum in Red Square and buried in an ordinary grave (a story taken up
Wednesday on the front page of Germany's Die Welt ). "The question is when," he said. "The
problem is a serious one. Lenin in his mausoleum is an historical symbol of our
past, but I agree with Alexiy II, patriarch of all Russia, when he says that it
isn't Christian-like behavior to keep the body of a long-dead person on public
display."

            The
Times of London led its front page Wednesday with the jailing in Serbia
of a TV technician who sparked the biggest anti-Milosevic demonstration since
the Kosovo war by breaking into a broadcast of a basketball championship match
to urge viewers to take to the streets. The demonstration by around 30,000
people in the town of Leskovac was one of several across Serbia Monday. The
tabloid Daily Express reported Tuesday that attempts to secure asylum
for Milosevic in Libya, South Africa, Russia, or China have all come to
nothing.

            Most
British papers also reported a speech in the House of Lords Tuesday in which
former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that Britain's treatment of the
former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet has left her country's
"reputation for loyalty and fair dealing in tatters." She said that his arrest
while under sedation in a London hospital was "inhumane" and "unlawful," and
that while Chileans have so far responded to it "with great restraint," it
should not be assumed that they will continue to do so, "particularly if Sen.
Pinochet, who is not in the best of health, were to die in Britain." In an
editorial, the conservative Daily Telegraph agreed with
Thatcher that Tony Blair's government was doing Britain unnecessary harm
"merely to enable the vengeful pack in pursuit of Pinochet to settle their
scores."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Ayatollahed You So

            
Security forces quelled student protests in Iran. Young people in 18 cities had
staged protests, thrown stones, and set police vehicles on fire. Pro-government
conservatives rallied right back. "" compares the uprising to civil war and the
fall of the Iron Curtain, but the Iranian newspaper Neshat argues that
revolution is "neither possible nor desirable."

            

               Peace talks broke down in Northern Ireland. Protestant unionists
rejected a plan to implement last year's peace accord on the grounds that the
plan requires sharing power with the political wing of the still-armed Irish
Republican Army. describes the clamor for negotiators to return the Nobel Peace
Prize they won last year. The BBC reports that the post-breakdown finger-pointing is drowning out both sides' weary vows to continue the process.

            

               Ehud Barak pledged to renew the peace process. President Clinton said he
looked forward to Barak's first U.S. visit like "a kid with a new toy," but CNN
predicted that Clinton would refrain
from pressuring Barak into immediate action. At his first official
meeting with Yasser Arafat, Barak promised to implement former Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's still-unrealized diplomatic agreements, while
Arafat repeated calls to curb West Bank settlements. Both meetings were deemed
key steps toward rebuilding relationships Netanyahu had soured. Click to read

                  Slate 's David Plotz puncture the Barak euphoria.

            

               Taiwan asserted its autonomy from China. The island abandoned its "one
China" policy, which implied China's sovereignty over and eventual
reunification with Taiwan. "Don't underestimate the Chinese government's firm
determination to uphold national sovereignty, dignity, and territorial
integrity," warned the Chinese Foreign Ministry in response. The Wall
Street Journal says the move "alarmed even Taiwan's friends," including
the United States, which quickly affirmed the one China policy. But Hong Kong's
South China Morning Post 
               reports that the Taiwanese are ready to call what they
think is China's bluff.

            

               Pakistan and India will end their standoff in Kashmir. Pakistani-backed
Islamic militants withdrew from their Himalayan stronghold after weekend talks
between Indian and Pakistani officials. One Islamic military group still
refuses to budge. The Pakistanis spun their pullback as a mutual cease-fire,
but as "" notes, India bragged of "a total military rout." The rest of the
world sighed with relief at what the New York Times 
               called "an end to the latest confrontation between the
world's newest nuclear powers." A Washington Post editorial credits
President Clinton with quietly brokering the deal but warns that America may
now be drawn into the conflict.

            

               Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic will try to oust Slobodan
Milosevic. The hitherto-silent Draskovic called for "massive rallies"
to topple the regime. The Washington Post 
               cautions that the effort may be sabotaged by a
crackdown from Milosevic or by internecine quarrelling among opposition
leaders.

            

               Rafael Resendez-Ramirez surrendered. The Mexican national who
topped the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and is suspected of killings in three
states turned himself in under a plan brokered by his sister. He had been
apprehended in June by INS agents for trying to enter the U.S. illegally, but
had then been released, allegedly because the agents had no information on his
record or his warrants.

            

               
                  The Senate passed compromise patients' rights
legislation.
                Republicans defeated a plan to let patients sue
their HMOs but approved more access to emergency care and specialists.
Democrats protested that the reforms would apply to fewer than one-third of the
161 million Americans with private insurance. The Washington Post awards
the GOP "a clean win on an issue of prime importance to the
American public" but foresees an election-time brawl. "Today we saw what
'compassionate conservativism' pretends to be," harrumphed Sen. Barbara
Mikulski, D-Md. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asserts that
managed care has bought Republican votes and that patients will die as a
result.

            

               George W. Bush will forgo federal matching campaign funds. He explained
that being unconstrained by spending limits will give him "strategic
flexibility." "There's a chance I'll be running against somebody who will be
able to jump in a government airplane and travel the country making promises,"
he said.

            

               Rep. John Kasich dropped his presidential bid. He endorsed
George W. Bush. USA Today 's Walter Shapiro eulogized
Kasich as "one of the most refreshingly outspoken figures in his party" and
concluded that "another voice in the struggle to define the party's agenda is
stilled." Other analyses agreed that Kasich was intimidated by Bush's haul of
money and endorsements, and wondered who might drop out next.

            

               Sen. Bob Smith quit the GOP and will run for president as an
independent. He castigated Republicans for going soft on gun control
and abortion. The Washington Post says that Republicans will encourage unity by allowing Smith to retain his
committee chairmanship and caucus membership. But Pat Buchanan opined on
Face the Nation that "the Republican establishment is doing its best
right now to almost force a fracture in the GOP."

            

               Republicans unveiled rival tax-cut plans. Senate Finance Committee
Chairman William Roth, R-Del., suggested slicing taxes by $792 billion over 10
years, while House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas,
floated a $850 billion reduction. The White House called the cuts "a huge risk
for the country," and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., called the Archer proposal
"a Christmas tree that's supposed to appeal to every Republican." In the
Washington Post , Archer accuses Democrats of supporting "big government 
                  on 
                  autopilot
               " and
argues that the cuts epitomize compassionate conservatism. But deficit-hawk
ex-Sens. Sam Nunn and Warren Rudman assert in the same pages that the surplus
should be used to pay down the deficit .

            

               The Vatican barred an American priest and nun from ministering to
gays. The decree accused Sister Jeannine Gramick and Rev. Robert
Nugent of an "erroneous and dangerous" failure to affirm the "intrinsic evil of
homosexual acts." The Washington Post reports that the decree
"effectively ends the careers of two of the most
prominent gay rights advocates within the Catholic Church."

            
               A
jury ordered General Motors to pay $4.9 billion to six victims burned by an
exploded Chevrolet fuel tank. It is one of the largest product liability
awards ever. The plaintiffs' lawyers had produced documents demonstrating that
GM execs resisted fireproofing fuel systems because it would cost an extra
$8.59 per vehicle. GM's lawyers, who had fought to conceal the memos, called
the argument "absurd." The Los Angeles Times clucks that "public trust
in product liability cases tried by juries might well be going down the drain
with these excessive awards ."

            

               Florida charged an airplane maintenance firm with murder in the Valujet
crash. The indictment blamed the deaths of the plane's 110 passengers
on the company's negligence. This is the first time criminal charges have been
brought over an accidental airplane crash in the United States.

            
               An
inexpensive drug will help prevent AIDS transmission from mothers to
children. Health advocates at the National Institutes of Health , which sponsored the trial,
predicted that the inexpensive medicine, Nevirapine, will curb infection rates
in poor countries.

            
               The
NAACP is planning to sue the gun and TV industries. The group will file
suits
against handgun makers, importers, and distributors to force gun companies
to market their products more carefully. It may also sue TV networks for
failing to depict minority characters in their shows. NAACP President Kweisi
Mfume told the Los Angeles Times that the networks are violating the
1934 Federal Communications Act , which specifies that the
airwaves belong to the public.

            
               The
U.S. Air Force dropped medical supplies to a South Pole researcher who found a
lump in her breast. Weather conditions will delay her evacuation until at
least October.

            

               Carnival Cruise Lines disclosed rape charges against its staff. Crew
members have been accused of sexual assault 62 times in a five-year span ending
last summer. The admission was ordered by a judge presiding over a lawsuit by a
former employee alleging that the company tried to cover up her rape.

            

               Apple's quarterly profits doubled. Its stock subsequently jumped to an
all-time peak. Formerly skeptical analysts raved about the popular iMacs and
predicted more good news with next week's introduction of iMac laptops.

            
               The
United States defeated China for the Women's World Cup soccer title. The
game was scoreless and ended in a penalty shootout. More celebrated was the
90,000-strong crowd, the largest ever for a women's sporting event. Former Sen.
Patricia Schroeder exults in the Los Angeles Times that the team "buries
some of the Barbie doll influence ," and Newsweek 's jubilant cover
story shouts that the team is "taking women's sports to the next level ," but New

               York 
               Times columnist George Vecsey wonders whether the
momentum to build a professional league can be
sustained. 
                  Slate
               's William Saletan explains the feminist
implications of .

            

               Jesse "The Body" Ventura will return to the wrestling ring. He will be a
referee at the World Wrestling Federation's Aug. 22 "SummerSlam" event. "It's
business that is separate from his gubernatorial duties," said an aide.

            
               The
Beatles will play their first concert in 30 years. Paul McCartney, Ringo
Starr, and George Harrison will commemorate the rerelease of the film Yellow
Submarine by playing a concert on a yellow submarine while floating down a
river in Liverpool.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Chinese Love-In

            Many
papers around the world led Wednesday with the thousands dead in the Taiwan
earthquake, and in London the Financial Times began to examine the quake's possible
economic effects. It quoted one financial analyst as saying that while
Taiwanese domestic consumption will tumble at first, within four months, fiscal
spending will make the net effect on the economy "hugely positive." But the
FT said that the earthquake might disrupt supplies of computer chips to
the world market. Taiwan produces 12 percent of the world's D-RAM chips, and
the earthquake is expected to interrupt production for several weeks, the paper
said.

            In
Beijing, China
Daily led with an offer of assistance to Taiwan by President Jiang
Zemin, who said "the Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits are as
inseparable as flesh and blood." This remark may have rankled Taiwanese
President Lee Teng-hui, who recently stirred things up by emphasizing his
country's separateness from China. But the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong welcomed
Beijing's change of tone from belligerence toward Taiwan to talk of blood ties.
"How sad that it can take tragedy to make people recognise a common bond," it
said in an editorial. "Beneath the rhetoric, there is one nation. If
Beijing's offer of help can cool things down, then even amid such devastation
Taiwan can expect calmer and happier days in the future." According to
Le Figaro of
Paris, however, People's Daily , the official organ of the Chinese
Communist Party, accused President Lee Tuesday of causing the earthquake with
his separatist statements.

            In
Australia, whose army is heading the peacekeeping force in East Timor, the
Sydney Morning
Herald led Wednesday on the discovery by Australian troops of the
tortured bodies of 30 people in a well behind the home in Dili of the East
Timorese independence leader Manuel Carrascalao. On top of the stack of
battered bodies was one of a woman who had been decapitated. The troops found
dried blood and meat hooks in a nearby garden, and locals claimed the victims
had been hung from the hooks before being dumped in the well, the paper said.
It said Carrascalao's house is only yards from the base of the Aitarak
pro-Indonesia militia group whose leader Eurico Guterres in May ordered his men
to go to war with the Carrascalao family. That same day, 100 of Guterres' men
stormed Carrascalao's house and killed 12 people, including his 18-year-old
son.

            The
Sydney Morning Herald also prominently reported the murder, allegedly by Indonesian soldiers, of
30-year-old Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes, who was the correspondent in
Jakarta for the Financial Times of London and the Dutch weekly Vrij
Nederland and who also wrote occasionally for the Christian Science
Monitor . He was riding on the back of a motorcycle through the deserted
Dili suburb of Becora when, according to his driver, who survived, six men in
Indonesian army uniforms opened fire. Later Thoenes was found lying face down
behind a gutted Becora house, "his notebook lying just in front, his body
battered and apparently mutilated." SMH correspondent Lindsay Murdoch
said the killers cut off one of his ears "and took it away as some sort of
bizarre souvenir." Thoenes had arrived in East Timor only hours before he was
attacked.

            Still
reporting from Dili, the SMH 's Murdoch said that East Timor might face a
new wave of violence because of the collapse of Indonesia's military command
structure. Hundreds of Indonesian troops due to leave soon are already
vandalizing buildings and loading furniture, food, and other goods onto trucks
and ships bound for West Timor. He quoted Maj. S. Ahmed of the Indonesian army
as saying on the eve of his 1,000 soldiers' departure, "You just wait ... all
hell will break loose." Murdoch also reported that the Australian military have
received strong indications that Maj. Gen. Kiki Syahnakri, the Indonesian
commander in East Timor, will not be able to stop last-minute revenge attacks
by members of his forces.

            In
Israel, Ha'aretz criticized Prime Minister Ehud Barak for declining
an invitation to address the German Bundestag during his visit to Berlin, the
first by a foreign leader since the city regained its position as capital of a
united Germany. It said a speech by Barak from the podium of the renovated
Reichstag building, where the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed, would have
been "an opportunity to talk about the greatest of horrors, to commemorate the
victims and to celebrate the victory of the rebirth of the Jewish people." It
said, "A speech of this type, had it been made, could have been a direct and
frank appeal to those Germans who wish to confront their past and to Israelis
who wish to preserve it in the annals of human history." In an interview with Le Monde of Paris Wednesday, Barak reiterated his
determination to achieve a Middle East peace settlement, but not at any price.
Jerusalem "will remain unified as the eternal capital of Israel," he said. In
an editorial, Le Monde lauded him as the first Israeli leader
to envisage the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel "without
either weakness or fright."

            In an
interview with Le
Figaro , Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky--the man known as the "Rasputin
of the Kremlin" because of his allegedly central role in all major political
maneuvers in Russia--denied that he has ever supported the Chechen warlords and
blamed them for the recent wave of terrorist bomb attacks. He also denied that
he is working for former presidential candidate Gen. Alexander Lebed to succeed
Boris Yeltsin. Berezovsky predicted that Yeltsin will see out his term until
the presidential election of June 2000, and that there is "a very small chance"
that Lebed might then succeed him. But the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets ,
which is anti-Yeltsin, reported a rumor that next week President Yeltsin is to
undergo a secret operation, which he may not survive. MK reporter
Alexander Khinstein speculated that, if Yeltsin dies under the knife, the group
of Kremlin insiders known as "the family," of which Berezovsky is the reputed
leader, "may not even make it on board the presidential airplane" to escape the
mobs demanding their blood.

            In
contrast to their attitude during her lifetime, Russian newspapers paid warm
tribute to Raisa Gorbachev after her death. Tuesday Izvestia likened her
to a star that flashed for a short time, but for long enough to change the
world--"our Soviet, gray, reinforced-concrete world." Moskovsky
Komsomolets said that her arrival on the Soviet political scene "had no
lesser impact on Russia than the fall of the Berlin Wall on the West." In the
business daily Kommersant , Alexander Yakovlev, a reformer close to
Mikhail Gorbachev, said, "Raisa Gorbachev turned out to be the first--and so
far the last--lady in our country." Yakovlev noted the rare closeness that
existed between Russia's former first couple. "They were always together, and
time did not exhaust their tenderness," he wrote. "I would not risk saying what
love is. It is something absolutely indefinable. But I can say about Mikhail
and Raisa Gorbachev: They had it."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Touched by a Tabloid

            Maybe it's a touch of premillennial fever or all
that post-Columbine soul-searching, but for whatever reason, the tabloids turn
their collective eyes toward heaven this month and find God. Even when the Big
Guy himself is not explicitly mentioned--and he's mentioned plenty--the current
crop of tabloid offerings brims with so many transcendent crises
(life-threatening illnesses, brushes with sudden death, ruminations on
mortality, profligate lives steered straight and narrow) that it feels like one
long episode of Touched by an Angel .

            The Globe , for starters, details not one but
two exorcisms underway this month: one performed on Burke Ramsey, the brother
of murdered child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, to "rid [him] of any remaining
memories" from the murder; and one on Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Lee's
exorcism has supposedly unearthed the "sweet little boy" inside him, spurring
ex-wife Pamela Anderson to run back into his tattooed arms--and, apparently,
into his bed. Pregnancy rumors abound, but only the Globe has a damning
photo of Anderson's abdomen, highlighted with a red circle to point out its
eyebrow-raising convexity.

            Talk show host Rosie
O'Donnell has also had spiritual matters on her mind of late. After 25 years as
a lapsed Catholic, the Enquirer reports, O'Donnell recently "took God
back into her heart." And, according to the Star , she is so terrified of
dying young that she has entered into a pact with perhaps the world's most
famous lapsed Catholic, Madonna, to make sure her children will be cared for.
Hoping to keep the Grim Reaper at bay, O'Donnell is also said to be assiduously
dieting and exercising.

            We heartily recommend that she do whatever it takes to stay
in the here and now, if only to avoid being included in the Enquirer 's
"Scandals of the Century" double issue, which devotes an entire section ("The
Quick and the Dead") to celebs cut down too soon. Unlike O'Donnell, actor River
Phoenix was apparently quite keen on the idea of checking out early. "I don't
want to die from old age in a nursing home," he reportedly told a friend. "I'll
be the best-looking guy in the morgue." It was surely in the interest of
proving the accuracy of this prediction, therefore, that the Enquirer
chose to run a post-mortem photo of the actor. And while Keeping Tabs finds it
inappropriate to quibble over the attractiveness of corpses, we will bestow
upon Phoenix our special nod for clarity in the face of eternity; it was he who
reportedly shouted, "I'm gonna die, dude!" on his way out.

            On the brighter side,
celebrities have saved--or tried to save--so many lives this month that we
wonder if anyone's getting any real work done in Hollywood. They've
revived an ailing dog ( ER 's Anthony Edwards), spent $700 nursing a
rabbit back to health (actress Gretchen Mol), spearheaded efforts to free an
inhumanely caged gorilla (Doris Day), and aided African elephants that suffer
from "Floppy Trunk Syndrome," a malady that keeps the poor beasts from eating
properly (Alicia Silverstone).

            Business has been no less brisk for human rescues. The
Enquirer details lifesaving efforts by Meryl Streep, Sylvester Stallone,
and Tom Cruise, among others. The re-Christianized Rosie O'Donnell is reported
to have made two daring rescues aboard her Jet Ski, says the Globe .
Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Kennedy's ex-wife, Joan, reportedly saved her own life by
calling a taxi in the middle of a mild heart attack. The Enquirer
suggests that "lonely" Joan was forced to make the call because she's been
"abandoned" by her ex-husband. The Globe , on the other hand, has the
good senator "rush[ing] right over" to be with his ex and thanking--you guessed
it--God that she was all right.

            One Globe
photographer's prayers must have been answered when he followed Brooke Shields
and new boyfriend Chris Henchy on what was supposed to be a simple exercise
outing. The "lensman was expecting to snap some fun photos of the couple
enjoying the spring day," the Globe explains breezily, as if the
photographer had actually been invited along for the trip. But Shields is on
emotional thin ice, having recently filed for divorce from her husband and
having lost a fellow Suddenly Susan cast member to suicide; and the
photographer was "stunned" when she suddenly began "sobbing uncontrollably."
Luckily for Globe readers, the quick-thinking paparazzo was not
so stunned that he couldn't get off several frames of the disconsolate actress.
Shields quickly pulled herself together, however, and she and Henchy headed for
a "trendy health-food store" to buy organic fruits and vegetables.

            While the Globe 's photographer failed to capture the
pair choosing hydroponic tomatoes, we feel fairly confident that they did not
buy any apples. The Star suggests that Shields' breakdown may be in part
attributable to the fact that the "stressed-out" actress is battling a
"crippling disease": temporal mandibular joint syndrome, or TMJ, which sounds a
bit like the aforementioned floppy trunk syndrome. With all due respect to TMJ
sufferers, Keeping Tabs can't help but note that Shields' symptoms, while no
doubt troublesome, seem to fall just a bit short of "crippling." "It got to the
point where I just couldn't open my mouth wide enough to eat an apple," Shields
is quoted as saying. "I had to get someone to 'start' my apples for me." Fear
not, apple eaters; the Star very thoughtfully reprints the address of
the TMJ Association's Web site.

            And finally, the tabloids try to account for the end
of soap star Susan Lucci's 18-time losing streak at the daytime Emmys. (The
Star asserts that she'll now quit All My Children for her own
talk show. But there's no word on whether she'll consider the path taken by
soap-stars-turned-preachers Susan and Bill Hayes, who according to the
Star have "traded in steamy scenes between the sheets" to "devote their
lives to the Lord.") The Enquirer offers this rather down-to-earth
explanation of Lucci's win, straight from an Emmy judge: She snagged the trophy
because she finally stopped submitting tapes with "overly dramatic"
performances and went with something subtler instead. (Less, apparently, is
more, even for a soap opera character who's been married to virtually everyone
on the show and once impersonated a nun.) The Globe , however, looks to
the Fates to explain her win, calling in two numerologists to mull over Lucci's
birth date, the cosmic significance of the year 1999, and the importance of the
number 19 in her life. Should we even feign surprise that she was 19 when she
"survived a devastating car accident"? Or that it was 19 years ago that Lucci's
son Andreas made it through a "touch-and-go" health scare? As far as the
numerologists are concerned, the other nominees shouldn't even have bothered to
show up on Emmy night. Numbers, shnumbers. Keeping Tabs is certain that Lucci's
win was, quite simply, the will of God.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 283: &quot;Storm Warnings&quot;

            
               The current issue
of a national magazine lists these warning signs: stain, unusual odor, the
sound of broken glass or plastic. What publication, what danger? (Question
courtesy of Jim O'Grady.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question (No.
282)--"It'll Take a Miracle":
            

            

               
                  An inquiry into Mother Teresa began in Calcutta, India, Monday, as
Pope John Paul II opted to fast-track her canonization, waiving the five-year
post-death waiting period. Beatification, the first step toward sainthood,
requires a confirmed miracle, and one has already been "authenticated." Name
that miracle.
               
            

            "Tears
streaming from the Time magazine cover of JFK Jr."-- Peter
Lerangis
            

            "Black
Hole of Calcutta now 'only a little gray, more like brown, really.'
"-- Andrew Staples
            

            
"Transformed Christopher Hitchens from semicoherent socialist into gibbering
right-wing tattletale."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            "Oh, I
know! She tortured Indians until they either converted or died! Or was that the
beatified Father Junípero Serra?"-- Greg Diamond
            

            "Since
Mother Teresa's death, there have been no movie sightings of Harvey Keitel's
penis."-- Alex Balk
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Something happened
between 1968 and 10 minutes ago that transformed the American flag from
hallowed symbol to fabric pattern. Thirty years ago, ABC would not televise
Abbie Hoffman's American flag shirt on the Dick Cavett Show ; last week
it was available at a street fair in my neighborhood in the form of silk
underwear. (Surprisingly comfortable.) This seems like increasing liberalism,
but it's only encroaching commerce, less a commitment to free speech than a
determination to sell paper plates, cups, and napkins for kicky Fourth of July
fun. Similarly, if more slowly, the term "miracle" has evolved from sacred
mystery to a substitute for mayonnaise. There is the Miracle Mile for shopping,
the Miracle on Ice for sports, Miracle-Gro for plants. But here it seems less a
chance to make a buck than something akin to grade inflation. Either way,
Mother Teresa is a shoo-in. And she'll look great on a medallion, boxers, or
briefs.

            
               Wondrous Answer
            

            Three miracles have already been attributed to
Mother Teresa, and the investigation has just begun.

            Henry D'Souza, archbishop of Calcutta, said a
patient in West Bengal claimed that a tumor disappeared after he was blessed by
Mother Teresa. D'Souza said the case has been authenticated by a doctor.

            A French woman in the United States who broke
several ribs in a car accident reportedly healed when she wore a Mother Teresa
medallion around her neck.

            A Palestinian girl suffering from cancer says she
was cured after Mother Teresa appeared in her dreams and said, "Child, you are
cured."

            It does not count
against Mother Teresa that she's concentrated all her miracles into one field,
medicine, failing to appear well-rounded. It does count against your HMO that
they are unlikely to provide any of these valuable services.

            
               Michael Jenning's Give
Me a Sign Follow-Up
            

            Near where I used to live in Australia, there is a
road along the bottom of a cliff where a series of signs says:

            FALLING ROCKS

            DO NOT STOP

            Driving past, we used to
comment, "Damn right they don't."

            
               Marc Cenedella's
Charybdis/Carybdis Follow-Up
            

            Apparently Jeff Newman
has taken too much Latin, since Homer's Odyssey is written in ancient
Greek. (P.S.: On the subject of Anglophone spelling, somebody should inform the
Greeks that they've misspelled Greece "Hellas.")

            
               Karen Bitterman's
Class-Conscious Vandals Follow-Up

            I don't know about your
'hood, but here, the prettier the car the more likely it is to be "keyed"--that
nasty, deep, full-length scratch (or scratches, if it is keyed by multiple
pissed-off proletarians) when one's car is parked on the street. Also, in a
sort of tribal downsizing, budding gangsters no longer have to steal your car
radio, they only have to steal the brand logo insignia from the hood or trunk
of your car (less likely to set off the alarm, which makes it more likely that
they can steal badges from all cars on a block) in order to prove their
inherent gangsterness. With all these options, spray-paint-wielding taggers are
free to concentrate on the stationary objects that will mark their turf, or to
defile the stationary objects in the turf of the other.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The affliction of Christopher Hitchens, the triumph
of various ball clubs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Defining Decay Down

            If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few
years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and
don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the
"intra-oral camera." As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying
little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies
the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A
harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's
Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can
be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and
whitening. "You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in
your mouth," says one recent victim of the camera. "You can't believe you are
walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth."

            The transformation of
American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely
business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work
itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be
extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled
cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their
revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept
falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At
the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new
dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10
an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of
the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few
remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long
Island.

            Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and
the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What
happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for
fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and
visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr.
Soothe. "People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass,
patients would not come to you," says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist.
Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on
them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a
certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.

            The most important
discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. "We are
dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the
dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look," says American Dental
Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no
longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied
themselves with the self-improvement movement. "You still go for the needs, for
the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to
feel better about themselves," says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland
dentist.

            People used to be happy if they made it to old age with
enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great
American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people
who are "very satisfied" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46
percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and
anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive
to patients. "It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease
and he said you needed a nose job," says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy
Teeth: A User's Manual .

            To flog $500 teeth
whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run
computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is
measured on a scale that starts at A1. "My dentist showed me these disgusting
color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get
married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' "
says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to
replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic
ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists
sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain
caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem "weak."

            Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical
scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to
whiten his teeth as a "preventive measure." (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?)
Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam
fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with
plastic fillings at four times the price.

            Dentists make a killing
on bad breath--or "halitosis," as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have
sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They
terrify patients with a "halimeter," a new gadget that measures a nasty
smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the
dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the
patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful
brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. "Now that there
is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it
motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments
available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years," says
Hartel.

            Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with
trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their
employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable
cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on
the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know
quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist
in how to get his patients to "trade up" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's
annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as "how to move
your patients to 'yes.' "

            The industry calls this
technique "treatment acceptance," a marvelous euphemism for parting you from
your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will
include an all-day "Treatment Acceptance" seminar "for the dental team that is
fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for
alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the
strategies for patients to accept optimum care."

            This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it
isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental
insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent
for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it.
As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of
their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary
income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients
want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients
want a quadruple bypass.

            It's tempting to dismiss
the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with
new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease,
malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our
awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists
filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so
many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have
studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make
crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave
almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's
implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of
your life.

            Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps
in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth.
New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low
birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running
wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip
your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night
guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between
teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum
surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is "an
excellent form of birth control," as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is
losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is
a hassle now because it works.

            "If you think back a
couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose
their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your
teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant.
But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in
18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to
lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure," says Dr.
Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.

            Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just
as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they
should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the
business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want
whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every
night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and
to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades
away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that
patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping
all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to
preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth
would have been goners 20 years ago.

            When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about
their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted
on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the
medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum
surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic
dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like
periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be
further from the truth.

            "Dentists are aware of providing what patients
want," says Hartel. "I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She
needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth
bleached, and she paid cash for it."

            Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they
can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Drug Bust

            

               George W. Bush said he 
               hasn't used drugs since 1974. On
Wednesday he vowed never to discuss his drug history. On Thursday he admitted
that he had "made some mistakes" and "learned from those" but said he would
have passed a 15-year background check in 1989. The media debated whether
Bush's drug history should be probed. Timothy Noah called the inquiries "" in
"Chatterbox," but John Stacks argued in Time that past dabblings with
cocaine could make Bush's hard-line drug enforcement policy hypocritical.
Maureen Dowd denounced Republicans for protecting Bush's past after years of
investigating President Clinton's.

            

               Serbs rallied against 
               President Slobodan Milosevic. As
many as 150,000 people attended the rally in Belgrade. Speakers from the
various opposition groups disagreed over when and how Milosevic should be
removed. The unanimous spin: The democratic factions are still too divided to
unseat him.

            

               The Episcopal and Lutheran 
               churches are uniting. They
will keep separate creeds and structures but will share clergy, sacraments, and
missionary projects. The pious spin: "Oneness becomes a proof of the authenticity of the
gospel ," a Lutheran bishop told the Washington 
               Post . The
practical spin: The two churches need to pool their dwindling resources and
memberships.

            

               Three Japanese 
               banks will merge to create the world's
largest financial institution. Bank executives hope the union will
resuscitate the Japanese banking industry and thus the entire economy. The
New York Times hails the move as "a long-overdue effort to deal with the
realities of an overcrowded market, massive bad loans and woefully low profit
margins."

            

               A federal study reported that teen 
               drug abuse fell in
1998. The optimistic spin: The war on drugs is finally working. The
pessimistic fine print: drug abuse among young adults and minority groups is
rising steadily. A Washington Post editorial berates Elizabeth Dole for
her ditzy stand on drug policy.

            

               Kenneth Starr will resign before the 
               year's end. The
judicial panel that appointed him split over whether his work should continue.
Since the independent counsel statute has expired, no one knows whether Starr
can legally be replaced. A New York Times editorial urges him to stay on
but to finish the job fast.

            

               A former Los Alamos official 
               called the espionage
allegations against Wen Ho Lee racist. The former chief of
counterintelligence told the Washington Post that investigators targeted
Lee because he is Chinese-American and that there is not a "shred of evidence" against him
               . However,
an Energy Department official told the New York Times that the charges
of racism are bunk and that only three of the 12 initial suspects in the case
were of Chinese background.

            

               An earthquake in Turkey killed at least 10,000 and possibly as many as
35,000. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet in effect charged
construction authorities with , and international papers roundly condemned
their shoddy building standards.

            

               Bosnian Muslim, Serb, and Croat leaders stole $1 billion in public
funds and international aid. The money was intended to rebuild
infrastructure and schools. The New York Times reports that the
corruption will chill private investment and charitable contributions to the
region.

            

               Vladimir Putin was confirmed as Russia's prime minister.
Indifferent to Yeltsin's latest pick and distracted by upcoming parliamentary
and presidential elections, the Duma rubber-stamped the appointment. Instead,
attention focused on former premier Yevgeny Primakov's announcement of his
alliance with a new political party.

            

               Russia attacked Islamic separatists in Dagestan and bombed neighboring
Chechnya. Newly confirmed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed to crush
the rebels immediately, but Chechens girded for another drawn-out conflict.

            

               French prosecutors dropped their investigation of the crash that killed
Princess Diana. They concluded it was caused by the driver's loss of
control. The Guardian reported that former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell has
volunteered to act as a liaison between the Pentagon and Mohammed Al Fayed in
the dispute over British and American intelligence about the crash .

            

               George W. Bush won the Iowa straw poll. Steve Forbes placed
second, Elizabeth Dole third, and Gary Bauer fourth. "" reports on the
unanimous spins: Bush won solidly but not overwhelmingly enough to send other
candidates packing. Forbes spent his way into second place. Dole is once again
a vice presidential contender, and Bauer is the candidate-designate of the
Christian right. Jacob Weisberg rates the , the , and the in "Ballot Box."

            

               Lamar Alexander dropped his presidential bid. On Meet the
Press , he conceded that George W. Bush's nomination is assured by a
"powerful force." Jacob Weisberg called Alexander a worthy candidate but agreed
that "another moderate Republican with a famous name and far more money ."
Other commentators suggested Dan Quayle would be the next to go.

            

               Columbine High School reopened. Students attended a "Take Back
the School" rally, and parents made a human chain around the school. Some
parents of slain children complained about the day's "rah, rah, let's
forget about the kids that died " tone. On the second day of school,
swastikas were found scrawled on the building.

            

               Planet Hollywood filed for bankruptcy. The Wall Street
Journal blamed the chain's failure on bad management and worse food.

            

               Tiger Woods won the PGA Championship. He beat 19-year-old
Sergio García by one stroke. The Washington Post concludes that Woods is
finally fulfilling the hype that surrounded his 1997
Masters victory, but the Associated Press reports that García stole the show . Commentators salivated at the
prospect of a rivalry between the two youngsters.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Real American Love Story

            The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love
Story --a 10-hour film about an interracial family--spawned a great deal of
chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In
fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only
2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain
of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings
actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly
more interracial couples will fall into each other's arms in the coming years
but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage
across the color line.

            But America already has almost 400 years of race
mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into
Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the
crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and
slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a
many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call
themselves "African-American." Outside of recent African immigrants to the
United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African
descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this
country.

            Four centuries of race
mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white.
Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had
some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door
in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line
to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their
veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such--and check
"white" when they fill out census forms.

            How did so much "black" blood get into so many "white"
people? Consider the story behind the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia ,
in which the Supreme Court overturned laws in 17 states that forbade black
people and white people to marry. Richard Loving was white and Mildred Jeter
was black. In 1958, weeks after the two were married, the Caroline County
sheriff dragged them from their marriage bed and jailed them for the crime of
being married. The Lovings were then exiled from Virginia under pain of
imprisonment. In banishing the couple from the Old Dominion, the Caroline
County judge said from the bench: "Almighty God created the races, white,
black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but
for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such
marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend
the races to mix."

            This statement would have
been ludicrous anyplace but was especially laughable in Caroline County--and in
the Lovings' hometown of Central Point, which had been an epicenter of race
mixing for at least 200 years. There were many such centers in the South. In
cities such as Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, for example, white families
and their fair-skinned black relatives lived so close together that they bumped
into each other on the street. Mixed-race people were initially treated as a
"new people" who existed in the space between white and black and deserved a
status not quite as high as whites but higher than that of black people in
general. This special status began to dry up just before the Civil War and
evaporated when slavery ended and free blacks competed with whites for jobs and
political power. White Southerners became obsessed with drawing an impossible
line that would preserve white "racial purity"--another way of referring to
white political dominance. The "one-drop rule" defined as black anyone who had
any black ancestry at all, even if that ancestry was invisible to the naked eye
or in the genealogical record. Those who fell on the black side of the law
often lost the rights to vote, to hold high-status jobs, and to defend their
persons and property in the courts.

            The revocation of special mulatto rights accelerated the
practice of passing for white. Central Point was locally known as the "passing
capital of the world." Passing for white was so common there that a section of
Central Point had actually been named "Passing.'' Some Central Pointers lived
as negroes at home but crossed the line to seize white privileges just an hour
or two away in Richmond, Va. Local children were often taken for white during
excursions to nearby towns, where they shopped in stores that did not serve
blacks and were admitted to the "white only" sections of movie houses.

            Having learned the
rewards of whiteness early, these children grew up, moved away, and continued
the charade. Those who entered the armed forces, which were segregated until
1948, were often classified as white and attached to all-white units. This made
for dicey moments when brown-skinned classmates from Central Point turned up in
all-black units. Some of these former classmates kept the secret, but a few
exposed the passers as frauds. Neither Britain nor France had laws that forbade
interracial marriage, and people in those countries had no clue what the Yanks
were going on about when they argued over who was really white or really black.
To the French and the British, race was defined by what you looked like: If you
looked white, well then, you were.

            Back in Caroline County, soldiers who were passing were
sure to travel home alone to prevent their white buddies from knowing who and
what they were. The passers from Passing married white spouses, moved into
white jobs, took up residence in white neighborhoods. When the couples returned
to Central Point to visit, the town went along with the masquerade. Families
ditched brown-skinned friends and relatives, and children stayed out of school
to avoid being seen on the colored bus headed to the colored school. Principals
and teachers stuck to the script. One of them told Ebony magazine in
1967 that blacks in Central Point had "infiltrated the white race more than any
other group of Negroes. When a student plays hooky from school for a week and
says an in-law is visiting the family, we understand. The kids just can't
afford to catch the Negro school bus without giving away the racial
identity."

            This infiltration was
common not just in Virginia but all over the United States. The most
interesting document listed in the amicus briefs for Loving vs. Virginia
is a statistical study called "African Ancestry of the White American
Population" by Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist from Ohio
State University. Stuckert's statistical models are tough going, but
eye-opening for what they show. Simply put, he examined census and fertility
data to arrive at estimates of how many white Americans had African blood lines
and how many fair-skinned blacks had crossed over the line to live as white.
Stuckert's tables show that during the 1940s alone, roughly 15,550 fair-skinned
blacks per year slipped across the color line--about 155,500 for the decade.
Stuckert estimates that by 1950 about 21 percent of the whites--or about 28
million of the 135 million persons classified as "white" in the census--had
black ancestry within the last four generations. He predicted that the
proportion would only grow in the coming decades. The belief that one's
ancestors are "racially uniform" is a basic American fiction, Stuckert wrote,
but a fiction nonetheless.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Asynchronic

            I'd been doing that, going
out just after sunset--
the sky a bowl of blue-green light,
a basin filled with cold, still seawater.

Shops in the advancing dusk looked like fish tanks
flooded with neutral overhead lighting that fell
on personnel about to close up for the day.
When I tugged back a sleeve, the wrist was naked--
forgot my watch again--and both hands chapped and rough.
Why do our hands have five fingers, no more, and no less?
Zoologists would know. Meanwhile
one of the routine, strictly business
clocks glimpsed through windows
during the rounds of my unofficial beat
could substitute for a watch. The first said 6:25;
the second, several storefronts down, 6:22;
a third, 6:29. Time didn't agree with itself.
Tonight, it didn't agree with me, either;
but then it never entirely had (and never will?).

A white-haired man with olive skin and tattered clothes
limped into Met Food and panhandled the clerk,
one I recognized, her face mild and familiar as bread.
For half a second--strange--it felt permanent,
indestructible as the tiny gleam
that pearled in the dark pupil of her eye.
6:33 ... And now a go-getter poised at 6:45.

Evening star in a sky by then blue-black ink,
and I roughly fifteen minutes older,
arms dangling at my sides.
But no wiser, only a bit farther
into the walk, with a sudden hunger pang,
the gut's alarm bell, sounding dinner hour.
All I'd seen, the streets, the clock-faces,
menagerie of the populous city, were saying
(so to speak), "Feast your eyes on this."
If the banquet had agreed with me,
and if I'd had a shelter to return to ...
Time had moved in back there, a silent
dimension unconcerned that it would turn us
out on the street (first you, and after
you'd gone, then me), according to some
ironclad schedule followed or policed
at glacial speed by supervising hands ...
Or, worse, when my door swung open,

            by spidery digitals that
glared
across the darkened room with their 6:58--

            
numbers reflected counter, greener, flame-like
(detail, the lost-and-found of deity)
in the crystal of the watch I left there on the table.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Bush Triangulation Strategy

            Last
week, House Republicans tried to postpone a fiscal squeeze by deferring payment
of the Earned Income Tax Credit to low-income workers. Their presidential
front-runner, George W. Bush, shot them down. "I don't think they ought to
balance their budget on the backs of the poor," said Bush. Tuesday, speaking in
New York about education reform, Bush spanked his party again, this time for
projecting pessimism, indifference, and "disdain for government."

            Bush's
broadsides have filled the talk shows and front pages with speculation that he
is "triangulating" against congressional Republicans, just as Bill Clinton
"triangulated" against left-wing rap artist Sister Souljah in 1992 and against
congressional liberals in 1995. But the media's one-dimensional understanding
of triangulation--that Bush is trying to "distance himself from the GOP's right
wing" and "stake out the middle ground" between two extremes--oversimplifies
the game. Bush isn't positioning himself on a straight line between Clinton and
the congressional GOP. He isn't even taking up a third position on their
two-dimensional battlefield. He is venturing into a third dimension, rejecting
the whole Washington debate, and defining his contest with Al Gore along a new
axis. He is trying to render Gore's three-point campaign message obsolete.

            

               1. 
               The country is doing well. Clinton and Gore
constantly recite statistics that reflect well on their administration: more
jobs, lower deficits, lower interest rates, fewer people on welfare, less
crime. They credit their own policies, particularly the 1993 tax hike, for
achieving these results by establishing fiscal responsibility. For years,
congressional Republicans predicted that Clinton's plan would ruin the economy.
Then they defied credulity by reversing their message, claiming that the
economy was in great shape and that their own policies were responsible for
it.

            This
is the biggest obstacle facing Bush: He is challenging the incumbent vice
president in a time of peace and prosperity, and the congressional GOP has not
made a persuasive case either that the prosperity is false or that it is true
because of Republican efforts in Washington. Clinton and Gore have spent seven
years telling Americans the story of how their administration revived the
economy. Whether or not this story is true, it is now deeply ingrained in the
public consciousness, and Bush can't look to his party in Washington for an
effective rebuttal to it.

            
Instead, Bush is attempting something far more bold and interesting: He is
weaving an alternative story. While focusing on Bush's criticisms of his party
in his speech Tuesday, the media overlooked the more important passage that
preceded them. He said:

            
               In state after state, we are seeing a profound shift of
[educational] priorities. An "age of accountability" is starting to replace an
era of low expectations. ... The principles of this movement are similar from
New York to Florida, from Massachusetts to Michigan. ... At the beginning of
the 1990s, so many of our nation's problems, from education to crime to
welfare, seemed intractable. ... But something unexpected happened on the way
to cultural decline. Problems that seemed inevitable proved to be reversible.
They gave way to an optimistic, governing conservatism. Here in New York, Mayor
Giuliani brought order and civility back to the streets--cutting crime rates by
50 percent. In Wisconsin, Gov. Tommy Thompson proved that welfare dependence
could be reversed--reducing his rolls by 91 percent. Innovative mayors and
governors followed their lead--cutting national welfare rolls by nearly half
since 1994 and reducing the murder rate to the lowest point since 1967. Now
education reform is gaining a critical mass of results. In the process,
conservatism has become the creed of hope. The creed of aggressive, persistent
reform. The creed of social progress.
            

            What's
important about this narrative is not what it says but what it doesn't say. It
makes no mention of anything that happened in the White House or in Congress.
Bush has decided that he can't win the federal policy debate that has consumed
Clinton, Gore, Newt Gingrich, and the national media for seven years. So he has
simply erased it. Yes, crime is down, fewer people are on welfare, and school
reform is gaining momentum. And yes, the incumbent party deserves credit. But
in Bush's story, that party isn't the Democratic White House. It's the state
and local GOP.

            

               2. 
               Congress is petty and mean. Republican congressional
leaders--Gingrich, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and House Majority Whip
Tom DeLay--have spent their tenure in the majority denouncing government,
bickering with Clinton and the Democrats, impugning their integrity, and
blaming them for every problem. They have convinced many people that Clinton
and Gore are blameworthy. But they have convinced many others that
congressional Republicans are more interested in impugning integrity and fixing
blame than in solving problems. The negative portion of Gore's game plan,
therefore, is to lump Bush together with Armey and DeLay as the party of
carping and destructiveness.

            Bush's
game plan is to turn Gore's game plan on its head. He's not going to argue with
Gore over which party is destructive or blameworthy. He's going to reject the
whole Washington blame game--undercutting his own party as well as Gore--and
portray himself as a man who solves problems instead of complaining about them
or blaming them on his enemies. "Too often, my party has confused the need for
limited government with a disdain for government itself," Bush said Tuesday.
"Our Founders rejected cynicism and cultivated a noble love of country. That
love is undermined by sprawling, arrogant, aimless government. It is restored
by focused and effective and energetic government. And that should be our goal:
a limited government, respected for doing a few things and doing them
well."

            Some
House Republicans, including DeLay, have fired back at Bush, accusing him of
betraying them, meddling in their business, and distorting their ideas. This
counterattack has only helped Bush achieve the distance he sought in the first
place. Others, including Armey, have tried to spin Bush's comments, suggesting
that he's really siding with them against Clinton in the Washington budget
fight. They don't understand that they've lost that fight and that Bush is
willing to repudiate the fight and everyone in it--including them--in order to
ruin Gore's strategy and beat him.

            

               3. 
               The religious right is scary. Gore, like Clinton,
has often used cultural issues such as abortion to make the GOP look extreme.
The media and "moderate" Republicans, convinced that these issues are the
party's weakness and that its libertarian economic ideas are its strength, have
interpreted Bush's remarks as a rebuke to Republican "Puritanism." But a closer
look at Bush's comments suggests the opposite: He is concerned that the party
looks mean because of its economic policies, and he is using cultural issues to
soften that image by projecting Republican "compassion."

            If
Bush had felt a need to triangulate against the cultural right, he could have
joined others in repudiating Pat Buchanan for questioning the wisdom of
American intervention against Nazi Germany. He didn't. Alternatively, he could
have used his address to the Christian Coalition last Friday to criticize
religious intolerance. Instead, he gave a speech that bypassed traditional
moral issues such as school prayer and homosexuality and never mentioned the
word "abortion." The media inferred that Bush was ignoring moral issues because
the religious right has nowhere else to go. They missed the real story: The
reason why Bush doesn't have to talk about old moral issues that might make him
look mean is that he's introducing new moral issues that make him look warm and
caring.

            In his
speech to the coalition, Bush used the word "compassion" 16 times. He urged
Christians to pursue a kinder, gentler mission: "What we need are people who
live out their faith in every walk of life, in politics, but also working in
crisis pregnancy centers, drug treatment programs, and homeless shelters.
People who make God's work their own. ... Our compassion must extend to the
poor and to the fatherless. Our compassion must defend the disabled. ... I will
rally the armies of compassion to nurture, to mentor, to comfort, to perform
their commonplace miracles of renewal. ... I will involve them in after-school
programs, maternity group homes, prison fellowships, and drug treatment
programs."

            
Tuesday, Bush warned, "Too often, on social issues, my party has painted an
image of America slouching toward Gomorrah. Of course there are challenges to
the character and compassion of our nation--too many broken homes and broken
lives. But many of our problems--particularly education, crime, and welfare
dependence--are yielding to good sense and strength and idealism." He went on:
"Too often, my party has focused on the national economy, to the exclusion of
all else--speaking a sterile language of rates and numbers, of CBO this and GNP
that. Of course we want growth and vigor in our economy. But there are human
problems that persist in the shadow of affluence." On this view, the GOP's
problem is libertarian indifference in Washington, and the solution is to fix
"broken homes and broken lives" through "compassion" back home.

            Gore
recognizes Bush's strategy and is trying to drag him back into the Washington
fight. "He's now differed with [congressional Republicans] on one little
detail," Gore said on Face the Nation . "If he really wants to try to
break with them, he ought to endorse our health-care Patients' Bill of Rights.
He ought to endorse an increase in the minimum wage for the working poor. And
he ought to come out against this huge, risky tax scheme." But Bush isn't
biting, and congressional Democrats, more interested in beating their
Republican colleagues than in beating Bush, have welcomed and exploited his
indictment of the GOP. Bush doesn't mind. They can have the battle. He wants
the war.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            It's in the Genes

            The
world press ran out of new things to say about Kennedy tragedies many years
ago, and all the old clichés were revived Monday in the massive coverage of the
tragic loss of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash Friday--the "curse" on the
family, its love of adventure, the "end of a dynasty," etc. But the Jerusalem Post peddled a new
theory. The Kennedys are not "star-crossed, cursed, or unlucky," it said in a
front-page report. "They undoubtedly bear the novelty-seeking and risk-taking
gene discovered in Israel that makes members impulsive, adventurous, and tend
to take chances with drugs, sex, speed, and other potentially dangerous
activities." The paper was quoting Dr. Richard Ebstein, a molecular geneticist
at Jerusalem's Herzog Memorial Hospital, who headed the team that discovered
the gene. "If I were a Kennedy, I would consult the best psychological experts
in the US to discuss what normal personalities are and how to control their
risk-taking urge," he told the paper. Ebstein discovered "the D-4 receptor and
serotonin transporter promoter gene" in 1996, the paper said. "He more recently
found that it increases the bearer's risk of getting addicted to hard drugs
(although several genes are probably involved), can cause adults to seek
sensation, and makes newborns as young as two weeks more alert and curious
about the outside world."

            There
was widespread reluctance in Kennedy-obsessed European newspapers to write off
the future of the family dynasty. Corriere della
Sera of Milan pegged John Jr.'s cousin Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on its
front page as the heir to his "sceptre." "It would be good if Camelot, the
mythical realm of King Arthur, were to end in the hands of a woman above
suspicion," it said. "It would be poetic if the first American woman president
were to be called not Hillary but Kathleen." Corriere also carried an
interview with Gay Talese, "the troubadour of today's America and yesterday's
Italy," dismissing the idea of a Kennedy curse. "I think, on the contrary, that
there burns inside them a feeling of invincibility, an obsession with
challenge, an arrogance of power that drive them to take risks all the time,"
he was quoted as saying. Asked if he thought John Jr. had been different from
the others, Talese replied: "Different in the sense that he wasn't a sexual
predator, like his father, uncle and grandfather, nor addicted to drugs or
alcohol, like other members of his family. ... But otherwise he was a
Kennedy--sure of himself and convinced of his immortality."

            

               La Repubblica
of Rome, on the other hand, said John Jr.'s problem was that he knew he wasn't
a Kennedy at heart and that he had crashed his plane because he wanted to be
one. "He didn't manage to live like a Kennedy, but fate allowed him at least to
leave this world as one," it concluded. (But what does La Repubblica
know about it? Another characteristic of the Kennedys is that they invite
reckless psychological examination.) La Repubblica led its front page
with a headline saying that John Jr. shouldn't have flown at night because he
wasn't certified to do so. In Britain, the tabloid Express announced in
huge letters that he had "had a death wish." In Paris, Le Figaro 's headline was
"The Accursed Kings" ("Les Rois Maudits "), and its front-page
editorial compared John Jr. to the late Princess of Wales. "Like Lady Di," it
said, "fate struck because, according to one of those Elizabethan poets of whom
President Kennedy always kept a quotation in reserve [not Elizabethan actually:
James Shirley, 1596-1666], 'There is no armor against fate;/ Death lays his icy
hand on kings.' "

            In an
editorial, the Times of London said John Jr.'s fate recalled another
myth--that of Oedipus, who fulfilled a prophecy by killing his father and
marrying his mother without knowing who they were. The Oedipus story survives,
the paper said, "because it embodies the deep human sense that free will is a
fragile thing, and no inheritance, however noble, frees one from the mark of
sin. ... The fate of John Kennedy Jr reinforces in every mind that melancholy
truth." The Independent of London also made the Princess Diana
comparison, saying that her myth, like that of the Kennedys, was not solely the
property of one country. "It would be a fitting legacy if John Junior's death
reminded America and the world of the high ideal of public service and liberal
values than run through the Kennedy rhetoric," it said in an editorial. "It is
the Kennedy greatness to call us to a higher moral purpose, and the Kennedy
tragedy that none of the family could fulfil that promise."

            The Guardian of London
commented in its editorial Monday that if John Jr.'s death "helps slow down the
US trend toward a new kind of dynastic democracy, then some good will have come
from this grim news." The paper also quoted Col. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, as
reported by the BBC, on its front page. While expressing his "deepest regret"
about the tragedy, Qaddafi said he was "even more sad" that the United States
has been unable to locate his plane. "America claims to know how to find a
mustard seed, either on earth or in space, thanks to its extraordinary
capabilities," he said. "Or perhaps the US is negligent and not serious in
searching for its citizens from the Kennedy dynasty?"

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            High Fidelity

            It has been heartening to
see some of my fellow survivors of mid-'70s adolescence (post-Vietnam,
post-Watergate, pre-punk, pre-Reagan) finally clear their heads of all the
drugs and bad music and put those "lost" years into perspective. But how can
any filmmaker nowadays convey the nihilistic embrace of dope and booze and
pills and do justice both to the way it felt at the time--blissfully gonzo,
liberating--and the way it came to feel after everyone did too much--like
quicksand? The comedy Outside Providence treats those dark years after
Nixon got flushed away with just the right amount of gleeful nostalgia and
horrified incredulity. The film is so free of cant that it's positively
cleansing: It leaves you both cleareyed and high.

            The movie is based on a
terse, bleakly funny 1988 novel by Peter Farrelly, who, with his brother Bobby,
wrote and directed Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There's Something About
Mary (1998). It tells the story of a poor Irish kid named Tim Dunphy who
lives in Pawtucket, R.I., "a rotting city bleeding off an anemic river just
north of Providence." That description is more bitter than anything in the
film, but it does suggest how Farrelly kept life among the urban unwashed from
crushing his soul: He cultivated a caustic sense of humor. The movie, directed
by Michael Corrente from a script he wrote with the Farrellys, is not in the
whacking, gross-out school of the brothers' other projects, but it shares with
them a tender regard for the scruffy outsider, the yearning misfit. (In the
novel, a headmaster actually refers to the hero and his friend as "Dumb and
Dumber.") More important, it has the Farrellys' characteristic mix of misery
and brightness: Whenever the view of the working poor threatens to become
oppressively self-pitying, the filmmakers pull something nutty out of their
hat--a scam, a bit of stoner dialogue, a jolt of rock 'n' roll--to prove that
this particular end only looks dead. OK, maybe it is dead, but
sometimes you can plow through a brick wall and come out the other side.

            The other side, in this case, is a fancy Connecticut prep
school, where "Dunph" (Shawn Hatosy) gets sent when he rear-ends a police
cruiser after an evening with his buddies and their bong. (It's thanks to the
murky intervention of one of his dad's poker pals, a gangster, that he ends up
there and not in juvenile detention.) At Cornwall (a k a "Cornhole"), Dunph's
stoner lifestyle proves more of a challenge to maintain. It's not that the rich
kids don't party as determinedly as the poor ones, it's that the dorms are
prowled by sadistic faculty watchdogs such as Mr. Funderburk (Tim Crowe), as
well as by students happy to rat out their peers if it means getting into an
Ivy League school. It's also that Dunph falls for the blond WASP Jane Weston
(Amy Smart), who, if not a goody-two-shoes, is determined not to let drugs
overwhelm her course of self-improvement. As his Pawtucket buddies die in car
crashes or face the prospect of lives scrambling for a dwindling number of
factory jobs, Dunph has a vague inkling that his level of consumption is not a
design for living.

            
               Outside

               Providence is hardly an anti-drug picture. That would be hypocritical,
since its most meaningful (and hilarious) connections happen over (and with a
large assist from) booze and pot. Its impulses are divided--which is just, I
think, as they should be. The movie says that getting high all the time can rot
your brain and even kill you, but it's not above going for Cheech &
Chong-style laughs or blithely wallowing in the sense of community that drugs
can instill. In Pawtucket, the kids get stoned and hang out at the water tower.
Over bong hits, they talk of moving to a West Coast utopia where "they got
babes, they got weed, they got cars that don't rust." When Dunph tells them he
likes the girl he's seeing so much he doesn't think about banging her, they say
she "sounds like a cool mule." I wish that the Pawtucket scenes hadn't been
shot on a special film stock--they're bleached a toilet bowl blue--but they
still have a powerful comic hum. Even Jackie (Tommy Bone), Dunph's
wheelchair-bound brother ("He had a freak accident at touch football and fell
off a roof," explains Dunph, in a voice-over), gets to be in on the jokes
instead of the object of them: In one scene, he feigns extreme cerebral palsy
so that he and his brother can have great seats at a football game.

            The charm of Corrente's direction comes as a shock. The
Rhode Island native made his debut in 1994 with a mannered, Mean
Streets -style, Italian-guys-from-the-neighborhood picture called Federal
Hill and followed that with a strenuously boring adaptation of David
Mamet's American 
               Buffalo (1996). In Outside Providence , he
stops trying to wow us with indie-auteur smarts. The details are right. Songs
that I hoped never to hear again--"Hold Your Head Up," "Take It Easy," "Band on
the Run," "Free Bird"--sound, in context, startlingly fresh, and Dunph's brown
corduroy jacket looks like the one I persisted in wearing into the late '80s
when a girlfriend finally took the initiative to drop it down a garbage chute.
Better, Corrente brings out the natural radiance in his young actors. The
snaggletoothed Hatosy has a soft, agreeable presence. Early on, he makes Dunph
seem a tad stupid, but when he's picked up hitchhiking by Jane and her rich
parents, you glimpse the sneaky undercurrents of his rube act. He passes her a
Coke, which turns out to be spiked with rum, and the two have a magical
collusion. (Amy Smart must be the nicest, most down-to-earth Southern WASP
goddess in history--if F. Scott Fitzgerald had met her, he'd have lived into
his 90s.)

            Like its title,
Outside Providence hints at a godless universe--as well as a motherless
one. (Dunph's mom shot herself when he was much younger.) You learn from your
peers--for better or worse--and not your elders. The movie might have been
unbearably depressing if Old Man Dunphy had been the thug of Farrelly's novel.
(In one of the book's first scenes, he kills his sons' mutt by crushing it in a
door after it tears apart a neighbor's cat.) But Alec Baldwin brings an outsize
comic spirit--and outsize vulnerability--to the film. He drops his voice an
octave and bellows lines like "Drag your pimply ass in here and say hello to
the guys--show some class f'r chrissakes" in a way that transcends caricature.
He's so frightened of communicating with his children that he has to caricature
himself . The source of his comedy is also what makes him tragic.

            In The Very Thought of You , three shallow,
London-based mates coincidentally meet and fall in love with the same pretty
blond American flake (Monica Potter), thus filling the one she likes best
(Joseph Fiennes) with guilt and shame. If watching the bug-eyed and irritable
Fiennes wrestle with this nonissue for 90 minutes sounds like fun to you, then
don't hold back on my account. The movie isn't awful. It pulls a couple of
amusing tricks with its narrative (the second act doesn't come until after the
fourth, whereupon everything starts to--sort of--make sense), but this kind of
flimsy romantic confection is either utterly charming or it collapses into a
heavy slab of obviousness. It doesn't help that Potter looks and sounds as if
she has just stepped out of a lab where someone was laboring to clone Julia
Roberts. She has the same wide eyes, turned-up nose, and vaguely glassy
hysteria, but everything is smaller-scale: Honey, I shrunk Julia Roberts.

            
               The 
               Astronaut's Wife is one of the
classiest terrible sci-fi movies you're likely to see. The tale of an astronaut
(Johnny Depp with a drawl) who comes back from a space accident somehow
different is cut from the same paranoid cloth as Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956), I Married a 
               Monster From Outer Space (1958)
and, midway, Rosemary's Baby (1968). But someone forgot to tell the
writer-director, Rand Ravich, that a genre movie can't survive on fancy,
high-toned portent alone--especially when the audience knows what's being
portended before they even buy their tickets. It's a testament to the lovely
Charlize Theron that she can hold our attention even when we're 10 steps ahead
of her character and only waiting around to see the big slimy outer-space
monster--which never comes. Even Samuel Beckett would be yelling, "Get to the
damn point!"

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=660525219-21091999>Barbie's Malibu Dream Knee</SPAN>

            
               Barbie Gives the
Finger
            

            Jane
Bahor--an anaplastologist at Duke University Medical Center--has discovered a new use for the
Barbie doll. By placing
one of Barbie's legs inside a hollow prosthetic finger, Bahor discovered that
Barbie's transplanted knee joint gave patients greater mechanical flexibility
and control over their artificial digits. "Although you could previously only
move joints that were in the hand [as opposed to the fingers], the plastic in
the legs of Barbie dolls allows patients to position fingers in different
flexion," she told the Duke University Chronicle . Glenn Hostetter, the
medical center prosthetics clinical supervisor, noted that the technique is an
inexpensive way to provide articulation in a finger and that it will help
prosthetic fingers become functional as well as cosmetic appendages.

            
               The Ascent of
Darwin
            

            A
University of Kansas library has mounted a small exhibit illustrating the ideas
of Charles Darwin in response to the Kansas Board of Education's decision to
eliminate Darwinism from statewide science tests. The exhibit, "Is
Man an Ape or an Angel?" at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, features both a first
edition of On the Origin of Species and a letter from Darwin to geologist James E. Todd, who joined KU's
staff in 1907. University librarian Sally Haines told the Associated Press,
"Librarians, we don't censor. ... When there's a controversy, we like to bring
out the books that caused the controversy." While the library staff isn't
taking an official position on the board's decision, Haines did admit, "We have
our personal opinions, and you can probably guess what they are."

            
               No Ph.D., No
High-Tech Laser Lab
            

            E.
Michael Campbell has resigned his post at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory after
anonymous faxes revealed that he had never earned a doctoral degree. Campbell,
formerly associate director for laser programs at Livermore and director of a
$1.2 billion program to conduct weapons research, announced his decision to
leave Aug. 27. Campbell had allowed the laboratory to believe that he had a
doctorate from Princeton University, the lab said, when in fact he had only
finished his Ph.D. course work. The spokesman also told the New York
Times that the lab requires "all senior managers to hold a Ph.D. or its
equivalent in experience." Campbell said only that he was leaving for personal
reasons.

            
               Head of the
Class
            

            An
unusual fossil skull, which may contain new clues about human evolution, was
discovered in an Upper West Side curio shop. The New York Times reports
that the skull arrived in the shop as part of a collection of rocks, minerals,
and curios. The shop owner recognized its significance after he cleaned it and
turned it over to scientists at the nearby American Museum of Natural History. Paleoanthropologists
examining the skull have traced its origins to Indonesia and presume it to be
that of a Homo erectus. However, they also note that the skull, which probably
belonged to a man in his 20s, has a high, humanlike forehead, not the sloping
kind typical of Homo erectus and other early hominids. "It's not like any other
Homo erectus we know from Indonesia or anywhere else," said Dr. Eric Delson,
the City College of New York paleoanthropologist directing the investigation.
"Of course, it's only one individual, but it could represent a distinctive
population."

            
               Bullshit!
Bullshit! Bullshit!
            

            A team
of Canadian psychologists believes that Tourette's syndrome--the condition that leads patients to suffer muscular spasms and to
blurt out obscenities--may be a psychological rather than a physical disorder.
Sufferers may actually be able to control their sputterings, according to
experiments led by Randy Flanagan at Queen's University in Ontario, BBC Online
reports. In one experiment, a Tourette's patient was directed to hold a
weighted box loaded with sensors. Anticipating the patient's regular tics, the
researchers monitored how his grip on the sensor box changed as his arm
twitched. They observed the subject adjusting his grip on the box just before
experiencing a tic, indicating that at some level he was in control of his
actions. Flanagan concluded, "[Tourette's sufferers] have motor control over
these tics, and these movements look normal and have all the same sort of
response we would expect to see in voluntary movement." He also suggested that
his findings may point the way toward behavioral therapy for the syndrome.
(Click here for a summary of the experiment.)

            
               No More Teachers,
No More Books ... No More Notes, Either!
            

            
College students, drop your pencils! StudentU.com, an Internet startup conceived by 27-year-old Oran
Wolf, may make note-taking in class obsolete. Wolf is developing a professional
online note-taking service to help students augment their own notes or to catch
up after a sick day, he told the New York Times . Student stenographers
are paid $300 per semester plus $200 for every five additional note-takers they
recruit for the company. In return, they must post their jottings within 24
hours on the StudentU.com Web site, which is open to all and financed by
advertising revenue. Todd Gitlin, a professor at New York University, railed
against the concept in a Times op-ed: "The very act of taking notes ...
is a way of engaging the material, wrestling with it, struggling to comprehend
or to take issue, but in any case entering into the work. ... A download is a
poor substitute."

            
               Caltech: No. 1
With a Bullet
            

            The
California Institute of Technology stormed from ninth place to top this
year's rankings of universities by U.S. News & World Report
... but how? The magazine explains that a "technical change" in its methodology
accounts for the move. Writing in 
                  Slate
               , Bruce Gottlieb that
"U.S. News fiddled with the rules." U.S. News editors Brian Duffy
and Peter Cary in 
                  Slate
               , defending their ranking methodology as
an improvement over their previous techniques.

            
               Bury My Heart at a
Toxic Waste Dump
            

            The
most controversial academic book of the season is The Ecological Indian:
Myth and History , by Brown anthropology professor Shepard Krech III.
Working from firsthand reports as well as archeological and scientific data,
Krech asserts that Native Americans are not the proto-environmentalists so
fondly imagined by "spiritually undernourished Americans" (in the words of
The New Yorker 's Nicholas Lemann). Rather, they hunted species into
extinction, exhausted large stretches of land, and mismanaged natural
resources. Jennifer Veech, writing in the Washington Post , points out
that: "[Krech paints] us a more complex portrait of Native American peoples,
one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native
Americans might wish to embrace."

            
               Tell It on the
Cold Mountain
               
            

            
Katherine Beal Frazier, a tenured accounting professor who is married to
Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier, has returned to North Carolina State University,
where she was fired a year ago for "neglect of duty." Last year, NCSU accused
Frazier of neglecting to complete paperwork and of raising her personal and
professional problems in the classroom, reports the Chronicle of Higher
Education . Frazier denied the claims, saying that she missed deadlines
because she was suffering from depression, which was a result of sex
discrimination she faced within her department and in the College of Management
beginning in 1993. Frazier sued the school for sex discrimination and
retaliation in 1998, just before the decision to dismiss her was finalized. Now
she is settling with the university and will be reinstated to her full
professorship, receive back pay of $100,000, benefits, and a cash payment. She
will be on leave, retroactively, from the end of the 1998-99 academic year
through 2002-03. Frazier told the Chronicle she would not have been able
to pursue her lawsuit had it not been for the commercial success of Cold
Mountain .

            
               What Said Has
Said
            

            
Literary critic, Columbia University professor, Palestinian spokesman, and
public intellectual Edward Said has responded to the accusation that he has
systematically distorted his life story. In the September issue of Commentary ,
Justus Reid Weiner, a lawyer and scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs, accused Said of lying about his childhood in order to
portray himself as a Palestinian refugee, when in fact he grew up in Cairo,
Egypt. Said has responded in an article published in the Cairo newspaper
al-Ahram , London's al-Hayat , and online at Counterpunch .
Said disputes the charges and challenges Weiner's research methods. Meanwhile,
Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn have stepped up to bat for him in
The Nation and the New York Press , respectively.
Still, others have taken Weiner at his word: The New York Post has
labeled Said the "Palestinian Tawana Brawley," and others have called for his
replacement as president of the Modern Language Association.

            
               U.K.
Surf
            

            The Chronicle of Higher
Education notes that Oxford University has fallen to seventh place in a
survey that ranks British universities by the jobs their graduates win at top
companies. When the survey was last taken three years ago, Oxford ranked third.
This year it trailed No. 1 Cambridge University, as well as the universities of
Leeds, Durham, and Manchester, University College London, and the University of
Nottingham.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Blues

            One thing that separates
intuitive artists from hacks and "players" is their difficulty doing even
mediocre work when their cylinders aren't firing. In the absence of true
inspiration, they can't fall back on a crafty understanding of what the
audience wants because they don't really know what the audience wants. They
follow their instincts and pray that they'll connect. When they don't, the
result is something like The Muse , which left me more dispirited than
any movie in ages has. Albert Brooks is my hero, and I don't like the thought
of people seeing this dud satire and concluding that he has lost his way. More
to the point, I don't like the thought that he has lost his way.

            At least The Muse
tackles this subject head on--the loss of one's way in a culture as venal as
Hollywood's. The protagonist, Steven Phillips (Brooks), is a middle-aged
screenwriter whose three-picture deal is terminated by a callow executive (Mark
Feuerstein) who tells him he no longer has his "edge." When other studios show
no interest, Steven goes to cry on the shoulder of an old friend, Jack Warrick
(Jeff Bridges), a vastly successful writer-producer. Tanned and beaming after a
string of recent triumphs, Jack decides to introduce his old buddy to his
"muse," Sarah (Sharon Stone)--a goddess of inspiration supposedly descended
from the ancient Greeks. Sarah, we learn, played a part in the latest hits of
Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron (all of whom show up to pay
homage and bring expensive gifts). Although he's incredulous, Steven can't
afford to pass up a chance to get his "edge" back, especially with a wife
(Andie MacDowell) and kids and a house in Pacific Palisades to maintain. In no
time, Sarah orders him to put her up in a $1,700-a-night suite on a high floor
of the Four Seasons (she's an ultrasensitive sleeper), provide a limousine, and
be ready to work at whatever hour she feels the urge to inspire him.

            In the first half-hour, The Muse plays a little
flatly, but that's not too troubling--artful flatness has always been a
component of Brooks' genius. The camera stares, unblinking, at Steven in
conversation with uncomprehending or contemptuous superiors. The message is
that there's no escape from the ignominy, not even through the (often lame)
one-liners he employs to win them over. When he goes for a meeting with "Mr.
Spielberg," Steven is denied "drive-on" privileges; the camera holds on him as
he makes the long, grueling hike through the studio compound, and a passing
tour bus driver draws attention to his lowly "walk-on" status. Then he finds
the meeting is with Stan Spielberg (scraggly-haired Steven Wright), who
hasn't seen his famous cousin in a year and doesn't even know what he's
supposed to be doing there. This is familiar Brooksian territory: impotence
prolonged and stylized until it turns into Theater of the Absurd. The universe
exists to humiliate Brooks' protagonists, to remind them of the precariousness
of everything that they'd smugly assumed was fixed--the steadiness of a job,
the permanence of a relationship, the support of a mother, the benign regard of
the universe.

            In The Muse ,
however, the masochism feels a little too reflexive, and the picture's flatness
gets flatter by the minute. Brooks is baking with dead yeast. As it turns out,
the movie isn't about the mystery of creativity but rather the New Age idiocy
of people who'd accept the idea of a muse--or, by extension, of gurus or smart
drugs or the power of cabala. For some reason, Brooks and his co-writer, Monica
Johnson, have made their protagonist an unbelievably uninteresting man--a
mopey, scattershot hack. Brooks might disagree. He told Gavin Smith in Film
Comment that Steven is a "good screenwriter going through the exact period
that tons of screenwriters are. Ninety-nine percent of writers write [for
hire]. ... They all get scared when the executives become younger than their
children; they get worried that they're not going to get those jobs anymore, so
they start writing things that maybe they don't love or they're not close to."
But Brooks hasn't provided any evidence that Steven was ever a decent writer.
His screenplay ideas in the company of the muse are pathetically feeble, and
when she encourages them--and when they find favor with Steven's agent and the
executives who'd previously spurned him--the point seems to be that
everyone in the film industry is a moron.

            Brooks, who is often accused (wrongly) of playing himself,
has left himself too far out of The Muse . At least I hope he has: How
else to account for this bland, pasty, not terribly funny protagonist? The
heroes of Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in
America (1985) have their jerky sides (emotionally squeamish viewers tend
to find them repellent), but they also have compensatory gifts--chiefly Brooks'
urgent babble, in which pleas are made and then restated and then turned inside
out in a way that brilliantly (and hilariously) distills neurotic thought
processes. His advertising executive in Lost in America has zero insight
into himself, but he's still an idealist who boldly attempts to live out the
escapist fantasies of his generation: He has--as buffoons go--enormous stature.
With his next film, Defending Your Life (1991), Brooks tried to make his
alter ego more palatable to a mass audience--to seem "vulnerable" instead of
"insecure." (See my 
                  Slate
                of Brooks' 1996 movie Mother for
the quotation.) The result was often charming, but the upbeat, go-for-it ending
felt simple-minded. Brooks' best scenes operate on an X-ray level of honesty,
so that shortcuts, formulas, easy ways out of dramatic jams--stuff that slicker
filmmakers can get by with--seem in his work embarrassingly exposed.

            
               Lost in

               America is a road movie that suggests the impossibility of travel;
perhaps Brooks conceived of The Muse as a movie about the creative
spirit that would subversively suggest the impossibility--at least in
Hollywood--of creation. That might have worked if his characters showed signs
of having deeper yearnings, the way they do in many of Paul Mazursky's Los
Angeles-set satires, so that there would be some tension between what they
think they want and what they actually need. But the characters in The
Muse are dull-witted materialists, and limp encounter follows limp
encounter until the movie seems populated by pod people. A hint that something
is off comes early, when Steven receives a "humanitarian" award. (A nice touch:
It's presented by Cybill Shepherd, who did some of the most attractive scenes
of her career opposite Brooks in Taxi Driver , 1976.) Steven gives a
winning, perhaps too self-deprecating speech, then holds his plaque high and
crows, "I'm king of the room!" And no one laughs--the audience stares at him,
puzzled. Brooks has spent too much time by himself if he thinks people in Los
Angeles wouldn't get that joke; even the non-English-speaking busboys would be
cackling.

            How is Sharon Stone at comedy? That's a trick question,
because her best performance, in Basic Instinct (1992), was essentially
a comic turn--a lusty, glittery-eyed sendup of film noir femmes fatales .
Here she starts promisingly, looking odd and imposing in her caftans,
childishly impervious to the absurdity of her demands. But she's
heavy-spirited, and it isn't long before she runs out of invention and starts
pulling goofy faces--like the one where she sucks a drink through a straw and
rolls her eyes skyward like a distracted 5-year-old. She isn't mercurial enough
to be funny: She's just a narcissistic dope, and you come to feel contempt for
anyone who'd swallow her bull. Stone's scenes with MacDowell--whom she inspires
to bake cookies--are the deadest that Brooks has ever directed, and his own
with MacDowell are only marginally more lively. (If you want an actor to flesh
out an underwritten character, don't hire MacDowell, who tends to sound as if
she learns her lines phonetically.) Jeff Bridges does a relaxed and confident
turn, but he's acting with his tan. The only scene that completely works is
between Brooks and an Italian guy (Mario Opinato) who doesn't understand a word
he says--an exhilarating throwback to the radio-comedy days of Brooks' dad,
Harry Einstein (also known as Parkyakarcas).

            Since I saw The Muse , I've been struggling to
figure out why it went so wrong--why the muse deserted the movie's maker. Has
Brooks, like Steven, lost his edge? Maybe the reasons aren't so dire. Brooks
obviously shares his protagonist's insecurity about his position in the
industry (in common with Steven, he never knows if he'll get the money to make
another film), but the two have little in common where it really
counts--artistically. They barely overlap. From the start, Brooks' impulses
have taken him to the source of his darkest anxieties. As a stand-up comic, he
was less interested in jokes than in the desperate, needy impulse behind the
jokes. As a writer and director, he has been less preoccupied with gags than
with the fear and helplessness out of which they spring. How could he possibly
be inspired by Steven Phillips, who thinks of nothing but writing a summer
blockbuster comedy set in a ramshackle aquarium and starring Jim Carrey? I'm
not saying that Brooks doesn't dream of being popular and having status--only
that he'd have to do it his way, working outward from the bone. Maybe it's
reassuring that The Muse is so bad, since a lot of other people could
have made it (and made it better). Maybe Brooks' muse is showing him what
happens when you satirize people who are so far beneath you.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hugh Anxiety

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Mickey Blue
                
               
                  Eyes
                (Warner Bros.). Rather
grim reports for Hugh Grant's latest smirking, stuttering performance as an
upper-crusty Brit. This time around, he gets mixed up in the mob family of his
fiancee (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Yes, Grant's cute, but the movie's a stinker,
"little more than a series of stitched together gags" (Stephen Holden, the
New York Times ). Reviewers disagree about whose fault it is. The
Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert says the scenes where Grant learns to
talk like a gangster are "so badly handled by Grant that the movie derails and
never recovers." The Los Angeles Times ' Kenneth Turan, on the other
hand, argues that Grant "goes a long way toward saving [the film] from itself."
(Click to read the review by 
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein.
Visit the official site to see stills and clips from the
film.)

            

               
                  Teaching Mrs. T
               
               
                  ingle
                (Miramax Films).
Kevin Williamson, high off his continuing success writing teen films
( Scream ) and television ( Dawson's Creek ), tries his hand at
directing. The results are disastrous. The plot? Students take revenge on a
sadistic teacher. (The film was originally called Killing Mrs. Tingle ,
but the title was toned down in the wake of recent school violence.) The film
"bludgeons the audience with broad, crude, creepy developments" (Ebert, the
Chicago Sun-Times ) and lacks Williamson's usual humor and panache. Helen
Mirren, playing the evil Mrs. Tingle, rises above the weak material--which only
makes the film "even more painful" to watch (Desson Howe, the Washington
Post ). One critic dissents: Kevin Thomas, the Los Angeles Times '
always easy-to-please critic, flouts conventional wisdom and calls the film a
"knockout directorial debut." (Click here to find out more about Williamson.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  The 
                  Jukebox Queen of 
                  Malta
               ,by Nicholas
Rinaldi (Simon & Schuster). Critics enjoy this love story about a young
radio operator from Brooklyn and a local jukebox repairwoman who meet in Malta
during the bombings of World War II. Richard Bernstein praises the novel as "a
funny, melancholy, romantic, disturbing, character-rich window on the war" (the
New York Times ). But others complain that "the influences of Joseph
Heller's classic Catch-22 and Louis de Bernières' recent Corelli's
Mandolin are rather too blatantly present" and make the novel feel overly
familiar. Still, "if Heller hadn't existed we might be calling this a pretty
terrific novel" ( Kirkus Reviews ). (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               
                  Conduct
               
               
                  Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in
Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn
               , by Regina Morantz-Sanchez (Oxford
University Press). Critics are intrigued by the dramatic story of successful
19 th -century gynecological surgeon Mary Amanda Dixon Jones, whose
career was derailed by a smear campaign. Unfortunately, Morantz-Sanchez
recounts the tale "in academic prose thick enough to thwart all but the most
persistent" ( Kirkus Reviews ). Bernstein of the New York Times
agrees, complaining that "Ms. Morantz-Sanchez is more interested in the
scholarly value of her story than its inherent drama and that will make the
book tough going for some readers." But most say the interesting sociological
history and insight into attitudes about women in medicine make it worth the
slog. (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Movie
            

            

               
                  Universal
               
               
                  Soldier: The Return
                (Columbia
Pictures). Critics groan at Jean-Claude Van Damme's sequel to the 1992 action
flick about reanimated dead soldiers. It's all "bullets, bombs, and boobs--the
biggest boob being Van Damme, natch" (Rod Dreher, the New York Post ).
But "for those eager to bid adieu to their credibility for 82 minutes," at
least the action "rarely flags" (Lawrence Van Gelder, the New York
Times ).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dangerous Sport

            Nearly
all British newspapers led their front pages Wednesday with the first big
European holiday tragedy of the summer--the deaths of up to 20 people in
Switzerland while engaging in the adventure sport of "canyoning." Canyoning, a
combination of rappelling and riding rapids without boats, sometimes described
as whitewater rafting without the raft, has been banned in several U.S. states.
The victims, mostly from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, were drowned
in the Saxet River near Interlaken when a thunderstorm caused a flash flood in
a ravine. The papers described canyoning as an "underground" sport with no
official organization to check equipment, offer advice, or govern safety. To
attract customers, companies promoting it promise maximum thrills with minimum
danger. One Swiss company adorns its Web site with the slogan "Canyoning: no
risk, much fun."

The Daily Telegraph of London reported Wednesday from Gnjilane in
eastern Kosovo that American Navy and Army welders have repaired a statue of a
Serb hero that was damaged by a mob of Albanian Kosovars. The statue of Prince
Lazar, who led the Serbs to a legendary defeat in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389,
was lassoed and pulled to the ground by several hundred Albanians last
Saturday. American naval engineers, assisted by Army colleagues, took the metal
statue to their base camp and welded it together again. American officers said
the work was intended to show Albanians and Serbs that the cultural monuments
of both must be protected. "People need to understand that you can't destroy
their culture and think that they will respect yours," said Capt. Larry
Kaminski. But he admitted that this is a lesson that neither side is eager to
learn. "This is the Wild West," he explained.

The Telegraph also reported from Pancevo near Belgrade that a U.N.
team rejected Yugoslav government claims that NATO's bombing campaign caused an
environmental catastrophe. The team concluded that severe air pollution existed
before the air attacks, which had merely worsened it in some places. The
Financial Times
reported from Pristina that, according to estimates prepared for the European
Commission, the reconstruction of all the houses damaged or destroyed in Kosovo
during the past two years of conflict would cost around 1.1 billion euros
(about $1.17 billion). A commission report said that of 204,585 housing units
in 1,300 Kosovo villages, 119,500 were damaged, of which 78,000 were either
severely damaged or completely destroyed.

In an editorial Wednesday, the Guardian of
London said the warning by the United States, Japan, and South Korea that
Communist North Korea will face "serious consequences" if it conducts another
long-range ballistic missile test "carries the ring of desperation." The
Guardian said, "It marks the latest low point in a largely unsuccessful
process, begun in 1994, to persuade the Pyongyang leadership to stop building
(and selling) weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems."

In France, Le
Figaro of Paris reported explosive growth in the sale of mobile phones,
which it described as a phenomenon without parallel in French commercial
history. One million mobile phones have been sold since the beginning of June
this year, bringing the total in use to 14 million. This number is expected to
rise to 20 million by the end of the year, and by the year 2002, to 30 million,
which is more than half the country's total population. Only two years ago,
there were less than 1 million mobile phones in the country. Le Monde led on the European
single currency, the euro, bouncing back against the U.S. dollar, with a gain
of 6 percent over the past week after a fall of 14 percent since the beginning
of January. In an editorial, the paper said the euro is now established as "one
of the world's great currencies" whose ups and downs against the dollar are a
minor issue. There is, however, a danger that in a future trade war the United
States might force the euro up too high by playing the "weak dollar"
card.

In Israel, Ha'aretz quoted defense sources as saying that peace
negotiations with Syria are likely to proceed more quickly than those with the
Palestinians because the issues are less complex and already fully understood
by both sides. The sources also believe that President Hafez Assad of Syria
"wants to bequeath his son and designated successor a legacy of peace, in order
to facilitate the continued rule of his Alawite regime," the paper said.

An editorial in Ma'ariv criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for
making "public and superfluous statements" about wanting to change parts of the
Wye agreement, such as the timetable for Israeli withdrawals from the West
Bank, without first talking privately to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. "A
few more meetings like that held last night [between Barak and Arafat Tuesday]
will be necessary before Arafat can be sure Barak is a partner toward whom it
is worthwhile taking another step," the paper said.

In Beijing, the official China Daily put a positive spin on this week's talks between
Chinese and American trade officials, saying that closer U.S.-China ties are
"in the best interests of both countries." But when U.S. Undersecretary of
Commerce David Aaron offered condolences over the bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade, Chinese Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng replied that
China still awaited a satisfactory explanation.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Round-Up

            What happened--old as the
hills, ancient as the ax,
the horse, water in a clay cup, dirt under the fingernails.
The river forgets the fish and the winter sun slides
beyond the far hills. All of them had mothers, and all
the mothers sang while swimming and as the women sang
the birds left the trees which ringed the water
for the clouds where the distance whispered a different dream
than the dream dreaming this

            dark afternoon. The men
were boys not that long ago--
delicate, confident paddling alongside their mothers
through the hot afternoons.
The water dark green with splash and shout--
summer just a whistle and gone.
Of course, the night will still hold stars,
the moon's journey, the planet's orbit. There will
always be nests, branches, the swaying and the saying.
They have names and are men exactly like you
lined up in jackets, boots and caps--
cold with the waiting.

            It is unbelievable, even
some of the soldiers
begin to sob. Trucked out to no-where
are doctors, lawyers, plumbers, builders, bankers.
It is winter, snow rides the collapse of clouds.
There are just shades of brown and grey,
a line of trees--a dark scribble
like markings done by a child.

            As each man is shot,
whether he drops backward
or to the side
he forgets us, his own name, this place,
civilization
like the kiss

            in the evening at the lit
threshold
whose intent was to swear return.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Monk in Gucci Shoes

            The
main story around the world Tuesday was the terror in East Timor, for which the
Jakarta
Post joined papers everywhere in putting most of the blame on the
Indonesian government. In an editorial, the paper accused Indonesian President B.J.
Habibie of perpetuating the errors of his predecessor, President Suharto, the
man who ordered the invasion of the former Portuguese colony in 1976. By
continuing Indonesian military rule in the territory, Habibie provoked the East
Timorese into overwhelmingly rejecting his offer of autonomy within Indonesia,
the paper said. It also talked of a looming political crisis in which Habibie
is likely to lose the support of the Indonesian military.

            In
Hong Kong, the South China
Morning Post said that Habibie, after repeatedly promising to keep the
peace, was either being duplicitous or had lost control of his senior military
leaders, who were vehemently opposed to independence for East Timor. "Either
way, the status quo is intolerable," the paper said in an editorial. "Other nations are reluctant to dispatch their
own peacekeepers without an invitation from Jakarta. But they should seek that
permission actively and be ready to follow through. Meanwhile, they should tell
Jakarta that World Bank and other loans are blocked until the Government
honours its many pledges to maintain order and let East Timor have the freedom
it chose."

            Around
the world, opinion hardened not only against Indonesia but also against the
United Nations. The Times of London called on the Jakarta government to let U.N.
peacekeepers in, and the Guardian said there was no longer any alternative to foreign
intervention. The Independent called the U.N. decision to pull its current
mission out of East Timor "a grand Pontius Pilate-style washing of hands" and
"a treacherous abandonment for the Timorese people." In Paris, Le Figaro accused the United
Nations of "letting Timor founder in chaos"; and Le Monde , calling it "an
Asian Kosovo," named Portugal, Australia, and the United States as the
countries which are morally obliged to form the kernel of a rapid intervention
force "to stop Indonesia carrying out a new crime against humanity." In Italy,
La Repubblica
of Rome ran a front-page commentary by Noam Chomsky blaming the United States
for the fate of the East Timorese because of its failure to withdraw support
from its "Indonesian client" or to tell it that its game was up.

            
Following the drubbing received by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in two
state elections this weekend (a subject that naturally dominated the German
press Tuesday), the Financial
Times of London said the outcome was predictable. "Mr. Schröder has
presided over a thoroughly muddled and quarrelsome coalition since he defeated
Helmut Kohl in last year's general election," it said in an editorial.
"The main victors [in the east German state of Brandenburg] were the reformed
communists in the Party of Democratic Socialism, with 23 per cent of the vote,
and the extreme nationalist Deutsche Volksunion, which will sneak into the
state parliament with 5.2 per cent." In a brief comment published on the front
page of Corriere
della Sera of Milan, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel expressed
alarm at the success of the Deutsche Volksunion, which he said exploits
unemployment to stir up racism. "It would be useful to know the percentage of
young people who identify with the German extreme right," he wrote. "One must
hope it is not a large percentage. All those who put their faith in German
youth must encourage them not to be seduced by simplistic and unworthy
solutions to real problems."

            

               Corriere 
               della Sera also reported on its front page a claim by
the British author John Cornwell that he has found evidence in the Vatican
archives that Pope Pius XII was a visceral anti-Semite who helped and supported
Hitler from when he came to power until the "final solution." The paper was
referring to a trailer in Vanity Fair for Cornwell's new book
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII that was omitted from
VF 's European edition. It quoted Jesuit church historian Giacomo
Martina, a professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, as saying that the
claim was "shameful." "How, for example, can it be reconciled with the fact
that in 1940, when the pope learned of plans by the German resistance to kill
Hitler, he passed the information on to the British authorities? To understand
the pope's caution in denouncing the persecution of the Jews, it would be
useful to analyse the similar caution shown by the Allies. The same reasons for
prudence guided both of them."

            
Another Vanity Fair article led Tuesday's Daily Telegraph of London--an
interview with Rupert Murdoch in which the media mogul referred to the Dalai
Lama as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes." In an
editorial, the Telegraph (which is locked in
bitter competition with Murdoch's Times ) called his comment "almost
endearingly wicked," having no purpose but to strengthen his business links
with China. "What Mr. Murdoch told Vanity Fair is profoundly wrong," the
paper said. "The Chinese have treated the people of Tibet abominably since they
invaded in 1959."

            In Israel, both
Ha'aretz
and the Jerusalem
Post ran editorials Tuesday welcoming the decision by Israel's High
Court of Justice that some of the rougher interrogation methods used by the
country's security service are illegal. Ha'aretz said
Israelis could take pride in the decision, even though it made the service's
work more difficult. The Jerusalem
Post said, "It is difficult to think of another nation that would be
willing to take such a bold step to protect the human rights of suspected
terrorists, at a time when the threat of terror is still so very real."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Pretty Woman, Lame Movie

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Runaway Bride
                (Paramount Pictures). Director Garry Marshall
scored the first time he paired Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, in 1990's
Pretty Woman , but he flounders on this outing. Critics complain about
the trite story line--Roberts plays a young woman who has a habit of leaving
her grooms waiting at the altar--and the lack of chemistry between the stars.
Maureen Dowd notes in the New York Times that Runaway Bride marks
the "flatlining" of the traditional romantic comedy and the birth of a new
genre: the unsympathetic heroine comedy (see also: My Best Friend's
Wedding and Four Weddings and a Funeral ). A few critics come to its
defense. Janet Maslin (the New York Times ) serves up a remarkably bland,
neither-here-nor-there review: "[Mr. Gere's] and Mr. Marshall's reunion with
Ms. Roberts guarantees a comedy that's easy on the eyes and dependable in the
laugh department." The New Yorker 's David Denby also pronounces the film
passable: "Although the movie dawdles and repeats itself, it is often
charming." Denby even goes against the conventional wisdom, contending that
"the Gere-Roberts connection is still alive." (Click here to check out a site devoted to Roberts and here for one devoted to
Gere.)

            

               
                  Twin Falls Idaho
                (Sony Pictures Classics). This David Lynch-ian
film about a love triangle involving a pair of conjoined twins and a prostitute
provokes a fittingly dual response from reviewers. (Ratcheting up the weirdness
is the fact it was written and directed by a pair of non-conjoined identical
twins.) Some find it "spellbinding," with "a solemn eroticism [that] sometimes
recalls The Elephant Man " (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street
Journal ). Others say the "slapped-on eeriness peels away to reveal little
more than simplistic dramatic ploys" and that it is "neither weighty nor as
weird as it would like to think" (Dennis Lim, the Village Voice ). The
balance tips slightly in the film's favor: The New York Times ' Maslin
writes that the film "has style, gravity and originality to spare ... dwells as
hauntingly in loneliness as it does on never actually being able to be alone."
(Click here to visit the film's official site.)

            

               Magazine
            

            

               
                  Talk
               . Just about every possible media outlet covers
the premiere of Editor Tina Brown's new magazine. Time devotes more than
a page, Newsweek just less than one, each featuring a photo of Brown and
the cover of the first issue. The early response is surprisingly kind:
Conventional wisdom has held that everyone was waiting to knock Brown off her
cloud, but there are notably few scathing condemnations or laudatory pieces
about the magazine in the news today. Instead, reports focus on the phenomenon
of Brown's buzz machine and the celeb-studded party she threw Monday night,
which Madonna described as "so much fun, I loved it" in the New York
Post . As for the prospects of the magazine, most agree that "if anyone
could dust off the genre [of a general interest magazine], it's probably Brown"
(Margaret Carlson and Stephen Koepp, Time ). (Click here to check out
Talk 's official Web site. Click to read last week's "Summary Judgment"
on early Talk hype.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  A Certain Age
               , by Tama Janowitz (Doubleday). The
brittle, shallow, single, gold-digging, thirtysomething protagonist of
Janowitz's latest hate letter to Manhattan is pronounced so unpleasant as to
make the entire novel (which follows her search for a suitably rich and
connected husband) quite a drag: "A hateful heroine and a catalog of
conspicuous consuming do not an amusing read make" (Elizabeth Gleick,
Time ). "One of the least likable characters in modern fiction history.
More self-obsessed than Portnoy, more marriage crazed than Bridget Jones, this
skinny blond twit is truly horrid" (A.J. Jacobs, Entertainment Weekly ).
The closest thing the novel gets to a positive review is a one-line mention in
a National Review roundup of new books on single women: David
Klinghoffer writes that the novel is "darkly funny." (Click here
to read an excerpt from the book and here to listen to an interview with the author.)

            

               
                  Run Catch Kiss
               , by Amy Sohn (Simon & Schuster).
New York Press sex columnist Amy Sohn turns in a first novel about ... a
New York-based sex columnist and her wild shenanigans with men. Critics are
more amused than impressed: "One reads ... with equal parts astonished
admiration and mounting horror at the calculated brazenness of it all" (Mark
Rozzo, Los Angeles Times ). Clarissa Cruz ( Entertainment Weekly )
finds that parts of the dialogue are "laugh out loud funny," but overall it's
"a frivolous read that's far more titillating than scintillating." More biting
reviews say it's yet another in the recent rash of single-girl-in-the-city
novels, just a "wobbly attempt to follow in Bridget Jones's Manolo Blahniks"
(Yahlin Chan, Newsweek ). (Click here to read an interview with the author.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Get Skintight
               , by the Donnas (Lookout!). This
foursome of female juvenile garage rockers gets solid reviews for its third
album. "These bad-ass ladies roll out rude, Ace Frehley-inspired guitar hooks
at a feverish rate, capturing the rebellious, mischievous and instantly
gratifying rock 'n' roll spirit of teenage trash culture" (Glen Sansone,
CMJ ). As all members of the band are under legal drinking age, the
lyrics touch on subjects such as driving around on the neighbor's lawn, hanging
out by the Slurpee machine, and looking at cute guys. On the downside, the band
relies heavily on its predecessors, and some songs sound lifted directly from
the Ramones, the Runaways, and Mötley Crüe (they also cover the Crüe's "Too
Fast For Love"). But most critics don't sweat the album's derivative
tendencies, pointing out that this kind of music isn't supposed to be blazingly
original, it's supposed to be fun. "A timeless burst of renegade teen spirit"
(Steve Dougherty, People ). (Click here to find out more about the band on its official site, and
here to check
out the "I have a crush on The Donnas" Web site.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Music
            

            
               
                  Out of
Business
               , by EPMD (Def  Jam). Critics praise the Long Island
duo's latest offering as "their best album since 1990's Business As
Usual " (Rob Hart, CMJ ). Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith's music is up
to their usual high standards, but even more impressive are their lyrics, which
"weave together tapestries of obscure pop-culture references and rap history
homages that could keep lesser rhymers in business forever" (Matt Diehl,
Entertainment Weekly ).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             The Love Bloat

            A day doesn't go by that I don't read in the press
... or some Microsoft customer sidles up to me ... or even my girlfriend says,
"Hey, Shuman, why is Microsoft software so bloated, so full of junk, sucking up
megs of space on my hard drive, hogging memory, and taking forever to load! The
toolbar buttons look like they were lifted from the cockpit of an F-16." My
grouchy critics are ramping up again as the very large Office 2000 software
suite hits the stores: "Shuman, why don't you and the other boy developers at
Microsoft write some trim and tight code?"

            Well, ladies and
gentlemen, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. The problem with
software today is not that it is bloated. The problem is that it's not
bloated enough!
            

            What is bloat? Bloat is the American dream: bigger, better,
and everywhere all at once. Supersize it! From VCRs to food processors to Ford
Expeditions, industry has historically provided consumers with features to
have , not necessarily to use. How many of you have programmed your VCR?
Minced carrots with your Cuisinart? Or gone off-roading in your SUV?

            Why should software be
any different? Do you really think software developers add features just for
fun, like some cackling tormentor? If only that were the case. Sadly, it is
you, the customer, who demands bloat, forever clamoring for new features.
Software companies take your wish lists seriously, and then make them happen.
It's like the violence-in-the-media argument: We hate it, but we buy it.

            Now, I don't deny that software is getting, um, alarmingly
large. A complete installation of Office 2000 requires 200 megabytes of
hard-disk space. This compares to the puny installation requirement of 5 megs
to 10 megs of hard-disk space for a similar array of DOS applications, circa
1988: WordPerfect, Lotus 123, dBase, Crosstalk, etc.

            But thanks to Moore's Law and its corollaries,
computer power continues to double every 18 months and prices keep falling.
Most computer users want to do fancy new things with their speedy
Pentium chips and mongolarge hard drives, not just run their old applications
faster. So if computers are getting more powerful, shouldn't we developers
harness that capacity?

            The anti-bloat whiners
would have you believe that Microsoft is coercing them into using our
extralarded software products! I call their bluff. The elegance of the Windows
98 operating system is that it runs practically every application from the DOS
days and all those goofy Windows 3.1 programs. If you want to run unbloated
legacy programs such as WordStar for Windows or Bitcom for DOS instead of new
applications, be my guest. (Also, you lovers of legacy applications should know
that one of the reasons Windows 95 and Windows 98 are so "bloated" is so that
they can run the old applications.)

            It is precisely because users can ignore the new releases
from Microsoft or Lotus or Corel that the software industry works overtime to
add new features to software, features that will convince users to spend $300
on an upgrade to do the same computing as they're doing now, only with more
bells and whistles and excitement. The day that Microsoft fails to convince you
to upgrade--i.e., to buy a product that the malcontents call bloated--is the
day that Redmond becomes a ghost town.

            Most bloatware complaints
come from users who own 2- to 3-year-old machines. They don't understand that
the new (bloated) versions of software are meant for the new 400-megahertz
machines and the wickedly fast machines to come in the next 18
months--including 1-gigahertz computers--not their Pentium 133 doorstops. Or
the complainers single out features that they never use, such as AutoSummarize
in Word or the Journal feature in Outlook (that can slow even the fastest
computer to a crawl). My advice to these complainers: Turn these features off
or ignore them.

            Having praised bloat, let me confide that when I worked on
the Microsoft Outlook team, bloat was my biggest enemy. A mean boss named Biff
routinely yelled hurtful things at me when I wrote indulgent, fat code, because
his bosses wanted programs to load and work quickly. Outlook SWAT teams swooped
down daily to reduce the size of our code. I remember endless hallway
discussions about how to balance the demand for lean and quick code against the
bloat required to add new and nifty features. (We were ultimately successful:
If you compare Outlook 2000 to the first version, Outlook 97, you'll see a vast
improvement in performance and stability. You'll also see a lot more cool
features, such as HTML mail and Preview Pane, to name but two.)

            The struggle between
concise code and bloated code plays out under the threat of a deadline. If our
software is occasionally too fat, we developers fall back on the same excuse
philosopher Blaise Pascal offered three centuries ago for his verbose letters:
"I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make
it shorter."

            If you're truly anti-bloat, there's a whole subgenre of
dainty, low-bloat computers out there for you: The PalmPilot and Windows CE
handheld devices. They pack a lot a power into little boxes, but let's not kid
anybody: Sometimes you can make do with a bicycle, but other times you need a
car. A fast car. A fast car with a big noisy engine and a bone-crushing CD
sound system. A Bloatmobile.

            I began this column with the provocative thesis that
software isn't anywhere near bloated enough. By that I meant that if we
software developers were really doing our jobs instead of resting and vesting
our stock options, word processors would have already bloated into 99.999
percent reliable voice-recognition software. Your computer would have fused the
functions of your telephone, television, and fax machine into one seamless
whole. Your computer would have become the instantly searchable repository of
all your correspondence, financial transactions, data searches, and phone
conversations. Plus, it would be making smart connections between your data and
actions. For instance, it will tell me, "Hey, Shuman, you can get a better auto
insurance policy from GEICO." Or, "Hey, Shuman, lay off the fatty, fried food,
why doncha? You want to get bloated or something?"

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 286: &quot;Supplies Party&quot;

            
               Vinyl rope,
magnets, large nails. What's the connection?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's Question
(No. 285)--"Sir, Counterintuitive, Sir!":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera has
announced a plan that will put more guns in American high schools. What is this
program called?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Puberty."-- Alison Rogers
            

            "Take
Your Father to School Day."--Norm Oder
            

            
"Project Louie Caldera's Kid Gets an A in Math or Else!"-- Erich Van
Dussen
            

            
"Coca-Cola and the U.S. Army Present 'Shoot a Pepsi Drinker and Win a Guest
Spot on Dawson's Creek ' Contest."-- Charlie Glassenberg
            

            
"Whatever, just so long as they're not singing 'Mony Mony.' "-- Colleen
Werthmann
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            The admonition, "You
become what you behold," has yielded to "You become what you belittle." We
Americans mocked the militarism of German youth in the '30s, and now we're
embracing Louis Caldera's ballistic schemes. In the '50s, we taunted the clunky
cars of the U.S.S.R. for their farm-wagon squareness; now we drive cool SUVs.
The joys of deriding portly Austrian burghers in the '60s haven't prevented us
from becoming a nation of American fatties. Nor has the fun we all had sneering
at England's squandering its North Sea oil windfall in the '70s and '80s kept
the Republican Party from proposing to give away the budget surplus to their
rich constituents. The frightening conclusion, if mockery precedes mimicry, is
that any minute now we'll all be working for Tina Brown.

            
               Lock and Load
Answer
            

            The program is the Junior Reserve Officer Training
Corps.

            To meet what it calls a growing demand from high
schools, the Army will double its JROTC by the 2000-2001 academic year, adding
it to 50 more high schools in 18 states, for a total of 1,420. After that, 50
more schools will be added annually for the next five years. There were 230,000
kids in the program last year. The Army will supply various pieces of
equipment, including guns for the kids' marksmanship training.

            Taught by retired Army
guys, JROTC courses cover history, current events, technology, communications,
physical fitness, and the ever popular shooting. Militaristic? You bet! But the
good kind of militaristic. "By expanding the JROTC, the Army is broadening its
investment in America's young people through a program that emphasizes the
values that have made our country great," says Caldera. "Insert your own dark
joke about those values," he did not add.

            
               Nominal
Extra
            

            Once left to
talented--or not--amateurs, naming new products is now frequently the task of
outside specialists. But has professionalizing this chore resulted in richly
evocative names? Can you tell what sort of products the following are (each
advertised in Sunday's New York Times )?

            
               Names
            

            1. Tiempo

            2. Aero

            3. Altima

            4. DaVinci 2

            5. Tango 3

            6. Rav 4

            7. Turbo Power 1500

            8. Rebel 2000

            9. Freedom Supreme

            10.
Cambridge Cherry

            

               Products
            

            1. Nike soccer shoe

            2. Compaq PalmPiloty
thing

            3. Nissan carish sort of
thing

            4. Another PalmPilotish
thing

            5. Adidas soccer ball

            6. Toyota SUV

            7. Hoover vacuum
cleaner

            8. Canon 35mm camera

            9. Minolta camera

            10. Fake Queen Anne
bedroom set from Drexel Heritage furniture

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Library Cad

            You'd think that a city would be thrilled to name
one of its streets after the most famous person who ever walked (or, in this
case, took a midnight "jog") down it, but that's not how it works in Little
Rock, Ark. Late last month, sign-wavers and activists mobbed city hall while
the city board considered whether to rename the street where the William
Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library will be located "President Clinton
Avenue." Hecklers offered derisive amendments: "Impeachment Avenue" was
proposed. But the city board eventually compromised, renaming just the few
blocks of Markham Street around the library after the president--a plan the
mayor said he came to embrace after asking himself, "What would Jesus do?"

            After a bit of fussing
from radio talk show hosts and newspaper columnists, the street-name dust-up
blew over, but it's one of the few controversies connected with the Clinton
Presidential Library that has. Since Little Rock beat out Hope and Hot Springs
for the library in November 1997, city policies from sales taxes to zoo funding
have been tangled up in Clinton and the building that will be his legacy. As
one local columnist noted, in Little Rock, even if they say it's not about
Clinton, it's about Clinton.

            Few Little Rockers dispute that a world-class library
building will be a boon to a town where the finest example of modern
architecture is the TCBY Tower, and the principal tourist attractions are quilt
shows and a building that had a cameo in Gone With the Wind (not to
mention the hotel rooms where Clinton propositioned women). But just as Little
Rock residents are embarrassed by Central High, the discomfiting monument to
desegregation and the town's other claim to history, some are queasy about
celebrating their not-so-favorite son.

            After all, Little Rock
had hardly won the library when the Lewinsky scandal broke and a vast new field
of inquiry revealed itself to Little Rock wiseacres: What's going to be in this
lie-brary anyhow? A cigar and a dress? Oral histories?

            But the library has provoked Little Rock not just because
it's a litmus test about Clinton. Even some Clinton fans have a bad taste in
their mouths about the way the Little Rock board of directors arranged to pay
for the 28-acre site. Private donors will fund the $80 million to $125 million
library, but city officials agreed to deliver construction-ready land. And
after recovering from the initial euphoria over winning the big prize, Mayor
Jim Dailey and Co. realized they had to find $15 million to buy and clear the
property.

            For a city with a $100 million budget, that's a
jawbreaker, but officials had made a commitment. They hit upon the idea of
issuing "parks revenue bonds," which didn't require voter approval, and
pledging revenues from the city's golf courses, parks, and zoo to pay them
down. The problem: Parks revenue bonds can only fund parks. Is a library a
park? That depends on your definition of the word "park." The city called the
library a "presidential park," and that took care of it.

            (The plan to take money
from the Little Rock zoo is another saga. For reasons too Byzantine to explain,
it's the only unaccredited big zoo in the nation, and it could use a cash
infusion. City officials are incredibly sensitive to the charge that they are
buying Clinton land with money that should go to feeding the giraffes. When the
city's newly hired zoo director came to town for a meet-and-greet recently,
reporters were warned in no uncertain terms that he was not to be asked about
the library.)

            Chamber of Commerce types welcomed this parks-bond trick,
but other members of the populace were not so gratified, among them 66-year-old
Nora Harris, a self-described "retired housewife." Harris sued the city,
claiming the library land deal is an illegal tax because the city will have to
raid the general fund to make up for lost parks revenue. A Pulaski County
Chancery Court judge ruled in the city's favor in June, but Harris plans to
appeal her case to the state Supreme Court. She has vowed to pursue the case to
the U.S. Supreme Court, or at least until she runs out of money.

            Harris isn't the only one
taking the city to court. Local developer Eugene Pfeifer III, a vocal opponent
of the library, owns a piece of property in the presidential park and promises
to fight the city's attempt to take his property by eminent domain.

            And then there's everyone else in the city. When the mayor
proposed a one-cent sales tax to shore up Little Rock's frayed budget, the city
revolted. Opponents such as Harris and Pfeifer argued loudly that the city was
forecasting a deficit because it is saddled with debt voters didn't approve, to
fund a library they didn't request, for the president who didn't inhale. City
officials squealed at that contention--the sales tax plan didn't mention the
"presidential library," and a deficit had been projected before the library
land grab--but Mayor Dailey was questioned about it everywhere he went, and his
answers didn't impress. The tax was walloped by more than two-thirds of voters
in a May referendum. Since then, the city has frozen hiring and chopped
programs to stave off a budget emergency.

            All this time, the land for the library has sat
undisturbed, covered with tall weeds and empty buildings, its intended purpose
marked only by a banner that has grown progressively more tattered. The mayor
originally hoped groundbreaking would take place six months ago, but it hasn't
happened yet. Still, the library is beginning to seem less of an albatross.
Earlier this month, Clinton finally picked the architects: James Stewart
Polshek and Richard M. Olcott of the Polshek Partnership in New York, along
with exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum.

            One unanswered question is how much time Clinton
will spend in his home state once his library is completed. Perhaps he'll live
in an upstairs apartment and huff around town in jogging shorts as he did when
he was governor. The rumor of a Senate run seems dead, but a local satirical
revue proposes that Clinton capitalize on his legendary press-the-flesh skill
by working as a Wal-Mart greeter. Speaking of pressing the flesh, Clinton will
undoubtedly put the library to good use. No one expects that Clinton will spend
a lot of time in carrels poring over his papers, but even so, he has a good
track record of making the most of the stacks. It was in the Yale Law Library,
after all, that he first put the moves on Hillary Rodham.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Talking About a Revolution

            Kelvin Lancaster died last month. He was an
economist's economist, famous within the profession (when an economist uses the
adjective "Lancastrian," he isn't talking about the Wars of the Roses), but
largely unknown beyond it. I can't claim to have known him personally: I was 3
years old when his famous paper on the theory of the "second best" was
published (click to read more about it), and we probably met only four or five
times. But nonetheless there was a time, a couple of decades ago, when we were
comrades-in-arms--when he and I, along with several dozen other people, helped
make a revolution in economic theory.

            That revolution went unnoticed among the wider
public, even among those who follow (or think that they follow) economic
thinking. David Warsh of the Boston Globe wrote an excellent series of
articles about some of the revolutionaries, and he's in the process of
finishing a book-length treatment. But other journalists ignored the story, or
if they did write anything got it wrong, preferring camera-ready fantasies in
which heroic outsiders challenged an obtuse Establishment. I've tried elsewhere
to correct some of the myths (click to read my article on the power of
biobabble and to read about the legend of Brian Arthur), but maybe Lancaster's
death is a good occasion for me to wax nostalgic, to recall what actually
did happen.

            To understand the
revolution, you need to grasp two related dichotomies. One is that between
constant and increasing returns; the other between perfect and imperfect
competition. Constant returns is the assumption that if you increase your
inputs, your output will grow by the same amount--e.g., if you double your
inputs you will also double your output. Increasing returns, on the other hand,
says that doubling inputs will more than double output. Perfect
competition is the assumption that producers are like wheat farmers, who take
the price of wheat as a given--and not like, say, Apple, which must decide what
to charge for an iMac and can choose within limits to raise that price if it is
willing to accept a reduction in sales.

            Perfect competition and constant returns go together like
cookies and milk; without constant returns, the assumption of perfect
competition becomes very hard to swallow. The reason, basically, is that when
there are increasing returns an industry will tend to become dominated by at
most a few large players, and these players are bound to realize that they have
some price-setting power. They are also likely to realize both that it is in
their common interest to agree, at least tacitly, to set prices high, and that
it is in their individual interest to cheat on that agreement and undercut
their rivals. Is the eventual result a stable cartel, a perpetual price war, or
an irregular alternation between the two? Hard to say. But what has long been
clear to economists is that increasing returns normally lead to imperfect
competition, and that imperfect competition can be a messy and intractable
subject.

            That recognition, in
turn, led the profession to spend about a century and a half--from David
Ricardo until the 1970s--concentrating its theoretical energy on models that
assumed constant returns and perfect competition, and economists tended to
avoid questions where increasing returns or imperfect competition were
self-evidently crucial. In so doing they were neither foolish nor dogmatic:
Most economists, I think, understood that increasing returns are sometimes
important, and a few people did try to take them into account. (In my
specialty, international trade theory, increasing-returns analysis is usually
dated from a 1925 paper by the Princeton economist Frank Graham; the first
fully worked-out mathematical model was published by R.C.O. Matthews in 1950.)
But useful theorizing in complex subjects such as economics is always a matter
of choosing the right strategic simplification, and for a long time it seemed
that the clarity of constant-returns/perfect-competition analysis justified its
violence to reality. Even now, one can say--and I did, back in 1995--that 95
percent of the time, it would be a blessing if politicians could understand
what's right about the constant returns model, not what's wrong with it.

            By the 1970s, however, patience with constant-returns
economics was wearing thin. Exactly why is hard to say. I don't think you can
claim that returns were less constant or competition less perfect in the real
world of 1975 than they had been in 1955, or even 1925. More likely, the
driving force was the field's internal intellectual logic: Economists had
answered most of the interesting questions they could ask in the old framework
and found that constant-returns economics was running into, well, diminishing
returns. And so they were finally ready to try something different.

            Kelvin Lancaster was one
of those who was driven to increasing returns. In the 1960s he had introduced a
seemingly obvious but highly useful twist to the analysis of consumer behavior
by pointing out that what consumers often want is not so much a specific
product as a particular bundle of characteristics. To take a modern example,
what business travelers care about in their notebook computers are low weight,
long battery life, and high computing power, rather than the logo on the case.
There are trade-offs among these good things; what differentiates one notebook
from another is where in this "characteristics space" they are located. But in
that case, why doesn't the market produce every possible notebook? (Much as I
love my Hewlett-Packard Jornada handheld, I'd prefer a machine with a slightly
better word processor, for which I would happily sacrifice something else.) The
answer, of course, is increasing returns: To proliferate varieties (and hence
to produce each variety at a smaller scale) means to increase costs.

            Now at this point Lancaster found himself up against the
usual problem: Increasing returns mean imperfect competition, and in general
imperfect competition is nasty stuff. But somehow, circa 1974, economists went
through a shift in mindset. My colleague Robert Solow likes to say that there
are two kinds of economists: those who look for general results and those who
look for illuminating examples. And more or less suddenly fell into the second
group; they decided that while a general theory of how imperfect competition
must work was never going to happen, it was OK to focus on interesting
examples of how it might work. How does the market for an industry with
Lancaster-type differentiated products function? It could be dominated by a
single firm that proliferates products to deter potential competitors--OK, Dick
Schmalensee wrote up that story. Or it could be "monopolistically competitive,"
each variety produced by a different firm--OK, Steve Salop wrote that up in one
version, Mike Spence in another, Avinash Dixit and Joe Stiglitz in yet another.
The point was to find stories that hung together, not determine once and for
all which was right.

            It's hard to convey, if
you weren't there, just how liberating this was. Once they decided it was OK to
tell illustrative stories rather than produce theorems, economists could write
about exciting topics that had been off limits: predatory pricing, strategic
investment to get the jump on competition, technological races, struggles to
define industry standards. By 1988, when Jean Tirole published his landmark
textbook The Theory of Industrial Organization , just about every idea
about the "new economy" that trendy writers proclaim as a radical departure
from conventional economic thought was, well, already in the textbook.

            Among other things, someone was bound to notice that the
interaction between increasing returns and product differentiation could help
explain some puzzles about international trade--like why most trade is between
seemingly similar countries. In the late '70s three people independently wrote
up that insight: the Norwegian economist Victor Norman, Lancaster himself, and
yours truly; and the "new trade theory" was born. A few years later economists
such as Paul Romer and Philippe Aghion applied related ideas to technological
change and economic growth, giving birth to the "new growth theory"; and the
ripples spread ever outward.

            Alas, golden ages do end. By the early 1990s, the
thrill of increasing-returns economics was fading. It wasn't just the
inexorable working of the law of diminishing disciples. There was a deeper
problem: The new ideas were immensely liberating, but at some point you can get
too liberated. In international trade, people started to joke that a
smart graduate student could come up with a model to justify any policy;
similar sentiments were felt in many fields. In short, we all got tired of
clever analyses of what might happen; and throughout economics there was a
shift in focus away from theorizing, toward data collection and careful
statistical analysis.

            But it was a golden age--a time of
innovation and intellectual excitement, when all of economics seemed up for
reinvention--and Kelvin Lancaster was one of those who made it so. Let us honor
his memory.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P><SPAN class=760110315-12101999>Mark Sikorski</SPAN></P>

            Captain's log: 0430 hours, underway in the South
Atlantic Ocean, steaming northeasterly along the southern coast of Brazil. The
phone ringing in my cabin awakens me; it's the conning officer on the bridge
making a report of a vessel that we have in sight approximately 12 miles away.
The conning officer is guided by my Standing Orders, which is a compendium of
actions to take when I'm not on the bridge. As directed, she is notifying me
that the vessel is on a head-on collision course with us and we need to
maneuver to pass clear of each other. Her recommendation to turn to starboard
20 degrees conforms with the International Navigational Rules; I agree and ask
her to watch the vessel until it is well past and clear. At sea, this scenario
is repeated numerous times every day. Safe navigation between ships is based
upon simple mathematics ... add the vectors representing each ship's course and
speed to determine if we are trying to occupy the same piece of ocean;
henceforth known as a collision. We have several technically sophisticated
computers that actually calculate the "closest point of approach" between our
ships. Nonetheless, each conning officer uses some common sense to verify the
computer solutions with what is actually happening. I have the final call on
all maneuvers to safely pass clear of other ships.

            0630 hours: My morning wake-up call and workout.
Since it is Columbus Day, we are in "holiday routine"; no reveille. Weather
remains very fair; it's already 66 degrees with light northeasterly winds;
barometer is holding steady; and the seawater temperature is 65 degrees. We are
all very excited that the weather is turning much warmer; it's a far cry from
the howling gale we encountered as we exited the Strait of Magellan nearly two
weeks ago. At 45 to 50 knots, the wind shrieked throughout the ship and was
actually tearing off the tops of the 25-to-30-foot seas. The seawater
temperature was 36 degrees! We beat ourselves up trying to work our way north;
the ship was rolling 30 plus degrees. All kinds of things broke free, including
a 1,000-pound box of free weights in the hangar and our 12-foot wardroom dining
table. We came through a bit battered, but thankfully no one was hurt.

            0730 hours: A second collision-avoidance report
from the conning officer; another large merchant ship trying to occupy the same
piece of ocean.

            0800 hours: Breakfast, coffee, and lots of good
conversation. Since we are on a rather long trek up the eastern coast of South
America, the routine has settled down somewhat from the hectic pace of the
previous three months. At the top of every hour, the bridge calls down to the
Engineering Control Center to record the seawater temperature from an engine
room gauge. To liven things up a bit, the engine room watch has calculated and
reported the seawater temperatures in units other than Fahrenheit: Kelvin,
Rankin, Celsius--the bridge didn't think it was too funny. In a similar vein,
several of the engineers have braved the elements by appearing at our daily
all-hands gatherings on the flight deck without coats; only to be outdone by a
petty officer who wore shorts through the frigid Strait of Magellan!

            1100 hours: Voyage planning; calculating distances
and fuel consumption rates to finalize port calls off the northern coast of
South America.

            1200 hours: Observed following daily customs:
Received ship's position report from the navigator. Current position is 28
degrees 19 minutes South latitude and 047 degrees 52 minutes West longitude
(about 1,700 miles south of the equator). The conning officer reports that all
small arms, ammunition, and pyrotechnics have been inspected. Traditional eight
bells are struck.

            1245 hours: Made a round of the ship. Clouds are
thickening; looks like rain. We are making 13 knots on a northeasterly heading;
the seawater has become bluer and has risen to 67 degrees. Engineering plant is
operating well; temperature between the main diesel engines--Jake and
Elwood--is 98 degrees; in the high southern latitudes the temperature was
barely 80 degrees. The evaporator is supplying us with enough water to keep up
with our consumption. Bilges beneath the operating machinery are dry and
clean.

            1300-1600 hours: Shuffled paperwork; reviewed
reports and signed the ship's official logs. Crew is enjoying a day of rest
watching movies and playing in the Morale Committee-sponsored spades
tournament.

            1700 hours: Ate dinner in the wardroom.

            2120 hours: Wrote Night Orders outlining
supplemental instructions for the night watches to follow.

            2300 hours: Engineer officer and I won our first
round of the spades tournament.

            0000 hours: Steaming under a canopy of stars,
gently swaying to the ocean swells; glowing lights on a distant shore. Another
day at sea is complete.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Too True To Be Good

            Not everything you read on the World Wide Web is
true. Not everything you read in the New York Times is true, either. So
when you read about scientific breakthroughs, how do you know what to
believe?

            Partly, you trust your instincts: A theory that
life evolved from clay is more inherently plausible than a theory that life
evolved from Play-Doh. Partly, you consider the source: A Harvard professor is
more credible than a Dartmouth dishwasher. And partly you rely on expert
judgments: If a prestigious journal has agreed to publish the clay theory, it's
probably wrong.

            Yes, I meant to say that: If a prestigious
journal publishes a theory, it's probably wrong . Given two equally
plausible theories from equally credible sources that have passed equally
strict scrutiny, the one that makes it into a top journal has a smaller
chance of being right. Here's why: Editors like to publish theories they find
surprising. And the best way to surprise an editor is to be wrong.

            That's not to say that
editors are reckless. At least in mathematics and economics (the two fields
where I can testify from personal experience), the editorial process is
rigorously demanding. Long before an article is submitted for publication, the
author is expected to circulate drafts among experts in the field and to
respond to their criticisms and comments--a process that typically takes years.
Only then is the (now heavily revised) article formally submitted, whereupon
the editor handpicks an expert referee to examine it line by line--a process
that can easily take another year or more. Are referees ever lax and careless?
Surely. Are they lax and careless with articles of genuine importance? In my
observation, essentially never. Through multiple rounds of correspondence,
referees demand satisfaction regarding every important detail. In many cases,
the author will visit the referee's home institution for a semester or a year
to be available for periodic grilling.

            That's exactly what's so damning about the hoax perpetrated
in 1996 by Alan Sokal. Sokal's paper, intentionally stripped of logic,
evidence, and even meaning, was accepted for publication in the cultural
studies journal Social Text . True, this was a one-time event, but it was
an event so far removed from anything that could possibly occur in a legitimate
academic enterprise that it converted agnostics like me, who had doubted the
status of cultural studies as an intellectual discipline, into hard-core cynics
with no doubt whatsoever.

            In a serious economics
journal, it would be impossible to publish an article like Sokal's. But it
would not be impossible, or even unusual, to publish a carefully reasoned
article that's still wrong. That's because of the bias I mentioned earlier:
Given two papers that have both survived the vetting process, editors tend to
prefer the more surprising, which means that on average they prefer the one
that's wrong.

            It's easy to see how the same dynamic could work at a
newspaper. "Man bites dog" is a better story than "dog bites man," but it's
also more likely to be wrong, even if both stories are reported by equally
reliable witnesses. In general--and this observation is a mainstay of college
statistics courses--when you think you've seen something unusual, you're more
likely to be mistaken than when you think you've seen something ordinary. But
it's the unusual that makes the front page.

            A few years ago,
economics professors J. Bradford De Long and Kevin Lang devised an ingenious
way to determine just how many published economic hypotheses are actually true.
They looked through several years' worth of issues of the top economics
journals and found 78 hypotheses that were confirmed by strong evidence--the
sort of evidence that led the authors to accept their own hypotheses. (Another
198 hypotheses were rejected by their authors.) In exactly none of the 78 cases
could the confirmation be called overwhelming.

            But that's OK. Strong evidence is, after all, strong
evidence, even when it's a little shy of overwhelming. In most cases,
overwhelming evidence is too much to ask for, because evidence can be hard to
collect and hard to interpret. So no individual article can be criticized for
failing to live up to an unattainable standard.

            But, said De Long and
Lang, out of 78 true hypotheses, surely there should be at least a few
that are overwhelmingly confirmed. In fact, they gave a precise definition of
the word overwhelming, according to which roughly 10 percent of all true
hypotheses should come packaged with overwhelming evidence. So if all 78
hypotheses are true, then roughly 7.8 of them--call it eight-- should be
confirmed overwhelmingly. And they're not.

            OK, so maybe that's because not all 78 are true. Maybe only
50 are true. In that case, five should be confirmed overwhelmingly. Or maybe
only 30 are true, in which case three should be confirmed overwhelmingly. The
problem is that exactly zero are confirmed overwhelmingly, and zero is
10 percent of--zero! So out of 78 "confirmed" hypotheses, it seems that
approximately zero are true.

            Using a more sophisticated version of the same
techniques, De Long and Lang concluded that some of the 78 "confirmed"
hypotheses might be true, but probably not more than about a third of them. In
other words, when a published article in a top journal presents evidence that
its hypothesis is true, its hypothesis is probably false. It would be very
interesting to perform the same experiment with, say, medical journals instead
of economics journals. I'd be very surprised if the results were substantially
different.

            If this makes you feel pessimistic about the
progress of science, keep in mind that we can learn a lot from even a very few
true hypotheses submerged in a sea of false ones. And here's another ray of
hope: De Long and Lang's results were published in the prestigious Journal
of Political Economy , so they're probably wrong to begin with. And this
account of them was published in 
                  Slate
               , so it's probably wrong,
too.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Playing the Heavy

            Blame it all on Calista Flockhart. Having
apparently grown tired of obsessing over just how skeletal the Ally
McBeal 
               Über -waif has become, the tabs take a different tack: They
bare their fangs and become positively McCarthyesque in their zeal to rat out
celebs who've become the least bit unsvelte. Fat jokes are the order of the
day--the meaner, the better.

            Where to begin? With the Globe 's snippy
caption for a photo of "tubby" Alec Baldwin "nearly blocking an East Hampton
street"? Or with the Star 's complaint that Titanic star Kate
Winslet "ballooned up the minute she got off the boat and loosened up her
corsets"? (The story goes on to say that she put on all of 10 pounds, for the
record.) How about the Globe 's report that at the bash to celebrate her
Saturday Night Live appearance, Monica Lewinsky "hit the buffet table
like a toothy tornado"? Lewinsky, the Globe explains, is in the midst of
a "frantic food frenzy"; the paper even provides a helpful restaurant diary
that details where she has been spotted and just what she has indulged in.
Sample entry: "She wolfed down a 20 oz. goblet of sugary hot chocolate at the
Upper East Side's Serendipity 3."

            The Globe also
claims that Cher--who has gained 12 pounds of her own, according to the
Star --fears that her daughter, Chastity Bono, is "eating herself into an
early grave." "I've seen her eating ice cream out of the carton," a source
confides. (If this is a warning sign, Keeping Tabs fears for the health of 90
percent of the American population.) And the Globe 's hit list goes on.
"Pudgy" Martha Stewart is said to have put on 20 pounds. An intrepid
Globe reporter interviews a vacationing Patsy Ramsey, mother of
JonBenet, while swimming in the Caribbean and observes that she has "obviously
put on weight." And, according to a Globe cover story, Oprah Winfrey has
"pack[ed] on 47 lbs.--& DOESN'T CARE!"

            The good news for all those who've been nailed by the
tabloid fat police is that the Globe has the secrets of Sen. Ted
Kennedy's "love diet," a seaweed-rich plan that has helped the "bloated blimp"
with "enough ballast to sink the Titanic " become a shadow of his former
self. Can it be coincidence that the Star claims it was a "wacky seaweed
therapy" that helped "hefty and hippy" Sophie Rhys-Jones drop 20 pounds before
her recent wedding to Britain's Price Edward? Furthering the maritime theme,
the Star reports that Austin Powers star Mike Myers lost 25
pounds on the "salmon salad diet."

            When they're not
obsessing about who's eating what (check out the Globe 's scintillating
two-page photo spread of celebrities' favorite breakfast foods), the tabloids
take time to remember that it's wedding season. Royal wedding intrigue
dominates, with the Globe raising the possibility that Prince Edward may
be gay--perhaps forgetting that only a week earlier, it had him confessing that
he was actually in love with his late sister-in-law, Princess Diana. But
there's no rest for the weary in tabloidland. A week after the royal wedding,
the National Enquirer had already reported that the honeymoon was "over"
and that cracks were "already showing" in the marriage.

            At the wedding of Courteney Cox and David Arquette--who'll
be getting the requisite Gucci nipple rings to celebrate, according to the
Star --the Globe says that "no one was paying more attention" than
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, because they are preparing to take the plunge
themselves. Brad and Jennifer will have to take a number. Among those the tabs
say are eager to walk down the aisle are Demi Moore and new beau Oliver
Whitcomb, Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin, Heather Graham and Ed Burns, Prince
Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, Mariah Carey and Luis Miguel, Julia Roberts
and Benjamin Bratt, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The
Enquirer says that actress Bridget Fonda is "stocking up on bridal
magazines," while country singer Dwight Yoakam shops for her engagement ring,
despite a concurrent report in the Globe that a "heartsick" Fonda "can't
find Mr. Right."

            So much love is in the
air that a number of stars are flying back into their former lovers'
arms--or at least trying to. And naturally, at the forefront of this wave of
celebrity reconciliations are Pamela and Tommy Lee. According to the
Star , the couple are thinking of getting remarried the old-fashioned
way: on pay-per-view TV, complete with a video montage of their "non-explicit
romantic moments together."

            Perhaps inspired by action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, who
recently retied the knot with ex-wife Gladys Portugues (making her wife No. 3
and No. 5), Lisa-Marie Presley is "desperately pleading" with ex-husband
Michael Jackson to get back together, says the Enquirer . "I'll treat his
two adorable kids as my own," Lisa-Marie is quoted as saying, in the
unmistakably stilted syntax of tabloidese. The Star , on the other hand,
has Presley busily planning her wedding to boyfriend Luke Watson, although at
least one member of the Jackson clan will reportedly be at the altar: Janet
Jackson is said to be the maid of honor.

            Prince Andrew must be
unfazed by how "chunky" the Globe says his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, has
become, because they are also talking remarriage, according to the
Enquirer . And when she's not worrying that her daughter is about to keel
over, Cher has been rekindling her romance with her ex Rob Camilletti,
according to the Globe , which also reteams Madonna with her baby's
father, Carlos Leon, and Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow with her ex Ben Affleck.
(Ben might want to check out the Star , which claims that Gwyneth could
be the next to jump on that Gucci nipple ring bandwagon.)

            The Globe stretches the reconciliation theme to new
heights with a story suggesting that the "fates" are trying to bring John F.
Kennedy Jr. back to his ex Daryl Hannah. The evidence? Hannah was recently
spotted in New York wearing a hat with a star on it, while Kennedy was
photographed elsewhere in the Big Apple wearing a T-shirt with--are you sitting
down?--the "same celestial sign." The Globe notes conspiratorially that
his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, was "nowhere in sight."

            One couple we definitely don't expect to see
reconciling anytime soon is Cybill Shepherd and her former fiance Robert
Martin. The Globe runs what it says is Martin's "open letter" to
Shepherd, in which he pleads with her to "open [her] heart and do what's right"
by repaying him the $4,000 she reportedly owes him. Confidential to Martin: You
might have had a better chance of getting your money had the Globe not
run a "World Exclusive" interview in which you're quoted disclosing
"titillating details" about your ex's sexual fantasies and happy-hour
proclivities. Keeping Tabs would never presume to speak for Ms. Shepherd, of
course. It's just a sneaking suspicion.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Beating Around the Bush

            
Everything you need to know about Gov. George W. Bush, R-Texas, you learned in
kindergarten. Launching his presidential campaign in Iowa this weekend, Bush
outlined a threefold agenda: to impose "bad consequences for bad behavior" and
"love our neighbor as we want to be loved ourselves"; to help churches and
charities "to nurture, to mentor, to comfort" people in need; and to insist
that "every child must be educated."

            A less
daring platform can scarcely be imagined. Yet the media lauded Bush's speech
for its boldness, citing the "contrasts" he drew with President Clinton while
"appealing to a different kind of audience from the one that had elected his
father" and "distinguishing himself from the rest of the crowded Republican
field." How does Bush pass off his clichés as confrontations? By fabricating
illusory distinctions and debates.

            

               1. Compassionate conservatism. This is Bush's unofficial
slogan. Saturday in Iowa, Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, introduced Bush as "a
conservative with a conscience, with compassion." Bush used the word
"compassion" 13 times in his speech, concluding: "I know this approach has been
criticized. But why? Is compassion beneath us? Is mercy below us? Should our
party be led by someone who boasts of a hard heart? ... I'm proud to be a
compassionate conservative. I welcome the label. And on this ground I will make
my stand." The crowd applauded, and the press swooned. As the Los Angeles
Times described the scene: "Taking up a challenge from some opponents, Bush
defended his philosophy of 'compassionate conservatism.' "

            How
does Bush spin compassion, the world's most universal value, as a courageous
"stand"? As with most magic tricks, the sleight of hand occurs at the outset,
when Bush says his philosophy "has been criticized." In truth, none of Bush's
rivals has criticized compassion or boasted of a hard heart. On the contrary,
some call "compassionate conservatism" an offensive phrase because it suggests
that unmodified conservatives lack compassion (just as many liberals complained
that Vice President Al Gore's "practical idealism" implied that unmodified
idealists were impractical). Others dismiss this phrase as "weasel words"
designed to substitute for positions on specific issues. What Bush's opponents
have "criticized," in short, is not his "approach" but its redundancy and
insubstantiality. By conning the media into reporting that he was "defending
his philosophy," Bush snuffed out the real question: whether he has a
philosophy to defend.

            

               2. Prosperity with a purpose. This is Bush's official campaign
theme. It's supposed to convey what he offers that Gore doesn't. Clinton and
Gore may have brought us prosperity, the slogan suggests, but Bush will give
our prosperity a purpose. And what is that purpose? According to Bush: "America
must be prosperous so that anybody who wants to work can find a high quality,
high paying job. America must be prosperous so that people can realize their
entrepreneurial dreams. America must be open so that every citizen knows the
promise of America. America must be educated so that all our citizens can
realize the American dream." In other words, the purpose of prosperity is ...
prosperity.

            

               3. The responsibility era. Bush doesn't talk about moral
issues that might get him into trouble, such as abortion or homosexuality.
Instead, he pledges "to usher in the responsibility era," in which we will
"confront illegitimacy," instill "discipline and love" in juvenile justice, and
accept that "we're responsible for our neighbors and helping in our
communities." Lest anyone point out the abstractness and obviousness of these
commitments, Bush says they stand in "stark contrast to the last few decades,
when our culture has clearly said, 'If it feels good, do it, and if you've got
a problem, blame somebody else.' " Does Bush really think the last few decades,
supervised in large part by his father and President Reagan, were the era of
irresponsibility? Or is he painting a dark background to lend the illusion of
luster to his pale moral agenda?

            
Likewise, Bush often uses sharp language to obscure fuzzy thought. "Some people
think it is inappropriate to draw a moral line in the sand. Not me," he
proclaims. And what is his line? "Children must learn to say yes to
responsibility, yes to hard work, yes to honesty, and yes to family." Likewise,
Bush asserts, "We must teach [our children] there are ... wrong choices." Such
as? Drugs, alcohol, and teen pregnancy, he says. And what's wrong with teen
pregnancy? It's "a sure-fire way to fall behind," he explains, using the
language not of a pulpit but of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

            

               4. New idealism. In Iowa, Bush elicited applause and media
excitement by taking what the Los Angeles Times called "several shots"
at Clinton. "I will not use my office as a mirror to reflect public opinion,"
declared Bush. "Government should not try to be all things to all people." "I
do not run polls to tell me what to think." "We will show that politics, after
a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better. We will give our country
a fresh start after a season of cynicism." "Americans are waiting for new
hopes, new energy and new idealism."

            The
difference between an idealist and a cynic, in this view, is that the idealist
is willing to take a stand contrary to public opinion. On taxes? Bush proposes
"to give Americans more money" in the name of "compassion." On special interest
pork? He told Iowans he supports ethanol subsidies. On Kosovo? He "welcomes"
the peace agreement but says "America should be suspicious" of it. On the GOP's
campaign against James Hormel, the gay man Clinton has appointed to be
ambassador to Luxembourg? Bush says that any qualified appointee should be
allowed to serve but that he won't speak out against the campaign because
Hormel isn't conservative. On fiscal restraint? Bush says, "[A]fter we meet
priorities, when we have money left over, we must pass it back to the
taxpayers." Note the caveat about "priorities." Sound familiar?

            Like
his father, Bush substitutes virtue for substance. When asked by
Newsweek what his family stands for, George W. answered, "Honesty,
integrity, serving for the right reasons." And what are those reasons?
"America, and what America stands for," he replied. "To bring integrity and
decency to the process and to serve for the right reason, which is country
above self. But I'm going to have a specific agenda that addresses what I think
are the big concerns as we go into the 21 st century." The younger
Bush's constant assurances that he's going to unveil his "10-point plans" and
"specific incentives" any day now--a vague pledge to be specific--are the
functional equivalent of his father's constant allusions to "vision." The less
you have of something, the more you boast of it abstractly.

            
               5. A uniter, not a
divider. Bush's greatest feat has been to spin his evasion of
controversies as a virtue. "A leader must be a uniter, not a divider," he
declares. "This country is hungry for a new-style campaign" that is "positive,
hopeful, inclusive" and "unites America." With those words, the Republican
front-runner takes a bold stand against taking bold stands. Shame on lesser
candidates who demand that he choose sides on the difficult issues of the day.
He's in his own league. And by selling the media distinctions without a
difference, he intends to keep it that way.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Would Buddha Do?

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My significant other
is driving me berserk. He changes religious beliefs like some people change
clothes. This might be only peculiar (and therefore tolerable), but he expects
me to accompany him, as well as get into the philosophy of the moment. I really
do not have time for this and, to be truthful, do not share his passion for
religious theory. I gave it a try but can no longer play along. How would you
recommend I deal with this? (And him?)
            

            

               --Pulling My Hair Out in Chicago
            

            Dear Pull,

            Your trendy friend sounds like a handful. If you
are interested in maintaining the relationship, you need to spell out that
lovers need not share every interest, and that his searching for new belief
systems is particularly tiring for you.

            It would be helpful if
you had a religion that you started with and said you wished to retain but,
failing that, tell the theologian that you are making a new beginning: that he
has your blessings, pardon the expression, to pursue the religion of his choice
... alone. If he throws it up to you that you used to go to all the various
services with him, tell him that was Zen, this is now.

            
--Prudie, individually

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               My wife of eight
years is starting to make me wonder if she is mature enough to even be married.
She spends more time with her girlfriends, most of whom are from high school,
than she does with me. (We have no children.) I wind up doing many things alone
on weekends and in the evenings because she always has plans with "the girls."
My wish is to make this marriage work because I love my wife, but I am feeling
like second fiddle to a gang of girls. Any ideas?
            

            

               --Stumped
            

            Dear Stump,

            Do you know the saying, "We're all grown-ups here?"
Well, that seems not to be the case in your life. Your wife sounds immature to
the max. Prudie is at a disadvantage, however, not knowing the details and the
dynamics of your marriage.

            Just regarding the
complaint about reliance on girlfriends, though, Prudie suggests you have a
loooong and serious heart-to-heart with your wife, outlining your disturbance
with her choices. Ask if she wishes to be married. Ask if she has complaints
about you . If she is willing, a couples therapist might be helpful. One
way or the other, you have to resolve the situation.

            
--Prudie, amicably

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My father was married once before my mother and
has three children from his earlier marriage. I am 25, and my stepbrothers are
in their late 30s. All three are intelligent (two are lawyers, one has an MBA)
but have never found themselves in stable situations. All three have been
bankrupt at one point during the past three years. All three apportion a great
deal of guilt to my father, who did not win custody of them when they were
younger. Their mother was not a good one, and I recognize that they have
emotional scars. However, my father never fails to bail them out of a financial
crisis. While my father has done well, he is by no means wealthy. I know he has
dipped into his retirement fund several times to help my siblings out.
            

            
               What bothers me is
that while my childhood was far more "normal," I demonstrate more
responsibility in my financial obligations (school loans, etc.) than my elder
siblings and, frankly, would be embarrassed to ask my father for money because
I couldn't get a handle on life. My father came from a poor family and I would
like him to enjoy his retirement. Is it appropriate for me to say anything to
him regarding this matter? I do love my elder sibs but feel they are exploiting
my father with guilt.
            

            

               --Concerned in D.C.
            

            Dear Con,

            It sounds as though you have your father's
well-being at heart, so you might gently engage him in a conversation about
your concerns. Do articulate that you do not feel competitive with your
half-brothers and try to bring up the question of "making reparations" out of
guilt. Also mention that bailing out these boys may not be in their best
interests. He cannot help but be touched if you tell him of your concerns for
his comfortable retirement. He may be amenable to what you have to say--or he
may not. Once you've brought the subject up, however, know that you can take it
no further. In the end, it is his money ... and his guilt.

            It is admirable that you
regard responsibility in a different way than the three boys you write about.
It is interesting, too, that the two lawyers and the MBA display financial
incompetence. Prudie recommends, by the way, that you not bring up this subject
with your brothers. That way lies fireworks.

            
--Prudie, gingerly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               This is going back a
bit, but I was struck by the letter from . As a psychology professor, a
previous psych major, and an avocational singer, I agree with your advice to
"Go for it" but think there's yet another option that Carpe should consider
before running away from home or from college. Since Carpe is already enrolled
in college, why not take a minor in music or even double major in psychology
and music? Surely Mom and Dad can't object to that, but more important, Carpe
has this wonderful opportunity to increase her musical skills, develop her
talent, and make important connections that could lead to jobs. Why not take
the four years to do all that and then "run away" to pursue her dreams, fully
prepared?
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               One Who Has Her Singing Dream and Her Psychology Job
            

            Dear One,

            Why not, indeed? What
you suggest is very sound advice, and Prudie thanks you for being a Prudie.

            --Prudie, rationally

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Chamber of Horrors

            Most
British newspapers led Friday with the discovery of a "medieval torture
chamber" beneath a Serb police station in Pristina and on an official British
estimate that more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians died in Serb atrocities. The
Guardian
carried front-page photographs of some of the instruments of torture found
inside the police interrogation center--knuckle-dusters, knives, a hangman's
noose, and a chainsaw. Although, according to local Albanians, the Serbs spent
three days burning documents before the British arrived, the Guardian
quoted an official of the Hague war crimes tribunal as saying that scraps of
paper left behind might be useful in establishing a "paper chain" between
President Slobodan Milosevic and the massacres carried out in Kosovo. "There is
correspondence going between here and Belgrade about numbers of 'terrorist
suspects' picked up," the official said. "It tells us a lot about how much
Belgrade knew was going on." The discovery prompted a hard-line editorial in
the Times of London calling on NATO to stand firm against any deviations
from the Kosovo peace deal. It asked in particular for rejection of a request
by some Kosovo-born Serb policemen to be allowed to discard their uniforms and
return to civilian life in the province. "To backpedal in any way would result
in more demands from all sides for more renegotiation, put the deal as a whole
in jeopardy, and must not be countenanced," it said.

            In
Paris Friday, Le
Monde strongly attacked French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre
Chevènement for his apparent indifference to the sufferings of the Albanian
Kosovars. It described as "shocking" the minister's public declaration of
concern about what might now happen to the Serbs in Kosovo "without a word
about the violence and deportations endured for long weeks by the Kosovars,
without a thought for the victims of the massacres carried out by the Serbs."
Le Monde 's editorial also deplored the timing of the minister's
statement, coming just as NATO is discovering that its worst fears about Serb
atrocities were justified and that the accounts by Kosovar refugees were not
exaggerated.

            The
Independent
reported the reappearance of Veton Surroi, the publisher of the
Kosovo Albanian daily Koha Ditore , which had its offices and printing
plant destroyed by the Serbs during the war but which started publishing again
in exile in Macedonia. The Independent , which described Surroi as a
possible future leader of the province, said it reached him by telephone and
was told that he is fine and will soon be coming out of hiding. The
Guardian ran an article by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about
the environmental consequences of the Kosovo air campaign. Writing in his
capacity as president of Green Cross International, a nongovernmental
environmental organization, Gorbachev called for a ban on weapons containing
depleted uranium such as NATO used in Yugoslavia. Although their external
radiation levels are quite low, he said, "the internal radiation source damages
various types of cells in the human body, destroys chromosomes and affects the
reproductive system." Gorbachev also wants the bombing of nuclear power
stations and of some chemical and petrochemical plants to be prohibited by
international law. "The human drama and the drama of nature should be of equal
concern to us," he wrote.

            In an
editorial on the G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, the Times said world leaders
"should stick to the hard stuff," such as the Balkans and Third World debt
relief, rather than introduce a new topic, education--"an interloper that risks
distracting leaders from urgent matters and perverts the purpose of these
summits"--to their discussions. "The G8 should concentrate on issues that only
they can solve," it said. "Tony Blair and his fellow leaders may hope that by
endorsing this charter [for lifelong learning] they will make the summit seem
more relevant to people's lives. Yet few voters are likely to be impressed by a
wedge of motherhood and apple pie, served with a topping of Third Way
jargon."

            In
Tokyo, Asahi Shimbun highlighted anticipated summit differences
between Japan and the West over the postwar reconstruction of Yugoslavia. It
said that while President Bill Clinton and French President
Jacques Chirac had agreed to deny all but humanitarian aid to Yugoslavia while
Milosevic remains in power, Japan opposes such a condition and has already
pledged $200 million toward reconstruction.

            In
Germany, both Die
Welt and Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung led Friday on a clash over abortion between Pope
John Paul II and the German Roman Catholic bishops. Under German law, women get
free abortions within the first three months of pregnancy, provided they have
first discussed their situations with a group of consultants comprising social
workers, psychologists, doctors, and representatives of the churches. Of the
1,700 such groups, 270 are organized by the Catholic Church. But in an
"outspoken" letter to the German Bishops' Conference, the gist of which was
leaked Thursday to Frankfurter Allgemeine , the pope ordered the German
church to stop participating in the state consultancy system. The paper said he
had thus put himself in opposition to about 70 percent of the bishops in
Germany.

            The
scandal, originating in Belgium, of contaminated Coca-Cola continued to make
front pages around Europe Friday. In Rome, La Repubblica said this was an "annus horribilis " for Coca-Cola,
that "the sun is setting on the empire of Atlanta," and that "the gods have
turned against the fizzy drink." The company is suffering from "a credibility
crisis which could prove devastating," it said.

            
               Le Monde 's front
page included an exposé of the famous French underwater explorer, Commander
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, as a rabid anti-Semite. It quoted a letter written by
Cousteau in 1941, when he was working for French naval intelligence in
Marseilles, complaining about the lack of decent accommodation. "There won't be
a suitable apartment until they have thrown out those vile 'youtres ' [an
abusive term for Jews] who encumber us," he wrote to a fellow naval officer.
Cousteau died two years ago this month.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Voting Online

            

               First of two parts
            

            Next
week, Jodi Kantor will report on the emergence of Internet voting and some of
the obstacles to it, the most daunting of which is ballot security. But let's
assume for the moment that the practical problems can be overcome. Will
Internet voting be good news for American democracy?

            The
chief argument for e-voting is that it will cause more people to vote. As
everyone knows, turnout has been declining. In presidential elections, it has
fallen from 63 percent of the voting-age population in 1960 to less than 50
percent in 1996. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is surely the
inconvenience of casting ballots in person. Before you can vote, you need to
have registered, often several weeks before an election. Then you must go
somewhere and stand in a line--on a day that seems scientifically chosen to
maximize the odds of lousy weather. If you're going to be away from home on
Election Day, you have to think ahead about getting an absentee ballot.
E-voting would eliminate these hassles. Some advocates believe that it would
have its greatest impact on participation by voters aged 18-24, who turn out in
lower numbers than any other group.

            On the
other side are a variety of objections. In addition to concerns about fraud,
some argue that Internet voting would accentuate the socio-economic skew of our
elections. Wealthier, whiter people are more likely to vote than poor people
and minorities. Since they're also more likely to own personal computers,
online voting might exaggerate the disparity. There is also an argument that
the familiar process of voting in person serves a civic purpose. Rick Valelly,
a professor at Swarthmore College, argued  in the New Republic recently that real
voting is a "vital public ritual that increases social solidarity and binds
people together." You might call this the communitarian objection. Valelly
thinks that e-voting would create "political anomie."

            I
think it's fairly easy to answer the race-and-class argument. No one thinks
that e-voting would replace r-voting any time soon. So long as it is an
optional alternative, e-voting makes it easier for some people to
vote--especially the handicapped, people living abroad, and frequent
flyers--without inconveniencing anyone else. This is what's called a win-win
situation. Over the next decade, access to the Internet is forecast to become
dirt cheap and quasi-ubiquitous. But for those who still can't afford or don't
want private access at home, there will be public Internet terminals in
libraries, schools--and probably grocery stores and bus stations as well.
E-voting might actually be a boon to the poor, who often can't miss work to
vote as easily as higher-income types can.

            The
communitarian objection is a bit more troubling. Around the world, people
struggle and die for the right to vote, just as people in this country once
did. If you've ever seen the once-disenfranchised standing in line all day to
cast the first ballot of a lifetime in South Africa or Guatemala, it's hard not
to be appalled at how cavalierly people treat voting in this country. It's
tempting to say that anyone unwilling to sacrifice an hour to exercise the
right to vote doesn't much deserve it. Having to take a bit of trouble to vote
reminds you that voting is the cornerstone of all our rights. By eliminating
the ritual, e-voting stands to diminish the meaning attached to it.

            I'd
say that this complaint is valid but not persuasive. The chief value of the
ritual of voting is to convey the significance of voting to democratic
citizens. Once the ritual becomes a deterrent to the act itself, as it pretty
clearly has, it ceases to serve its purpose. In the end, the communitarian
objection to e-voting seems more aesthetic than substantive. On the Internet,
more of us will exercise our right and fulfill our civic responsibilities. We
just won't meet in a church basement to do it. The trade-off of higher
participation for poorer visuals would seem one well worth making.

            In fact, e-voting is less
of a leap than it might seem. When you think about it, voting has long been a
fusion of public and private, of tradition and technology. The secret ballot
was a Progressive Era reform. Voting machines--which utilize primitive, punch
card computer processing--came into widespread use in the 1960s. These two
innovations mean that we already vote privately by computer--we just visit a
public place to do so. It's not that nothing will be lost when we all vote from
remote terminals instead of at the local polling place. But what we stand to
lose is ephemeral. What we stand to gain from virtual voting is very real.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <EM>Tarzan</EM>, King of the Cartoons

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Tarzan
                (Walt Disney Pictures). Critics from all
corners rave over Disney's first major release of the summer: "Never has an
animated feature seemed more animated by sheer kinetic joy" (Joe Morgenstern,
the Wall Street Journal ). What makes it so great? 1) The animation,
bolstered by a new technique called "Deep Canvas"; 2) Phil Collins' energizing,
percussion-heavy soundtrack; and 3) the timeless Tarzan story (although
some note un-PC bits have been left out of this version). Janet Maslin (the
New York Times ) calls it "one of the more exotic blooms in the Disney
hothouse." A few gripes from the fringes: According to the Village
Voice 's Richard Gehr, although beautiful to look at, the film is "numbingly
formulaic" and rife with the usual Disney clichés: "absent parents,
unthreatening yet princely hero, perky but ditzy heroine, swarthy villain, cute
sidekicks, hugs, lessons, and a CD's worth of forgettable pop tunes." (Click
here to see a listing of all the Tarzan films, all
the way back to 1918's silent Tarzan of the Apes .)

            

               
                  The General's Daughter
                (Paramount Pictures). Critics
dump on the gratuitous violence--especially a rape and murder scene involving a
naked woman staked to the ground--in this thriller starring John Travolta,
James Woods, and Madeleine Stowe. For Roger Ebert (the Chicago
Sun-Times ), it's a "well-made thriller with a lot of good acting" but is
"so unnecessarily graphic and gruesome that by the end I felt sort of unclean."
Director Simon West ( Con Air ) "shows a knack for underutilizing good
actors while pumping up the story's gratuitously ugly side" (Maslin, the New
York Times ). And in his scathing review in the Wall Street Journal ,
Morgenstern probably doesn't realize that his line describing the film as
"soft-core porn in an expensive star package" is likely to attract rather than
repel the target audience. (Click here to
find out more about John Travolta.)

            

               
                  Run Lola Run
                (Sony Pictures Classics). This
high-energy German film has taken its native country by storm, and American
critics are equally impressed: It's a "hyperkinetic pop culture firecracker of
a film" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). A woman (Lola) has 20
minutes to run across town and recover money lost by her boyfriend. If she's
too late, he'll be killed. And so "Lola takes off, trucking along with a
muscular R. Crumb look and distinctive flaming-cranberry hair," and from that
point on, the film is full if "smashing bravado" and "sheer cleverness"
(Maslin, the New York Times ). The film crackles with little tricks--at
times Lola morphs into an animated figure, and her trip starts over three
times, each version ending differently. A few critics pipe up with
complaints--the film is weightless and a bit air-headed--but most find Lola's
whirlwind race against time exhilarating. (Click here to read David Edelstein's review in

                  Slate
               .)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
               ,
by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). Critics are wary of the unimpressive
analysis and shaky sourcing in Bob Woodward's latest, which delves into the
effects of Watergate on the presidency. Shadow "is filled with
authoritative accounts of conversations ... that are at best re-creations based
on biased participants' memories, at worst near-fabrications" (Frank Gannon,
the Wall Street Journal ). And as Jake Tapper notes in Salon , reviewers "regurgitate the most titillating tidbits,
usually missing the point of the tome's larger thesis." Highlights: Clinton was
afraid his wife wouldn't forgive him (what a shocker) and Hillary Clinton was
deeply pained by her husband's affair (another surprise). Speculation has
arisen about who gave Woodward the Clinton material, and according to the
New York Post , the "No.1 suspect" is Robert Barnett, a partner of
Clinton's personal lawyer, David Kendall. (Click here to read an excerpt and to read Chatterbox's take on
the book in 
                  Slate
               .)

             

            

               
                  Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
               , by Will Self (Grove
Press). Reviewers fall into two camps on Self's latest collection of stories.
One deems it more of the same old riffing on the underside of society, "calling
up as many vile impressions of humanity as possible" (Liesl Schillinger, the
Washington Post ), while the other detects a new maturity in Self and
labels this "his most disciplined storytelling yet," marked by "a new control
and polish (Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times ). Everyone concedes
that his writing is masterful; it's just a question of whether he has
progressed. Jonathan Lethem (the New York Times Book Review ) finds both
ends of the spectrum in the book: "When he's at his best, Self's struggle with
these opposed gifts conjures up fiction that alternately boggles, amuses and
horrifies. At his worst, he merely offers punch lines that are laboriously
stretched on a rack of realist detail." (Read the first chapter here.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Da Real World
               , by Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott
(Wea/Elektra Entertainment). Hip-hop's most innovative female artist turns in
her second album, and critics deem it a worthy follow-up to her blockbuster
platinum debut, Supa Dupa Fly (1997). But after praising the album's
freshness and listing the many guest artists (from Eminem to Aaliyah to Lil'
Kim), most critics start nit-picking. Main gripes: The rhymes are only so-so,
and the tired sexual politics that provide most of the lyrical subject matter
send a mixed message. (Click here to read an interview with Elliott.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Music
            

            
               
                  ¡Viva el
Amor!
               , by Pretenders (Warner Bros.). Borderline
reviews--"competent but utterly unexciting" (Natalie Nichols, the Los
Angeles Times )--for the band's first album in five years. Front woman
Chrissie Hynde still shines with her trademark snarl and gravelly voice, but
some of the songs are serious clunkers, and even the best sound like a rehash
of the band's older material.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Unclogging House Guests

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Last weekend a
friend and her husband came to visit me for a few days. This is a friend I have
known for 25 years, and although we've lived in different cities for the last
23 years, we've always kept in touch and stayed fairly close. We had a great
weekend--saw the sights of the city, ate out, etc. But the day after they left
for home, I found some damage had been done that they hadn't told me about. The
turntable in the microwave was chipped, and the toilet in their bathroom was
clogged. Neither of these things in and of themselves bothers me. What does
bother me is that this lifelong friend didn't have the courtesy to let me know
what had happened. Should I just let these things go in the name of preserving
the friendship? If not, what are my options?
            

            

               --C.S.
            

            Dear C.,

            The chums took the easy
way out. It was not classy or first-rate, but it saved them what they perceived
to be embarrassment. Avoidance is a rather common behavior ... some people
decide it's easier to skitter away than to 'fess up. Granted, it's left-footed
social behavior; Prudie is not going to argue with you there. Your options,
however, depend on how strongly you feel about letting them know you know. If
you just can't stand to let it ride, then write a non-accusatory note saying
you were sad they didn't feel close enough to have mentioned the microwave or
the sluggish toilet. To lighten it up, you could add that all the repairs have
been made, and you look forward to their return visit. Think about it for a few
days, then decide how you want to play it.

            
--Prudie, tactfully

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               A year ago my husband's cousin and his wife
moved in with us. They were relocating from another state and needed a place to
live "for a few months" while they got to know the area, and found jobs and a
place to live. They agreed to pay half the rent and attendant bills.
            

            
               Well, they're still
with us, and they never pay anything on time. They seem to think that junk food
qualifies as their half of the groceries. My husband and I keep the house
supplied with good food, but we can't afford to support two grown adults. We
also cannot stand their dog. (It's not housebroken, and it's full-grown.) We
have made subtle hints and mentioned that they need to start looking for their
own place. But they aren't catching on. How do we tell them to get out of our
house without causing family problems? We've always been close and don't want
to lose the friendship. They are using us, and I need help with this.
            

            

               --T.M.
            

            Dear T.,

            The "visitors" are,
indeed, using you, but you've permitted it. Family problems seem a small price
to pay for evicting two junk-food-eating freeloaders with a dog that uses your
house as a fire hydrant. Subtle hints won't cut it, guys. You've got to insist
that the "temporary" situation--now at 12 months and counting--has run its
course. They have overstayed their welcome and must be told to leave. Unless
the name of your house is Ritz-Carlton, bag the subtle approach, and give them
a deadline for their departure. And do ask for a settling of accounts, as per
the original agreement. Prudie is sputtering on your behalf and wishes you tons
of luck.

            
--Prudie, insistently

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               How long is a fair amount of time to date
someone before getting engaged? My girlfriend, the love of my life for the last
five years, recently broke up with me because she felt our relationship had
gone on too long without any sign of future commitment. I always intended to
marry her and always reminded her of this when the topic came up. She feels
that if I truly loved her I would take her now before anyone else did. Since we
are both only 24 years old, I felt we shouldn't rush things, since we have the
rest of our lives to be together.
            

            
               What do you
think?
            

            

               --Left Long Before the Altar
            

            Dear Left,

            Ah yes, which came first
... the chicken or the engagement ring? Five years with the love of your
life--whom you've always planned to marry--suggests that this would not be a
rush job. Prudie thinks a fair amount of time to date someone before getting
engaged would be ... oh, five years. So hop to it and get her back with
whatever kind of engagement ring you can afford.

            
--Prudie, romantically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I just bought a
seersucker suit and was wondering if you could give me some fashion tips on the
types of shoes, ties, shirts, and belts I should wear with it.
            

            

               --Hot in Florida
            

            Dear Hot,

            You obviously have
Prudie confused with some other columnist, but just so it shouldn't be wasted
bandwidth, by all means wear any shoes, ties, shirts and belts that don't clash
with the suit.

            
--Prudie, nattily

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am 45 years old and a former accomplished
gymnast in Texas. During my years as a devoted gymnast, I experienced several
damaging landings and falls during practice. Multiple surgeries have left me
somewhat "ambulatory impaired" and unable to wear skirts/dresses with high
heels. I am short in stature, wear a brace on my right lower leg, and have four
stainless-steel implants in my right ankle. Wearing a skirt or dress without
pumps looks pathetic on me, and people tend to stare. Well-designed pantsuits
and formal pant-wear allow me to attend professional and social functions
without the appearance of an obvious handicap. My question: Why do so many
people take offense at my wearing pants to the many functions I must
attend?
            

            
               Thanks!
            

            

               --Female Athlete
            

            Dear Fem,

            Anyone who believes
women wearing pants is incorrect is antediluvian. Even the stuffy dining rooms
in Boston's most WASPy clubs allow them. Plus, Katharine Hepburn and Prudie
have been wearing them for years, so you are in good company.

            --Prudie, stylishly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=350300619-12101999><SPAN class=350300619-12101999>Fighting Over <EM>Fight Club</EM></SPAN></SPAN>

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Fight Club
                (20 th Century Fox). Strong
reactions--positive and negative--to director David Fincher's ( Seven )
film about a underground bare-knuckles fighting group born as a response to
men's feelings of disenfranchisement. "What's most troubling about this witless
mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the
increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of
significance" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times derides it as a "frankly and cheerfully fascist
big-star movie," labels the violence "macho porn," and frets that though
"sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard
enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in Fight Club
have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat
the hell out of Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles." A few critics rave.
The New York Times ' Janet Maslin, for one, dismisses other reviewers for
misunderstanding the film: "If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be
mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent
nihilism in an all-out assault on society," but she sees it instead as an
investigation of "the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented,
dehumanized culture." Newsweek 's David Ansen is more ambivalent, saying
it's "alternately amazing and annoying ... an outrageous mixture of brilliant
technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload." The
one point of agreement: Stars Brad Pitt and Edward Norton earn strong marks.
(The official
site includes video and audio clips from the film.)

            

               
                  The Story of Us
                (Polygram Filmed Entertainment).
Critics gag on this cornball story of a marriage on the rocks, starring Bruce
Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Rob Reiner. "Though it sets out to
explain why this marriage is worth saving, [it] could prompt even single
members of the audience to file for divorce" (Maslin, the New York
Times ). Its main defect: Although the movie tries for the same combination
of whimsy and insight Reiner captured in When Harry Met Sally ... ,
there's no chemistry between Willis and Pfeiffer. Owen Gleiberman is the film's
sole supporter, praising it as "pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful"
Entertainment Weekly ). (Find out more about Willis here and about Pfeiffer
here.)

            

               
                  The Straight Story
                (Buena Vista Pictures). David
Lynch ( Blue Velvet, Lost Highway ) shocks everyone by directing a G-rated
film of the sweet, true story of a 73-year-old farmer who drives 300 miles on a
lawnmower to visit his sick brother. Even more surprising, critics rank this
among Lynch's best work: It's his "first movie since Blue Velvet that
truly envelops you in its spell ... a piece of celestial Americana"
(Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly ). Maslin calls it "a supremely
improbable triumph," all the more powerful because the film's "wholesome
radiance and soothing natural beauty are distinctly at odds with the famously
unwholesome Lynch imagination" (the New York Times ). Turan is the only
one who hears the faint sucking of Dennis Hopper's oxygen mask in the
background, calling the film "too mannered and weird around the edges to be
convincing" (the Los Angeles Times ). (Lynchnet has a page devoted
to the film complete with trailers and pictures shot on location.)

            

               
                  The Limey
                (Artisan Entertainment). "Like Pablo
Picasso thrillingly exploding old notions of how we perceive faces and wine
bottles, director Steven Soderbergh thrillingly splinters time and action" in
this "small cubist masterpiece," exclaims Entertainment Weekly 's Lisa
Schwarzbaum. Few others go so far in their praise, but most express a certain
awe at this '60s-style revenge movie starring Terence Stamp as an ex-con out to
whack his daughter's boyfriend and probable killer (Peter Fonda). A few critics
find the time-splintering distracting and annoying, asking, "Is he working out
a new form of visual storytelling, or has the ever-so-promising director of
sex, lies, and videotape lost his chops and his marbles?" (Richard
Corliss, Time ). (Click here to watch an interview with the director about The
Limey .)

            

               Book
            

            
               
                  Motherless
Brooklyn
               , by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday). Lethem's latest
genre-bending novel, featuring a Brooklyn detective afflicted with Tourette's
syndrome, impresses the critics. "Taking his cue from writers like Don DeLillo
and Philip K. Dick, who successfully blurred the lines between serious and
popular novels, Lethem is like a kid in a candy store, grabbing all the tasty
plots and gimmicks he can" (Albert Mobilio, the New York Times Book
Review ). The heart of the book is the protagonist's affliction and his
constant verbal outbursts, which form "a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention
that has tour de force written all over it; it's an amazing stunt, and, just
when you think the well is running dry, Lethem keeps on topping himself"
( Kirkus Reviews ). A few call the punning Joycean literary outbursts
unrealistic, but most just take them in stride, admiring the "highly
artificial, flamboyantly bizarre world that constantly upstages its genre
format ... in the end, the hero and his terrifying isolation from human
discourse are so vividly drawn that the novel becomes unexpectedly moving"
(Jack Sullivan, the Boston Globe ). Edward Norton will produce and star
in the film version. (Read the first chapter.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Yo-Yo Peace Plan 

            With
peace talks on a yo-yo, the previously Kosovo-obsessed editorial pages largely
ignore the subject. In Britain, the Times and the Independent
venture forth with scolding opinions on the peace plan. The Times : "President
Clinton's admission that Russian troops in Kosovo may not now come under Nato
control is irresponsible; only the probably tardy deployment of Russian forces
can stop it being disastrous." The liberal Independent : "[N]or should we crack open the champagne if, or
when, Slobodan Milosevic finally signs on the dotted line. The aftermath of
such an agreement may prove to be almost as nightmarish as what came before."
It concluded, "The military victory will, however, pale into insignificance by
comparison with the task of recreating a civil society in Serbia. Above all,
Serbia needs to win its own battles against intolerance. That will be a much
more difficult war to fight."

            The
world's papers showed no reluctance to pontificate on Monday's Indonesian
elections. The slowness of the vote count, reported Hong Kong's South China Morning Post , resulted in the tabulation of less
than 2 percent of the more than 116 million votes by Tuesday night, and the
Straits
Times of Singapore reported
that "[s]ome tempers flared over the pace of the vote count." The government
had promised a 50 percent count by that time. An election official told the
SCMP that the final result wouldn't be announced until June 21. There
were also reports of vote-buying by the incumbent Golkar Party of
former dictator Suharto and of "logistical problems" such as defective ballots
and "indelible ink" (designed to prevent multiple voting), which, in practice,
"washed off voters' thumbs in minutes."

            An
editorial in the Jakarta Post declared the elections "a triumph for the
Indonesian people and democracy," but in light of predictions that Golkar would
poll strongly in the country's outer islands and might be able to hold on to
power with the help of small Islamic parties, the Post said, "It would
be a hollow victory and a terrible irony if our exercise in democracy failed to
produce the very goal of the whole process: Voting out the status quo and
putting a proreform government in its place."

            
Although Indonesia is 85 percent Muslim, the state ideology of "Pancasila"
declares it to be a secular nation. As a piece in
Wednesday's International
Herald Tribune noted, "politicians, business interests and foreign
governments are watching to see whether Islamic political parties gain ground"
in the polling. Twelve of the 48 parties contesting the election are
Muslim-based, and some want to make Islam the country's established religion.
In the final weeks of the campaign, two religious groups called on the faithful
to support Muslim-affiliated parties, which was seen by many observers as an
attempt to undermine front-runner Megawati Sukarnoputri, the leader of the
Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle and daughter of Sukarno, Indonesia's
founding president. The story reported that there was a clash last week in
Sulawesi between Muslim students, who questioned whether Indonesian Muslims
would accept a female president, and supporters of Megawati. The Straits
Times editorialized that "Indonesians are free to vote for any party they
want, but that choice should be based on what unites them as Indonesians with
non-Muslims, not what separates them."

            
Although it now appears that in last week's South African election the African
National Congress failed by one seat to reach the two-thirds majority that
would have given it the power to change the constitution, editorials supported
President-elect Thabo Mbeki. Wednesday the Pioneer of India
welcomed Mbeki's "Africanist" agenda: "Immediately after the
dismantling of Apartheid, [Nelson] Mandela's main message was one of
reconciliation among races. Five years later, Mbeki's must be to Africanize. It
must be Mbeki's concern and responsibility to take a firmer stance on Black
empowerment in every shape or form." Giving a positive spin to Mbeki's
perceived "grayness" compared with his predecessor, the Pioneer said,
"Mandela will be missed, of course. On the other hand, perhaps, South Africa
may even be able to get a clearer view of its harsh realities, and its uphill
tasks, without his overarching charisma. As we in India know only too well, in
this process, charisma, sometimes, can play saboteur."

            One leader not faring so
well this week was Britain's Queen Elizabeth, who celebrates her "official
birthday" Saturday. The Sydney Morning Herald attacked the "dour new image" of the monarch on Australia's new
coins, even mentioning her "double chin." The Herald complained that the
money carries "the visage of an old woman"--hardly surprising since the queen
is 73. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the Press of Christchurch was underwhelming in its support
of the sovereign. Under the headline "Why we still need the Royals," a
columnist wrote, "It's not so much that we've gone off the Royal family, we
have merely outgrown them. ... [Britain] is such an integral part of our
history and our culture, I cannot envisage us formally breaking all our ties.
If the Spice Girls did not push us to the brink, nothing will."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 271: &quot;Stop the Pressing&quot;

            
               On Wednesday, the
Future Homemakers of America made a startling announcement. What?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question (No.
270)--"Crisis Management":
            

            

               
                  
                     "I didn't even want to talk about chocolate-chip
cookies, really. I shaved my beard and stopped wearing hats." Who said this
about what?
                  
               
            

            
"Famous Amos, after being profiled and strip-searched one too many times on the
New Jersey Turnpike."-- Dan Ricci
            

            "Donna
Shalala, in reference to some new Health and Human Services crap."-- Jon
Hotchkiss
            

            
"George W. Bush. I don't know what he was talking about, and I don't really
care. What matters is that he can win this, and we're backing him all the
way."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "This
was the disillusioned Jesus speaking days after performing the miracle of the
loaves and fishes. Knowing he had lost his grip on the crowd when they inquired
what was for dessert, he decided to make a radical change in his
life."-- Ellen Macleay
            

            "Queen
Elizabeth, complaining about just everything, describes the disguise that
enabled her to sneak out of Edinburgh a day early."-- Steve Bodow
( Sean Fitzpatrick and Matthew Cole had similar answers.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            By far the most frequent response involved Hillary
Clinton, the once and future baker, or nonbaker, who today begins her four-day
"listening tour" at the Moynihan Farm. (Fun With Juxtaposition: Which is the
more ludicrous expression, "listening tour" or "Moynihan Farm"?) Unimpressed
with her upstate forays, Rudolph Giuliani, her likely Senate rival, boasts:
"Every time I have gone up there, I have gotten the sense that they like me. I
think they like what I did with New York." (Fun With Prepositions: Instead of
"with" New York, substitute "to.") Like him they may, but have any of them
written a tribute as passionate as Ann Powers' love letter to Hillary in this
morning's Times ? (Some sentences omitted.)

            "[S]he waits, like the
sentinel of an enchanted world, and judges when it's safe to open up a trade
route. Her judgment has not always proven correct, but right now it is
impeccable. [W]hen you're a star of her magnitude, fashion will always return
to you, hanging its head. [S]he established herself as a mythical heroine,
questing but always true to herself. Even at her most spectacularly styled, she
keeps a rough-and-tumble vaudevillian edge. By maintaining an old-fashioned
ethic of showmanship, she seems exceptionally real." (Fun With Objects: Was
this flatulent blather actually about Hillary or was it perhaps about Cher?
Either way, just nuts, right?)

            
               There Are Second
Acts in American Baking Answer
            

            Wally "Famous" Amos reveals his feelings about the
dark days when his cookie empire collapsed.

            Amos started the company in 1975 with $25,000
borrowed from Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy, pals from his days as a talent
agent. In 1982, revenue reached $12 million. But like many entrepreneurs, he
was not prepared to manage such a large enterprise, and in 1988, after attempts
at restructuring, the company lost $2.5 million and was sold. Under the terms
of the deal, Amos was not even permitted to use his own name for business
ventures. That's when he hit rock bottom.

            Much has improved.
Keebler, the new owner of Famous Amos, just offered him a two-year contract to
promote his old brand, and they are allowing him to use his name for his own
new businesses.

            
               Jewish Environmentalism
Extra
            

            Yesterday's Extra
squeezed a few cheap laughs out of a pamphlet for the Society for the
Advancement of Judaism, including their use of the phrase "Jewish
Environmentalism," for which you were invited to provide even cheaper
definitions. Such as these:

            "What
has the ozone ever done for our people?"-- Beth Sherman
            

            "Not
peeing in the (indoor) pool at Grossingers."-- Eliot Cohen
            

            "No,
it's all right, I'll sit in the dark."-- Jon "Have You Ever Known Any Jewish
Jons With an 'h' in the Name?" Zerolnick
            

            "You
call THIS an environment?!? Feh! I'll show you an environment."-- Matthew
Singer
            

            
"Suffering in Silence"-- Alison "The WASP-y Name Is Not My Fault"
Rogers
            

            "A
tree has been planted in your name ..."-- Beth Sherman
            

            "Look,
where once dead deserts lay, now flowering cities arise! Zionism IS
environmentalism. Oh, and no Arabs allowed."-- Matthew Singer
            

            
               Good News Extra
            

            
"Missing Man is Found Alive and Stuck in Mud"--headline, New York
Times
            

            
               Jon Zerolnick's
Headline Haiku
            

            'You've Got Mail'
doesn't inspire Americans
to buy two
guns of Academe

            
               --Wall Street
Journal , July 6, 1999 (first section)

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Fields, Mr. Claus, Mr. Elf.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 273: &quot;Fun With Ambiguity&quot;

            
               Here's a headline
from this weekend's New York Times : "Swerve and Sharp Elbow Cost a
Hotfoot the Stage." What's the lead?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 272)--"The Old Ways":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           Yesterday Bill Clinton did something
that no American president has done since FDR did it on vacation in 1936.
What?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Told
an aide named Ickes to stop giving so many crazy ideas to his wife,
goddammit."-- Peter Carlin ( Jennifer Miller had a similar
answer.)

            "Had
sex with a member of the class of '00."-- Bill Gammons
            

            
"Packed the selection jury for a new dime design."-- Steve Bodow
            

            "Bill
Clinton reviews the FDR section of his legacy checklist: 'Cheat on wife' ...
been there. 'Get into European war' ... done that. 'Die in office so
unimpressive vice president can be elected' ... Maybe I'll just visit an
impoverished Indian reservation."--Sean Fitzpatrick
            

            
"Visited an Indian reservation. Pat Buchanan followed immediately behind,
handing out smallpox-infected blankets and bottles of whiskey."--Floyd
Elliot
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            "President Attends World Cup Final, Enjoys Two
Scoreless Hours." That's the headline that didn't run in Sunday's papers,
suggesting that, contrary to many News Quiz responses, Clinton's portrayal as
prancing national satyr is ended. Further evidence: At the end of the match,
when Brandi Chastain tore off her shirt, ABC did not go to a split-screen shot
of the president drooling. Which was only fair, because he seemed to be
salivating less over America's new golden girls than over his giant tub of
fried something or other--popcorn? Clams? Chihuahuas?

            If ABC's coverage of the big game is portentous,
Clinton's place in history is as the fatty boy we first elected: Every time
they cut to him, he was eating junk food. There was a guy beside him--Secret
Service?--who poked him in the ribs whenever he was on camera; his goofy stare
would flit from his trough of nachos to the playing field. Apparently
schoolchildren of the future will learn anecdotes of Clinton and French fries,
like those heartwarming stories of President Taft's giant bathtub. Filled with
chili.

            There are, incidentally,
no known photographs of FDR with any sort of junk food. But activists are
determined that the new Roosevelt statue in Washington will depict him eating a
bean burrito.

            
               Is That a Pocket of
Poverty, or Are You Just Glad To See Me Answer
            

            As a part of his Poverty '99 Road Tour--and the
tour jackets, incidentally, are way cool--Clinton visited the Oglala Lakota
Sioux Indian reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D., making him the first president to
set foot on a reservation since Franklin Roosevelt visited some Cherokee in
North Carolina more than 60 years ago.

            Clinton's determination to eradicate poverty is
consonant with the welfare "reforms" he championed so vigorously, his
determination to raise the minimum wage so high that it's nearly possible to
live on it, and his commitment to do something or other for the 43 million
Americans who lack health insurance.

            Here's the slogan that's
not emblazoned on the back of those jackets: "Casino Gambling--Is There
Anything It Can't Do?"

            
               MyTwinn™ Extra
            

            A perverse practice played for laughs in Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and for terror in voodoo cults is now a
freakish gift for children: You can buy a tiny duplicate of yourself. Or
someone you love. Or, presumably, hate.

            For $134.95, the MyTwinn "artisans" will make a
posable, 23-inch doll that bears a frightening resemblance to your
daughter.

            To order, send a photo and fill out a questionnaire
that's pretty much a police Identikit. There are 26 pictures of eyeballs in
assorted colors; circle the one closest to your child's. There are, however,
only six choices on the skin tone chart, from "porcelain," to a suspiciously
light "dark brown." There are also hair and eyebrow charts and a sketch of a
face upon which you draw birthmarks, moles, and freckles. "Pierced ears, cleft
chins or dimples are not currently available."

            "MyTwinn dolls are created to be more child-like
than doll-like, which makes them more fun to play with. They are soft cuddly
and durable; and they become a treasured keepsake for years." Isn't this the
sort of thing no longer available in Times Square?

            The other business here is to make you a steady
customer for doll-and-daughter outfits at around $50 to $100. The catalog,
filled with photographs of overly cute little girls and their grotesque
simulacra--identically dressed!--is deeply disturbing. Deeply. I'm not kidding.
Deeply.

            Near the end of the catalog are the MyTwinn Boys.
Not for the fainthearted. And, in a chilling retroactive Dorian Gray bargain,
"[G]randmothers can also have a MyTwinn doll made to resemble them when they
were 3-12 years old." And alive.

            The MyTwinn workshop is
in Colorado; the Ramsey family, same thing. Read more about it and order a
catalog of your own, if you've got the guts, at www.mytwinn.com.

            
               Alex Balk's Good News
Extra
            

            "Al Gore Should Pick
This Jew for His Running-Mate."--
               Richmond Times-Dispatch
headline over Ben Wattenberg's column on Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Sex on wheels.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Disordered Diana

            

               
                  Editor's note: Some of the letters below originally
appeared in "The Fray," Slate 's reader feedback forum.
            

            
               Who's Deliriously
Mean-Spirited?
            

            Your review of my book Diana in Search of
Herself was so confusing that I scarcely know how to respond (see the Sept.
2 "" posting). Your writer asserts in the first sentence that it was
"deliriously mean-spirited"--a surprising statement, given that reviewers for
Time , Newsweek , and the Washington Post among others have
remarked on the even-handedness of my book. In fact, Judith Shulevitz is
herself "deliriously mean-spirited," and I resent the fact that she relies on
material from my book in an effort to make her arguments.

            Your writer assesses the book in only one other
place, noting that Diana suffered "from what Smith dubiously diagnoses as a
borderline personality disorder." The review promptly lists seven psychological
problems that plagued Diana, all of which are common in those afflicted with
borderline personality disorder. For the record, I used the term as a framework
for understanding Diana--in particular how its symptoms interacted to produce
the chaotic behavior that so many close to her witnessed over the years. I
emphasized that while I couldn't say with certainty that Diana had the
disorder, the evidence (as presented throughout the previous 363 pages) was
compelling. As it happens, a number of psychiatrists have approached me since
the book's publication to say that Diana was a classic borderline.

            I suppose that I should
be flattered that the three meatiest paragraphs (of five) in the review were
drawn entirely from my biography. But as someone who read a vast amount of what
had been written about Diana, conducted 150 interviews (many with her
intimates), and included 60 pages of detailed footnotes, I find it dismaying
that 
                  Slate
                would run such a disingenuous review.

            

               --Sally Bedell Smith
            

            
               Sucking Up to the
Boss
            

            "" always makes for interesting reading; whether or
not it really gets anyone to give (besides maybe Bill Gates) is open to
question, but I'm sure it can't hurt. At least it's better than trying to rank
colleges.

            I have a question about that $225 million gift that
heads the list, though. As far as I can see, the gift was made by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, not the Gateses themselves. Obviously, most (all?) of
the foundation's assets have come from the Gateses, and I don't want to
diminish the generosity of surrendering $17 billion for the public good. But
strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any other foundation on The

                  Slate
                60 list, nor are Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or the very
living Walter Annenberg listed. (In truth, I don't know how much the Annenberg
Foundation gave away last quarter, but let's pro-rate its annual giving and
guess that it was around $25 million, based on 1998's figures. Here is the
summary if you want to look it up.)

            In fact, if I understand the rules, a $17 billion
foundation will have to give away roughly $170 million per quarter and, in
today's market and economy, ought to have considerably more than that to spend,
even after hedging against inflation. Aside from the occasional Ted Turner
bombshell, the Gateses seem to have just about guaranteed themselves the top
slot on The 
                  Slate
                60 for the rest of their lives, even if they
never give another nickel away.

            As I said, I don't want to suggest that Bill Gates
isn't a generous person nor even that his giving doesn't represent considerable
sacrifice on his part (though it must be nice to be able to give that kind of
money away). But as this edition is constituted, it looks an awful lot like
sucking up to the boss.

            (Of course, if it helps
keep you in business, by all means carry on.)

            -- Chris Hammett
            

            New
York

            
               
                  Ann Castle
replies:
                
               You're right that the head-of-the-list gifts come from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The funds in that foundation were given by
the donors themselves, so they meet our criteria as gifts from living
individual Americans. The Gateses use the foundation as their giving vehicle,
as do some others on the list.
            

            
               You mention Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and
Walter Annenberg as examples of foundation founders who are not on the list.
Ford and Carnegie are easy to explain--they are no longer living, and we
decided to list family foundation gifts only when one of the original donors is
still alive.
            

            
               The Annenbergs--Walter and Leonore--have
appeared on the list previously. But, according to a cursory search done today,
the Annenberg Foundation announced gifts totaling $1.78 million in July 1999, a
total that under our terms would not have met the minimum for the second
quarter of 1999. This total was composed of 24 gifts ranging from $40,000 to
$150,000.
            

            
               Our method looks for single large gifts. There's
nothing sacred about that technique; others have ranked cumulative giving over
a lifetime, etc. We count pledges as well as paid gifts. I look for gifts
announced by the donor or the recipient as gifts from individuals--that's why
you saw the Rockefeller name appear for the first time on The Slate 60
this quarter. I also search for foundation gifts from individuals and have set
an arbitrary minimum of $1 million.
            

            
               We don't list gifts that we can't verify. A gift
was announced earlier this year from James E. Beasley to Temple University Law
School as "the largest endowment in the history of [the university]" to the law
school, which has been named the James E. Beasley School of Law in his honor.
We couldn't verify any amount, so this gift was not included in The
Slate 60, although it almost certainly would have qualified.
            

            
               Some people make all their gifts through their
foundations; others do a portion of their philanthropy that way. Some give at a
particular time of year; others spread it out. Many of the same people making
announced large gifts also give anonymously, and I don't try to ferret those
out. Our goal is to celebrate both donors and recipients, so we list gifts as
they are made out of a foundation to a separate nonprofit. That's why the
Gateses were not credited with the even larger amount that was announced in all
the papers: If we recognize them for the $6 billion they put into their
foundation, then we can't recognize the organizations that receive that money
down the road or we'd be double-counting.
            

            
               The fact is that the
Gateses now have created the largest personal foundation in the United States
and will probably continue to make the top or near the top of the list.
However, as Jack Shafer noted in , there are plenty of other people out there
who could meet and exceed their 1999 running total of $255 million and not even
wince.
            

            
               At Lager Heads
            

            Don't get me wrong. I vastly enjoyed James Fallows'
deep, probing piece on blind beer tasting (""). But Fallows does perpetuate a
few common mistakes that should be cleared up.

            1) "Lagers are the light-colored, relatively
lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in
the United States."

            2) "Sam's success could reflect its
quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a 'lager.' "

            Both of these statements are incorrect in their
definition of "lager." Lager is one of the two main types of beer, the other
being ale. Lager beers come in all varieties of flavors, strengths, and colors,
from the pale, crisp Pilsener (what most American beers are modeled on, albeit
weakly) to thick, deep brown, rich, strong (8.5 percent) "doppelbocks." What
defines a beer as lager is its method of fermentation: at cool temperatures,
using a specific type of "lager" yeast, with an extended cold maturation
period. Ales, on the other hand, tend to experience warm, rapid
fermentations.

            Sam Adams is a lager
beer that happens to be brewed in a slightly fuller-flavored style, something
akin (perhaps) to mainstream American beers in the '40s and '50s. But it is as
much a lager as any of the other beers in Fallows' tasting.

            -- Ben Myers
            

            
Author, Best
American Beers
            

            
               Defending the First Boy
Scout
            

            Geoffrey Wheatcroft's article "" portrays all adult
scout leaders as pedophiles who are involved with scouts for nothing more than
a steady diet of young boys. How tragic that this is the legacy that our
prurient minds attach to one of the finest civic-minded organizations of the
century.

            I was a Boy Scout throughout my childhood years. I
attained the rank of Eagle, and never once did I feel as though I was in danger
of being molested, attacked, leered at, or otherwise harassed by an adult
leader. The men who were adult leaders while I was a scout were in many ways
more influential on my life than my own parents were. To lump these pillars of
respectability in my life and in my community with the few bad seeds that slip
through the cracks of the organization is a grave disservice to the thousands
of men and women who willingly give their evenings, weekends, and dollars to an
organization whose core goal is to mold impressionable boys into upstanding,
moral men.

            In the future, please
research a story more before sniggering and laughing at a man in a scout
uniform ... he's trying to make his son and boys like his son into better men,
something that articles like yours will never do.

            -- Bill Maly
            

            Cedar Rapids, Iowa

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 312: &quot;Ominous, Anomalous&quot;

            
               Hillary Clinton,
Chelsea Clinton, William Bennett, the president's staff, the American people,
God. Which does not belong? Why?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 311)--"Dutch Treatment":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        Tuesday, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
reopens one of Amsterdam's most popular tourist attractions after extensive
renovations. What attraction?
                     
                  
               
            

            "Her
warm, welcoming bosoms."-- Richard Nikonovich-Kahn ( Matt Sullivan
and Tim Carvell had similar answers.)

            "Queen
Beatrix's Mystery Spot."-- Merrill Markoe (similarly, Bill
Scheft )

            "The
house Anne Frank lived in with 'Diversity,' 'Trench,' and 'Otto' during MTV's
first Real World ."-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            "Pat
Buchanan's Wonderful World of It's None of Our Business."-- Chris
Kelly
            

            "Dutch
World, where all sorts of fictional characters created by Edmund Morris come
out to play with children of all ages!"-- t
               he other Steven
Davis
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-
               Up
            

            Sex, drugs, and hidden
Jews! That's what I remember about Woodstock. Or perhaps that's what News Quiz
participants remember about the Dutch. Here's what they've
forgotten--Rembrandt, van Gogh, Spinoza, hydraulic engineering, silver skates,
Boswell's education, (I was sure there'd be many a smartass remark about his
law school days), treat, courage, uncle, rub, elm disease, those damned Spanish
Hapsburgs, that crazy Protestant Reformation (the long hair, the beads,
the--oh, wait, Woodstock again), the seizure of Sumatra, the wars with England
and their possible connection to the death of Christopher Marlowe (who never
got to see Gwyneth Paltrow naked, but might have if only he and she had been at
Woodstock), and the nation's new maturity in 1952 when it took its place among
other great nations as a member of the European Coal and Steel Commission.

            
               Despite

               Everything I Believe This Is the Answer
            

            "The house in Amsterdam
which hid Jewish teen-ager Anne Frank during World War II officially unveiled
its new look Tuesday after 10 years of renovation," Reuters reports. "The snack
bar, the gift shop, the new roller coaster--the entire place is just
Annetastic!" they did not add. "Makes other Holocaust museums look like a lot
of boring Holocaust museums," also went unsaid.

            
               Some

               Highlights
            

            

               Black-and-white photos of the neighborhood in the early 1940s have been
affixed to the windows for a sense of going back in time.

               The Anne Frank Foundation has re-created the atmosphere of the office as it
was in the 1940s, including the smell of spices.

               A visitors' cafe* and a virtual tour through the house on computer have
been added.

               The house remained open throughout the renovations. There were 822,000
visitors last year.

            

            

               *
               Rainy 
               Day Fun
Draw your own menu for the Anne Frank House visitors' cafe. Is there a
children's menu? Can you include the phrases "all you can eat" and
"fajitas"?

            
               Al

               Cloutier's Auto-Translation Extra
            

            What I have done is translate the last News Quiz
from English to German and from German back to English using the Alta Vista translator.

            Below, Randy's Wrap
Up:

            

               The RANDY
AUFRAEUMARBEITEN

               Tim Carvell I explain to
you, what I do not understand--why professor Shoshanna Sofaer of the university
Baruch cranky sounds in such a way. (necessities few sabbatical?) Or why
congress (necessities designate delimitations? Of approximately 30 seconds?) It
corresponds to labels strongly for the normal people for attaching a group
complaint however more simply, so that enormous oil companies pump free oil of
the general country and at a profit, probably at NBC sells it (necessities--OH
-, where one begins? With sentimentally nonsense Tom Brokaw over world war II?
O.k.. There!) those large turbines refuel, in order to expose studios for
telecasting the halfpopular Kaldaunen on the general Airwaves at the
considerable profits, for the maintenance of the bored oil platform workers out
in any as soon as-excellent national park. (you need a good book memory
beginning with a series author appearance, possibly with Susan Faludi? It is
full from understanding. And slogans) know you, whom would understand? Karl
Marx. Quite obviously to it. But like a large genius Marx its heading more than
350 Pound even weighed and with a special pig iron field to be fastened had,
evenly above he cannot not to understand, why love is a crime, the assortment
of the crime spells out in a provisional order of any judge (NECESSITIES ITS
GODDAMNED HEADING CHECKING!!!!) who OH is, thus ready for use, to ignore
everything a person it says and believes you simply that everything, which says
any other person even if it a liar is! Hypothetically speaking. Answer me this
professor Shoshanna Sofaer of the university Baruch! Where is your whole
government advice now?

            

            
               Our

               Corporate Philosophers Extra
            

            Three hundred corporate
titans are gathered in Shanghai for the Fortune Global Forum. Some big ideas
from these exemplars of capitalism:

            On Altruism

            "When you go into a
market like China, you recognize talented artists and give them an opportunity
for expression. That's an important public role. Companies like ours have a
role to play in creating world harmony."-- Gerald M. Levin , chairman of
Time Warner, said this with a straight face.

            On the Role of the
Press

            "Journalistic integrity
must prevail in the final analysis, but that doesn't meant that journalistic
integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the
countries in which you operate."-- Sumner Redstone , chairman of Viacom,
said this and did not die of shame.

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Legal drugs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 293: &quot;Sporting Life&quot;

            
               This weekend,
6,500 Canadians will jam Montreal's Olympic Stadium to share in a timeless
spectacle involving bravery, farm animals, and Velcro. What is it?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               
                  Wednesday's
Question (No. 292)--Military-Industrial Cineplex:
               
            

            

               
                  Porcine screenwriter John Milius praises it as "another link between
Hollywood and the military that seems to have broken down over the years." What
is it?
               
            

            "The
dismal failure of Planet USO."-- Beth Sherman
            

            "Both
'institutions' are now 'forced' to 'admit' 'women.' "-- Seth Mnookin
            

            "Manly
homosexual love. If you don't believe me, watch any John Milius-written
screenplay, like Conan the Barbarian ."-- Dan Ricci
            

            
"Putting some teeth into the drug war, Colombia's right-wing paramilitary death
squads will now be aided by apple-cheeked American teen-agers. Wolverines!
Wooo!"-- Daniel Radosh
            

            "Bob
Hope."-- Brian Jacobsmeyer ( Colleen Werthmann had a similar
answer.)

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Chris' Wrap-Up
            

            There are three types of people in Southern
California: entertainment people, aerospace people, and everyone else. Oddly,
if you're an entertainment person, you never meet anyone from the aerospace
industry. That's always struck me as strange. They make death at places like
China Lake and Point Magu, we sell death at places like Sony. They're
conscienceless white guys with money, and so are we. Why don't we hang out? I
don't know, but I'll bet Joan Didion does.

            Hey, remember that
debate with Walter Mondale where Ronald Reagan said that the military needed
money for "wardrobe"? Oh, how I laughed. Of course, at the time I was living in
Canada.

            
               Infotaining
Answer
            

            Producing training material. This week, the Army
announced the creation of a $45 million Institute for Creative Technologies at
the University of Southern California. The institute will work with film
studios and video-game designers to create the next generation of military
simulators. The studios and designers will then be free to use the technology
they develop to create theme-park rides and special effects. "It's a win-win
for everyone," says Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera.

            It's good for the country, it's good for the
studios, and it's good for us. Like when Howard Hughes took all that money for
airplanes and shoved it down Jane Russell's shirt.

            The New York
Times asked screenwriter John Milius for his opinion, and the Conan the
Barbarian scribe said it sounded just fine to him.

            
               Quiz Extra
            

            In 1966, John Wayne sent a cable to Lyndon Johnson
to secure his support for The Green Berets . Johnson adviser Bill Moyers
responded that "it sounded like an exciting venture." Wayne followed up with an
eight-page list of the things he would need to make his movie.

            Which of these items did
Wayne really ask for, and which have I just slipped in for fun?

            

               5,800,000 rifles and carbines

               102,000 machine guns

               28,000 trench mortars

               53,000 field and heavy guns

               13,000 airplanes

               24,000 airplane engines

               50,000 ammunition wagons

               11,000 field kitchens

               1,150 field bakeries

            

            
               Answer
            

            I didn't add anything to
this list. Wayne received full military cooperation on his terms and was billed
$18,623.64.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            
               Red Dawn .

            
               Editor's Note
            

            Tim Carvell will be the guest host for next week's
News Quiz. Randy Cohen returns Aug. 30.-- C.K.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Air Sickness

            Ready for vengeance, everyone?

            It is I, the Great Shopping Avenger, reporting to
you from the Great Hall of Consumer Justice, a k a the Shopping Avenger's
poorly air-conditioned attic office.

            The Shopping Avenger has had a terribly busy month
(Aquaman never had it so busy), and he is pleased to report that demand for his
services has grown exponentially. He is also disconcerted, because the sheer
number of e-mails in response to last month's installment means that too many
evil corporations are treating too many loyal consumers without regard for the
basic norms of customer care, such as answering the phone and not calling
customers bad names.

            Before we turn to this month's shameful examples of
corporate malfeasance, a couple of housekeeping notes:

            1) Two dozen readers wrote to let the Shopping
Avenger know they were pissed off by his use of the term "pissed off" in last
month's column. The term "is offensive to anyone with any sense of courtesy,
pride in themselves, décor of personality, and sense of decency," the vengeful
reader R. wrote.

            The Shopping Avenger notes that he possesses a
great deal of "décor of personality." He also notes that many readers, driven
to near madness by customer-service representatives, use strong language to
describe their plights, and the Shopping Avenger is merely reflecting their
anger. Though the Shopping Avenger offers this piece of advice: When writing to
"consumer care specialists," or whatever they're being called today, do not use
the honorific "asshole" by way of greeting. And remember: The assholes are the
ones making seven-figure salaries. The people at the other end of the 800 line
are lackeys and shills and running dogs, but they aren't assholes.

            2) Speaking of lackeys,
it has now been approximately 47 days since U-Haul spokeswoman Johna Burke
promised to share her company's reservation policy with the Shopping Avenger.
For those of you who missed the , the Shopping Avenger attempted to help an
aggrieved U-Haul customer who made a reservation for a truck, only to be told
close to the time of pick-up that no such reservation existed.

            Though U-Haul--apparently unimpressed by the supernatural
power of the Shopping Avenger--has not deigned to provide answers, no fewer
than 34 deputy Avengers e-mailed over the past month, complaining about
U-Haul's reservation policy. "I reserved a U-Haul truck for a Saturday morning
to be picked up at 8," one correspondent, T., reports. "I hired some help for
the day to help me move. When I arrived that morning to pick it up, I was told
it was not there yet. After much complaining, a few phone calls were made, and
I was told the truck was 200 miles away."

            T.'s complaint is entirely typical. Another member
of the Avenging Brigade, B., wrote in to say this: "A U-Haul employee in
Phoenix last 4 th of July weekend told me the company had 2,000
reservations in Phoenix that weekend and 600 available trucks. My truck was
three days late, and I only got it by threatening legal action."

            The Shopping Avenger will
revisit the U-Haul issue each month until satisfactory explanations are
provided. That is the least the Shopping Avenger can do for you, the pissed-off
consumer.

            Last month, the Shopping Avenger also put out a call for
airline and pest-control horror stories. One wag, J., wrote in to ask, "Is
there a difference between pests and airlines?" (Contest alert: Best punch line
e-mailed to the Shopping Avenger
will be rewarded by public mention in this space, plus a lifetime supply of
Turtle Wax, if the Shopping Avenger can figure out what Turtle Wax is.)

            The complaints poured in. As noted previously, the
Shopping Avenger is but one superhero, and he issues abject apologies to all
those who did not receive personal responses.

            Pest control will be dealt with in a future
episode. But about those airlines: The interesting thing about the airline
complainants is that they don't even want the Shopping Avenger to seek
retribution or restitution. All they want to do is vent. Maybe no one believes
that airlines even care anymore or are capable of responding to complaints.

            The complaints covered
the waterfront: baggage problems, surly flight attendants, mysteriously
canceled flights, billing atrocities. But the most compelling complaints
concerned bereavement fares. There's nothing like an airline screwing with
someone who's going to bury his mother to make the blood boil.

            "Recently, my mother passed away and I needed to travel
from Orlando to Fort Wayne, Indiana, the next day in order to attend her
funeral," our correspondent J.D. writes. "In June of last year, I had traveled
to Orlando from Detroit on Northwest Airlines (that should send up a few red
flags), and was given a $400 travel voucher because the plane literally did not
show up. Being that airline tickets, even a bereavement fare, purchased at the
last minute can be quite expensive, I opted to cash in my voucher."

            J.D. says he made the reservation by telephone,
holding the seat with his credit card. He was told to present his credit card
with the voucher upon his arrival at the airport, where he would be charged,
obviously, only for the part of the ticket not covered by the $400 voucher.

            Then, trouble. "On arriving at the airport I
proceeded to do this and was told by the agent that the tickets were already
purchased and I could not use my voucher," J.D. writes. "I contested this, but
she was unwilling to budge and unwilling to get a supervisor, telling me that,
'That's just the way it is.' "

            J.D. says he let it drop, vowing to "settle this
upon my return from the funeral."

            After the funeral, he contacted Northwest, he says,
and after much frustrating dialing, reached an answering machine. "I had to
leave my particulars on a voice mail because no agents were available to take
my call. This worked out poorly, since when the agent called me back, she got
my voice mail and left a message with the same number. So when I called back,
of course all I got was the same opportunity to leave my particulars on their
voice mail system."

            This is when the customer says, "Arrrghh."

            After much go-around,
J.D. called American Express, told them his plight, and Amex canceled the
entire charge.

            I e-mailed Northwest spokeswoman Marta Laughlin, who
responded first by questioning J.D.'s motivation: "The writer's remarks about
the 'plane never showing up' and 'raising red flags' cause me to question his
story. It just sounds like there's something more personal here."

            One could argue that a passenger might have
"personal" feelings about an airline after said airline messed with his head
while he was traveling to his mother's funeral.

            Laughlin followed up, though, by saying that "the
death of anyone close is a very emotional and trying experience, and
individuals frequently behave differently as a result of their pain." She's
still blaming the customer but, she continues, the "Northwest employee at the
airport should have taken extra steps to help the writer in his time of need. I
wish that was the case, and I apologize on behalf of Northwest Airlines."

            Grudging, double-edged,
but an apology all the same.

            We will return to the issue of airlines in a future
episode, but the Shopping Avenger would like to relate another tale that caught
his attention this past month. The company in question is Sprint PCS, and the
story most definitively does not end with an apology.

            In short strokes, the story goes like this: A
customer, William Summerhill, an associate professor of history at UCLA,
ordered two phones from Sprint PCS. He was billed for six--weirdly, at three
different prices (still another charge, for one cent, was also billed to his
credit card by Sprint PCS). He fought the bill; Sprint PCS fought back, by
phone and fax, wasting a good amount of time.

            Finally, his credit card
company agreed that he was the victim of false billing and canceled out the
charges for four of the six phones. Professor Summerhill continued to be
billed, but one thing he did not receive in the mail was a rebate on one of the
two remaining phones, part of a special promotion he signed up for. Though he
paid for the two phones, he withheld paying his monthly fee until Sprint PCS
straightened out his case and gave him his rebate. In response, Sprint PCS
canceled his service and referred his case to a collection agency, which is
threatening his credit rating.

            When I first contacted Sprint PCS (which is a tale in
itself--the 800-line operator, citing policy, refused to disclose the telephone
number of Sprint PCS headquarters, apparently fearing that customers might try
to talk to the executives whose salaries they pay), a spokesman, Tom Murphy,
told me the case was terribly complex. Actually, it isn't: Sprint PCS billed a
customer for six phones, refused to stop billing him, and threatened him when
he wouldn't pay for service pending a resolution of the problem.

            Summerhill, who is now a happy customer of
AT&T, says he will pay the monthly fees when he receives an apology and the
rebate money. The rebate money is owed to him, and so is the apology. He
estimates that he has spent 40 to 50 hours trying to straighten out the billing
problem, which is clearly Sprint PCS's problem.

            But no apology is
forthcoming. The Shopping Avenger received an e-mail from Alison Hill, an
"executive analyst" at Sprint PCS, who writes that she works "directly for Mr.
Andrew Sukawaty, the President and CEO of Sprint PCS." Hill concedes that
Sprint PCS was at fault for erroneously charging Summerhill for phones he did
not want--she claims he was charged for two phones he didn't want, even though
his records show he was billed for four--but she says the "customer is also at
fault" for not paying his bill for telephone calls made on the phones he did
use.

            I spoke with Hill directly and told her it seemed
reasonable to me that Summerhill would withhold payment until his billing
dispute was settled and the rebate issue resolved. She said he was wrong. I
mentioned to her the quaint notion that "the customer is always right," and she
said, "in my opinion, the customer is wrong."

            Obviously, the Shopping Avenger juju has not yet
worked on Sprint PCS, but Summerhill reports that it has worked on the
collection agency. "I told the agency that I was reporting this matter to the
FCC, to the California consumer protection people, and to the Shopping Avenger
at 
                  Slate
               . She didn't say anything about the FCC or the consumer
protection people, but she did ask me to please not give the name of the
collection agency to 
                  Slate
               ."

            Professor Summerhill has
promised to tell everyone at UCLA and in his Army Reserve unit to boycott
Sprint PCS. "I'm pro-business, I love America, I love capitalism, but these
people are crazy," he said. "They could make this go away, but they won't."

            Sprint PCS could take a cue from Southwest Airlines, one of
a handful of companies in America with sterling reputations for customer
service. A little while back, the Shopping Avenger received a plaintive e-mail
from B., who reported that he was the only passenger on his flight not to
receive free drink coupons. Apparently, the flight was late, and as a friendly
gesture Southwest let the passengers get drunk on its dime. But not B. Somehow,
he was skipped over.

            The Shopping Avenger let Ed Stewart, Southwest's
spokesman, know of B.'s sad story, and within hours, the Shopping Avenger
received this reply: "As I'm sure you've heard, we here at Southwest Airlines
pride ourselves on our Customer Service and would NEVER want it to be said that
we deprived anyone--particularly a Customer!--the opportunity to have a drink
on us."

            Stewart says that B. will be mailed an apology,
plus Southwest peanuts, plus a coupon book for free drinks--including mixed
drinks!

            "I hope that this will satisfy your sense of
justice," he wrote.

            It does indeed.

            
               
                  Got a consumer
score you want settled? Send e-mail to shoppingavenger@slate.com.
               
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Road to Beverly Hills

            Sunday, Oct. 3, 1999.
Holiday Inn, Charleston, W.V.

            My name is Robert Kaufman. I normally write about
social policy for a small magazine of opinion, but right now I am driving from
Washington to Los Angeles in a 10-year-old Honda Civic with my friend Elizabeth
Ash. Elizabeth is moving to my hometown, the California hamlet of Beverly
Hills, to become a sitcom writer. E's Pottery Barn hope chest is in the
backseat, stuffed with books. Her 13-inch television is in the trunk. On the
roof are balanced a wood futon bed frame, E's mountain bike, and E's queen-size
futon, which I failed to convince her to throw in a Dumpster. The whole pile is
tied down with a variety of bungee cords, giving my Honda an appearance not
unlike an updated version of the Joad family vehicle in Grapes of
Wrath .

            E has recently written several quickie celebrity
bios, and here is an instant celebrity-based guide to our characters: For me,
think the youthful Elliott Gould of, say, California Split , slowly
turning into the more eccentric Elliott Gould of Kicking &
Screaming . For E, think the dewy Mariel Hemingway of Manhattan with
a touch of Alan Dershowitz. In the unreadably bad novel I wrote last year, E
was the basis for a Washington femme fatale . By Page 20, she'd already
run through four men, including the male protagonist, who wrote about social
policy for a small magazine of opinion. I trashed the novel when the one person
I showed it to was, how to put it, less than fully supportive. "You have no
idea how to write fiction," she said. "For instance, you have this
character--all he cares about is sex and welfare policy! Nobody will believe
that! You have to flesh him out a bit! Give him some real human qualities."

            Why would I take a week off from work to drive E
and her stuff 2,800 miles across the country? Because driving across the
country is my idea of a vacation. I've done it about 14 previous times. I enjoy
doing it alone. Doing it with another person is that much better. True, I used
to be interested in E, but that was years ago, and we're now just good friends.
I have no desire or expectation that anything romantic will happen on this
journey. Please remember this, as it is an important point. No expectations.
None at all. Zero. Right.

            I would say the trip began with three trouble
signs. In order of increasing troublesomeness, they are:

            1) E is on a health kick and declared, "I only want
to eat tofu on this trip." I try to let her down gently, suggesting that while
of course they surely stock the basic tofu products in, say, Silt, Colo., they
might not have the selection she has come to expect.

            2) She mentioned that there is some guy who wants
to meet her in Las Vegas and take her to a show.

            3) She has brought a tape of Crosby, Stills &
Nash.

            We've already discovered that it is hard to follow
the news on the road. This morning, at our hotel in Washington, we briefly saw
the new outsider/insurgent candidate for president, Al Gore, giving an
interview to Bob Schieffer on CBS. It seemed as if Gore's thin hard carapace of
impenetrability has been replaced by a thick, smooth gelatinous coating that is
equally impenetrable. But I don't know for sure. I also know there are some
expense-account accusations against Gore's campaign manager, Tony Coelho, but
don't know who the anti-Coelho factions are that are spreading them (or why
they couldn't dig up something bigger).

            And has the following point been made on the Op-Ed
pages: that Arianna Huffington and Warren Beatty have chosen to attack centrist
Democrats as cynical sellouts who ignore American poverty just when, according
to the Census Bureau, those cynical centrists are making the greatest strides
against poverty that have been made in my adult lifetime? ("Poverty Drops to 20
Year Low"--that was the USA Today headline we saw at a Wal-Mart in
Morgantown.) Poor Beatty has a need to think Clintonite Democrats aren't
tackling race and poverty, much like Marx had a need for a proletariat, except
that Marx's need was theoretical, while Beatty's is only theatrical. And Marx's
was closer to reality.

            The best sign so far? Somewhere in the Maryland
panhandle, E and I were for some reason discussing Wendy Shalit's book, The
Return of Modesty , which makes the case for chastity, patience, courtship,
etc. Shalit argues that when you walk down the street you can tell the virgins
by their fresh, healthful glow. E's critique, in full: "I don't know. I always
thought it was the girls who got fucked that had the healthy glow." She also
said she hasn't had sex in two years, which I didn't believe. But, come to
think of it, she does look a bit pale.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Being John McLaughlin

            When
presidential candidates brag about their "dialogue with the American people,"
as they inevitably do, what they really mean, of course, is their "monologue at
the American people." They orate, you write a check. This is not conversation,
it is a sales pitch. (The candidate's idea of give and take is you give, I
take.) Even the much-vaunted campaign Web sites allow visitors no more
engagement than sending an e-mail off into the inky void.

            But it
is an Internet axiom that there are no one-way streets. For Netizens, a
"national conversation" requires actual discussion. There are plenty of Web
sites that will feed you political information--see Jack Shafer's "" for the
best--but where can you go on the Net to debate, bicker, blab, argue, spar,
kvetch, or just plain gossip about the presidential campaign? Where can you
play John McLaughlin to another cybergabber's Jack Germond?

            The
first stop is Usenet, where dozens of political newsgroups are gearing up for
Iowa and New Hampshire. Alt.politics.election is the most fertile of these
bulletin boards, but other heated campaign confabs can be found at
alt.politics.republicans, alt.politics.liberal, alt.politics, alt.politics.usa,
alt.politics.media, us.politics, alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater, and
others. (If you're not used to Usenet, you can access the groups at Deja.com.)

            
Newsgroupies aren't yet fixated on 2000, so to find campaign chat you'll have
to bypass endless threads about Waco, the Brooklyn Museum, Jesse Ventura, and
Masonic conspiracies. But once you do find it, the Usenet campaign talk is a
tonic. At their best, the groups spin off both Al Frankenesque quips and
high-minded colloquies about campaign platforms. On alt.politics, for example,
a couple of dozen folks spent several days drilling down on Bill Bradley's
health-care proposal. Meanwhile, "Athanaric" capped an alt.politics.republicans
debate on George W. Bush's alleged cocaine use with an endorsement of a
powderhead president: "Stoners ... just sit around hitting the bong, watching
CNN, and sending Secret Service guys out to bring back some Taco Bell. Real
cokehead politicians would be running around getting things done. You can't sit
still and be lethargic after doing a fat rail! I'm for Bush here." (It must be
admitted that there is a lot more quipping than wonking in these debates.)

            The
newsgroupies are wonderfully vitriolic. Many of the discussions are flame wars,
and almost all are uncivil. (Conservatives are the clear champions: A thread
titled "Republicans shoot American children in the back" is easily trumped by
"Democrats believe in raping their own daughters.") But the intimacy of the
newsgroups frequently borders on claustrophobia. You'll see the same names and
the same harangues over and over if you stay too long in a group. And Usenet
attracts more than its share of obsessives (most are garden-variety Waco
conspiracists or anti-Clinton loonies). Many threads that begin by analyzing Al
Gore's campaign end by denouncing the "Vice Criminal" and the "First
Rapist."

            For
less rant and more substance, head to the political Webzines.

                  Slate
               'sown forum, "," always has several active campaign threads,
usually pegged to "Ballot
Box " or "Frame
Game " columns. Because The Fray is linked to specific ,
campaign-related articles, it tends to stick to the election and not meander
off into conspiracy land. Salon also has lively campaign chat in its
"Table Talk "
section: It tends to be more conversational but less focused than The Fray (he
says unbiasedly).

            The
portal sites are trying to grab a share of the campaign palaver, too. Yahoo!
hosts several dozen political discussion "clubs." Most claim only a handful of
members (e.g., Republicans for Bill Bradley), but some of the larger ones are
quite lively, especially "Fear
and Loathing on Campaign 2K " and "Campaign
Techniques ," where they were debating whether candidates should ever
make campaign promises when I visited. MSN offers a similar array of
Web communities , though they are far less active. Both
CNN and MSNBC
are chockablock with political bulletin boards, though they too are tepid.

            Sadly,
otherwise abundant political sites such as Political Junkie don't
embrace conversation. Only Primary Diner has a forum worthy of the name. I learned more
about the pros and cons of the front-loaded primary season from the prattlers
at Primary Diner than I have from years of C-SPAN watching.

            When
you tire of the staidness and bipartisanship of the mainstream BBSs, invade the
free-fire zones of FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne. com
               . These are the spawning grounds of
the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. FreeRepublic gained a modest name for itself
during the Lewinsky scandal as a haven for Clinton haters, and Lucianne.com is
the queendom of Lewinsky doyenne Lucianne Goldberg. Lucianne and FreeRepublic
serve presidential chat laced with arsenic. Specially targeted: George W. for
conservative flaccidness and Gore for enviro-kookiness. (These sites are
proudly conservative, except when it comes to intellectual property law. They
reprint articles--or huge chunks of articles--from other publications without
seeking copyright permission.)

            You
can also conduct your 2000 debates purely by e-mail on a politics listserv. The
listserv I'm on--subscribe by sending the message "sub politics [your name]" to
listserv@aloo.netaxs.com--has not
yet focused on the campaign, but will as Iowa and New Hampshire beckon. (You
can search for political listservs at L-Soft .
Please tell us if you find a great one.)

            The
presidential candidates are beginning to acknowledge all this online campaign
talk, if only halfheartedly. Most of them have participated in live chats at
MSNBC or CNN.com. (Read the transcripts of the better CNN chats here . Look for the
Allpolitics section toward the bottom of the page.) But the chats are basic Q
and A's: Chatters ask routine questions, the candidate types back a canned
response. It's too bad the candidates' lone exposure to Internet talk is so
denatured, so polite, and so very dull. They could learn something--not much,
perhaps, but something--from the lively, nasty online discussions they're
missing.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>The Decline of Rupert Murdoch</SPAN></SPAN>

            
               
                  Economist , July
3
            

            The
cover story
                predicts excitement from the 2000
presidential race, if not from the selection of the candidates then from their
stances on the economy, Medicare, and Social Security. ... The editors
opine that President Clinton's Medicare plan "does
nothing to address the underlying problems of rising health costs" and "is
simply endorsing a massive rise in government spending on health care."
... An article debunks the notion that guns have always been
a fixture of American life. Before 1850, no more than a 10th of all Americans
owned guns. ... Another piece attributes the decline of Rupert Murdoch's media
empire to his belated entry into new media and his alienation of the local
partners on which his broadcasting deals depend. (For more on Murdoch and new
media, see ".")

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , July 19 and 26
            

            The
Rev. Al Sharpton brags to a reporter that Hillary Clinton will need his
blessing to win a New York Senate seat. "How enthusiastic[ally] I would support
her would be based on how she respects and regards the new dynamics of New York
politics," he hints cagily. ... A piece reviews growing scientific evidence that the
practice of religion promotes good health. Possible explanations: Most
religions advocate temperate lifestyles, and prayer encourages mental
well-being. The findings amount to "a health boon" and "a new argument for
taking faith seriously." ... The "TRB " column protests the "gross generational inequity" of
President Clinton's Medicare plan. Prescription drug coverage for the elderly
isn't nearly as pressing a need as education and child nutrition.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , July 4
            

            The
cover story is an oral history of Stanley Kubrick told by film types and family
members. He comes across as a paranoid perfectionist. He required 80 or more
takes on a single scene and once called an employee and demanded help while she
was in labor. ... An article explores the Patel Motel phenomenon: More
than half of American motels are owned by Indians, and 70 percent of those
Indians have the last name Patel, indicating that they belong to the same Hindu
merchant subcaste. Why? Motels are fairly easy to run and come with a house,
and many were for sale at the time Indians began immigrating to the United
States in large numbers. ... A grim piece profiles Chevron's
superintendent of operations along Nigeria's Niger River. His job consists of
paying off tribal chiefs to prevent them from disrupting pumping operations. He
relies heavily on Nigerian military muscle to protect Chevron's interests.

            

               
                  Vogue
               
               , July 1999
            

            An
article heralds the return of curvy models. After a decade of fashion androgyny
and heroin chic, waifs and weird-looking "girls" are yielding runway space to
full-bodied Breckish beauties. Reasons for the zaftig vogue include the
mainstreaming of the hip-hop ideal of beauty and the popularity of curvaceous
actresses such as Catherine Zeta-Jones. A Manhattan plastic surgeon testifies,
"They're no longer asking for stick legs. No one wants their butt removed."

            
               
                  Business
Week
               
               , July 5
            

            The
cover story says that megabillionaire and
stock-picking legend Warren Buffett has quietly shifted his focus from buying
individual stocks to purchasing companies. Stocks have shrunk from 76 percent
of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s assets in 1996 to 32 percent currently.

            
               
                  Time ,
July 5
            

            The
cover story purports to critically examine the hype
surrounding Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut but really just adds to it.
Co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are featured naked on the cover--"like
you've never seen them. " (Like you've never seen him , perhaps:
Newsweek put a naked Kidman on the cover last year.) Contrary to
previous reports, there is no necrophilia in the film, but there is an orgy.
... An article examines "cascading," the post-affirmative action
phenomenon in which minority students denied access to top-tier universities
attend lesser ones. Students at University of California, Irvine claim they are
succeeding in a supportive atmosphere. Critics worry that the kids
underestimate the importance of blue-chip college credentials. (The New York
Times Magazine wrote a nearly identical piece two months ago.)
... A "surprising" survey of American kids ages 6-14 finds
that the overwhelming majority believes in God, pray, feel safe in school,
admire their parents, are in no hurry to grow up, and disapprove of premarital
sex.

            
               
                  Newsweek ,
July 5
            

            The
cover story , while profiling several instant millionaires and
noting that 6 million workers now get stock options, says that more than 60
percent of Americans feel they are missing their chance to prosper during the
high-tech boom and bull market. (For 
                  Slate
               's earlier
take on Internet envy click .) ... An article examines the latest hot dietary supplement: SAMe.
European trials and anecdotal evidence suggest the naturally occurring
substance can relieve depression, arthritis, and liver disease without the
toxic side effects of pharmaceuticals. ... A photo essay vividly depicts the brutal rite of genital
mutilation in Uganda. A circle of family and friends looks on as an "initiate"
lying on the ground has her clitoris removed with a razor blade.

            
               
                  U.S. News
& World Report , July 5
            

            The
cover story hails the "class of heroes" who graduated from
West Point in 1939. The 456 graduates of '39 played a vital role in three major
wars, and 72 became generals. ... George W. ought to keep his distance
from the Washington establishment, according to an analysis . Bush might be tarred by the congressional GOP's
fumbling of the gun and budget battles. ... A piece mocks a law pushed by Louisiana Republican Gov. Mike
Foster requiring school kids to say "sir" and "ma'am" when addressing
teachers.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker , July 5
            

            A
"Talk of the Town" item sourced to "some old friends of the First Family"
suggests that President Clinton is considering running for Senate from Arkansas
in 2002. The only ex-president to serve in the Senate was Andrew Johnson, also
the only president besides Clinton to be impeached. ... A piece warns
that Wall Street's blue-chip firms may be just as unstable as the infamous
hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Wall Street banks are just as heavily
leveraged as LTCM was, exposing them to staggeringly enormous potential
losses.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , July 5
            

            The
cover
story blasts the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft.
The government was snookered by Netscape into assailing Microsoft for its
predatory conduct. But the evolution of the browser market belies the charge.
Contrary to the DOJ's predictions, the Internet has thrived, and bullying
competitors is part of the "creative destruction" that leads to marketplace
innovation. ... Bill Bradley is alternately disagreeable and boring,
according to an article. The quixotic presidential candidate refuses to answer
reporters' questions and even disagrees with his wife when she introduces him
to donors as "demure." ... The magazine publishes George W. Bush's Map
of the Balkans. West of the Yugoslav capital of Retrograd, Kosovaria borders
Fredonia, topped by Souvlaki, which is adjacent to Insomnia, a neighbor of the
Check Republic.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            John McCain's War of Attrition

            Monday
afternoon, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared his candidacy for president. He
did everything by the book: highlighted favorable issues, exploited his
personal history, and portrayed his opponents' advantages as vices. But McCain
also defied the political playbook by deprecating himself in a shrewd effort to
pre-empt criticism and turn up the heat on his rivals. Here's a breakdown of
his tactics.

            

               1. 
               Focus on foreign policy. Each candidate has
expertise in a particular terrain of issues. The advantage will go to the
candidate on whose terrain the battle is fought. If the election is about
cultural concerns, George W. Bush has the advantage. If it's about economic
growth, Al Gore has the advantage. If it's about poverty, Bill Bradley has the
advantage. McCain, thanks to his military career, owns the terrain of foreign
policy. While Bradley can argue that poverty is the most morally pressing
concern, Gore can argue that growth is the most fundamental, and Bush can argue
that cultural decay is foremost in the minds of voters, McCain can argue that
military issues are the most grave. "The most solemn responsibility given the
president is the role of commander in chief," he declared Monday. Of the time
McCain spent discussing issues, nearly half was devoted to the military and
America's role in the world.

            

               2. 
               Emphasize biography. Since the end of the Cold War,
it has been difficult to get the public to focus on foreign policy. But McCain
can frame the election to his advantage in another way. He can bypass the
choice among issues by persuading voters to focus on the candidates'
biographies instead of their platforms. Every candidate launches his campaign
with a glossy account of his upbringing and career, but McCain's heroism in
Vietnam makes his story a far easier sell than Bush's, Gore's, or Bradley's.
McCain exploits this advantage by filling his speeches with the word "service."
"Serving my country is an honor, indeed, the most honorable life an American
can lead," he said Monday. "I have passed from a young man to an old one in the
service of my country."

            

               3. 
               Moralize the issues. Once he has convinced voters of
his superior character, McCain exports this advantage by describing every
subject in moral terms. In his announcement address, as in previous speeches,
he framed domestic issues in terms of "honor," "courage," "strength," "faith,"
"selfishness," "honesty," and "respect." He called trade protectionists
"cowards," accused the government of swindling taxpayers, and denounced
President Clinton for breaking his promise to protect Social Security. Two
months ago, addressing the National Council of La Raza, McCain said of Hispanic
voters, "Their support is my honor." Couching every issue in such language
maximizes the leverage of McCain's heroism.

            

               4. Stigmatize 
               wealth. The elite pedigrees of Bush and
Gore make them vulnerable to a populist underdog. Auditioning for this role,
Pat Buchanan uses economic issues, Bradley uses Midwestern humility, and McCain
uses the soldier's ethic of obedience, teamwork, and self-sacrifice. "I don't
begin this mission with any sense of entitlement. America doesn't owe me
anything," McCain proclaimed Monday. "I was born into America's service. ... I
want to return our government back to whom it belongs--the people. So that
Americans can believe once again that public service is a summons to duty and
not a lifetime of privilege."

            

               5. 
               Vilify partisanship. McCain, like Bradley, has
generated significant interest among independent voters and needs their help in
New Hampshire's open primary. Moreover, unlike Bradley, McCain has made
numerous enemies in his own party by promoting legislation that would restrict
campaign contributions and require tobacco companies to pay for health care and
anti-smoking education. To convert this adversity into an advantage, McCain
accuses his critics of subverting the national interest for the sake of
"partisan ambitions." He scolds "Congress" as well as Clinton, "Republicans" as
well as Democrats, and "conservatives" as well as liberals.

            
Conventional strategy dictates that having framed the election along these
lines, McCain should emphasize his superiority in each respect. Instead, he
proclaims his own inadequacy. McCain's favorite words are shame, blame,
failure, and disgrace. In every account of his POW ordeal, he absurdly
concludes that he "failed" to withstand the enemy's torture. In speeches, he
accepts "blame" for everything Congress does wrong, says he "failed" to prevent
it, and vows to "try harder" next time. He is "ashamed" of
everything--political pork, unwise military procurements, high-dollar
electioneering. "The people whom I serve believe that the means by which I came
to office corrupt me," he declared three months ago. "And that shames me. That
shames me. Their contempt is a stain upon my honor, and I cannot live with it."
Pundits choked up at McCain's words. Since then, he has repeated them verbatim
on at least five occasions. Shame has become his shtick.

            This
accomplishes two things. First, it pre-empts criticism from the media. It's no
fun whipping McCain when he's already whipping himself. Second, it establishes
a test no other candidate can survive. McCain is the only candidate with a
biography of steel. When he calls himself weak and corrupt, nobody believes
him. If Gore were to call himself weak and corrupt, his opponents would replay
his confession as a campaign ad.

            To
beat Bush, McCain has stripped character down to experience. Bush speaks the
language of character and has plenty of foreign policy counsel on which to
rely. McCain wants to take those assets out of the game, reducing the
comparison to what each man has done with his life. In military confrontations,
McCain warned Monday, "there comes a time when our nation's leader can no
longer rely on briefing books and talking points ... when the sum total of
one's life becomes the foundation from which he or she makes the decisions that
determine the future of our democracy. ... The president is a lonely man in a
dark room when the casualty reports come in. I am not afraid of the burden. I
know both the blessing and the price of freedom." With that, McCain began a
refrain--"I am not afraid"--designed to shame his rivals.

            
McCain's ultimate weapon is cynicism. He plays it up because it endangers his
opponents more than it endangers him. The central line of his speech proclaimed
a "New Patriotic Challenge. It is a challenge to each of us to join in the
fight against the pervasive cynicism that is debilitating our democracy." It
corrodes every politician except John McCain. "We who are currently privileged
to hold public office have ourselves to blame," he laments in his stump speech.
"It is we who have squandered the public trust, we who have time and again
placed our personal or partisan interest before the national interest, earning
the public's contempt with our poll-driven policies, our phony posturing, the
lies we call spin. ... We are all corrupted."

            The
first politician McCain wants to portray as corrupted is Bush. "At a time when
Americans are growing increasingly cynical about public service and
increasingly disillusioned about their political leaders," McCain charged
Saturday, "I was disappointed to see my fellow Republicans' reaction to recent
comments and writings by Pat Buchanan concerning our nation's role in defeating
Nazi Germany. By continuing to appease Buchanan, several of our candidates
appear to have put politics ahead of our party's principles. ... Like Gov.
Bush, I want to see a united Republican Party. But no political campaign is
worth sacrificing our principles."

            So
much for McCain's "war against cynicism." He hates cynicism like the Russians
at Stalingrad hated the snow.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Tarzan

            Carl Jung once observed that it is easier to
discern the presence of archetypes from the collective subconscious in works of
pulp fiction by writers such as H. Rider Haggard than it is in literary
masterpieces. If only Jung had put Edgar Rice Burroughs on his
depth-psychologist's couch. Burroughs was the George Lucas of his day, creating
in Tarzan and other characters beings as profoundly mythical--and as
stereotypically superficial--as Darth Vader. Like Luke Skywalker's saga, the
tale of Tarzan mixes and matches motifs from the archetype-haunted dreamtime of
humanity anatomized by Jung and Jung's disciple, Joseph Campbell. The tale of
the prince raised in secret by adopted parents (King Arthur, Luke Skywalker) is
fused with the story of the feral child raised by animals (Romulus and Remus,
Enkidu, Mowgli, Pecos Bill) in the romance of the orphaned English lord raised
by a foster family of African apes.

            The fact that Tarzan is really an English
lord--Lord Greystoke, to be precise--was central to Burroughs' conception of
his character. In the pulp fiction of Burroughs, as in pulp fiction of any
period, timeless archetypes rub shoulders with the vulgar prejudices of the
writer and his audience. In the works of Burroughs, today's race/class/gender
theorists can easily find a key to the racial, social, and sexual anxieties of
early 20 th -century white American men and boys. When the first
Tarzan books were published, the British Empire ruled the waves, the United
States had recently joined the ranks of imperial powers, and white supremacy
was the norm in the United States and throughout the world. Confidence in the
innate superiority of the Caucasian race--and, within that race, of its
Anglo-Saxon variant--coexisted with paranoia about the yellow peril and black
"savagery."

            The two major characters
in the oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs are Tarzan of the Apes and John
Carter of Mars. Although John Carter never made it in Hollywood the way that
his cousin in the jungle jockstrap did, it is worth reviving him to make a
point. Tarzan and John Carter were both exemplars of Anglo-Saxon
masculinity--Tarzan, the heir to an aristocratic English family, and John
Carter, an upper-class Virginian by birth. The Tarzan and Carter stories can be
viewed as experiments--take a member of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, strip him
of all his advantages, and put him in a radically different environment, in
order that the innate superiority of his breed may be demonstrated. Whether in
Africa (the symbol of precivilized savagery) or on an old, desiccated Mars (the
symbol of overrefinement and cultural exhaustion), the Anglo-Saxon man proves
that he is royalty. Tarzan becomes Lord of the Jungle, John Carter weds the
Princess of Mars. Space, in Burroughs, is a metaphor for time. Tarzan and John
Carter represent the era of Anglo-American civilization, at the midpoint
between prehistoric barbarism and post-historic decadence.

            Burroughs' genius can be seen in the way that he redeemed
the imagery of savagery for his Anglo-Saxon ape-man. In the mythology of white
supremacy, even before Charles Darwin, black Africans and other nonwhites were
assimilated to apes (Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of
Virginia , finds credible the rumor that African women mate with
orangutans). In much 19 th - and early 20 th -century pulp
fiction, American Indians and black Americans have a mystical rapport with
animals, which author and audience alike understood arose from their proximity
on the evolutionary scale. But Burroughs' Tarzan is closer to the animals than
the black Africans who live nearby. The Great White Hope is at once more
civilized and more savage than the "natives"--he is the Lone Ranger
and Tonto. With Tarzan monopolizing the highest and lowest rungs of the
Chain of Being, the "natives" find themselves deprived of the one asset that
racist mythology attributed to them, closeness to the animals, leaving them
without any particular function in the economy of kitsch literature, except to
be rescued by Tarzan from rogue elephants and the occasional witch doctor.

            When first published, the
Tarzan stories provided a largely American audience of white men and boys with
a fantasy version of the ultimate White Guy, the virile aristocrat, who, far
from being effete and degenerate, could go Ape as well as Ascot. Something like
this vision inspired Theodore Roosevelt, the asthmatic Yankee patrician who
turned himself into a cowboy and, as an ex-president, nearly died while
exploring a tributary of the Amazon in Brazil, in an adventure that might have
been scripted by Burroughs. George Bush--a professed admirer of TR--is the
Tarzan of our day: A patrician Yalie (Lord Greystoke), and at the same time a
Texan redneck (Tarzan), engaged in wildcatting (could there be a more
metaphorically resonant term?). By jumping out of airplanes in his 70s, Bush
continues to battle the Wimp Factor. Perhaps he should swing from vines as
well. By contrast, George W., a rich kid who, unlike his father, sat out the
war of his generation, is Boy.

            The Tarzan mythos, then, depends on a balance of
tensions--between Tarzan the Ape-Man and Lord Greystoke, between England and
Africa, between civilization and savagery. Play down one side of the equation,
and the meaning of this whole system of pre-World War II social stereotypes
collapses.

            This is what happened
when Hollywood got hold of the Tarzan story. Beginning with the Johnny
Weissmuller films, the jungle began eclipsing the English manor. Tarzan became
simply a feral child, a white Mowgli. The genre changed to pastoral: Tarzan and
Jane became the equivalents of the innocent shepherds and shepherdesses of
Hellenistic Greek and Renaissance pastoral fiction, striving to preserve their
natural idyll from corruption by civilization. Pastoral Tarzan need not be an
English lord. He need not even be white. A black or brown or Asian Tarzan would
defeat the whole point of the Burroughs mythos but would not be out of place in
the Hollywood or TV versions.

            Disney's new animated Tarzan is the politically correct
heir of several generations of Hollywood Tarzans--a facsimile of a facsimile.
Gone is the social Darwinist worldview that underpinned the original. In the
prologue we see Tarzan's parents, but we do not learn they are titled. Indeed,
from their facility at assembling a tree house we might think that they are,
not Lord and Lady Greystoke, but Mr. and Mrs. Robinson (as in Crusoe or Swiss
Family). The embarrassing problem of what to do with the "natives" in a
post-racist age is solved by eliminating the natives altogether. Disney's
gorillas live in a jungle uninhabited by human beings, until Europeans
intrude.

            The Disneyfied Tarzan is
such a wimp that he is not allowed to kill anything or anybody, although our
Paleolithic pacifist is permitted to use martial arts techniques in
self-defense. The two villains of the movie are a homicidal (and simiocidal)
cheetah and an English hunter--the Evil White Male without which no PC epic
would be complete. But when the time comes for them to die, both do themselves
in accidentally while fighting Tarzan: The cheetah falls atop a spearhead that
Tarzan happens to be holding, and the Englishman inadvertently hangs himself on
jungle vines. This Tarzan is a warrior for our day, when the United States
refuses to send soldiers into combat because one of them might actually get
hurt.

            In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a prostitute lures Enkidu away
from his animal companions. Once he has slept with a woman, the animals refuse
to associate with him; he cannot go home again. Masculine wildness is overcome
by civilized femininity. In Disney's Tarzan film, nature is feminine and
civilization masculine. Disney's Tarzan is not only post-imperial, post-racist,
and post-classist but also post-masculine. Tarzan is a momma's boy. His gorilla
foster mother, Kala (whose voice is provided by Glenn Close), remains on the
scene after he reaches adulthood. When Tarzan introduces Jane to Kala, he
grovels and whimpers before a disapproving Ma Gorilla.

            Halfway through the
film, Tarzan, a Victorian-era Enkidu, lured by Jane, is prepared to follow her
back to England. But then, having learned how evil civilized Englishmen can be,
Tarzan, Jane, and her father (in the PC universe, old and feeble white men are
tolerable) decide to renounce civilized society for the jungle. There, by happy
coincidence, the two alpha males (Kerchak the bull ape and the evil English
hunter) are gone, clearing the way for the utopia of beta males and females.
Although Tarzan is now nominally in control, one suspects that Kala the
Ape-Mom, the Empress Dowager of the Jungle, is really in charge. At movie's
end, Tarzan and Jane move in with Mom and her furry family, like '90s yuppies
who have given up and moved back home. Perhaps Jane's widowed human father will
wed Tarzan's widowed gorilla mother (so the Southern Baptist Convention should
be worried about bestiality but not homosexuality).

            If the pulp fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs gives us a
glimpse into the often appalling collective unconscious of white-supremacist
America, the Disney version of Tarzan will provide a similar service
to future scholars pondering the equally weird mentality of feminized and Green
America, circa 2000. If the original Tarzan celebrated the Anglo-Saxon male
proving his superiority over Nature red in tooth and claw, Disney's version
embodies the ideology that vilifies the "white male" and idealizes the feminine
(human and ape) and the wilderness imagined by customers of The Nature Store.
Me, Tarzan. You, Jane. Nature Good. Civilization Bad. Girls good. Boys bad.

            Rumor has it that the next object of touchy-feely
bowdlerization by Disney is Beowulf. No doubt in the Disney version, Beowulf
and the feisty, coed-army warrior-princess who inevitably will be written into
the script as his partner will befriend a misunderstood Grendel and Grendel's
mom (it's not easy being green). For my part, I plan to endorse the Baptist
boycott of Disney. Disney is evil--not because it's turning children into
liberals, but because it's turning them into wimps.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Swann Song

            Last week, a federal judge ordered Charlotte, N.C.,
to stop busing students to integrate schools. Newspapers noted the perfect
symmetry--busing had begun with the Supreme Court's 1971 Swann vs.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision--and the
neoconservative-dominated commentariat cheered the demise of what it deemed a
failed experiment. But while busing did great damage in many cities, in
Charlotte it was widely considered an against-the-odds success. That fact makes
last week's news all the sadder.

            The landmark Swann suit had its origins in
the 1955 Supreme Court decision known as Brown II . Brown II
gummed up the initial 1954 Brown ruling--which had decreed segregated
schools unconstitutional--by saying, in a now-infamous oxymoron, that
desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed." By 1965, Charlotte
had seen more deliberation than speed. Only 2 percent of black schoolchildren
attended integrated schools. To maintain this racial separation, 60 percent of
all students were actually bused to schools far from their homes, a form of
busing that raised no outcry from the white community.

            With the injustice self-evident, the NAACP and
other civil rights groups trolled for parents to challenge the system, finding
Vera and Darius Swann. The Swanns wanted their 6-year-old son, James, to attend
Seversville Elementary School, one of the few integrated schools in the city.
Seversville Elementary happened to be closest to their home, but the school
board refused to admit James.

            The Swanns filed suit
but lost. They continued to appeal until their case reached the desk of Federal
District Court Judge James McMillan in 1969. The grandson of two confederate
soldiers, McMillan was on record deriding "the folly ... of requiring that
pupils be transported far away from their natural habitat so that some
artificial ... racial balance be maintained." But when he examined the Swann
case he realized that Charlotte's school board was plainly in violation of the
law and that it wasn't going to desegregate unless forced by the courts. The
precedent had been set with the 1968 Supreme Court decision Green vs. County
School Board of New Kent County , Va., in which the court ruled school
boards had an "affirmative duty" to ensure "racial discrimination would be
eliminated root and branch." McMillan ordered the Charlotte board to draw up a
plan to take steps--not necessarily busing--to do so.

            At first, school board officials refused to implement
desegregation plans and then submitted plans that failed to address the
problem. All McMillan could do was reject them. After a year of school board
stalling, McMillan appointed an outside referee to devise a desegregation
strategy, which entailed the busing of black kids to previously white schools,
and vice versa.

            The buses began rolling
on Sept. 9, 1970. Enraged, many whites protested, sometimes violently. McMillan
received death threats and was hanged in effigy. The office of the Swanns'
attorney was fire bombed. Black students were beat up at school. Some white
parents withdrew and sent their children to private schools, while others
formed citizens' groups to agitate against busing.

            In 1971, the high court unanimously upheld McMillan's
decision. But the school board, split between busing supporters and foes,
continued to produce half-hearted integration plans that McMillan had to
dismiss as not "in good faith," and busing continued according to the court's
prescription.

            Meanwhile, a previously
apolitical 33-year-old housewife named Maggie Ray began convening local
activists, black and white, pro- and anti-busing, to work out an alternative
solution--and also endeared herself to the judge at a backyard barbecue. Her
informal committee, called the Citizens Advisory Group, finagled an end-run
around the school board and persuaded McMillan to put it in charge of the
busing plan. In 1974, the board compromised with the committee on an
arrangement that won McMillan's approval, and a year later he withdrew the
court from supervision of Charlotte's desegregation plans, trusting the
citizens to do it fairly.

            After the initial round of white flight, Charlotte
maintained for the next two decades a mix of roughly 60 percent white and 40
percent black students. The presence of whites, especially affluent ones, in
once all-black schools lifted those schools' quality, since white parents'
complaints about outdated textbooks, sub par teachers, and dilapidated
facilities were heeded by school officials. Blacks' test scores rose too, after
a special effort led by a pro-busing superintendent. Students, parents, and
local officials found new pride in their integrated schools, generating more
goodwill. Political reform followed too, creating a city government that better
represented both blacks and poor whites. Finally, a solid educational system
provided a foundation for the economic growth the region has recently
enjoyed.

            Charlotte's busing
success hinged on several things. Unlike the earlier schemes, Ray's plan didn't
exempt the wealthy whites in southeast Charlotte. As a result, some lower-class
whites no longer felt singled out to carry the burden of integration.
Acknowledging the situation's class dimensions blunted the racial
animosity--and created a coalition of blacks and less affluent whites. Also,
the white flight that doomed busing in Boston and elsewhere was not really an
option. Charlotte's whites could flee to private schools (and some did), but
because the county had consolidated its school system in 1960 the outlying
areas as well as the inner cities were embraced in the busing blueprint. (A
1974 Supreme Court ruling exempted suburban school districts from busing,
meaning few metropolises experienced wholesale integration
Charlotte-style.)

            Equally important--and I admit this sounds kind of
cornball--success required the civic spiritedness of pro- and anti-busing
parents alike, who saw their way clear to hammering out compromises. This meant
shelving the belief that a single, foolproof plan could be implemented once and
for all. Citizens got involved with adjusting the busing plan (and refighting
painful battles) year after year after year--a demanding but inescapable
burden. The 1990s even saw a major overhaul, when Charlotte introduced magnet
schools devoted to excellence in a single area, such as math, and open to
students from all neighborhoods--to give whites extra incentive to travel long
distances to school.

            Unfortunately, the
magnet schools began the undoing of desegregation in Charlotte. To remain a
tool for continued desegregation and not just for excellence, the magnet
schools had to maintain set-asides for black students. A newcomer to
Charlotte--Bill Capacchione, who had not witnessed the city's efforts in the
'70s to surmount mutual distrust--sued to enroll his daughter into a magnet
that officials didn't want to "tip" all white. This year, the case came before
Judge Robert Potter--a former Jesse Helms aide, a Ronald Reagan appointee, and
a sworn enemy of busing since he fought against it on the front lines in 1969.
Calling bused students "cogs in an experimental machine," Potter declared that
all vestiges of harm wrought by the Jim Crow-era dual school system have
evaporated. This despite a recent Charlotte Observer study that found
that without busing, segregation would return for more than half of the
district's students.

            Charlotte and the nation have come far, and we can hope
that integration may someday endure without a conscious effort to preserve it.
But it's dishonest or naive to claim that that moment has arrived. Thirty years
may seem like a long time to someone nursing a grievance since the pitched
battles of the late '60s, but in the sweep of history--on the heels of 90 years
of Jim Crow and 200 of race slavery--it's nothing. Ironically, busing will
become unnecessary only when no one seems to have a problem with it
anymore.

            Now Charlotte's civic leaders, and other proponents
of continued desegregation efforts, have to reckon with Potter's ruling. While
not carrying the weight of a Supreme Court decision, it does point the way for
other judges, if they want to follow. As the city decides in the next weeks
whether to appeal, it also has to scramble to make sure its denser (largely
black) areas will have enough schools to house the kids who can't be bused
across town anymore to less crowded institutions.

            The most distressing part of Potter's decision was
his swipe at social experimentation. As all great social reformers have known,
fixed formulas, one-size-fits-all policies, and judicial fiats rarely solve
intractable problems. The only thing that does is what FDR called "bold,
persistent experimentation," as the example of Charlotte nobly attests.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Diced Islands

            
Britain's Independent on Sunday reports that pro-Indonesian militiamen fleeing from the
multinational peacekeeping forces in East Timor are setting up guerrilla bases
in Indonesia's sympathetic West Timor. "They have supplies, weapons, sympathy
and a population of supporters which they have moved into exile with them,"
says the paper. "The already tiny country will be, in effect, partitioned, with
the peacekeepers unable to secure the western areas of East Timor." The head of
Indonesian forces on Timor warned the international forces not to pursue
militiamen into West Timor. He told the Jakarta Post , "The Indonesian Army will not stand
still if our territory's borderlines are breached." (For a Timor primer, click
).

            On the
eve of Monday's withdrawal of Indonesian troops from East Timor, the
Straits
Times of Singapore reported that in their last days on the island,
Indonesian soldiers were seen selling what appeared to be either looted goods
or redirected foreign aid at "exorbitant prices" to "needy East Timorese." The
paper said, "Whatever the source, it was clear that food was being sold to the
highest bidder--and those with the right credentials. East Timorese who sided
with pro-independence militias were either ignored or sold goods at sky-high
prices."

            Less
than a week after the murder in Dili of a Dutch journalist, British member of
Parliament and former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell called on the press to
voluntarily reduce their numbers in East Timor. In a column in the
Independent on Sunday , he said, "The peacekeepers have better things to
do with their limited resources" than to protect journalists. He also claimed
that the number of news-gatherers in areas of conflict has become
"unmanageable. News events get distorted under the weight of them. They bring
an unacceptable increase in the risk of casualties from land mines, sniper fire
and brigandage."

            Many
papers around the world contrasted China's ambiguous response to last week's
earthquake in Taiwan with Greece's no-strings-attached aid to rival Turkey
after that nation's August temblor. The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong reported that Taiwanese officials accused China of slowing
international rescue efforts by refusing permission to fly through mainland
airspace. A Russian mission, for example, was forced to avoid China and to take
an air route via Siberia, causing a 12-hour delay. The paper also said that
Beijing has been asserting its sovereignty claim by "thanking foreign donors
for offering help to 'our country's Taiwan area.' " Another attack on China's
humanitarian response came in the Jerusalem Post , which claimed that when Taiwan told China
that it needed cash donations rather than rescue assistance, the mainland's Red
Cross offered a mere $100,000 in cash and $60,000 in relief goods: "small
indeed, when compared with the $50 million Taiwan has given to help
flood-victims in China in recent years."

            The
Russian air force bombed the Chechen city of Grozny over the weekend in what
the International Herald
Tribune described as an attempt to "destroy Islamic militants
based in Chechnya." The militants have twice invaded the neighboring Russian
region of Dagestan in the last month and are thought to be responsible for the
apartment bombings that have killed 300 people in Moscow and other Russian
cities. The Russian daily Kommersant said that the air raids show that
"Russia will no longer capitulate to Chechnya but will only speak in the
language of force" and concluded the raids have rendered the Chechen leadership
"less bellicose."

            An
op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times by a Russian academic proposed a bold
solution to the Russian-Chechen conflict: Grant the territory independence.
Calling the Chechnya uprising an "act of banditism" and a "civil war," Boris
Kagarlitsky said that independence for Chechnya would clarify the situation and
make it much easier to resolve. "If we do declare Chechnya independent, we can
create a real border between Chechnya and Russia, ... that we can give
international status. Such a border would be easy to fortify and control. It
would also be easy to close. ... Likewise, our government would have to
guarantee full equality and respect for the civil rights of Chechens who choose
Russia as their place of residence. Today, Chechens in Russia don't have any
clear status. Against such a background, there is an anti-Caucasian hysteria,
which holds any person from that region responsible for the actions of soldiers
in the hills of Dagestan. Racist paranoia doesn't distinguish between rebel
fighters and salespeople in the marketplaces."

            Microsoft co-founder Paul
Allen's forthcoming Experience Music Project in Seattle could be in trouble if its
British equivalent is anything to go by. The National Centre for Popular Music
opened in Sheffield in March but is already threatened with closure after
attracting fewer than half the visitors it expected. The Sunday Times
said the museum was seen as "vital in helping the city to shake off its Full
Monty image of dying industry and unemployment." However, the museum is
said to be too expensive and has been attacked for playing down the "sex and
drugs" aspects of rock. "It is all a bit innocent," Jenny Frankel told the
Times . "You can get round it in about an hour, and you expect a bit more
than that for £7.95 [$12.50]."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Cocaine Question

            This
weekend, Adam Clymer of the New York Times reported that George W. Bush,
responding in Ohio to a question about long-ago cocaine abuse, had issued
"another awkward answer" of the sort that had "made the issue linger." A
Times "Media Watch" story noted that Bush's previous answers had
obviously failed to "end the questioning." What both articles neglected to
mention was who had asked the question in Ohio: Adam Clymer.

            This
practice of self-concealment, which reporters pass off as "objectivity," is one
of the great frauds of American journalism. While many "opinion" writers argue
openly that the cocaine question is legitimate--pointing out, for example, that
Bush has jailed drug offenders and that Republicans have investigated President
Clinton's sex life--most "news" reporters pretend that the question is
immaculately conceived and needs no justification. Reluctant to become "part of
the story," news reporters press the question while obscuring their complicity
in keeping it alive. Instead, they tell readers that the question is "dogging"
Bush. Nonsense. Questions don't dog politicians. Reporters dog politicians. And
while they're dogging Bush, they ought to account for dodging a few questions
of their own.

            

               1. Who's asking 
               the cocaine question? Journalists
pretend that the question drives itself. It "hounds," "haunts," and "stalks"
Bush. It "percolates," "persists," and "swirls around" him. It is "turbulence,"
a "storm," a "blizzard." John Stacks, a Time editor who has led the drug
frenzy, said the question has "a kind of organic life." "These things take on a
life of their own," agreed Dan Balz of the Washington Post . "It followed
[Bush] from Texas to Ohio today, the question that will not go away," NBC's
Brian Williams reported Thursday night. "The questions would not go away,"
agreed NBC correspondent David Bloom. And who, exactly, had followed Bush and
asked him the question that day? David Bloom.

            

               2. Who's judging 
               Bush's answers? Not the media. They
don't evaluate the merits of a candidate's remarks. They just assess whether
the remarks will succeed or fail politically. Rather than treat the cocaine
inquiry as a dialogue in which the questions as well as the answers are subject
to rational scrutiny, most reporters depict it as a force of nature. Bush's
replies have failed to "douse the questions," "dampen the controversy," or
"turn down the heat." On the contrary, they have "stoked a brush fire," "fed
the story," and given it "oxygen," with "the automatic and absolutely
inevitable effect of keeping it going." Journalists are just part of this
"automatic" cycle. They're not hurting Bush. He's hurting himself.

            

               3. Why is the 
               press pursuing him? Reporters who
acknowledge their role in the assault seldom offer a reason. They say they're
just doing what comes naturally, and Bush is to blame for provoking them. His
answers "opened the door," "courted scrutiny," and "encouraged" more questions.
"His not answering it is just like waving red meat in front of carnivores,"
argued Susan Feeney of the frenzy-leading Dallas Morning News . "It's
inevitable that reporters will push until there's an answer." On Good
Morning America , ABC's Charles Gibson told George Stephanopoulos, "You know
the press. [Bush's answers] won't push the questions away, and he'll get them
again and again." Boys on the bus will be boys on the bus.

            

               4. What's wrong 
               with his answers? Journalists who admit
to judging Bush's answers generally accuse him of "shifting," "backpedaling,"
"altering," and "reversing." And what exactly did he reverse? He "reversed his
stance of not going beyond acknowledging youthful 'mistakes,' " complained the
Times ' Maureen Dowd . "First it was seven years, then it was 15
years, then it was 25 years." The complaint is not that Bush reversed his
story--there is no contradiction in being drug-free for seven, 15, and 25
years--but that he reversed his spin, obliging his advisers to "defend the
change of strategy." Why concede a politician's substantive consistency, when
you can attack his tactical vacillation?

            

               5. Did he 
               use cocaine? Careful journalists never infer
such impropriety. Instead, they posit the appearance of impropriety,
warning that Bush's answers "create an appearance at least that he has
something to hide" and "leave the implication" that he used hard drugs. His
assertion of "marital fidelity," according to the Times , "only adds to
the impression that he is hiding something about other aspects of his life." By
confining their inferences to such "impressions," the media sidestep the
unpleasant duty of ascertaining the truth.

            

               6. Is he 
               lying? Again, scrupulous reporters eschew this
question, focusing instead on public perception. Dowd, Paul Gigot of the
Wall Street Journal , and Chris Black of CNN concluded that Bush "looks
like" and "sounds like" he's dissembling. The Post suggested that Bush may have "created the impression with
voters that he is being cute or coy rather than forthcoming." Other pundits,
too scrupulous to characterize the public's perceptions of Bush, quoted their
colleagues' perceptions of the public's perceptions. ("Several people said ...
that George Bush came off as Clintonesque," ventured CBS's Bob Schieffer.)
Since the media decline to characterize the truth, perception is all that
matters. "Inconsistencies and ambiguities, real or imagined, are to journalists
as catnip to the cat," shrugged the New York Daily News , justifying the
drug story's persistence.

            

               7. Is the 
               controversy important? Pundits tend to ignore
this question, focusing instead on how Bush is "handling the crisis." "What
disturbed me this past week more was not even the fundamental issue, but it was
the handling of it," said ABC's Cokie Roberts. Gigot agreed: "What should especially
disturb Republicans is Mr. Bush's political judgment. If there's bad news to
get out, Politics 101 says release it as early as possible." 
                  Time
                called the controversy "the first big public test of
Bush's instincts and of his staff, and the results were pretty wobbly." Other
publications, too timid to endorse even this superficial assessment, reported
that "analysts" and "top Republicans" were questioning Bush's "erratic handling
of the drug question" and warning that his "candidacy had been bruised by his
handling of the issue."

            

               8. What exactly 
               is the question? The media imply that
Bush keeps refusing to say whether he has used cocaine. But that's not how the
question has generally been posed during this two-week frenzy. The first
version, crafted by CNN's Rowland
Evans, was: "Sir, is it not in your interest to tell us flatly if these
rumors are or are not true? ... Everybody says--every politician--[that] it's
to your disadvantage not to answer it." The second version, posed by a Reuters
correspondent, was whether Bush thought rumors of his cocaine use were "being
planted." A third version, posed by USA Today , was: "How can you make
questions about whether you used illegal drugs in your youth go away? Won't
they dog your campaign until you answer?" As Bush's inquisitors focus less on
the truth and more on politics, the inquisition becomes self-justifying.

            Bush's
Republican rivals are happy to exploit and hide behind the media's
pseudo-objectivity. While defending Bush's "privacy," Sen. John McCain
stipulated that "it is the media and the American people who decide what
questions should be asked." A spokesman for Gary Bauer agreed: "Gary feels the
candidates don't determine what is the statute of limitations on questions of
character and committing a felony. The American people and the press do." Dan
Quayle called the drug story a "side show" but added that Bush's wounds were
"self-inflicted. ... The general principle is that these questions,
unfortunately, are going to be asked." Sen. Orrin Hatch concluded, "I don't
think it's going to go away. ... The media is going to beat it to death until
he finally has to just say one way or the other."

            It's
hard to feel sorry for Bush, given his preposterous spins on the question. He
says he's stonewalling it because divulging past drug abuse "sends bad signals
to your children." Bush's surrogates claim that he's leading a "heroic" effort
"to purge the system of this 'gotcha' politics." He's making himself a
"positive role model" for kids and displaying the "leadership" for which "the
American people are hungering." "George Bush is the first guy in the line of
fire who's had the guts to stand up and say, 'I'm not going to play by the old
rules anymore,' " former GOP Chairman Haley Barbour boasted on television this
weekend. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, chastised Bush's rivals for
failing to "show the same courage that George W. has shown" by "taking a stand"
against "personal destruction." Comments like these make you wonder not whether
Bush and his friends ever used cocaine, but whether they ever stopped.

            The
point is not that the question is unfair. The point is that the power to choose
and craft questions is more profound than the power to choose and craft
answers--and with that power goes responsibility. When the question is as
controversial as the answer, journalists who report the exact answer and who
said it ought to report the exact question and who asked it. And if it's their
question, they ought to justify it. In Newsweek , for example, Stuart Taylor Jr. spends an entire
column proposing and defending a better question than the media have asked Bush
so far: "Would you seek long prison terms for today's 18-year-olds for doing
what you say you may or may not have done as a young man--and when you now
suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus
irrelevant to your candidacy?" You can decide for yourself whether you like
Taylor's question--and that's the point. He has thought it through, spelled it
out, and told you who's asking it and why.

            The
same can't be said for the New York Times . In its editorial on the
cocaine controversy, the Times advised Bush "to be honest, and to let
the country take his measure. In his campaign, the governor has emphasized the
importance of assuming responsibility for one's own actions. He should be
thinking now about how to set a good example." So should the Times .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Taking the Voters' Pulse Online 

            The
landslide winner of a recent TIME.com poll on the GOP candidates was a shocker.
The respondents' choice for the presidential nomination was none other than ...
Orrin Hatch.

            That's
the same Orrin Hatch who's wallowing near the bottom of the Republican field by
almost every measure--including most polls. TIME.com's straw poll allowed
anyone, not just registered voters, to cast a ballot and to do so as many times
as they wished. The Utah senator's Web site linked supporters to the poll, and
he pulled in 60 percent of the vote.

            While
this unscientific survey is the Web's version of the just-for-fun 900-number
telephone polls, there's concern among researchers that the public has trouble
distinguishing one poll from another on the Web. In fact, the news media has
picked up on some of these pseudopolls, and in at least one instance reported
on the poll as if it were credible. An ABC.com straw poll on the Democratic
presidential candidates found 25 percent of respondents favored Warren Beatty.
Amazingly, the New York Times ' Maureen Dowd cited the results as
evidence that the political "nutty season" had begun.

            The
confusion surrounding online polls is adding fuel to the biggest debate now
raging among pollsters: Is it time for the Internet to replace the telephone as
the polling technology of choice?

            
Already, the Harris Poll Online has chronicled the upcoming presidential
contest by assembling a pool of 5 million Internet users and surveying
demographically adjusted samples of that pool every month. The company's
efforts have attracted wide interest, but Harris' methods have prompted concern
that Internet users are not representative of the national population: They're
too white, too male, too young, and too wealthy.

            "Our
opponents think you should not let it out of the garage yet," says Jonathan
Siegel, director of Harris' Election 2000. "But Internet polling is going to
happen."

            
Meanwhile, media outlets and well-established polling entities such as the
Gallup Organization say they are staying away from Internet polling--for
now.

            "I
will be doing what I normally do: blocks of nationally representative telephone
surveys," says Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News. She admits
she's intrigued by the flexibility of Internet polls and the potential for
sharing visual materials with respondents online. But she notes that the Net
still poses problems for pollsters. "You can't just randomly sample Internet
users. You're not supposed to send unsolicited e-mail. And there is a truly
nonrepresentative nature to the people actively engaged on the Internet." Most
disturbing of all, she says, is the underrepresentation of the over-65 age
group, which, studies show, votes in high numbers.

            At the
same time, there are new efforts underway to perfect the use of the Net as a
polling technology. InterSurvey, a company recently started by two Stanford
University professors, pulls a random sample the old-fashioned way--through
random-digit phone dialing--and then equips panel members with Internet-access
devices, such as WebTVs, so they can respond to Web-based surveys. The company,
which is backed by venture capitalists and the university, has thus avoided
much of the criticism leveled at Harris over its sampling; InterSurvey is also
in talks with several campaigns and consultants about work on the 2000
election.

            When
pollsters talk about a "representative sample" they mean a sampling that
accurately reflects the population at large. The most widely used method is
random-digit dialing, in which the first six digits of a telephone number are
selected to allow for every region to be well represented, while the remaining
four digits are dialed at random.

            One
problem with online polling is that pollsters can't e-mail people at random.
E-mail addresses follow no standard format. There's no central phone book for
all e-mail addresses. And some Internet service providers block spam to
subscribers.

            
Technology has always influenced the way pollsters do their job. Starting in
the 1960s, the phone replaced door-to-door polling as the preferred means of
taking the nation's pulse. That was only after phone use became ubiquitous. But
a 1998 Department of Commerce study found only 26 percent of households had
Internet access, though more recent private studies estimate that share to be
between 38 percent (Nielsen NetRatings) and 44 percent (Jupiter
Communications).

            
Gallup, for one, is waiting until Net use becomes more widespread before
embracing online polling. "We will continue to consider it," says Jack Ludwig,
vice president and research director at Gallup. He says the company might use
the Internet "at some point, if the penetration gets up to where it is with the
telephone or television."

            A
recent study by Mediamark Research bears out assertions that Net users aren't
representative of the population at large. Some of the findings: Fifty-two
percent are male, 42 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34, 39 percent have
yearly household incomes exceeding $75,000, and 88 percent are white. The
comparable figures for the population at large: 48 percent are male, 34 percent
are in the 18-to-34 age bracket, 21 percent have a household income above
$75,000, and 84 percent are white.

            
Michael Traugott, president of the American Association of Public Opinion
Research, asserts that weighting the data--as Harris plans to do--won't
compensate for the differences in any meaningful way. But Harris' Siegel notes
that in 1998 the online Harris Poll accurately called 21 of 22 U.S. Senate and
gubernatorial races, while traditional polls miscalled five of the 22
races.

            
Traugott argues that pollsters need to look deeper at the data from online
polls. "The question is not whether you called the right candidate; it's the
margin of victory between the two candidates. In the Web surveys, they got the
bias you would expect. The results were pro-Republican. Web users are from a
higher socio-economic status; they're better educated, and they're more likely
to identify with Republicans."

            Will
candidates embrace Internet polling? Alex Gage, president of Market Strategies
Washington, the polling firm that's working with the George W. Bush campaign,
says his opinion of the Net's potential has shifted. "I began the year thinking
the Internet would be used in storing, retrieving, and distributing
information," he says. "More and more, I've come to realize that you can have
selected panels of suburban women who you know have 90 percent Internet access,
and you can talk to them every week about what they've seen." Gage says the
potential lies in testing advertising, keeping tabs on opponents, and getting
instantaneous reactions from events like debates.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Budget Fudging

            
President Clinton opened his hourlong news conference Thursday with a defense
of his budget proposals and a critique of Republican tax-cut plans. Newspapers
duly reported his quarrels with the GOP over revenue projections and the cost
of new Medicare benefits. Which side will prevail on these matters remains to
be seen. But the underlying struggle to shape the terms of the debate remains
invisible to the media. And Clinton is winning that struggle hands down.

            
               1.
Whose money is it? President Reagan used to argue constantly that federal
money belonged to taxpayers, not "bureaucrats." Later, House Speaker Newt
Gingrich took up this theme. But now both men are gone, and nobody in the GOP
seems capable of battling Clinton's counterspin. Clinton chooses words that
oblige the media and the public to look at every financial question from the
standpoint of the government rather than the taxpayer. The Republican tax cut
plan will "cost" too much and cause "an enormous loss to the American people,"
Clinton argued Thursday. This obscures the alternative point of view--that
taxes themselves impose "costs" and "losses" on everyone who has to pay the
Internal Revenue Service.

            
Likewise, Clinton shrewdly portrays tax cuts as a kind of "spending." At his
news conference, he questioned how Republicans could "finance" their tax cuts.
Words such as these dissolve the moral difference between giving money "back"
to the people it came from, as Reagan and Gingrich used to put it, and passing
it on to others instead. Once the question is framed as how to "finance" tax
cuts--implying that the government owns the money and gets to decide who should
receive it--conservatives can't win.

            
               2.
Who can spend it more wisely? Conservatives used to frame this question as
a choice between government "spending" and private "investment." "Investment"
meant the money was working and growing. "Spending" meant it was being wasted.
Clinton has turned this language on its head. "We must decide whether to invest
the surplus, to strengthen America over the long-term, or to squander it for
the short-term," he argued Thursday. To "squander" the money, in Clinton's
language, is to "spend" it on tax cuts. To "invest" it is to allocate it to
"long-term goals," which used to be called government programs.

            
Clinton constantly borrows capitalist terminology to make federal budget
decisions appear as productive as corporate budget decisions. At his news
conference, he made clear that allocating money to poverty-stricken parts of
the country isn't subsidizing the poor; it's "investing in America's new
markets." Adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare isn't additional
spending; it's "modernizing" the program to meet future needs.

            
               3.
Who deserves it most? Reagan used to dominate the moral dimension of budget
debates by posing a choice between hard-working taxpayers and irresponsible
beneficiaries of government programs. Clinton's greatest feat has been to
reverse this hierarchy. The question, as he put it Thursday, is no longer
whether to spend more money on programs but whether "to meet our basic
responsibilities in education, defense, the environment," and other
commitments.

            What
about the government's responsibility to taxpayers? Clinton explained that in
contrast to the GOP's "risky" tax-relief plan, he favors only "tax cuts we can
afford," since we must maintain "fiscal discipline." "We" refers, of course, to
the government. "Afford" makes clear that it's the government's money and that
tax cuts are a secondary and purely elective consideration. Our
"responsibilities" come first, and to forsake "fiscal discipline" by cutting
taxes would be immoral as well as imprudent. This spin keeps the alternative
interpretation of fiscal discipline--cutting taxes first, and then cutting
spending accordingly--conveniently out of the picture.

            Good
spin wins the issue of the day, but great spin goes further. It wins the war
invisibly, by skewing the debate at such a deep level that the media can't see
it. And it so permeates public discourse that even the opposition helplessly or
unwittingly succumbs. Four months ago, when George W. Bush launched his
presidential exploratory committee, he defended tax cuts by arguing that it was
"compassionate" of political leaders "to give people more money." That's not a
challenge to Bill Clinton. That's a tribute.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 277: &quot;Summerize&quot;

            
               
                  Trent
Lott, Ronald Reagan, and Steve Martin did it when they were young, and this
summer more than 400,000 people will attend camps to learn how to do it better.
Do what?
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 276)--"Circuit Breaker":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    
                                       
                                          

                                             
                                                Fill in the blank as ACLU lawyer Pamela Summers disdains an
opinion handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11 th
Circuit: "The courts are saying 'We'll just have a local option on the
Constitution, and you people down there in Alabama can go ahead and
_____________ all you want.'
"
                                             
                                          
                                       
                                    
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            "Name
your children 'Fob.' "-- Charlie Glassenberg ( Molly Shearer Gabel
had a similar answer.)

            "Sign
eighth-grade football players to letters of intent."-- Mark Greenberg
            

            "Buy
all the slaves you can afford."-- Leslie Goodman-Malamuth (similarly,
Bjorn "I Want a Malcolm X Beard" Larsen , Michael S. Gilman , and
Andrew Staples )

            "I
don't know, but I heard screamin' and bullwhips crackin'."-- Barbara
Lippert (similarly, Peter Carlin and Dwayne Hitt )

            "
'@#$^*%@#!!!' There, I masked it. Now give me a goddamned R rating."-- Greg
Diamond
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            The French mock the British, the British mock the
French, the Serbs kill the Albanians, the Albanians kill the Serbs--ah, that
crazy regional humor. But our anti-Southern jabs, above, are more than the
ordinary scorn of neighbor vs. neighbor, more than urban vs. rural. Most of our
jibes work a rich vein of educated vs. uneducated, which is another way of
saying rich vs. poor. It's class warfare played out as a barnyard bestiality
joke. What those dumb hicks really lack is the wherewithal for a fine
university education that will lead to a job in the go-go tech sector.

            There is one detail of
Southern japes that has inverted its class associations. Several centuries ago,
incestuous liaisons were for the aristocracy, now they're farmyard fun. In the
former case, incest was a symptom of decadence, in the latter it's just rural
isolation and the lack of dating opportunities. Them folks don't need loftier
morals, they need a Starbucks.

            
               Southern Fried
Answer
            

            "You people down there in Alabama can go ahead and
pray over the intercom all you want."

            An opinion from a three-judge panel from the
11 th circuit allows students to conduct organized prayers in school
as long as they don't actively proselytize, and as long as school personnel
have no direct role.

            School officials said one change will be that
pre-game prayers will now be conducted without the coach.

            Chandler called the
decision, allowing students to use state facilities to foster religion,
"hideously unprincipled." The ACLU is expected to appeal.

            
               Sean Fitzpatrick's
Ichthys Follow-Up
            

            The Catholic
Encyclopedia says:

            
               Among the symbols employed by the primitive Christians, that of the
fish ranks probably first in importance. Its popularity was due principally to
the famous acrostic consisting of the initial letters of five Greek words
forming the word for fish (Ichthys), which briefly but clearly described the
character of Christ and His claim to the worship of believers: Iesous Christos
Theou Yios Soter, i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
            

            You've probably seen the
bumper stickers of the fish symbol inscribed with Greek letters IX(TH)YS (iota
chi theta upsilon sigma). Lately there have been stickers in which the fish has
sprouted feet and eyes and is inscribed "Darwin." A couple of months ago in
Atlanta I saw the Darwinian whatever being swallowed by a larger fish,
inscribed "TRUTH." And the beat goes on.

            
               Domain Name
Availability Extra
            

            Many a company about to launch its Web site
discovers to its dismay that its name is already taken, part of the speculative
frenzy in domain names. In that case, they can either buy the name from its
owner or, with ingenuity, devise an alternative.

            Which of the following
is taken, and which is still available?

            1. GeorgeWBush.com

            2. ClarenceThomas.com

            3. RudolphGiuliani.com

            4. SchoolPrayer.com

            5. SchoolShooting.com

            6. EnormousPenis.com

            7. TinyPenis.com

            8.
NicoleKidmanNude.com

            9.
NewsQuiz.com

            
               Answers
            

            1. GeorgeWBush.com is
registered by the Governor Bush Committee.

            DrunkOnMoney.com is
available.

            2. ClarenceThomas.com is
registered by OneNetNow.

            Scalia'sPuppet.com is
available.

            3. RudolphGiuliani.com is
registered by Steven G. Mautner, D.D.S., P.A.

            RudyGiuliani.com is
registered by Fernstrom Inc.

            Heartless.com is
registered by SFHS.

            ColdAndHeartless.com is
registered by Carroll Inc.

            MoreCops.com is
available.

            4. SchoolPrayer.com is
registered by Log In Productions.

            5. SchoolShooting.com is
registered by Nolex.

            
SchoolSpittingAndCursing.com is available.

            6. EnormousPenis.com is
registered by Donnie Grossman.

            7. TinyPenis.com
registered by Tiny Penis, Ltd.

            TinyLimpPenis.com is
available. Act quickly. Too quickly.

            8. NicoleKidmanNude.com is
registered by Cupcake Party.

            TrentLottNude.com is
available. And scary.

            9. NewsQuiz.com is
registered by the mysterious Adam A. Corelli.

            But
StromThurmond'sAss.com is, as News Quiz regulars know, very available.

            
               Ongoing Domain Name
Extra
            

            Participants are invited to submit a pair, similar
to the examples above, of a domain name that is already taken along with an
amusing and available alternative.

            You can check the availability of domain names at
http://www.eHost.com/domain_reg/index.html.

            Replies due by noon ET
Thursday.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Rural incest.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Don't Laugh at Me, Argentina

            Argentina used to be a place of legendary political
irresponsibility, where generals in funny hats declared war on Margaret
Thatcher, and populist politicians who promised paradise consistently delivered
hyperinflation instead. But over the past 10 years President Carlos Menem has
steadily turned the country's reputation around. Inflation has been eliminated,
with the peso securely pegged to the dollar. An absurdly inefficient system of
protected markets and money-losing public corporations has been liberalized and
privatized, producing a fair bit of unemployment but a huge surge in
productivity. And as recently as five or six months ago the country was the
darling of the business press, praised for its success in riding out the
world's financial storms.

            As usual, however, good
press was the sign that things were about to take a turn for the worse. For a
variety of reasons, including the devaluation in neighboring Brazil, Argentina
has been sliding into a moderately severe recession and with it a growing
budget deficit, just as a presidential election approaches. And in apparent
desperation over his lag in the polls, Eduardo Duhalde, the Peronist
candidate--the candidate, in other words, of Menem's party, which brought
Argentina its unaccustomed stability--startled everyone by announcing his
intention to discuss possible debt relief for Argentina. Not with the banks,
mind you, but with the pope. (The pope has recently joined the call for debt
forgiveness for poor nations, but he was surely talking about Fourth World
economies such as Mozambique, not relatively well-off places such as
Argentina.)

            You have to admit that it is pretty funny. Surely the Monty
Python cast is about to leap into view, shouting "Nobody expects the
Spanish Inquisition!" But somehow, the markets didn't appreciate the humor: The
Buenos Aires stock market plunged, and the interest rate on Argentine bonds
soared.

            The odds are that this
whole affair will soon blow over. But even assuming that the peso holds and
that things don't fall apart, there is still a serious lesson in Argentina's
current travails--namely, that you can scratch one more supposed economic
panacea off your list. For Argentina has been the role model for those who
believe that a credibly stable currency is all you need to promote prosperity.
And its troubles--especially the contrast with the unexpectedly good news from
Brazil--are therefore a reminder that, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out way
back in the 1920s, a strong currency and a strong economy are by no means the
same thing.

            Now, Argentina does, by law (the so-called "convertibility
law"), have an undeniably strong currency. A peso is worth a U.S. dollar, and
that promise is made credible by the legal requirement that every peso in
circulation be backed by a dollar's worth of foreign exchange reserves. In
other words, short of actually abandoning its own currency in favor of the U.S.
dollar--a measure that has been discussed quite a bit lately--Argentina has
done everything possible to make that currency credible and secure. This
"currency board" system was introduced in 1991, when hyperinflation was a
recent memory and most people expected it to return in due course, and you can
make a reasonable case that Argentina should stick with its currency board for
some time to come. (Domingo Cavallo, who as finance minister was the architect
of the board, suggested a few months back that it should endure for a decade or
so.) But you can no longer brush off the argument that the system is a sort of
economic straitjacket, one that is becoming increasingly onerous.

            The problem, you see, is
that the same rules that prevent Argentina from printing money for bad
reasons--to pay for populist schemes or foolish wars--also prevent it from
printing money for good reasons such as fighting recessions or rescuing the
financial system. Argentina came very close to financial collapse in 1995 when
it turned out that the convertibility law left no leeway to rush cash to
troubled banks. It has since established various safety nets to prevent a
repeat of that crisis, but some observers doubt whether those nets are really
strong enough. And now the country faces what is basically a garden-variety
recession, the sort of thing that happens to every economy now and then--except
that unlike the United States, or even a similar-sized First World country such
as Australia, it cannot try to cushion the slump by lowering interest rates and
pushing more money into the system.

            Now, these problems with a rigidly fixed exchange rate are
not news. But for a while, managed to convince themselves that they weren't
significant. They argued that as long as governments themselves followed stable
policies--and as long as the economy was sufficiently "flexible" (the
all-purpose answer to economic difficulties)--there would be few serious
recessions.

            But it turns out that
history does not stop just because the currency is stable. And faced with a
politically inconvenient recession, the Peronists find that there is nothing
they can do. They cannot print money. They cannot even borrow money for some
employment-generating public spending, because fiscal indiscipline would
undermine the peso's hard-won credibility. You can understand why Duhalde might
be tempted to appeal to a higher authority.

            Of course, Argentina's economic team still believes that
its system is better than the alternatives. The more sensible advocates of
currency boards and, if necessary, dollarization, have always based their views
less on hope than on fear--fear that any attempt to fight a recession by
devaluing would lead instead to a surge in inflation and a financial collapse.
But, as it turns out, their fears may have been almost as overstated as their
hopes. When Brazil--whose economic history is nearly as dismal as
Argentina's--finally devalued in January, the predicted hyperinflation never
arrived and neither did the financial meltdown. Indeed, it is starting to look
as if the collapse of the real was just what the doctor ordered.

            The serious lesson of the antics in Argentina,
then, is that the big issues of monetary economics--fixed vs. flexible exchange
rates, whether countries should have independent currencies at all--are still
wide open. It's an eternal controversy, and not even the pope can resolve
it.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Continue</SPAN></SPAN>

            
               
                  New
Republic ,
               Sept. 6
            

            The
cover story says George W. Bush's
less-than-overwhelming straw poll victory makes the primaries competitive.
Elizabeth Dole's third-place finish demonstrates she can compete with John
McCain as the moderate alternative to Bush. (For 
                  Slate
               's Ames
debriefing, click here .) ... A book review calls the military's "don't
ask, don't tell" policy an abysmal failure. In practice, commanding officers do
ask and vigorously root out homosexuals. Many soldiers have been put under oath
and forced to describe their sexual propensities; more than 5,000 have been
discharged. ... "TRB " extrapolates Warren Beatty's presidential platform from
his political manifesto, Bulworth . That "108-minute-long affront to
black dignity" portends a demagogic campaign that blames corporate interests
for America's real and imagined ills. (
                  Slate
               's "" bets against a
Beatty candidacy.)

            

               
                  Economist
               , Aug. 21
            

            A
piece predicts that brick-and-mortar companies will
beat pure Web retailers in the battle for e-customers. Although Internet
companies have lower start-up costs, meat-space firms have loyal customers,
established distribution systems, and the ability to cross-market through their
retail outlets. ... The cover editorial warns that the East Asian economic
recovery is precarious. Real recovery depends on regional political stability,
the continued strength of the export-absorbing American economy, and Japan's
ability to bounce back from its slump. ... An article cautions against underestimating the
possibility of a Chinese military assault on Taiwan. Even though China is
reluctant to anger the West, Taiwan's rejection of a "one China" policy makes
any diplomatic settlement difficult.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine
               
               
                  , Aug. 23 and Fall Fashion Supplement
            

            The
cover package worries about boys. One story says that boys, bombarded with
images of unattainable male bodies, have more body image problems than ever.
(G.I. Joe has got buffer, so have Calvin Klein models.) The "culture of
cruelty" in junior high can make adolescents "pathologically preoccupied" with
body image. More adult men are getting liposuction. ... The other cover
story describes the survival strategies of high-school outcasts, who seek
solace in computer games, camaraderie, and the occasional joint.. ... A
profile of B. Smith touts her as the anti-Martha Stewart. The former model has
parlayed her restaurant successes into a lifestyle TV show and a forthcoming
magazine. She has a much more relaxed style than Mistress Martha. Smith is an
icon of the new black upper-middle class, though three-quarters of her audience
is white. ... The surprisingly delightful Fall Fashion Supplement is
full of blithe self-parody and reader games. There is a fashion-centric
crossword puzzle, a color-by-numbers dress, a Mad Libs column, and a cutout
Gwyneth Paltrow doll, among other amusements.

            
               
                  Atlantic
Monthly , September 1999
            

            The
cover story argues that stocks are massively undervalued. Bullish investors are
not irrationally exuberant; they recognize that stock prices have been
depressed by an excessive aversion to risk. According to the authors' valuation
theory, the Dow should be heading toward 36,000. (Author James Glassman
expounded this theory last year in . disputed it.) ... A piece
lavishes praise on Waldorf schools. Established by an Austrian in 1919, the
schools place imagination at the center of the learning process and emphasize
art projects, oral presentations, poetry recitations, and discussion. Graduates
are capable and inquisitive. There are more than 100 Waldorf schools in the
United States and 700 worldwide.
            

            
               
                  Newsweek ,
Aug. 23
            

            A
special issue on guns includes a rare editorial declaring war on "one common link in the chain of
violence: firearms." All assault weapons should be banned, all gun owners
licensed, and all guns registered. ( Newsweek 's crusade follows a
Time essay earlier this month calling for a handgun ban.) ... A
Newsweek 
               poll finds that 74 percent of Americans support registering
all handgun owners; 93 percent favor a mandatory waiting period for gun
purchases. ... A piece explores the backroom battle between the gun industry
and the gun lobby. The industry wants to make concessions, but the NRA
threatens the gun-makers with boycotts if they give an inch.

            
               
                  Time ,
Aug. 23, 1999
            

            The
cover story reports on new discoveries about human evolution.
We started walking on two legs between 6 million and 4 million years ago,
tool-making began 2.5 million years ago, and our brains grew dramatically
between 2 million and 1 million years ago. Abstract thought began only tens of
thousands of years ago. Our technological improvements have dramatically slowed
natural selection. ... A piece surveys new school safety precautions,
including mass-shooting drills, locker searches, and security cameras.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker , Aug. 23 and 30
            

            The
"Adventure" issue meditates on human limitations, trust, and courage. A
correspondent camps out in Central Park, braving gangs, ducking cops, and
talking to raccoons. ... An author recounts how he abandoned a plan to
sail solo to Alaska in order to nurse his dying father. His father's gracious
acceptance of death is a braver act than any macho journey could be. ...
A profile of Lynne Cox describes how the solo swimmer conquered fear by braving
icy, shark-infested waters. She traversed seemingly unconquerable bodies of
water, including the Bering Strait, to demonstrate the potential for harmony
between hostile neighbors.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , Aug. 23
            

            The
cover
story calls for censorship of movies, television, and music. The mass
media's "moral pollution" is "actual and malignant." Our forefathers didn't
have sex and violence in mind when they crafted First Amendment freedoms. The
choice is censorship or barbarism. ... A series of commentaries rejects the censorship proposal, arguing that
Americans do not want to be regulated by institutional elites. Government
should discourage images of sex and violence in the media by holding
congressional hearings that demonize Hollywood. ... An article argues
that the United States should provide Taiwan with new weapons and military
advice in order to deter Chinese expansionism.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 290: &quot;Fighting Crime ... With Science!&quot;

            
               According to the
Cambridge, Mass., Police Department, the list includes Mexican-Americans,
Pakistanis, Indians, and Cajuns. List of what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 289)--"No Problem":
            

            

               
                  
                     Quoted in the Wichita Eagle , Kansas Gov. Bill
Graves said, "This is a terrible, tragic, embarrassing solution to a problem
that did not exist." What is?
                  
               
            

            "The
new state law requiring public school teachers to use
quotation-marks-with-hands gestures whenever they use the words 'evolution,'
'Darwin,' or '20 th century' in class."-- Andrew Milner
( Alex Pascover had a similar answer.)

            "The
forced annexation of Kansas City, Mo., to avoid geographical confusion. But
it's not a problem, since nobody knows anything about geography anymore
anyway."-- Mac Thomason
            

            
"Warren Beatty's threat to run for president. Imagine 14 months of that
excruciating white-guy rap! Al's and Bill's and W's fund-raising excesses don't
seem so bad anymore, do they?"-- Scott Baisch (similarly, Jay D.
Majors and Sean Fitzpatrick )

            "The
decision by the Kansas Board of Education to define pi as 3.0. The resulting
increase in computational speed is expected to raise the state's average SAT
score by approximately 0.1415926."-- Sean Fitzpatrick (similarly,
Jonathan E. Snow )

            
"MAXIM ."-- Colleen Werthmann
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Chris'
Wrap-Up
            

            What do we think of
Kansas, class? It's pretty flat, we know that, and it's all in black and white,
as opposed to Oz. They have tornadoes. It entered the Union as a free state,
and In Cold Blood happened there. Bob Dole's from Kansas and ... um ...
its state fair is in Hutchinson, starting the Friday after Labor Day. But now
I'm cheating by looking in the almanac. Some places are so boring that that's
what's comically interesting about them: Peoria, Encino, Cleveland. Kansas is
so boring it's not even funny. Sort of like Bill Bradley.

            
               Faith-Based
Answer
            

            As many of you knew, Gov. Graves was talking about
the Kansas Board of Education, and its decision to excise evolution from the
state's science curriculum. As another step in its retreat into state-sponsored
superstition, the board has also forbidden all references to the Big Bang.
"Creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began,"
editorialized the Topeka Capital-Journal . "And we're pretty sure thunder
is caused by Jews doing some sort of loud Jewy thing," the paper did not
add.

            A supporter of the new educational guidelines, Mark
Looy of Answers in Genesis, a creationist group, said: "There's no meaning in
life if we're just animals in a struggle for survival. It creates a sense of
purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain,
murder and suicide." Which is hanging a lot on the poor old theory of natural
selection. I thought pain, murder, and suicide were caused by television.

            Wait a minute, what about that smutty
Friends show? Only one member of the ensemble appears to have a job, and
what is it? "Ross Geller" is a paleontologist. A paleontologist, people! Not
only does he have premarital sex, he believes in dinosaurs. If you were from
Kansas, it would be almost enough to make you think. And by the way, what kind
of name is "Geller"?

            By 1861, even Thomas
Huxley was tired of arguing with people who didn't believe in evolution; "Life
is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once,"
said the eminent biologist. Little did he know.

            
               Parallax
Extra
            

            Last week, Arianna Huffington decided that Warren
Beatty was running for president and said so in her
surprisingly-still-syndicated column. He wasn't and he isn't and he won't, but
the idea was intriguing enough to go a couple of news cycles in the legitimate
press and on Fox News. One remarkable thing didn't come up in the discussions
of the candidate: his age. I think this says nice things about us as a society
and nice things about Beatty's colorist.

            If elected, Beatty would
be older than 37 of America's 41 presidents the day they took office. Arrange
these presidents and candidates by age at their inauguration or prospective
inauguration.

            Calvin Coolidge

            Liddy Dole

            Warren Harding

            Teddy Roosevelt

            Chester Arthur

            Warren Beatty

            Orrin Hatch

            John Adams

            Pat Buchanan

            James Polk

            
               Common
Denominators
            

            Bob Dole, ignorant Christian hicks, primates,
Viagra.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 318: &quot;Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien&quot;

            
               "You won't hear
any apologies from me," said Dr. Stephen Ostroff of the Centers for Disease
Control. "Anyone who continues to maintain that there was some mistake here
doesn't understand the way science proceeds." What isn't Ostroff apologizing
for?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 317)--"She's Still Got It":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           "We are quite the best country in
Europe. In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland Europe, and all
the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations of the world," said
Margaret Thatcher in her first speech at a Conservative Party conference since
stepping down as prime minister in 1990. Lady Thatcher was inspired to speak by
a particular cause. What?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Raising money for the Pol Pot Leisuredome."-- Barbara Lippert
            

            "Oh,
when will the western European rappers make peace with the eastern European
rappers?"--Francis Heaney
            

            
"National If English Was Good Enough for Our Lord Jesus Christ, It's Good
Enough for Me Day."-- Michael J. Basial
            

            "Pat
Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire . (She was dictating the
foreword.)"-- Raymond Chen ( Anthony D. Stone , Larry
Renbaum , and Eric Akawie had similar answers.)

            
"PinochetAid concert."-- Cathy Christianson
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Reagan and Thatcher
present us with contrasting retirement strategies--pathetic senility and
rancorous immortality, each in its way a grotesque form of self-parody. We
always knew they had it in them. Other figures of the Reagan-Thatcher era chose
other retirement plans. Duvalier went with exile to France, Noriega went with
prison, and Brezhnev, I believe, is now a privately owned cement factory near
Sverdlovsk. What none of them ever does is die in a hideous automobile
accident. This defies all probabilities. Every American has been in a car
crash. Forty thousand of us die that way each year. Either each powerful
retiree is transported in some kind of titanium case or that satanic pact is
still in effect even after one leaves office. Either way, great benefits.

            
               Stand

               by Your Man Answer
            

            Lady T. was shaken from her slumber by the plight
of Augusto Pinochet.

            "Make no mistake, revenge by the left, not justice
for the victim, is what the Pinochet case is all about,'' she declared to a
packed hall in Blackpool, at the Conservative Party's annual conference.

            "Sen. Pinochet," she said--choosing his honorific
with the same care ABC News uses when calling its own pet war criminal "Dr."
Kissinger--"is, in truth, on trial not for anything complained in Judge
Baltazar Garzon's indictment but for defeating communism. "

            "What the left cannot forgive is that Pinochet
undoubtedly saved Chile and helped save South America,'' she said. "That, and
the torture and murder of thousands of civilians, but mostly that," she did not
add.

            A British court has
ruled that the former murderer can be extradited to Spain.

            
               Al

               Cloutier's Franco-Prussian Extra
            

            Sure, all the world's
problems come from Europe, but who is able to produce funnier problems, the
French or the Germans? At last, science can decide. Using Alta Vista's translator, I've double-translated a passage from the Tsu-tech
"Inti-Mist" Family Bidet Web site into French then back to English:

            

               Sit Of heating: A seat of heating eliminates "the frosted contact" usually
tested when to rest on a seat of toilet cooled by the cold of the winter. You
will be astonished and satisfied the comfortable comfort of the seat of toilet
of heating by Bidet of Inti-Mist.

            

            The same passages,
translated into German then back to English:

            

               Lively seat: A lively seat eliminates the "icy note" normally experienced,
when sitting on a toilet seat to showers of the winter cooled down. They are
surprised at cozy the comfort of the lively toilet seat intimatist bidet and
please.

            

            
               Who is funnier? Ask Margaret Thatcher.
            

            
               Ongoing

               Bail-Out Extra
            

            "As a journalist who writes about pizza ..." Boom.
Right there. That's where I snapped off my radio, in the opening phrase of a
piece by some twinkly gasbag on NPR's annoying Sunday Edition .

            Certain phrases are so potent and evocative they
inspire you to hurl the newspaper across the room, or hurl yourself across the
room to switch the station, or hurl the cat across the room to ... not that I'd
ever do that.

            Participants are invited to submit similar
examples--from newspapers, magazines, or broadcast news--of what The New
Yorker used to call "letters we never finished reading" (or something like
that).

            Best examples to run
Thursday.

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Anglo-French hostility.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tea and Cookies 101

            

               Iggy's Stooges
The Ig
Nobel Prizes, spoofs on the Nobel Prizes that honor both genuine and phony
research, were handed out this month. Len Fisher of the University of Bristol
won the physics prize for researching the best way to dunk a cookie. A South
African team won the peace prize for a car alarm that stops thieves with a
flamethrower. The British Standards Institution received the literature prize
for its six-page exposition on the proper way to make a cup of tea, while the
Kansas Board of Education and Colorado State Board of Education shared the
science-education prize for "mandating that children should not believe in
Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they should believe in Newton's
theory of gravitation ... or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease,"
according to the Chronicle
of Higher Education . Neither board sent a representative to the
Cambridge, Mass., award ceremony.

            
               The Allah Who
Failed
            

            
University of Kuwait professor Ahmad al-Baghdadi was jailed for blasphemy after
writing that Mohammed failed in his mission to convert Mecca's nonbelievers to
Islam. The professor, chair of the political science department, was sentenced
to one month behind bars for offending Islam and immediately went on a hunger
strike that sent him to the hospital. Upon his release, the professor
apologized for any offense he caused, reports Agence France Presse.

            
               A 4.3 Grade Point
Average
            

            
Princeton
University wants to ditch the A-plus. There are "too many of them to
suggest that the students getting them are really doing exceptional work," a
university spokesman told the New York Times . A faculty committee
wants to replace the A-plus with an "A with distinction." Teachers would still
be able to personally annotate the A, but it would still only be worth 4.0
grade points (compared to the A-plus' 4.3). Students oppose the proposed
change. The university says the new grade will allow outstanding work to be
honored while "not disadvantaging students in the contest for academic honors,
awards, and prizes which depend significantly on grade point averages." (See

                  Slate
               's "" for an irreverent take on the grade
deflation.)

            
               Gettin' Buggy Wit
It
            

            How do
locusts swarm? BBC News reports that Oxford University scientists have
determined that locusts attract other locusts with chemical signals to amass
swarms that can strip a field bare within hours. Swarming female locusts can
also manipulate the genes in their eggs to ensure that their young will want to
join the swarm immediately. (Locusts reared in seclusion are reluctant to
gather.) Researchers hope to isolate the chemical and use it to design
synthetic compounds that will block swarming.

            
               Punt, Pass, and
Cheat
            

            Tutors
may have done schoolwork for at least five members of last year's national
championship college football team, according to an ESPN
report. University of Tennessee Coach Phillip Fulmer declined to discuss
the allegations, but school president J. Wade Gilley told the Associated Press
that the school's general counsel is reviewing the matter. If the ESPN report
is true, players, tutors, and administrators will be subject to punishment
under the school's honor code and NCAA guidelines.

            
               Visions of
Dylan
            

            
Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has dubbed Bob Dylan's "Visions of
Johanna" the best song lyrics ever written. Citing "the concentration and
surprise" of Dylan's lyrics, as well as the "rasp of his anger," Motion
rhapsodized over the songwriter's use of language. Not all British poets share
Motion's taste. Dannie Abse told the London Observer , "[Dylan's]
writing is inferior poetry, and inferior poetry is not really poetry at all."
Poet Craig Raine argued that Lorenz Hart was a better lyricist than Dylan.

            
               
                  In Loco
Parentis Returnus
               
            

            
Recently amended federal confidentiality laws have prompted such schools as the
University of Delaware,
Indiana University, and
Penn State to notify parents
when students under 21 violate campus rules concerning drugs or alcohol. A
student referendum on notification at the University of Illinois produced the highest turnout for a
student election in 10 years: More than 80 percent of students voted against
it.

            
               All Hail Marx and
Einstein
            

            Karl
Marx is the greatest thinker of the millennium, according to a BBC News Online
poll. Albert Einstein placed second. Rounding out the top
10: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, St. Thomas Aquinas, Stephen Hawking, Immanuel
Kant, René Descartes, James Clerk Maxwell, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

            
               Indian
Giving
            

            The
Lilly Endowment Inc.'s recent donation of $30 million to the American Indian College Fund
is the largest private donation ever made to a Native American organization.
The money will be spent on improved classrooms, labs, and libraries at tribal
colleges on reservations. In July, Lilly gave $50 million to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and last
year it donated $42 million to the United Negro College Fund, making it one of the largest
supporters of minority education.

            
               Journalists, Heal
Thyselves
            

            The Journal of the American Medical
Association has appointed its first female editor: Dr. Catherine D.
DeAngelis, a former nurse, the vice dean of Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine, and a member of JAMA 's editorial board. The Journal
dismissed George Lundberg as editor in January after he published a survey of
college students' sexual attitudes (sample question: Is oral sex the same as
sex?) that too conveniently coincided with President Clinton's impeachment
trial. Asked if she was offered guidelines about editing the journal after
Lundberg's dismissal, DeAngelis told the Washington Post , "Editorial
freedom is essential. I have no doubt that editorial freedom will be the
byword."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The New Death Penalty

            Last
Friday on Iowa Public Television, George W. Bush was asked to summarize the
message of his campaign. "I understand governments don't create wealth," Bush
began. "Governments create an environment in which entrepreneurship and
producers can flourish. That's why I support cutting the tax rates. That's why
I support getting rid of the death penalty."

            Hold
it right there. Did Bush just say he's against the death penalty? And what on
earth does that have to do with creating wealth?

            He did
say it, and it has everything to do with creating wealth. A few years ago,
Republicans not only supported the death penalty; they campaigned on a promise
to apply it more often. Days after the GOP's victory in the 1994 elections,
Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich pledged to bring every plank of the "Contract With
America" to the House floor, including "an effective, enforceable death
penalty; beginning to phase-out the marriage penalty in the tax code; allowing
senior citizens to earn up to $39,000 a year without penalty from Social
Security; a capital gains cut and indexing."

            Along
the way, the two "penalties" merged. Republicans began to use the phrase "death
penalty," like the phrase "marriage penalty," to describe a tax pegged to one
of life's most sacred passages. The inheritance tax, which had been known as
the "estate tax," became the "death tax"--which in turn, by association with
the hated "marriage penalty," became the "death penalty."

            Two
years ago, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., told the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce he would do something about "unfair" taxes, starting with the "death
penalty." Four weeks ago, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, declared
on Fox News that Congress could use the surplus to address "a serious
unfairness in the tax code, such as the marriage penalty, the death penalty,
taxes on senior citizens." Last weekend, Bush adopted the same phrase.

            The
transformation of the inheritance tax into the "death penalty" provides more
grist for satirists who wonder whether Republicans, having condemned the
"marriage penalty" for discouraging marriage, now worry that the inheritance
tax is discouraging death. (For a head start on the satire, check out the work
of 
                  Slate
                necro-economists and .) But the true import of the new
"death penalty" is the demise of the old one. In 1994, Bush, Lott, and Armey
would never have called the inheritance tax the "death penalty," because the
death penalty meant something else. Today, they can speak out against the
"death penalty" without confusion or irony--and without being asked for
clarification--because the traditional meaning of that phrase is no longer
plausible. Capital punishment is no longer a live issue.

            What
killed it? Two things: Incomes went up, and crime went down. Americans stopped
feeling scared and started feeling comfortable. The GOP stopped talking about
saving your life and started talking about your life savings. As for Democrats,
they don't complain much about the death penalty anymore. The last guy who did
that was Michael Dukakis, and look what happened to him. Now every serious
politician either supports the death penalty and makes a show of it, as Bill
Clinton has, or keeps his mouth shut.

            The old death penalty
debate was profound and heated. Liberals called the practice murder.
Conservatives called it the only fitting punishment for unspeakable crimes. It
was a moral struggle of the highest consequence. But these days, unspeakable
crimes are no longer spoken of, murder is what happens to your portfolio on a
bad day, "family values" are debated through the Internal Revenue code, and the
"death penalty" is a tax issue. It may be a perfectly worthy topic in an age of
affluence. But it's hardly a matter of life and death.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Carnival of Carnage

            "Are we shooting?" calls a boyish American soldier
(Mark Wahlberg) to distant buddies at the start of Three 
               Kings .
He stands in a flat, whitish Iraqi desert dotted with mounds. On top of one,
far away, an Iraqi waves a rifle and some kind of cloth. Is he taunting the
American? Appealing to him? Is he surrendering or on the verge of opening fire?
Hard to tell: The light is too glaring; the man's frantic gestures too alien. A
title has informed us that it's 1991, that the cease-fire with Iraq has just
become official. "Are we still shooting people or what?" the soldier calls
again. In the absence of a clear answer--of a clear anything--he raises his
rifle and shoots. The soldiers reach the Iraqi as he's hemorrhaging, a look of
wonder in his dying eyes. "You shot yourself a raghead!" whoops one, but the
American who fired--identified by an on-screen title as U.S. Army Sgt. Troy
Barlow--recoils from his handiwork. The war is over and Barlow has just killed
his first man.

            That scene is like a
mini Beckett farce with a cruel jet of gore for a punch line. Barlow is
shooting at people he doesn't know and can barely see for reasons that are
never apparent in a place that's as foreign as the surface of the moon. All
that's finally real is the blood. From this brilliant overture, it's obvious
that the writer-director, David O. Russell, wants to break down your defenses
against cinema's violent imagery: He's juxtaposing farce and atrocity in ways
that few American directors have dared. And he's not stinting on the carnage,
either. The movie's most talked-about close-up shows the track of a bullet as
it enters a body, plowing its way through tissue and into a liver, which
releases blackish bile. (Reportedly, Russell had bullets fired into a cadaver.)
No wound, the director is saying (screaming, in effect), should ever be taken
for granted.

            It helps that Russell is fueled by genuine outrage at that
most jumbled and arm's length of wars: the one that pretended to be about the
"liberation of the people of Kuwait"; the one that ended up (once the oil wells
were recaptured) rebounding on Iraqis who'd been convinced by President Bush to
take up arms against Saddam Hussein. As the protagonist, Special Forces Capt.
Archie Gates (a hard, brooding George Clooney) declares in his first scene, "I
don't even know what we did here." Cynical and disgusted, Gates gets
wind (so to speak) of a wild discovery: a map lodged in the rear end of an
Iraqi prisoner that shows what appear to be bunkers holding loot plundered from
Kuwait. Announcing that he has no moral problem stealing from Saddam what
Saddam has stolen from the sheiks, he joins with Barlow, Barlow's buddy Vig
(skinny Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Being John

               Malkovich ), a game but witless redneck, and the resourceful Chief (Ice
Cube) in search of the motherlode. Millions of dollars worth of gold bullion,
Gates says, can be loaded into their Humvee without firing a shot, and they'll
be back at camp before lunch.

            At this juncture,
Three Kings seems poised to turn into a relatively straightforward genre
piece--a perverse "caper" movie with a touch of Gunga Din (1939). But
the surreal setting hints at dissonances, disturbing incongruities. The white
light scorches every surface--it seems to be eating into people. Details of the
natural world are bleached out, but artificial colors--such as the pink and
green footballs the soldiers pack with explosives and lob from their speeding
vehicle for sport--leap out of the screen like radioactive Christmas baubles.
The action comes in jarring spasms. A cow is blown up during an exercise, and
the Americans are showered with bloody chunks of beef--a harbinger of the
insane slaughter to come. When Gates and company reach the village where the
gold is supposed to be stashed, the Iraqi people think they're being liberated
and rejoice, pushing their babies on the "United States of Freedom." They can't
understand why the Americans aren't chasing away Saddam's soldiers, whose
mission, in light of the cease-fire, has shifted from fighting the American-led
alliance to ruthlessly suppressing all signs of Iraqi rebellion.

            The weird juxtapositions in these scenes are the movie's
soul. Inside a bunker, a soldier uses a NordicTrack in front of a television
just down the corridor from a torture chamber. Piles of cell phones,
Cuisinarts, blue jeans, and gold watches sit side by side with weapons of mass
destruction. The Iraqi soldiers turn machine guns on a truck that's heading for
the village, riddling its driver with bullets. When it skids into a building
and overturns it doesn't explode: Its tanks are full of milk for the starving
people. Gates and his men have gone beyond the computer simulations and the TV
cameras. As Russell has said, they've "fallen down a rabbit hole" into a place
where nothing makes sense. It's the same twilight zone that Steven Spielberg
attempted to capture in Saving Private Ryan (1998). But Ryan , set
in World War II, ultimately lacked Three Kings ' sense of moral
chaos.

            
               Three Kings lacks
something, too, but only because its imagery is so ferociously original that
Russell can't quite find a structure worthy of it. All at once, the movie
becomes a "conversion" melodrama--the kind in which an amoral, Bogartish
protagonist is unable to ignore injustice and so throws in his lot with the
oppressed. It's a winning formula, but a formula all the same. Whereas the
opening manages to be shocking and ironic at once, the picture's turning point
is crudely manipulative. (Don't read this if you want to be surprised--but I do
recommend you read this, because it's not a good surprise.) A wife
leaves her little daughter and howls for Saddam's men to free her husband; a
soldier pulls her away, holds a gun to her head and then, in full view of her
spouse and child, blows her brains out; and the little girl throws herself on
top of her mother shrieking, "Yuma! Yuma!" while the woman's blood gushes into
the sand. This shocking act recalls the climax of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild
Bunch (1969), in which a prisoner is executed with similar defiance, and
Russell builds to the same wordless exchange among the protagonists: Those
manly looks that say, "We're outnumbered and outgunned. We could leave now with
our money. But if we do, we'll never be able to live as men again." But the
victim in The Wild Bunch was morally compromised: He'd shot people
himself for no good reason. And he didn't have a wide-eyed little girl bearing
witness to his murder.

            No doubt Russell would justify the starkness of the
mother's killing by saying you can't make a movie about the obscenity of
violence without showing something so obscene that it scalds us. I don't
quarrel with his intentions. But after that sequence, a part of me shut down.
Where do you go from something like that? To more horrible killings? To more
absurdist comedy? The climax--in which Gates and the others decide to escort a
horde of noble Iraqis (men, women, children, the elderly) to the border and are
predictably converged upon by Saddam's men, unfriendly American troops, and a
CNN reporter (Nora Dunn)--isn't bad; it just feels cheap compared to what has
preceded it. In Time , Richard Schickel calls the genre structure a
pretext for a "surreal essay" on the Gulf War, and he might be right. And it's
also true that a studio such as Warner Bros. would never have spent $50 million
on a film that didn't have a conventionally rabble-rousing outline and an
upbeat finish. But I think those conventions diminish the movie. If I'm holding
Russell to the highest standards imaginable, it's only because his vision is
that powerful.

            It's also possible that
Russell is too sadistic by temperament to make a fully convincing anti-war
film. He's out to blast us. He wants to punish the characters--and the
audience--for their ignorance. At the time of the Gulf War, a study showed that
a majority of heavy CNN viewers (people who watched seven hours a day) who
supported the action believed that Kuwait was a democracy, and the soldiers
here are portrayed in a similar state of gung-ho naiveté. One of the film's
most outlandish (and effective) scenes is the torture of Barlow by an Iraqi
officer (Saïd Taghmaoui) who wants to "educate" him. The session begins with a
bizarre dialogue about Michael Jackson--an African-American superstar who in
the Iraqi officer's view was driven by bigotry to whiten his face and
straighten his hair--and winds up with the Iraqi pouring oil down Barlow's
throat in a brutal effort to drive home the war's real aim.

            We hate and fear the Iraqi, but when he tells Barlow that
he lost his 1-year-old son to an American bomb, Russell cuts to a shot of the
child in its crib as the ceiling caves in. When he asks how Barlow would feel
if his wife and daughter were similarly killed, Russell cuts to a shot of the
mother and child as the walls explode around them. The connections among enemy
soldiers have rarely been made so palpable--or jocular. An Iraqi officer trying
to escape from the smoke-filled bunker with a huge pile of blue jeans isn't so
different from the Americans lugging bullion in Louis Vuitton bags. And both
sides share a reverence for Infiniti convertibles and Rolexes. Three
Kings is not the first anti-war movie in which opposing soldiers have
recognized themselves in one another before pulling the trigger, but it might
be the first to make the point in a way that has nothing to do with liberal
humanism. The movie takes the view of a mordant social scientist who recognizes
that consumerism has become the true world religion.

            Russell's first two films, Spanking the
Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), were much smaller
in scale, but both were products of the same angry sensibility. In the latter,
the director used farce not to lighten the drama but to darken it, so that the
slapstick debacles seemed to spring from the hero's roiling unconscious. In
Three Kings , those debacles spring from the blind desires of
nations--from the collective unconscious. A war movie that opens the
instant the war has ended, Three Kings is among the most pitiless
autopsies ever filmed.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 308: &quot;Praise With Faint Damns&quot;

            
               According to
remarks made Tuesday, it is characterized "by greed and lust for power, by
hot-blooded hatreds, and stone-cold hearts." Who was describing
what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 307)--"Scotch and So ...?":
            

            

               Alexander Graham Bell, Mary Queen of Scots, Andrew Carnegie, William
Wallace--what's the connection?
            

            
"They're examples of the kind of 'good immigrant' Pat Buchanan is looking
for."-- Alex Balk ( Tom Reynolds had a similar answer.)

            "All
appear as characters in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald
Reagan ."-- Mark 
               Greenberg
            

            "They
all invented the telephone."-- Al Cloutier (all but identically, David
Finkle )

            "OK,
so they didn't break the chain, and I did--what's your point?"-- Julie
Anderson
            

            
"Because of an ancient Scottish curse, anyone who writes a life of these four
historical personages ends up reproducing, word for word and comma for comma, a
long-out-of-print biography that they have never even read!"-- Katha
Pollitt
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Among his many
accomplishments, Dr. Johnson was the first of the great Scot-bashers, elevating
a common anti-immigrant prejudice to a wittier sort of anti-immigrant prejudice
and a way to tweak his great friend James Boswell. Some examples, taken from
the delightful Samuel
Johnson Sound Bite Page maintained by Frank Lynch.

            

               When Boswell boasted about his country's landscape, saying it had many
noble prospects, Johnson replied: "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever
sees, is the high road that leads him to England!"


               "What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?"


               At dinner, Mrs. Thrale expressed a wish to go and see Scotland. Johnson:
"Seeing Scotland, Madam, is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the
flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk. "


               "Knowledge was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to
every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful."--Hester Thrale Piozzi:
Anecdotes

               

               Asked by a Scot what Johnson thought of Scotland: "That it is a very vile
country, to be sure, Sir" "Well, Sir! (replies the Scot, somewhat mortified)
God made it." Johnson: "Certainly he did; but we must always remember that he
made it for Scotchmen, and comparisons are odious, Mr. S, but God made
hell."--Piozzi: Anecdotes

               

               "Your country consists of two things, stone and water. There is, indeed, a
little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone
is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping
out."--Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

               

               Mr. Arthur Lee mentioned some Scotch who had taken possession of a barren
part of America, and wondered why they would choose it. Johnson: "Why, Sir, all
barrenness is comparative. The Scotch would not know it to be barren." Boswell:
"Come, come, he is flattering the English. You have now been in Scotland, Sir,
and say if you did not see meat and drink enough there." Johnson: "Why yes,
Sir; meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient strength to run
away from home."


               I having said that England was obliged to us for gardeners, almost all
their gardeners being Scotchmen; Johnson: "Why, Sir, that is because gardening
is much more necessary amongst you than with us, which makes so many of your
people learn it. It is all gardening with you. Things which grow wild here,
must be cultivated with great care in Scotland. Pray now," throwing himself
back in his chair, and laughing, "are you ever able to bring the sloe to
perfection?"

            

            (All taken from
Boswell's Life of Johnson unless otherwise noted.)

            
               
                  Déjà Vu
Answer
            

            Each was the subject of a biography by James Mackay
that faced charges of plagiarism.

            The prolific Scottish author of more than 100
books, Mackay is accused of cribbing passages of his newest work, I Have Not
Yet Begun To Fight: A Life of John Paul Jones . Publication of this
biography of another Scottish-born subject, set for next month by the Atlantic
Monthly Press, has been put off.

            "I am holding back distribution and getting an
independent evaluation," said publisher Morgan Entrekin. "Like I should have
done with that Jay McInerney rubbish," he did not add.

            While Mackay acknowledges similarities between his
books and those from which he is accused of copying, he denies wrongdoing,
pointing out that "there are only a certain number of words in the English
language."

            He does admit stealing
valuable proofs of stamps belonging to the crown when he worked at the British
Museum but notes that this was a long time ago. "This is something that
happened when I was a young man. I've surely paid my price for youthful
folly."

            
               Ongoing Help the
Sloganless Extra
            

            Shallow catch phrases
still sought for Al Gore, John McCain, Dan Quayle, and Elizabeth Dole. Answers
to run Thursday. Some early entries:

            Al Gore:

            "Hi. I'm Al
Gore."-- Dave Gaffen
            

            John McCain:

            "I was locked up in a
dank prison for five #$%^&* years ... oh, and I'll cut your
taxes."-- Erin H. Murphy
            

            Dan Quayle:

            "Prosperity With a
Purpos."-- Bill McDermott
            

            Elizabeth Dole:

            "The other
ED!"-- Andrew Solovay
            

            
               
                  The New Yorker
Cartoons Without the Drawings Extra
            

            Pete Seeger? I said,
"Hire Peter Singer!"

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Mocking Mel Gibson's career, reciting Mike Myers'
routines.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Flushed

            Today's decision by the South Carolina Supreme
Court to outlaw the state's $2.8 billion video poker industry is the most
remarkable defeat for gambling in memory. Other states have blocked
gambling--as Alabama did by defeating a lottery referendum this week--but this
marks the first time in 50 years that a state has outlawed gambling and
uprooted a living industry.

            The South Carolina decision is a triumph for
anti-gambling activists, who have been hammering the Palmetto state for years.
Yet, weirdly, it is also a victory for gambling--at least the kind of gambling
that Americans want.

            To understand why, you
have to realize how ugly the South Carolina video poker industry is. Those who
have not visited South Carolina recently don't know what a favor the Supreme
Court has done the state. Gambling everywhere in America has produced its share
of social disarray and political sleaziness, but nothing remotely equals South
Carolina, whose poker industry was built on lies, legal chicanery, and just
plain crime.

            Most Americans don't realize South Carolina even has legal
gambling, yet it has 7,000 places to gamble--more than any state and three
times as many as Nevada. It has 34,000 gambling machines, more than all but
three states. South Carolina is--and there is no other word for it--blighted by
gambling. About one-quarter of all South Carolina retail businesses
offer gambling. Every place you can think of that might have gambling has
gambling: Convenience stores, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, truck stops,
etc., are fogged with cigarette smoke and filled with people who don't have
much money playing games they can't win for five, 10, 20 hours at a stretch.
(I'm not exaggerating. I have seen this.) Video poker operators grossed $750
million last year, and their take has been growing 20 percent annually. And all
this has occurred in a state that never intended to legalize gambling.

            The video poker industry
finessed itself into existence. South Carolina law clearly banned gambling. But
in 1986, as a favor to a big local businessman, a state senator stuck a tiny
amendment in the back of a gigantic budget bill. The amendment erased two
words--"or property"--from an obscure South Carolina law. It passed without any
debate--public or private--and without legislators knowing what they had done.
It legalized video gambling, allowing game owners to pay jackpots to video
poker winners. It wasn't until 1989 that the state even realized what had
happened.

            Having legalized itself through the backdoor, the industry
proceeded to duck, skirt, or break every law passed to control it. When the
state banned big jackpots by forbidding machines to pay more than $125 to a
player in a day, poker operators ignored the law. They continued to offer
multithousand dollar jackpots: If a gambler hit the jackpot, he was simply paid
$125 a day for as many days as it took to empty the pot.

            When the state banned
casinos by limiting operators to five machines on one "premises," operators
surmised that "premises" meant, essentially, anything with a wall and a door.
Then they jammed 40 or 60 or 100 machines into a single building and subdivided
it into endless five-machine closets. (They call these places, with a sick
sense of euphemism, "video malls." More dismal casinos you cannot imagine. At
one "video mall" where I spent several days, the only food on offer was Tootsie
Rolls.) Unlike virtually every other state with gambling, South Carolina does
not tax gambling revenues, does not forbid children to play the machines, and
does not ban felons from owning them. Gambling experts call it the "Wild West"
of gambling.

            The video poker industry's latest trick was buying itself a
governor. After Republican Gov. David Beasley tried and failed to ban video
poker last year, the industry went to war against him. It spent at least $3
million--and almost certainly a lot more--to defeat Beasley's re-election bid.
By one estimate, video poker supplied more than 70 percent of Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Jim Hodges' war chest, plus another million from a
single poker operator on his own anti-Beasley operation, plus another million
or more in soft money for the Democratic Party. (The chairman of the state
Democratic Party is the leading lawyer for the poker industry.) Beasley, a
popular Republican governor in a thriving Republican state, lost to a
little-known, uncharismatic Democrat. The poker money swamped him.

            But despite Hodges'
victory, the backlash against video poker grew. The overwhelming image of
American gambling is of Vegas glamour, but the new reality is "convenience
gambling." This is the industry euphemism for the infiltration of gambling into
everyday life (which is indeed convenient for the businesses that make millions
off it). Traditionally, Americans have separated gambling, exiling it to the
desert of Nevada, the horse track, or the beach. But convenience gambling has
brought it next door, in the form of video gambling in places such as Montana,
South Dakota, and Louisiana, and in the form of scratch-off lottery games all
over the country. South Carolina is by far the most extreme example of
convenience gambling.

            Experts deplore convenience gambling. It is extremely
dangerous to addicts: Every trip to the store becomes a temptation. (Video
poker, which is fast and requires skill, is known as "video crack" because it
is by far the most addictive form of gambling. According to the only study of
South Carolina gamblers, the state seems to have a problem-gambling rate twice
as high as Nevada's.) Convenience gambling also addicts businesses. South
Carolina hooked previously independent gas stations, convenience stores, bars,
and restaurants on gambling dollars.

            Most alarmingly,
convenience gambling exacts huge social costs in the form of addiction and
financial hardship without providing any economic benefit. Unlike casino
gambling, convenience gambling does not bring with it hotels, restaurants,
tourists, or good jobs. "There is no pretense that this is about tourism or
about a nice night out or this is entertainment. This is hard-core,
grab-the-paycheck gambling," said Tom Grey, founder of the National Coalition
Against Gambling Expansion, when I interviewed him about South Carolina this
spring for Harper's .

            Today's decision is the culmination of the anti-poker
backlash. This summer, the legislature ordered a Nov. 2 referendum to decide
the status of poker once and for all. The law specified that if the referendum
were ruled unconstitutional, poker would be banned in July 2000. South Carolina
has no referendum right, so the Supreme Court canceled the vote and upheld the
ban.

            It's unfortunate that the Supreme Court voided the
referendum, because it deprives voters of the opportunity to throw out the
poker industry themselves. And there is little doubt they would have done so.
The anti-poker campaign has galvanized the state like no issue ever has.
Virtually every church in the state, the top strategists from both parties, the
state chamber of commerce, and thousands of grassroots organizers banded
together to defeat poker. The most recent poll suggested that the anti-poker
forces would win in a rout: More than 60 percent of voters favored banning
poker, and only 16 percent wanted to keep it.

            "Poker was a like a
houseguest that was unwelcome in the first place, that stayed too long, and was
really obnoxious. People just want it gone," says Glenn Stanton, who runs the
anti-gambling Palmetto Family Council.

            Video poker is not gone yet. The industry has a magnificent
aptitude for escaping defeat. It has used suits and lobbying and more suits to
stymie previous efforts to restrict it. There is no doubt the industry will ask
the legislature--poker usually "asks" with thousands of dollars in campaign
contributions--to reconsider the ban.

            The irony of the South Carolina fight is that video
poker's death may actually help the gambling industry. For the past few weeks,
rumors have been circulating in South Carolina that Nevada casino owners were
subsidizing the anti-poker campaign. The American Gaming Association has spoken
out against the state's gambling anarchy, and for good reason. The gambling
industry wants to be the gaming industry. Casino owners have carefully
cultivated a family-friendly, law-abiding image: They loathe South Carolina,
where gambling is criminal, ugly, and unpopular.

            Kill video poker in
South Carolina, and you erase the biggest stain on gambling's image. The
businesses that remain--perfumed slot palaces, Indian bingos, lotteries--seem
virtuous, and are virtuous, by comparison.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Cannibalism? <I>Yeah, Baby!!!</I>

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
                (New Line
Cinema). Good reviews overall. Several critics carp that Mike Myers' horny '60s
swinger is not as novel the second time around: "Most of the silliness has
become pretty strenuous and some of the sweetness has settled into desperation"
(Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal ). But despite their
protestations, reviewers can't help recounting all their favorite jokes from
the film, a habit that effectively dilutes their complaints. On the plus side:
The characters of Dr. Evil and his son, Scott Evil, are fleshed out and funnier
this time around. On the minus side: Heather Graham doesn't match up to
Elizabeth Hurley as Myers' ladylove. (
                  Slate
               's David Edelstein is
one of the film's biggest fans, saying it's "better than anyone dared hope:
bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab
bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on
them." Click to read the rest.)

            

               
                  The Red Violin
                (New Line Cinema). Director François
Girard ( Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould ) hits the musical theme
again in this "odd, piquant tale" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment
Weekly ) that traces the peregrinations of a priceless
17 th -century violin. Is it an "utterly predictable" (Richard
Schickel, Time ) gimmick for a costume drama, or is it a fascinating ride
through history? Stephen Holden (the New York Times) is in the first
camp, complaining that as soon as the spectacular score subsides the movie
"clatters back down to earth." But others find the film "beautifully crafted,
intricately designed" (Eric Harrison, the Los Angeles Times ) and credit
Samuel L. Jackson's outstanding performance as a crotchety and morally
ambiguous violin appraiser. (Click here to find out more about the film.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Hannibal
               , by Thomas Harris (Delacorte). Stephen King
raves in the New York Times Book Review that this sequel to The
Silence of the Lambs surpasses its predecessor: "It is, in fact, one of the
two most frightening popular novels of our time, the other being The
Exorcist . ... If Hannibal Lecter isn't a Count Dracula for the
computer-and-cell-phone age, then we don't have one." But Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt (the daily New York Times ) speaks for most critics when he
notes that this one, while a fantastic thriller, "simply lacks the compact
power of the previous books." A few reviewers are horrified by the amped-up
gore (a man cuts off his own face, feeds it to dogs, then has the dogs'
stomachs pumped so he can try to have the recovered nose surgically
reattached). Says Deirdre Donahue ( USA Today ): "You end up wanting to
quickly kill off Hannibal Lecter yourself, just to stanch the flow of foul
language, repellent imagery and bloodshed." (Click here to read the rest of King's review; the page also includes a
clip of Harris reading from Hannibal .)

            

               
                  Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
               ,by A.S. Byatt
(Random House). Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt's collection of fanciful
tales wins the hearts of most critics, although all admit that some stories
don't quite work. But when she's on, Byatt's writing "leaps and pirouettes,
shimmies and shivers" (Gabriella Stern, the Wall Street Journal ) and has
an "aura of extravagant ingenuity" (David Barber, the Boston Globe ). A
few find the tales a bit too similar--there is a theme throughout of the
conflict between the warm southern temperament and the cold northern one--but
most deem the sameness unimportant when the writing is so superb. (Click
here to read an interview with Byatt.)

            

               Music
            

            

               
                  Surrender
               ,by the Chemical Brothers (EMD/Astralwerks).
The dance-music duo surprise critics with their latest: "Instead of revisiting
blocks already rocked, the Brothers venture down untravelled paths from which
their contemporaries have shied away. ... The world has already praised the
Brothers as creators of clever, catchy dance tracks, but Surrender will
finally make the public respect these guys as mature, intelligent and
enterprising musicians" (M. Tye Comer, CMJ ). What's different this time
is that they've relaxed a little and broadened their horizons from exclusively
dance-oriented music: "This is a subtler, moodier, sweeter, funkier record,
less in-your-face, more in-your-heart. Even the dance instrumentals are booty
shakers, not bone crunchers" (David Gates, Newsweek ). (Click here to listen to
samples from the new album.)

            

               
                  Terror Twilight
               , by Pavement (Matador). Excellent
reviews for the fifth album from indie rock's favorite lo-fi sons. It's not as
groundbreaking as 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain , but it's close:
"[T]he music is leaner and cleaner, with lunatic word play that remains an
advanced course in pretzel logic" (Chris Nashawaty, Fortune ). The album
"redefines the band's stellar status" (Colin Berry, the San Francisco
Chronicle ), and vocalist-guitarist Stephen Malkmus delivers not just the
expected musical power-punch but dead-on lyrics as well: It's "his most direct
statement of purpose ever (in short: Things hurt, and growing up is hard, but
kissing helps)" (Joe Levy, Rolling Stone ). (Click here to listen.)

            

               
                  Californication
               , by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
(WEA/Warner Bros.). After years of addiction and attempts at recovery, the
nearly 16-year-old California band has entered dinosaur land. Most critics come
down hard: Newsweek 's Gates says "it's mostly midtempo mush," and
Entertainment Weekly 's David Browne detects a "whiff of desperation" on
the record. On the upside: 1) Former guitarist John Frusciante returns to give
the band a hint of their former jammy-jammin' glory; and 2) Rolling
Stone is wildly positive (four stars), if completely alone in its
enthusiasm--"They've written a whole album's worth of tunes that tickle the
ear, romance the booty, swell the heart, moisten the tear ducts and dilate the
third eye" (Greg Tate). (Click here to watch a multimedia presentation on the band.)

            

               Snap Judgment
            

            
               Music
            

            
               
                  Learning
Curve
               , by DJ Rap (Sony/Columbia). Critics give a polite nod to the
debut album from one of the few female DJs in the boys' club world of
electronic music. Most praise her for being able to hold her own, as opposed to
noticing any genuine musical ability, and note that the album is far more
pop-oriented than the drum 'n' bass and jungle she spins live.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Tomorrow Is an Udder Day

            
               She's Got a Bone
To Pick
            

            One very important factor that Emily Yoffe ("")
leaves out in all the comparisons among diets in China, Africa, and America is
genetic/ethnic background.

            Did these studies compare Chinese-Americans to
Chinese people in China, and African-Americans to native Africans?

            The genetics of a person of European descent can be
vastly different from a person of Chinese or African descent. Osteoporosis,
breast cancer, and sexual maturation are all highly influenced by genetics.
Unless you are comparing rural Chinese diets with the diets of Americans with
the same ethnic background, these comparisons are largely invalid.

            People in Northern Europe and North America have
consumed dairy products as a large part of their diets for centuries. They also
tend to have very different body types than Asians or Africans. It is known
that many people of African ethnic origin and other ethnic groups (including
Asian) have problems digesting milk products past puberty. People of Northern
European descent often do not have this problem. Could it also be that Northern
European ethnicities have more problems with hip fractures or higher estrogen
levels for reasons other than diet?

            Just because rural
Chinese and African people may not need high dairy consumption to be healthy
does not mean that Americans should be discouraged from drinking milk.

            
               --Rachael
Harralson
            

            
Auburn, Calif.

            
               The Values
Thing
            

            With respect to Jacob Weisberg's "Ballot Box" (""),
he makes one decent point, and then blows it.

            It's true that, as he says, "We're electing someone
to run the government, not minister to the condition of our souls." And though
Bill Clinton proves that people will elect presidents who feel their pain,
still I think Weisberg is close to the mark on this point. But from there, he
goes wrong.

            George W. Bush and Bill Bradley are not talking
about individual holders of wealth. Nor are they engaging in subtle class
warfare. They are responding to those who would assert that American society as
a whole is just fine because it is collectively wealthy. American society is
manifestly not "just fine."

            I believe the majority of Americans, if they think
about it at all--and keep in mind that the ones who think about it are also the
ones who take the time to vote--think that our cultural life has coarsened, or
even debased, and that the sense of "values" that just 30 or even fewer years
ago meant that the majority of Americans felt no need to lock their doors has
been, perhaps irretrievably, lost. How else can people understand tragedies
such as Littleton, in which "normal" middle-class kids are not playing baseball
or flirting with girls or even duking out their differences after school on the
playground; they are nursing monstrous visions of murder and mayhem, while
building bombs in their clueless parents' garage. Anyone who pays the least
attention could make a long list of their preferred examples.

            This is the spiritual
emptiness Bush and Bradley are talking about. Not whether a 27-year-old
"Dellionaire" is bored with his Lamborghini. Or whether those less fortunate
are envious of his horsepower.

            
               --Patrick
Moore
            

            
Dallas

            
               Revenge Killings,
Served Up Cold
            

            I must thank David Greenberg for the fascinating
"History Lesson" ("") on the postwar Jewish "Revenge Group," but I disagree
that such an organized and, frankly, insane plan has much in common with the
revenge killings by Albanians (we assume) of Serbs in present-day Kosovo.

            I think the Serbian government and police were the
evil monsters in the recent conflict--the Yugoslav army maybe less so--and that
the outcome of our bombing campaign was generally a good thing. However, I've
never had any illusions about the unsavory nature of the Kosovo Liberation
Army, as the more simple-minded media outlets seem to still hold.

            The killings of the 14 Serbian farmers look to be a
case of classic terrorism with a clear political aim--scaring the remaining
Serbs out of Kosovo. Killing even the boys and old men doesn't sound much like
the vengeance of honorable men.

            The "Revenge Group," on the other hand, was bent on
carrying out revenge killing without any political aim. The Nazis were well out
of power; nothing would have come of the killings except a vague sense of
self-satisfaction on the part of those involved.

            In any case, I can't
condone what either group of killers did or planned to do. To even for an
instant try to intellectually justify killing members of one group simply
because other members of that group did unspeakable things--whether that group
consists of Serbian civilians or imprisoned SS guards--is lazy thinking. It's
plainly wrong, and there's no amount of philosophizing that could convince me
it's not.

            
               --Paul
Wagenseil
            

            New
York

            
               How To Keep Your
Kids From Turning Into Tele Tubbies
            

            The recent installment
of "Culturebox" ("") by Judith Shulevitz deserves comment. She's wrong: The
issue isn't that working parents must choose between anesthetizing their
children with television or catering to all their whims while also trying to
pay the bills and nuke the frozen dinner. Given a little guidance and some
suitable playthings, children who don't get hooked on television at an early
age are actually perfectly capable of amusing themselves for long stretches of
time. Obviously there's a lot more to say on the subject, but Shulevitz doesn't
seem to be aware of much that has already been said.

            
               --Alix Beatty
            

            Chevy Chase, Md.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <I>Gorgeous</I> Isn't Even Skin-Deep

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Drop Dead Gorgeous
                (New Line Cinema). Miserable reviews for this
mockumentary about a Minnesota teen beauty pageant starring Ellen Barkin,
Kirstie Alley, and Denise Richards. The idea of spoofing the superficial,
back-stabbing world of teen pageants seems funny to most critics, but all agree
that the execution is abysmal. It relies heavily on Minnesota-bashing--the film
has "more lutefisk and Lutheran gags than a year of A Prairie Home
Companion " (Richard Corliss, Time )--and predictable jokes about
stage mothers and bitchy teens. Drop Dead Gorgeous was written by a
former Minnesota Miss Teen runner-up, but despite this insider angle, it offers
nothing that wasn't done better in 1975's Smile . (Click here to find out what
the Pageant News Bureau thought of the film.)

            

               
                  The Haunting
                (DreamWorks SKG). Frighteningly bad reviews for this
old-school horror movie: "The scariest thing about The Haunting is how
awful it is. No, worse than awful: desperate" (Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Entertainment Weekly ). Instead of going for the tongue-in-cheek, campy
horror style so popular of late, director Jan De Bont ( Speed ) relies on
old-fashioned things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares. Despite a tasty cast
(including Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and Lili Taylor),
the only faintly amusing element of the film is the computer-generated special
effects, which give the haunted house moving statues and doors that sprout
arms. A remake of a 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The
Haunting of Hill House , this version cuts out the psychological elements
that made the original compelling. Roger Ebert is the only critic to speak up
in favor of the film, citing the scenery and effects as reason enough to see
it. (Click here to watch the trailer.)

            

               Magazine
            

            

               
                  Talk
               . The buzz on Tina Brown's celeb-mag reaches a fever pitch
a week before the first issue appears. Already, unasked-for publicity has been
showered on Brown's new baby, which is being published in partnership with
Miramax Films. 1) New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani denied permission to host the
launch party at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, apparently after hearing his Senate
seat rival Hillary Clinton was going to be on the cover. 2) A parody Web site by
Brill's Content writer Michael Colton was shut down by Miramax's
attorneys but was reinstated after Brown saw it and called off the lawyers. And
3) the New York tabloids have been charting every whisper of gossip on the
magazine for weeks. Brown has also been making the rounds talking up her new
project: Already this week she's done an interview in the Wall Street
Journal and been quoted at length in a piece in the "Business" section of
the New York Times . Times reporter Alex Kuczynski writes that
Talk "more closely resembles a postmodern version of Life
magazine or Paris Match " than Vanity Fair , and says that yes, the
cover will feature Hillary Clinton, but it will also give space to Miramax star
Gwyneth Paltrow and George W. Bush. According to the New York Post and
online gossip sites, Brown is steamed that the magazine went to press before
John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crashed, thus missing the biggest story of the
moment. (Not to mention the fact that rival Graydon Carter stopped the presses
at the last minute on the latest issue of Vanity Fair to change the
cover to a pic of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.) The first copies of Talk
will be handed out at next Monday's launch party--held at the Statue of
Liberty, which is federal, not state, property--and it hits newsstands Tuesday.
(Click to read David Plotz's assessment of Brown in

                  Slate
               .)

            

               Event
            

            
               Woodstock
'99 . The massive rock festival ended in mayhem with fires, looting,
and riot police on Sunday night. After three days of music from acts such as
Jewel, Alanis Morissette, Insane Clown Posse, Rage Against the Machine,
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Limp Bizkit (the last band drawing the
biggest response from the crowds), a few hundred of the estimated 200,000
spectators broke loose. Highlights from the melee included: 12 tractor-trailers
set on fire, impromptu stripteases, giant bonfires with people leaping through
the flames, looting of T-shirt vendors' booths, smashed ATMs, and a food fight
with liberated soft pretzels. (Click here to
see Webcasts from the festival on the official site.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Why It's Not So Bad To Be Canadian</SPAN></SPAN>

            
               
                  Economist, July
24
            

            The
cover story concludes that technology has probably
given birth to a "new economy," though there is no statistical proof of it.
Although America's productivity growth spurt has been concentrated in the
computer industry, anecdotal evidence suggests that technology increases the
flexibility of capital in all industries. (Click for Paul Krugman's assessment
of "new paradigm" economics.) ... A survey postulates that it is not necessarily bad to be
Canadian. Canada has universal health care, low inflation, low interest rates,
and strong economic growth. On the downside, Canada's economy is weaker than
the United States', and Canadians have an inferiority complex about their
southern neighbor.

            
               
                  
                     
                        New
                     
Republic , Aug. 9
            

            The
cover package debates how to divide the surplus. One
article argues for public investment in research, infrastructure, and
education, based on the premise that the information revolution, not deficit
reduction and low interest rates, undergirds our prosperity. Another piece,
which embraces the notion that smaller deficits and lower interests rates have
midwifed prosperity, proposes shoring up Social Security and Medicare, and
saving the surplus. Some minor tax relief, such as an increase in the earned
income tax credit, is also appropriate, as is boosting education and
infrastructure investment. A final article calls for "monumental tax cuts" to
restore faith in individualism, abolish the tax code's dispiriting
progressivity, and pare government down so it can't do much.

            

               
                  
                     
                        George
                     , August 1999
               
            

            The
jokes in the unfortunately timed "political humor issue" fall hideously flat.
Guest editor Ben Stiller joshes about banishing John F. Kennedy Jr. and is
photographed making off with John-John's sports equipment. ...
A mock interview with Ricky Martin suggests that he is a secret policy wonk: He
reads the New Republic and loves to expostulate on Puerto Rican
sugar-cane subsidies and "la domestic policy loca." ... In a
real profile, Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., defends herself from charges of
promiscuity. "If I had had an affair with Newt Gingrich, I would have ended up
on the Ways and Means Committee," she retorts.

            
               
                  
                     
                        New
                     
York Times Magazine , July 25
            

            The
cover story worries about the implications of a gender-selection technology.
The experimental "Microsort" process separates sperm carrying X chromosomes
(which create girls) from those carrying Y chromosomes. Doctors impregnate
women with embryos of the favored gender. Ethicists fear that the technique
will further institutionalize sex discrimination. ... An article warns
that all computer networks are unsafe and that the plaintiff's bar will reap
millions from lawsuits prompted by network fiascoes.

            
               
                  Atlantic
Monthly , August 1999
            

            The
cover story maps a political agenda to engage the apathetic Generation X:
fiscal restraint, investment in education and training, and class-based
affirmative action. ... An article recommends a cup of "shade coffee."
"Sun coffee," grown in high-yield rows, doesn't taste as good. "Sustainable
coffee," grown in the shade amid other vegetation, is better for the
environment and a great way to differentiate java in an overcrowded market.
... A piece claims world population will fall in the next 50 years. In
the past two decades, global fertility has dropped by 1.5 children per woman
and industrialized nations have fallen below the 2.1 children-per-woman
replacement rate. (Click for a 
                  Slate
                "Dialogue" on population
trends.)

            
               
                  Time , U.S.
News & World Report , and Newsweek , July 26
            

            Special editions mourn the
passing of JFK Jr. ( U.S. News junked copies of its original edition to
put out the Kennedy special.) All are packed with full-page photos of John in
various stages of his public life. Time has fresh shots of an anguished
Ethel and a plaintive Rory Kennedy. The weeklies embrace the myth of the
Kennedy curse. 
                  Time
                calls the clan "the first family of pain."
U.S. News says the death of JFK Jr. "seemed almost
ordained."

            The cookie-cutter profiles note that Kennedy was a
mediocre student but had a perfect 6-0 conviction record as a prosecutor. He
became a devoted editor of George , which seems likely to founder in his
absence. U.S. News says he met Carolyn Bessette jogging in the park,
Newsweek says they met at a charity ball, but all agree it was a
storybook romance. Newsweek reports that JFK Jr. actively explored a
Senate run before Hillary Clinton expressed interest. His wife was afraid to
fly with him, preferring to travel with a professional pilot or drive herself.
U.S. News and Newsweek both declare JFK Jr. was not reckless like
his cousins, but Time questions whether it was foolhardy for Kennedy to fly solo over the ocean. (Click to
find out why 
                  Slate
                recommends against flying to Martha's Vineyard
by yourself.)

            A Newsweek 
               article reassesses what turned the tide in Kosovo. Though
NATO damaged civil infrastructure, the Serb army remained basically intact.
Only the belief that ground war was imminent led Slobodan Milosevic to
cave.

            A U.S. News 
               report distinguishes among different types of memory loss.
Forgetting names is not a cause for alarm, but forgetting how to prepare dinner
indicates loss of "executive functioning," which signals the onset of
dementia.

            A Time article
dismisses the hysteria over rationed health care. Ninety-seven percent of
treatment decisions by doctors are approved by managed-care plans and 40 states
already offer patients some protections against insurance plans.

            
               
                  Weekly Standard ,
July 26
            

            The
cover
story chastises the "ideological ax-grinders" for exploiting the U.S.
victory in the Women's World Cup. "Blowhards" falsely claimed that the game
demonstrated women are the same as men. Since female players are weaker and
slower their play is more offense-oriented and therefore more exciting to
watch. (Read William Saletan's "Frame Game" on soccer politics .) ... An
article salutes the 30 th anniversary of the first moon walk by
calling the space shuttle program a flop and the international space station a
disaster. These programs have produced no significant scientific discoveries.
Congress should cut NASA funding and let free enterprise flourish in space.

            
               
                  The New Yorker ,
July 26
            

            A
profile of New York Times Publisher and Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
concludes that he has shepherded the company through profound changes while
maintaining its integrity. Sulzberger created new sections, introduced color to
the front page, enlivened the editorial page, and promoted minority viewpoints.
His greatest challenge: bringing the Times to the Internet without
sacrificing quality. ... A dispatch mocks Herb Allen's summer camp for
moguls in Sun Valley. The media elite socialize during raft trips and water
fights and vie for a place in the annual Annie Leibovitz portrait. ...
An item reveals that although an independent counsel deputy proposed indicting
Hillary Clinton, most Starr staffers, including former ethics adviser Sam Dash,
dismissed the idea as meritless.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Cups, Bras, and Athletic Supporters

            "Girls
Rule!" screams Newsweek 's cover story on the U.S. soccer team's victory
in the Women's World Cup. "Women's sports take giant leap," exults USA
Today . Everyone agrees the tournament was a cultural leap forward--but in
which direction? Beneath the celebration lurks a struggle between equality
feminists, who think the tournament proved that women can be just like men, and
difference feminists, who think it showed how women are different and better.
The spin contest covers four issues: individualism , sex ,
careerism , and playing dirty .

            
               1.
Individualism. Equality feminists want each woman to assert herself. One
school of egalitarians sees the World Cup as a demonstration that women can be
"independent." Another school, illustrated by the Gatorade ad that shows U.S.
soccer star Mia Hamm battling Michael Jordan at various sports, pushes the idea
that women should embrace competition. "Anything you can do, I can do better,"
goes the ad's jingle. A third school, influenced by male sports marketing,
selects certain players on the women's team and pitches them as solo stars.
Several male columnists ignore most of the championship game and focus on the
game-ending goal by American defender Brandi Chastain--"a shootout, womano a
womano," with "one winner, one loser, everybody holding their breath."

            
Difference feminists draw the opposite lessons. They reject the rampant
individualism of "loutish male basketball and baseball players," as the New
York Times ' George Vecsey puts it, and they celebrate the U.S. women's
squad as a collectivist countermodel. "U.S. Takes One for the Team--Collective
Selflessness Culminates in Title at Women's World Cup," beams the Washington
Post 's front-page headline. Newsweek , picking up the "selflessness"
theme, praises U.S. players who "accepted diminished roles" and offered "to do
anything I'm asked for this team." Contrary to the Gatorade ad, the magazine
reports with admiration that Hamm "sees herself as a solid cog in a remarkably
powerful machine" and "refuses to acknowledge that she's a player with unique
gifts."

            Some
difference feminists suggest women are born this way. Vecsey, for example,
calls them "innately good teammates." Others attribute their selflessness to
environmental programming. According to Newsweek 's account of the U.S.
team's preparation, "Roommates were switched at every stop on the World Cup
road to prevent cliques from forming. As the tourney progressed, the imaging
tapes, designed to be watched in private, were shown in groups." The resulting
collective consciousness is captured in Nike ads that depict the players doing
everything together. In one ad, a player goes out on a date, and her teammates
tag along. In another, a male dentist who has given one of the players two
fillings stares in amazement as one teammate after another rises, zombielike,
to declare, "Then I will have two fillings!"

            
Equality feminists find this celebration of selflessness creepy, but it's not
just being foisted on women by male writers. World Cup Chairwoman Donna de
Varona lauds the American players' "humility." Time columnist Margaret
Carlson praises "their unassuming ways." One player, Kristine Lilly, says the
team is "like a second family. Female sports are different. You do a lot better
when you care about each other. We are nurturing people, caring people. ... We
all want to see each other happy."

            
               2.
Sex. Many difference feminists celebrate the U.S. women team's sex appeal,
recycling David Letterman's descriptions of the team as "Babe City" and "Soccer
Mamas." The icon of these pro-sex feminists is Chastain, the player who posed
nude (but not lasciviously) in Gear magazine, kicked the winning goal,
and then tore off her jersey and bounded around the field in a black sports
bra. Equality feminists worry that the players' exploitation of their physiques
is self-objectifying and retro.

            
Pro-sex difference feminists find their heroine under attack less from the left
than from a scandalized news media elite. Sunday morning talk show hosts asked
Chastain in a tone of polite disbelief what in God's name prompted her to tear
off her jersey. "What are you thinking ? What are you doing ?"
stammered ABC's Robin Roberts. Newsweek says Chastain had posed for "a
lowbrow men's magazine"; the Post 's Ann Gerhart calls it "the frat boy's
Esquire ." Time calls her jersey-removal flourish a "strip" and
jokes, "Hey, her name is Chastain, not Chaste." Purists prefer to praise
Michelle Akers, the less flashy midfield workhorse who has pronounced herself
"a bit uncomfortable with Brandi's deal."

            
Chastain's defenders offer several counterspins. First there's the pro-choice
defense, which says every woman's choice should be respected, whether it's
running marathons or posing for Gear . Then there's the "sexy to be
strong" defense, which praises the U.S. women for adding muscle tone to our
idea of feminine beauty. Then there's the "have it all" defense. As USA
Today 's Jill Lieber puts it, the team's "message" is that "you can
have it all. ... That if you're also driven, determined, aggressive, tough and
committed, you can captivate Tom Brokaw, David Letterman and the nation with
your brawn and your brain, your femininity and sexuality, your athletic skills
and your 'babeness.' "

            Some
equality feminists also take Chastain's side. Their superficial spin is that
male players whip off their shirts all the time, and women should be able to do
the same. Their subtler spin, well-expressed by Gerhart, is that Chastain "has
brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and
practical--not a traditional bra of shine and lace and cleavage, but a sturdy
compression garment. The sports bra is the cloth symbol of Title IX's success."
The crudest egalitarian spin is that Chastain is using her sex appeal to get
attention but that this is OK because she's using the attention to make money,
just as men do. As a Newsweek essayist puts it, the team is "having some
fun--not to mention making some profit--with America's sexual obsession."

            
               3.
Career and family. Equality feminists measure the team's success by its
paychecks, complaining that its salaries are "meager by men's standards," and
its bonuses for winning "pale in comparison" to what men get. Noting the team's
decision to arrange its own tour of promotional matches, contrary to plans made
by the U.S. Soccer Federation, the Post says the players are "determined
to promote and pay themselves better than they believe the [USSF] has."
Time , agreeing that the team has boosted its negotiating leverage,
beams, "Welcome to the big time, ladies."

            
Difference feminists reject "the big time" as a crude, ugly, and destructive
male pursuit. They celebrate the U.S. women's comparative innocence. "In an era
when the egos of male athletes are dwarfed only by their paychecks, the World
Cup women, minimum wagers by pro-sports standards, reminded the country that
sports superstars can be gracious and grateful," coos Newsweek . CNN's
Bruce Morton observes approvingly that unlike male athletes, the female players
don't "have million dollar contracts or big shoe deals. They actually seem to
play because they love their game."

            
Meanwhile, the World Cup coverage exalts players who focus on their families.
Several articles applaud "soccer moms" Carla Overbeck and Joy Fawcett, as well
as Hamm's devotion to her Marine husband overseas ("We've sacrificed so much,"
Hamm told USA Today ). Even the World Cup's CEO, Marla Messing, is
glowingly profiled for stepping aside to stay home with her kids. She "plans to
turn her attention from filling stadiums nationwide to bringing a much smaller
crowd together: her family," the Post reports. Now "her most serious
ambition is to get reacquainted with her husband ... and daughters."

            
               4.
Playing dirty. Difference feminists portray women's soccer as more civil
and noble than men's soccer. As Vecsey puts it, women eschew "the cynical fouls
and flagrant flops of the men." Equality feminists draw a different lesson: The
World Cup showed that women can body-slam, curse, and cheat just like men.

            Each
of these vices has an exemplar on the U.S. team. Akers has been elected to
represent body-slamming, with the Post 's William Gildea calling her "the
Dick Butkus of women's soccer." A 13-year-old boy interviewed by the Los
Angeles Times pays her the ultimate adolescent male compliment: "Michelle
Akers, she's my thug."

            
Chastain represents crude language as well as physical immodesty. Before the
championship game, she was notorious for defending her Gear spread by
observing, "I ran my ass off for this body." After she kicked the winning goal,
ABC put a microphone in her face and asked her to tell the nation about Akers.
"She's the toughest goddamn player I've ever played with or against," Chastain
blurted. Sportswriters chuckle at Chastain's "salty" language and call it
"another step" toward gender parity in athletics.

            The
team's goalie, Briana Scurry, represents cheating. It was she, more than
Chastain, who won the game by blocking one Chinese kick in the shootout. Scurry
did it by sneaking forward, against the rules, to narrow the shooter's angle
before the kick. Far from chastising Scurry, male sportswriters are
congratulating her on her "savvy." "Yes, she said later, she knew she was
breaking the rules," concludes Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times .
"But because the referees didn't call it, it apparently falls under the heading
of gamesmanship. 'Everybody does it,' she said. 'It's only cheating if you get
caught.' Sports equality indeed."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Cold Coffee

            

               Russia lied to the International Monetary Fund. The country
overestimated its currency reserves by $1 billion in 1996 while applying for
support, and IMF money may have been used for profiteering. The IMF is
considering lending Russia $4.5 billion more. The Washington Post suggested that the IMF won't give up
on Russia but that Congress may give up on the IMF.

            
               The
United States intercepted two Russian bombers over Iceland. Western
officials were bewildered by Russia's first probe of Western air defenses since
the end of the Cold War. Moscow denied that the flights were unusual.

            

               Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak formed a government. He is partnering
with secular, ethnic, and religious parties that support the peace process. A
Los Angeles Times editorial points out that the coalition members share little else.

            
               A
cable car crash killed 20 people in the French Alps. All were working at a
space observatory. Authorities were unsure of the accident's cause.

            
               The
Federal Reserve raised interest rates. The .25 percent hike is the first in
two years. The ever-hawkish Fed warned of "the emergence, or the potential
emergence, of inflationary forces that could undermine economic growth."
Inflation doves argued that the hike will cut jobs. The 
                  Washington Post
                approves, but William Greider
argues in the Washington Post that the Fed is
needlessly punishing the masses; instead, it should discipline only banks that
lend promiscuously.

            

               Congress limited Y2K liability. Potential plaintiffs must grant
businesses 90 days for repairs before suing and will be able to collect only
limited punitive damages. Spins: 1) The bill will save computer companies from
financial ruin. 2) The bill will expose their clients to financial ruin. 3)
It's a slippery slope to leaving consumers unprotected in product liability
cases.

            

               Kurdish rebel Abdullah Ocalan was sentenced to death. A Turkish court
found him guilty of treason for waging a bloody drive for Kurdish self-rule.
But his execution may not win the requisite parliamentary approval, because
Turkish politicians fear martyring him and sparking Kurdish unrest. (Listen to
the chorus of pleas for leniency in ".")

            

               Kosovo update: 1) Thousands of Serbs rallied for Slobodan Milosevic's
resignation. More protests are scheduled in coming weeks. 2) Ethnic Albanians
continued to loot and torch Serb villages. Kosovar Serbs continued to flee. 3)
Evidence that directly links Milosevic to Serb atrocities was found. The
British paper the 
                  Observer
                unearthed a trove of documents that
recount how Milosevic planned to systematically eliminate Kosovar
Albanians.

            

               President Clinton proposed using federal budget surpluses to shore up
Medicare and Social Security. The larger-than-anticipated surplus
would be used to cover prescription drugs for Medicare recipients and to
partially fill the projected gap in Social Security coverage. House Republicans
countered with a tax-cut plan. The Wall Street Journal forecasts that
Clinton will partially yield to Republican calls. The Washington Post entreats Clinton to stand firm,
warning readers not to believe in "an accounting mirage to finance a misshapen
tax cut that the country can't afford."

            

               President Clinton presented his plan for overhauling Medicare. His
proposal introduces prescription drug coverage and eliminates payment for
preventive services but aims to cut costs by stoking price competition among
HMOs and requiring patients to chip in for some services. The New York
Times 
               deems the plan "sensible" and "prudent," and a
Washington 
               Post editorial observes that Clinton deftly "changed the subject from
the solvency of Medicare to its adequacy." But the New Republic

               laments the plan's "gross generational inequity" and
instructs President Clinton to spend the money on education instead. A
Post 
               news analysis asks "whether Clinton can use his talent
for political positioning to actually implement policy."

            

               HMOs will cut back treatments to the elderly. A survey reported that the
industry will force Medicare recipients to chip in for treatment and may ditch
250,000 recipients outright. The HMOs contend the government doesn't contribute
enough to allow them to provide adequate care. Patient advocates argue that
HMOs can't produce the lavish benefits they used to drum up business.

            

               Physicians will unionize against managed care. The American
Medical Association voted to form a union to negotiate for better wages and
working conditions but promised never to strike. Spins: 1) Collective
bargaining will win doctors more control over the type and quantity of
medication they prescribe, resulting in better care for patients. 2) Collective
bargaining will win doctors higher pay, resulting in higher costs for patients.
(Read William Saletan's "" to see how the doctors cultivated their common
touch.)

            
               The
independent counsel statute expired. The power to initiate investigations
will once again reside with the attorney general. The 
                  Washington Post
                warned that the law may be
resurrected "the next time Congress becomes dissatisfied with the way the
Justice Department conducts a politically charged investigation" and urges that
it be replaced with a rule "that would give the attorney general wide
discretion on when to seek an independent counsel and some say in who that
investigator is."

            

               Webster Hubbell will plead guilty. In return for Hubbell's
confession that he covered up his and Hillary Clinton's role in a crooked
Arkansas land deal, Kenneth Starr's office will recommend that Hubbell not
return to prison. Hillary Clinton had been named a potential witness in the
trial. Click here for Robert Novak's explanation in the Chicago
Sun-Times of why legal woes could still cloud her Senate run.

            

               George W. Bush broke fund-raising records. He has raised more than $36
million. Al Gore has almost $18.5 million and Bill Bradley $11 million. The

                  Washington Post
                recounts the unanimous spin from
Gore, Steve Forbes, and others who intimate that Bush will be beholden to his
donors.

            

               The Supreme Court barred lawsuits against states for violating federal
laws. Individual plaintiffs will no longer be able to sue states that
violate federal laws; only the federal government may do so. Observers called
this a coup for the court's Reagan- and Bush-appointed states' rights faction.
Liberals protested that the ruling emasculates Congress' power to bind states
to federal law. Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky opines in the Los Angeles Times that the decision is
"the height of conservative judicial activism" because it "invented new rights
for state governments at the expense of individuals." But David Ignatius
tells 
               Washington Post readers that the court
"is only ratifying a power shift that has already taken place" from the bloated
and hamstrung federal system to the more effective state level.

            
               The
Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Microsoft. The company
is accused of failing to disclose all its cash reserves in order to smooth out
fluctuations in its earnings. The SEC strongly prefers full disclosure of cash
flow. The Wall Street Journal 
               dismisses the seriousness of the investigation but
calls it "one more headache for Microsoft."

            

               Starbucks profits dipped. The coffee business is fine, but earnings were
sapped by investments in online ventures, including a retail store and an
magazine. CEO Howard Schulz's spin: "We are not just another company adding a
'dot com' to our name." The Wall Street Journal 's retort: "Earth to
Howard Schultz: Return from cyberspace. Your coffee needs you."

            

               Timothy Leary was an FBI informer. Newly available records show that he
ratted on a radical leftist group in 1974 in an attempt to reduce his prison
sentence. The documents were published by The Smoking Gun .

            
               A
headmaster staged a false boycott of the sitcom The Family Guy . The
Rev. Richardson Schell deluged advertisers with letters from a fake group,
leading some to cancel potential spots. The show was created by one of Schell's
former pupils, who gave some of its characters the surname of Schell's former
assistant. Schell said he was irked first by the name and then by "obnoxious,
objectionable" content such as presidential, urination, and flatulence jokes.
Fox rejoined that "an irreverent comedy that can't raise a clergyman's eyebrows
isn't doing its job."

            

               The San Antonio Spurs beat the New York Knicks for the NBA
title. The 
                  New York
Post
                grew misty over the "playoff run that almost became the
impossible dream," but the 
                  San Antonio Express News
                crowed that "New York's
Cinderella story was little more than the final chapter in the Spurs' own
fairytale."

            

               The U.S. women's soccer team advanced to the World Cup
semifinals . Fans rejoiced at the team's success. Oganizers rejoiced at
the 600,000 tickets they have sold. Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam
effuses that the team is "the most exciting
professional sports franchise in the country."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Avengers 

            The execution-style killings of 14 Serbs by
Albanian Kosovars in mid-July left a tight knot in my gut. Not any tighter than
the knots left by the accounts of Serb atrocities against Albanian Kosovars,
just different. For I can't help asking: Do these acts of revenge undermine the
humanitarian rationale of NATO's intervention in Kosovo? Does the barbarism of
a few of Slobodan Milosevic's victims vitiate the justness of the war? Can we
continue to view the Albanian Kosovars as the good guys? Although I can arrive
at rational answers to these questions--no, no, and yes ()--the knot doesn't go
away.

            Postwar acts of
vengeance--ranging from isolated killings to the recommencing of full-scale
combat--are as historically commonplace as they are morally problematic. The
impulse to avenge is human, and the opportunities for it are abundant at the
end of a war, when law and authority evaporate. But that doesn't make them easy
either to condone or to condemn unequivocally.

            Consider the aftermath of World War II. When American and
Allied troops rolled into Germany in 1945, a few of them raped and killed
German citizens. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, some of those who had suffered
under Nazi rule turned violently against their oppressors--or their oppressors'
countrymen--and hundreds, even thousands, may have been killed. (It's
important, however pedantic it may sound, to keep stressing that only "some" or
"a few" partook of such vengeance, since even choosing to discuss these
acts--and not the vastly more extensive crimes that preceded them--threatens to
distort history.) No one would cheer these reprisals, but only the most twisted
would shed their deepest tears for the Nazis and their supporters.

            Jews, though scant among
the revenge-takers, did in some cases seek retribution as well--and this
chapter of the post-World War II retaliation has been especially problematic
(as I explain ). In a penetrating essay in the Forward last fall, Hillel
Halkin asked whether Jews who pursued extremely drastic retaliation were
"courageously honest in seeking to act out what others merely dreamed of, or
... shockingly criminal? Or both? Or are all such categories simply irrelevant
to the experience of people who, maddened by the loss of their families and
entire worlds, might best be considered to have been 'temporarily insane' in
the full and exculpatory legal sense of the term?"

            T he specific group to which Halkin refers is the legendary
(or notorious) "Revenge Group" organization founded in 1945 by a young,
charismatic poet named Abba Kovner, who is at the center of a fascinating
little chapter in the history of revenge killings. During the war, Kovner had
vainly tried to defend the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Poland, and at the war's end
he banded together with other ghetto-defenders and partisans. They all shared
an apartment in Lublin, Poland, and one night they were sitting around
drinking, contemplating their next move. "We sat with our glasses and the idea
flew out of us and suddenly it was no longer in the air but on the table,"
recalled one member, Pasha Reichman. "Everyone wanted revenge." Specifically,
they concocted the idea of a mass murder of their German oppressors. As Joseph
Harmatz, one of their number, explained, they felt the only reason they had
been spared death like so many friends and kin was so that they could
administer revenge.

            The small group of five
soon grew in number to almost 40, according to one of the founders, drawing on
survivors of the death camps as well as refugees from the forests. They devised
two plans. Plan A involved poisoning the water supplies of major German cities.
Plan B entailed killing off SS guards held in American POW camps. When Kovner
tried to enlist support from Jewish authorities, they balked--some out of
horror, some indifference. Nonetheless, Kovner procured some poison from a
chemist in the future state of Israel. Meanwhile, Reichman and others--posing
as German engineers or, in Harmatz's case, a Polish knight--got jobs in the
waterworks of Hamburg, Nuremberg, and other cities. They secured blueprints to
the cities' water mains, staying up late to memorize every detail. They figured
out where to administer the poison as well as how to spare the sectors of the
city where American troops were living.

            Plan A went awry, however, when the British arrested Kovner
as he attempted to leave Palestine. Reichman decided to revert to Plan B--the
killing of SS guards. On April 13, 1946, under a full moon, a handful of his
group broke into a bakery near Nuremberg that provided bread for the Allies'
Stalag 13 POW camp. A man they had planted in the bakery had managed to hide
under the floorboards several bottles of arsenic, which had been tested on a
cat in Paris. (The cat died.) They sprinkled the white powder on the loaves of
black rye bread that were headed for Stalag 13. (Reichman and his men knew that
on Sundays the American soldiers at the camp received only plain white bread to
eat.) Suddenly, hearing the banging of window shutters that had come loose,
security guards arrived, and Reichman's men fled. Three thousand loaves were
shipped off anyway--the guards suspected a burglary, not a poisoning--and as a
result some 2,000 of the 15,000 prisoners came down with food poisoning. None,
apparently, died.

            With the failure of these
two plans, most of the Revenge group migrated to Palestine. A few pursued a
Plan C: retribution against known Nazi war criminals. They were joined in this
dark enterprise by some renegade members of the Jewish Brigade--Jews who lived
in Palestine during the war and fought with the Allies under British command.
Some brigade members had arrived in Italy at the war's tail end and, arriving
too late for combat, vented their revenge impulses by hunting down Gestapo and
SS agents around the Italy-Austria border.

            Eventually, these soldiers got hold of a Gestapo official
who provided them with a list of names of Nazi men, their wartime activities,
even their addresses. They proceeded to track down some of the SS men who had
participated in the mass extermination of Jews and, on their own authority,
kill them. Typically, they would dress up as British military policemen, drive
to the home of the SS man, and ask him to come with them on some conventional
business. Then they would shoot or suffocate him.

            The vast majority of Jews, of course, did nothing
of the sort--just like the vast majority of Czech, Pole, and American soldiers.
As the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has written, what is striking among
Holocaust survivors was, in fact, the relative absence of avenging actions. The
more common response among Jews was to devote themselves to Zionism as a
bulwark against future persecution, or to engage in symbolic retribution
(banning Wagner from Israeli national radio), or to pursue justice through the
Nuremberg war crimes tribunals or other legitimate arenas of justice. Likewise,
many Nazi war criminals were punished, sometimes with death, by Polish courts
of law.

            It is always futile to try to draw practical
lessons from history. Yet it seems possible that one reason Jewish acts of
vengeance were relatively few was simply that the Nuremberg trials existed.
Jews could take comfort that at least some of the most evil of their oppressors
would be punished by a united world opinion. Other efforts to prosecute Nazi
war criminals--from the apprehension of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 to the ongoing
efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the U.S. Office of Special
Investigations--continue the honorable policy of replacing lawless revenge with
legitimate justice. Even so, it's worth considering that a more vigorous
pursuit of Serbian war criminals, while unlikely to stop every retaliatory
killing, might nonetheless send a signal that the world believes justice to be
a substitute--not an instrument--for revenge.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Handicapped Restroom Etiquette, Part 2

            
               Please send your
questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            Prudie has received a
flood, you should pardon the expression, of correspondence in response to the .
The volume of mail was astounding. Following is a fair sampling from the
deluge, with Prudie's thoughts at the end.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am dismayed at your answer to the query about
using the handicapped stall in a public bathroom. I use a wheelchair. I cannot
begin to tell you how many times I have entered a public facility to find the
ONLY stall occupied is the handicapped one--and by a person who did not need
it! The large size is not because we are "deserving of such amenities," but
because people in wheelchairs need the space to turn around, to clamber onto
the toilet, to empty catheters, whatever. People such as myself cannot get up
from the seat in a conventional stall without handrails.
            

            
               I have seen people
use them with their kids--waiting until two or three toddlers "make pee-pee."
People sometimes use them to change clothes! This means I sometimes soil
myself. If there are NO other empty stalls and you gotta go, then, by all
means, use them--but never if there are other stalls you can use.
            

            

               --Ann
            

            

               How clueless!!! Here we have an able-bodied, selfish caffeine addict, who
can't seem to wait for a stall, callously making someone who is handicapped
wait. What will it take--seeing a person standing in a puddle--or worse--before
you realize that you're a doofus?
            

            

               --BM98
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I felt the need to
respond to this. I don't know how many times I have gone to use the handicapped
stall and there's always someone in it. If there isn't another stall open, I
understand. However, the comment I object to is the one where you say there is
never a handicapped person waiting to use it when you are done. There are many
conditions that are not visible. I have MS and look just fine. What is not
apparent is that I have a bladder problem and a catheter. For me to deal with
this is almost impossible in a "standard" stall.
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            
               Me
            

            
               You dropped the ball big time in your response
to "Doubting," about the able-bodied using stalls for the disabled. Let me
enlighten you: Almost every time I need to use the disabled stall (I am in a
wheelchair), I have to wait for an AB to leave, and they all apologize meekly
when they leave. Your insensitivity is truly astounding. What you consider
luxurious is a necessity to us. I suggest that you try holding your bladder or
bowels, race to the bathroom, and find the ONE stall you can possibly use
occupied by someone who prefers the "luxury" of the handicapped stall. Please
reconsider your opinion.
            

            
               Thank you.
            

            

               --Eric
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Sorry to inform you
that in California it is a finable offense to use a handicapped-designated
restroom stall if you're able-bodied. The fine for the first offense is $271. I
was riding my bicycle on the state beach at Huntington Beach and was arrested
and given a ticket, which the court has upheld--in the winter the beach
maintenance closes all but the handicapped facilities, so I guess you are
supposed to use the landscape.
            

            

               --For Real
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               The article on use
of the handicapped stall was a farce. You basically said it's OK to use it any
time. As a former roommate of a disabled person, I became more aware of the
functional aspects of being handicapped. Many of these individuals do not have
the capacity to "hold it," as you or I do.
            

            

               --A Concerned Citizen
            

            

               
                  Prudie,
               
            

            
               I'm sure you are not
advocating disregarding the rights of the disabled, but I think you may have
misled others to do so. There is a big difference between handicapped parking
and handicapped restroom stalls. Courtesy would dictate yielding designated
bathroom facilities to those who require them, though when available, their use
is not restricted from the general public. I would be encouraged to see this
clarification published.
            

            

               --D.P.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Public restrooms are
for public use. The larger stalls are meant to accommodate the handicapped--not
specifically for.
            

            

               --Phyllis W.
            

            Prudie, after much thought, realized several things
about this matter. One is that the disabled have a strong, perhaps
disproportionate, influence when it comes to public policy. Mostly this is to
the good. There are some caveats, however. Prudie remembers the Atlantic
Monthly story about the French kiosk company that developed wonderful
individual bathrooms for use on streets. New York tried them but had to give
them up because the lobby of disabled persons raised such a fuss about
all of them having to be handicapped accessible. This, of course, was an
impossibility, and unreasonable, so none were allowed on the streets.

            An illogical example of the power of this lobby can
be found in hospitals. The number of bathrooms for surgeons and surgical staff,
proximate to the operating rooms, has been reduced so that there can be
wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. Well, there are no surgeons and allied
personnel in wheelchairs, given the nature of the work.

            As some correspondents did point out, when no stall
is available and there is a line, anyone can use the designated handicapped
stall--if that is the next one to open up. It is a bit of an ethical conundrum
that the handicapped want fairness, but fairness for them sometimes results in
unfairness to others. Perhaps this is an acceptable trade-off, given the
particulars.

            Prudie's reconsidered opinion is that when an
able-bodied person enters a public restroom, and there is a choice of stalls,
that person should not go into the handicapped accessible one. Prudie, herself,
after undergoing some rather strong e-mail aversion therapy, plans never to
step foot in the more spacious stall again.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Sieg Haider

            The
electoral surge of the far right in Austria made the front pages of most
European newspapers Monday. In Germany, it led the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and the Süddeutsche
Zeitung of Munich, but curiously not Die Welt , which confined the story to an inside page.
The Italian papers raised the loudest alarm. In La Repubblica of Rome,
columnist Bernardo Valli said the achievement of the Austrian Freedom Party in
getting more than 27 percent of the vote in the general election was "a slap in
the face" for Europe. The party's leader, Jörg Haider, who has praised Hitler
and described former SS soldiers as "decent men of character," won a share of
the vote almost double that ever achieved by the xenophobic French party of
Jean-Marie Le Pen, he said. (Le Pen has never got more than 15 percent.) The
result could only be regarded as worrying, even "obscene," by Austria's
neighbors, especially since Austria is now a member of the European Union,
which espouses principles quite different to Haider's.

            

               Corriere della
Sera ran a front-page cartoon showing Hitler as a jack-in-the box
making the Nazi salute and shouting, "Sieg Haider!" Its eight-column headline
was: "Austria, the hour of the extreme right." Much of the press comment
stressed the importance of keeping the Freedom Party from joining a new
governing coalition. The Times of London, noting that Haider's result "has thrown the
country's politics into turmoil, frightened investors and brought closer to
power the leader of the largest and most radical far-right party in Europe,"
said Monday in an editorial that it is a disaster for Social Democrat
Chancellor Viktor Klima, an embarrassment for Austria, and "a triumph for a man
whose political prejudices have shattered the country's cosy and often corrupt
consensus." If Klima cannot form a government, Haider is next in line, it said.
"For much of Europe, that would be unthinkable: the ghosts of the Nazi past
have never been properly exorcised in the land of Hitler's birth, and the image
of the right-wing leader, denouncing foreigners as criminal, calling for the
expulsion of asylum-seekers and denouncing the European Union, would make the
international storm over Kurt Waldheim seem nothing by comparison."

            
Following the close of polling in the Indian elections Sunday, Corriere
della Sera announced on its front page that, according to exit polls,
Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, Italian widow of the assassinated Rajiv
Gandhi, has clearly lost to the nationalists, although the official results
won't be known until Wednesday. Indian papers led on the deaths of 18 people in
violence during the final phase of polling, about which the Times of India quoted
the chief election commissioner's conclusion: "It's gone off well." In an
editorial, the paper said: "Hot air, floods, blood, death and abuse--these are
the abiding images of Election '99. ... Not all is well with the polity." The
editorial described Sonia Gandhi as "stiff and inarticulate" and said many
people considered her "a ventriloquist's puppet and an instrument of a
self-serving coterie." The future of the Gandhi dynasty, it suggested, rests on
her daughter Priyanka, whose "strength is her charm and her seeming ability to
communicate with people." But she will have to prove "she has a mind of her own
and intends to use it regularly."

            
British war correspondent Robert Fisk led the front page of the Independent of London
Monday with a scare story about health-endangering contamination in
Kosovo caused by the NATO airstrikes. "After insisting throughout its air
bombardment of Yugoslavia that its use of depleted uranium [DU] munitions
against Serb forces posed no hazard to human health, Nato officers in Kosovo
now admit that particles from their shells may have contaminated soil near
targets in Yugoslavia and could cause 'inhalation' problems, especially for
children," he wrote. In briefings to international aid workers in Pristina, one
K-For officer warned of "contaminated dust" at the scene of depleted uranium
munitions explosions and urged aid officials to stay 150 feet away from targets
hit in NATO airstrikes. But NATO cannot--or will not--say where it used DU
ordnance against Serb forces, Fisk wrote. He said that in Iraq, where the
United States fired more than 860,000 DU rounds during the 1991 Gulf War,
doctors subsequently found "an exponential increase in child cancers and
deformities" among families living close to the targets. "One Iraqi doctor's
report in Basra last year recorded three babies born without heads in August
along with four with abnormally large heads, six babies born with no heads in
September, and two with short limbs," he added. "In October 1998, another baby
was born without a head and four with oversize heads."

            The
Times of London led Monday with warnings from Irish police sources that
dissident Irish Republicans are planning a series of high-profile terrorist
attacks in Britain around the end of the year, including one on the Millennium
Dome in Greenwich, London. The planned bombing campaign by the Real IRA, as the
renegades call themselves, is considered by the police to be "a serious
threat," the paper said, and is designed to coincide with any millennium bug
computer problems.

            Harold
Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times and the Times of London
before he emigrated to America and became president of Random House, returned
to Fleet Street Monday as a columnist from the United States. The first of his biweekly columns for the Guardian on the
presidential election campaign is about the battle between Al Gore and Bill
Bradley for the Democratic nomination and how they are both currently
campaigning as underdogs. "The problem for both Gore and Bradley in the odd
game of chicken they are now playing is that neither will be electable if they
act the underdog for too long," Evans wrote. As a new American citizen, Evans
seems proud to use language that few British readers will understand, as in
this explanation of why Bradley relishes his underdog status: "He has happy
memories of those electric nights with the Knicks when he caught the opposition
napping with a last-second slam dunk."

            The Daily Telegraph fronted
a report from Paris that thousands of fish have been killed in the River Marne
by a surfeit of champagne. The fish, mainly pike, roach, and tench, died when
the residue of grapes from the last pressing was washed into the river by heavy
rains last week.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Heart of Glass

            The New Northwest's distinguishing feature isn't
rain or money or coffee. It's Chihuly . Not "Dale Chihuly." Not "glass
art by Dale Chihuly." Chihuly is all you need to say, whether you're
talking about a particular glass piece ("a Chihuly") or evoking the movement,
the institution, the aesthetic, and the regional identity epitomized by the
Northwest's (and the glass world's) most famous artist. Not since Bernini
decked Rome with fountains, or at least not since the Wyeths became Maine's
official art family, has an artist so exemplified the spirit of a city or
region--and it took three generations of Wyeths. Chihuly's work doesn't say
anything outright about us, but he's the best mirror we've got for divining
what we've come to today.

            A little background, with apologies to anyone who
lives here and already knows it all. Dale Chihuly is the artist/celebrity who
gets most of the credit for elevating glass blowing from one more craft to a
bona fide--and wildly popular and lucrative--art form. He grew up in Tacoma,
Seattle's soporific little-sister city, and headed first back East, and then to
Venice, to study in the emerging studio glass movement. In 1972, on a tree farm
north of Seattle, he founded the Pilchuck Glass School, which made that
movement an institution even as he turned it into an industry.

            Try as we may, we can't
escape the glass Chihuly makes (or rather, has others make): the lurid
"Venetians," writhing "sea forms," and extravagant, candleless "chandeliers"
resembling giant wasps' nests or clusters of water-filled condoms. The loftiest
galleries and living rooms out here have their Chihuly bowls; the crasser
tourist galleries stock copycats. To gain "Seattle credibility," the apartment
set in the sitcom Frasier sprouted one. No new cultural palace or
festival shopping experience is complete without a Chihuly (click if you think
I'm exaggerating). Seattle's new symphony hall boasts two Chihuly
chandeliers.

            Chihuly himself is just as much a fixture as his Chihulys,
especially in of the Seattle Times ' gossip column. (Sample: "While a
tour of the [Chihuly] studio is standard for celebrities, Bono did it one
better. He tried his hand ... at glass blowing.") The Seattle Opera
commissioned a set (in Mylar) from Chihuly. Only Leonardo da Vinci and King Tut
have topped the attendance record set by Chihuly at the Seattle Art Museum. The
first project Paul Allen picked for his new film company was a study of
artists' inspirations, including ... you guessed it. But the ultimate
confirmation of Chihuly's stature is the lottery hometown artists stage to mock
Seattle's star-struck provincialism and celebrity fawning: The winner gets to
"smash a Chihuly."

            But Seattle still lags
behind its erstwhile rival Tacoma in Chihuly-mania. For Tacoma, glass is a last
chance at world stature. Its grandest landmark, the Neo-Baroque Union Station,
has been renovated and reopened as a Chihuly showcase, with the mother of all
chandeliers in its atrium and more big pieces scattered around. This is just
the warm-up to the International Glass Museum (originally the "Chihuly Glass
Center") being built on Tacoma's waterfront, reached by a 474-foot "Chihuly
Bridge of Glass." Tacoma's captains of industry and finance all ponied up for
it. As one of them told the Times , "Every downtown needs a niche."

            Chihuly is the natural choice for Tacoma and not just
because he's a native son. His is the perfect art for boosters, wannabes, new
money, and self-conscious arrivistes . In other words, perfect for the
precociously wealthy, culturally callow New Northwest. Glass has the museum
seal of approval, but it's supremely and (as practiced by Chihuly) almost
purely decorative--blissfully unburdened with threatening, ambiguous, or other
meanings. "You don't have to be smart or art-historically sophisticated to
understand these," a Chihuly's assistant explains in one of several
documentaries on him by Seattle's public TV station. "They're merely
beautiful." Forget Sister Wendy and her gloomy paintings; glass, shimmering and
vacant, is the ideal TV art, a match for Riverdance and the tenors.

            Glass also suits a money-drunk,
technology-intoxicated place like the Northwest. It's showy and luxurious, as
glittery as jewelry and a hundred times bigger. It's hard, slick and,
literally, edgy. At the same time, Chihuly taps an earlier, earthier ecotopic
sensibility. His forms evoke not only phalli and vaginas but sea squirts and
anemones--the marine biosphere that sustained the first Northwesterners, which
we still delude ourselves into thinking we're sustaining. His "baskets" mimic
Native American basketry outright. The implicit, if wishful, message: We can
have our machines and money and preserve the wild, unspoiled
Northwest.

            But beautiful Chihulys
are just part of the Chihuly phenomenon. Chihuly himself is the main show. With
his rampant curls, bluff growl, black eye patch, and bright-colored pirate
shirts and scarves, he's the perfect foil to geek chic, a year-round version of
the "Seafair Pirates" who frolic at our big summer parade--the artist for the
new buccaneer capitalism, the jester who amuses (but never challenges) the
geeks. He reprises the Renaissance role of artist as courtier, standing like a
third senator onstage when President Clinton visits, partying on Paul Allen's
yacht with Robin Williams, Candice Bergen and, of course, Bill and Melinda
Gates. This year, when Gates hosted his annual CEO Summit, the world's most
celebrated gathering of tycoons, who provided the entertainment? The Vienna
Philharmonic and, with "an exhibition of glass-blowing art," Dale Chihuly.

            Not that he blows glass himself, though he still says
things like this, from the 1994 book Chihuly Baskets : "Glass blowing is
a very spontaneous medium, and its suits me. ... I've been at it for thirty
years and am as infatuated as when I blew my first bubble." Chihuly hasn't
actually blown since 1976, when an auto accident cost him an eye and his depth
perception--and made his career. He acquired the trademark dashing eye patch,
without which he'd be just another chubby little guy with frizzy hair. And he
hired other people, including top Italian masters, to blow more glass than he
could alone--enough to make him the Christo of glass, decking Northwest streams
and (you've gotta admire the chutzpah) Venetian canals with bright globes and
tubes.

            The Eye-Patched One has
gone far, and so has this town. How far? Consider the other time, 50 years ago,
that Seattle had a distinctive, defining artistic tradition--and not one but
two celebrity artists. Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and others in the generation
later dubbed "Northwest visionaries" drank deep of both the drizzly, mossy
natural scene and of Asian art and philosophy. Tobey sketched spinach hawkers
and bums at the downtown Pike Place Public Market and was sometimes mistaken
for one. Graves hid out in the deep woods. Tobey painted calligraphic "white
paintings" and Graves bodhisattva birds, in delicate gouache and pastel--media
notably unsuited to large atriums. Today these seem as quaint as hand-bound
books or handwritten letters.

            Chihuly succeeds because he's not a maker of art in
the usual sense; he's a coach, ringmaster, and impresario--and, above all, an
entrepreneur. No one expects entrepreneurs to do the production work. No one
argues anymore over whether Gates is really a techie or worries about Jeff
Bezos' literary taste. And no one cares whether Chihuly blows glass.

            Like Seattle's software, bookselling, and coffee
tycoons, Chihuly has triumphed by marketing and branding the hell out of his
product, elevating it to something at once precious and ubiquitous. The
Northwest trick is not so much to create something out of nothing as making
something very large out of something small, and then repeating the process. A
hundred million PCs, a billion "personalized" book and CD sales, a zillion cups
of coffee ... or hundreds of chandeliers made of brittle blades of glass. Which
is, after all, just melted silicon.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Witch Way Should They Go?

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I read you often and now need advice. My son
and his fiancee are getting married soon, and I have serious questions about
the ceremony. My son is 28 and very successful. His fiancee is 26 and is a very
intelligent, successful woman. They have been together many years, living
together for the last three. The problem is not their relationship, but my son
and his intended are both witches--that's right, witches--and they are having a
"handfasting," a witchcraft wedding ceremony. My wife and I are devout
Catholics, and it seems that going to a pagan ceremony goes against all our
religious beliefs. Even one of the elder priests in our parish said it would be
against God to attend such an event, though a younger priest said as long as we
didn't take part in the ceremony, it would be OK.
            

            
               I know my son
doesn't believe in Satan or evil. He's a very good boy, and I'm proud of him.
He has even allowed me to read the ceremony that will be performed. Actually,
it's just about the most beautiful ceremony I've ever read, but I'm very
confused. Should I possibly go against my faith to support my son by attending
a pagan rite, or should I alienate my son because of my own religious beliefs?
Any advice would be appreciated.
            

            

               --Charles
            

            Dear Cha,

            Oh, my, talk about
dilemmas ... your cauldron runneth over. Prudie, however, feels comfortable
with the assessment of the younger priest, and you should, too. Since you're
not participating in the actual ceremony and found nothing objectionable in the
text, you and your wife should not deny this lovely son your presence. And
Prudie hopes you appreciate the reversed roles in this situation: Usually, it's
the mother-in-law who's the witch.

            
--Prudie, matrimonially

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Your advice to "" struck me as amazing. From
years of corporate bathroom use, the rule among men seems to be nothing spoken
in the "sit-downs," banal comments of the "Hot enough for you?" variety at the
"stand-ups," and pleasant trifles at the washstands.
            

            
               By the way, an old
corporate pro once told me never to discuss anything of importance in a
bathroom or an elevator. I once was in a courthouse elevator with the other
side's counsel, who hadn't yet been introduced to me, who spent the ride down
discussing strategy with his client!
            

            
               --Faithfully,
            

            

               Eyes Front
            

            Dear Eyes,

            Thank you for one of the
better letters inviting Prudie to reconsider. Please read on.

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I enjoy your column
and often think your advice is excellent and daring. Except in the case of
"Wondering, too." I suspect Prudie was napping when she answered that one. I,
myself, not being shy, wouldn't mind a friendly chat while in the office stalls
but many would. Some would feel embarrassed at simply being identified and
addressed in a compromising position. Others would feel tense, and conversation
might interfere with the reason they are there. Not to mention that some people
go there to sit and be quiet and have a small private break. Addressing someone
by name, after identifying them by their shoes while they are sitting on the
commode, seems downright rude to me.
            

            

               --Privacy Please
            

            Dear Pri,

            Prudie has finished her nap and wishes to
acknowledge that the flub-up fairy was visiting her when she answered that
letter. Persuaded by several people, she now wishes to reverse herself and begs
the pardon of anyone who's had to suffer chitchat during a private moment
simply because Prudie said it was OK.

            An interesting sidelight
to bathroom Kremlinology is the men's room tradition articulated in the
preceding letter. Women do not have such a rigid convention, but they weighed
in, as well, with pleas for silence when nature calls.

            
--Prudie, correctively

            

               
                  Prudence,
               
            

            
               I'm 28, and my
boyfriend and I are expecting our first baby in January 2000. My boyfriend's
mother is terribly embarrassed by the fact that we are not married. (But we've
been living together for two and a half years.) I was brought up with the
values that you got engaged, got married, and then started a family. For some
reason, I was blessed with this baby much sooner than planned. What can I say
or do to convey to my boyfriend's mother that this is a blessing and not a
tragic event? Please help. Thank you very much.
            

            

               --Confused
            

            Dear Con,

            For one thing, you can tell your boyfriend's mother
that the baby is on time; the wedding is late. (Was this woman, by any chance,
a member of Congress when they decided that Ingrid Bergman should be kept out
of the country? If you have no idea what Prudie is talking about, ask your
parents.)

            In any case, your
attitude about the blessed event is most pleasing, and your relationship sounds
solid. To assuage social convention, however, and to validate Prudie's
suggested retort, perhaps you and the father-to-be might consider legally tying
the knot ... and perhaps before the little bundle of joy requires a sitter.

            
--Prudie, expectantly

            
               
                  Dear
Prude,
               
            

            
               I was ensconced in a
manly game of collegiate football-watching when I overheard the womenfolk
discussing proper breast-feeding etiquette. When asked, I indicated that as
long as the breast is hidden under a blanket with the child, I don't mind.
However, when a woman goes "National Geographic" and everything is out in the
open, I feel a bit squeamish. There was no consensus amongst the men (one
turned up the volume on the game so he didn't have to deal with the whole
thing). The women were mixed in their opinions. So what is appropriate when
breast- feeding in public? Thanks.
            

            

               --~jeff
            

            Dear ~jef,

            Though there is
disagreement on the subject, good sense and good taste would seem to dictate
that this perfectly normal function can be carried out in public with as little
obviousness as is feasible. Prudie is not sure about a total blanket tent for
both baby and breast, but an attempt at decorous draping would seem the thing
to strive for.

            --Prudie, discreetly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Road to Beverly Hills

            Hays, Kan.; Wednesday,
Oct. 6, 1999

            Last night was not the best.

            As part of her ongoing I-am-not-a-princess
campaign, E has been claiming she wants to stay at motels that cost $29.95. I
have resisted so far. Last night we picked out a nice-looking $62.95
establishment that shall remain nameless (for reasons that will become
obvious). We were heading up to our room when the pleasant, Midwestern clerk
said, "Oh, one thing: If you turn on the heater, the smoke alarm will go off."
Since it was a cold night, this had a slight Monty Pythonesque quality--"Should
a man come into your room and hit you over the head with a hammer, pay no
mind!" We imprudently forged ahead and settled into our room (we're sharing,
though as part of my "hands-off' "policy--see below--I always ask for two
beds). After a couple of hours of sleep, E turned on the light, and announced
"I'm not feeling well." Indeed, she was feverish, and large red welts had
appeared all over her body. I rushed her to the local emergency room. The
doctor's diagnosis: The sheets had poisoned her. The doctor explained this was
not uncommon (apparently the detergent used by some motels can cause an
allergic reaction) and sent her home with three different prescriptions, which
returned her skin to its previous lustrous condition but rendered her
semi-comatose.

            This incident decisively ended the
I-am-not-a-princess campaign, which quite frankly wasn't working anyway.
Note to E : I see where you have called me a hypochondriac in your
earlier entry ... But I don't have to be taken to the hospital if my thread
count falls below 250.

            To be fair, E has (until last night) required less
maintenance than expected. Her morning beauty routine is minimal to
nonexistent. She just jumps into the shower and puts her wet hair back into a
ponytail, which emphasizes her deceptively childlike appearance, and makes me
feel slightly Humbertish at check-in time. (It doesn't help when I ask for two
beds.)

            Some non-E-related points:

            
               Trends noticed in America's Heartland: 1)
Skyline improvement. Postmodernism may have worn out its welcome, but it has
certainly made cities look better from a distance. Louisville, St. Louis,
Kansas City--all now have a fabulous, turreted, Oz-like appearance. 2) More
hitchhikers than there were a few years ago. 3) The Lindy Hop (whatever that
is). 4) Peter Frampton Revival!

            
               Favorite Billboard: "Monks? Yes!
1-800-Me-a-Monk"

            
               The Tipper Principle: By June 2000, I
predict, we will all hate Tipper Gore. This is not because she is particularly
unlikable. To the contrary--it's precisely because she is likable that
her husband's handlers will stick her in our faces until we can't stand the
sight of her. This now appears to be an ineluctable law of modern politics: All
first ladies become unpopular. If they're unpopular to begin with, the law is
satisfied ab initio . If they are popular to begin with, they will be
overexposed until they aren't. Ernestine Bradley is next.

            Back to E: I do think I may have scored some points
with my protective response during the Princess and the Pea episode. In
general, my Darwinian strategy is to take no overt romantic actions, in keeping
with the founding lie of this journey. Make her wonder why I'm not
hitting on her.

            She hasn't made any moves on me either. Perhaps
she's trying the same approach.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 310: &quot;Insight Out&quot;

            
               "I'm saying we
really do have to recognize that it's going to be difficult and take a while
for people to get this stuff," says Professor Shoshanna Sofaer of Baruch
College, an adviser to the federal government. "And for a significant
percentage, they're never going to get it because they're cognitively impaired,
they're too frail, or they just don't have the energy to invest in
understanding these things." Who's never going to understand what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's
Question (No. 309)--"Lost in Translation":
            

            

               
                  " 'EIN Nod: Bodlonrwydd Llwyr I Gwsmeriaid' is not the
snappiest slogan to those who speak no Welsh. Yet the banner inside General
Electric's aero-engine servicing department in South Wales--'_____________'--is
a fair approximation of what GE has been up to in Nantgarw since it bought the
business from British Airways in 1991." 
                  Fill in the blank in
this lead from the Economist by translating that slogan from Welsh to
English. (Question courtesy of Andrew Solovay.)
                  
               
            

            "A
note: We apologize for Suddenly Susan ."-- Mac Thomason
            

            
"Working in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism under the party's tutelage to
achieve the Four Modernizations."-- David Lofquist ( Shany Mor had
a similar answer.)

            "Kill
All the Fish and Blame Somebody Else."-- Dave Gaffen
            

            "No
scrubs: A scrub is a guy who can't get no love from me."-- Dennis
Cass
            

            "Our
Goal: A Low-Wage Workforce Without the Brown People."-- Matthew
Heimer
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Anecdotal
Wrap-Up
            

            Before GE bought NBC, just outside each bank of
elevators at 30 Rockefeller Center was a direction sign listing each employee
who worked on that floor. It was exciting, albeit in a slightly childish way,
to see your name on that signboard, confirming that you still had your cushy
job in this historic broadcasting center. And the signs made it easier for
visitors to find their way around. After the takeover, one of the first hints
of the new corporate culture was the removal of all those convenient signs,
and--so the rumor went--the firing of the guy whose job it was to keep them up
to date. As he went from floor to floor removing the signs, did he realize what
was going to happen after he'd taken down the final one?

            A little while later,
the "RCA Building" sign that had been on 30 Rock since its construction was
replaced with one reading "GE Building," completing the eradication of the
individual employee and the rewriting of architectural history. Isn't this the
sort of thing we used to detest when the Soviets did it? That, and replacing
all the hall lighting with 40-watt bulbs and MIRV missiles?

            
               Total Electric
Answer
            

            "Our Goal: Total Customer Satisfaction"

            Says the Economist , the popular business
fanzine: "GE tops most polls as the world's most-admired company. This year it
may become the first firm to rack up net profits of $10 billion." Most people
still associate GE with making things. (And with mass firings, polluting the
Hudson, busting unions, scary nuclear power plants, scarier defense
contracting, and scariest NBC twaddle-- Ed. ) In 1980, manufacturing
provided 85 percent of the group's profits; now three-quarters come from
services. Around half of that comes from its two "pure" service arms, GE
Capital, which alone provides about 40 percent of its profits, and NBC. (But
even as a service provider, GE will always be known for mass firings, polluting
the Hudson, busting unions, scary nuclear power plants, scarier defense
contracting, and scariest NBC twaddle.-- Ed. )

            In addition to its shift from manufacturing to
service, GE is changing from an American company into a truly international
operation. Again, the Economist : "GE has redoubled attempts to pass
business to cheap hands and cheap minds. If you live in Texas and get a strange
voice asking why your credit-card payment is late, it is probably because the
call is coming from India (the operators assume western names and reportedly
pick up the twang of the region they cover)."

            Servicing aircraft
engines in Wales embodies both these aspects of GE's new philosophy. No wonder
they're so admired. By the Economist . The popular business fanzine not
known for its nude CEO centerfolds.

            
               Anecdotal Extra
No. 1: Ooh, It's the New Norma Kamalis, Your Grace
            

            When I called to renew
my New Yorker subscription, I asked the operator if she could offer me a
bargain. "Are you a priest?" she asked. A special low rate is listed for
priests but not for the clergy of any other faith. Presumably, Condé Nast is
courting Catholic clerics (coveted by advertisers?). "It's true at
Vogue , too," she said. "And if you're a bishop or above, we'll actually
pay you to subscribe to Mademoiselle ," she did not add.

            
               Anecdotal Extra
No. 2: Why John McCain Will Never Be President
            

            "John McC. was on my US
Airways flight from Orlando to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport this
morning. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact. He pressed no flesh. He
was widely recognized, but it appeared he did not wish to be seen. Was it
because he was flying economy class? Because of his Mickey Mouse-logo polo
shirt? Did he pay for it, or was it baksheesh? Face it: He just doesn't seem
hungry."-- Leslie Goodman-Malamuth
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            A demigod walks (or rides around in a limo) among
us, and his name is Jack Welch.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Indonesia Still on the Fence

            The
Jakarta
Post led Wednesday with a pledge by the Indonesian military to support
the U.N. peacekeeping force in East Timor. Military spokesman Maj. Gen.
Sudrajat told opponents of the force that Indonesia should accept it to avoid
international condemnation. But in an opinion piece, Makmur Keliat, a lecturer in international
relations at the University of Indonesia, said the Indonesian government still
seems to be playing for time and that its acceptance of the force does not mean
it will recognize East Timorese independence.

            In
Australia, which is to lead the peacekeeping force, the Sydney Morning Herald said,
by contrast, that Australia intends "to respect the will of the East Timorese
people and their clearly stated choice of freedom." It said in an editorial, "Indonesia stands shamed before the world for its
armed forces' encouragement of, and participation in, the killings and
destruction in East Timor." The paper led its front page on the U.N. Security
Council authorizing its peacekeepers "to use all force necessary" to rein in
the East Timor militias.

            In
Britain, the Times of London led Wednesday with a disclosure that 130
million pounds (some $210 million) in public money has been spent within the
past year to help Indonesia buy British Hawk fighters. The Guardian front-paged
the news that British Trade Secretary Stephen Byers overruled Treasury
officials by allowing financial help to Indonesia only weeks before militias
started massacring people in East Timor: A $1.1 million loan helped Indonesia
buy British engineering products. The government is already under attack from
the left wing of the Labor Party for breaching its own much-vaunted "ethical"
foreign policy in its relations with Indonesia.

            In
Russia, where terrorist bombs have killed more than 200 people in the past
week, Izvestiya said that strongman Gen. Aleksander Lebed, a former
presidential candidate, is hoping to take power as acting prime minister if
President Boris Yeltsin loses office. It said he appears to have the support of
Boris Berezovsky, the financial and media tycoon, who recently visited Lebed in
Krasnoyarsk, where he is regional governor. "Apparently, Berezovsky holds the
opinion that Lebed is capable of coping with the chaos in the country," the
paper said, adding that "many American congressmen hoped that Lebed would be a
future president of Russia." Reporting on the tightening of security following
the Moscow bombs, Rossiskaya Gazeta said Wednesday that 24,000 personnel
had checked 26,560 apartments, 180 hotels, and 415 hostels and dormitories
during the previous 24 hours.

            The
Times of London, in an editorial expressing "heartfelt sympathy" for the
people of Moscow--and also for the Russian administration "lumbered with yet
another crisis"--warned, nevertheless, against an abuse of power. It said there
is no need for a further law on full emergency rule, "nor should Moscow police
fall prey to the traditional temptation to arrest every dark-skinned man in the
capital." The editorial concluded: "A survey this week shows that fewer than 6
per cent of Muscovites want a draconian state of emergency. Russia's leaders
must heed their wishes and refrain from going too far." In India, the
Hindu said in
an editorial Wednesday that U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen's offer to
help Russia fight terrorism is "a cheering indication of how close the two
world powers have come since the end of the Cold War less than a decade
ago."

            In
Japan, Mainichi Shimbun said that North Korea's agreement with the
United States this week to suspend plans for further test-firing of long-range
missiles "by no means constitutes a fundamental solution to the North Korean
missile problem." Noting that North Korea hadn't agreed to refrain from
missile-launching in the future, the paper said Wednesday in an editorial that Japan shouldn't lift economic sanctions against
the country until it has. Asahi
Shimbun 's editorial was about parents killing their children to claim
insurance money. There have been six such murders in the past 15 years, four by
fathers and two by mothers, it said. "The lamentable moral degradation that
leads some people to exchange human lives for money has its roots in our
materialistic society, characterized by badly swollen egos," the paper claimed.
In London, the Financial
Times ran an editorial sharply criticizing Japan for letting the yen
strengthen "dangerously" against the U.S. dollar. It called on the Bank of
Japan "to act decisively, now," and asked, "Why on earth does the Bank not buy
the dollars itself, allowing the domestic money supply to expand in the
process?"

            The
South China Morning
Post called on Hong Kong "to think hard and decide slowly" before
starting a gambling casino in the territory. "The goal is to offer something
quite different from the rather tawdry centres of Macau," it said Wednesday in
an editorial. "The model is Las Vegas. There, some of the
world's most pretentious and absurd architecture beckons visitors from around
the world to see such sights as in-house acrobats or an art museum, a battle of
full-size pirate ships, or to tour an ersatz Paris, Egypt or other improbable
replication. Near such fantasies, of course, the casinos' main line of business
always beckons, ready to extract huge sums from the unwary." The paper noted
the findings of the United States National Gambling Impact Study Commission:
that while gambling produced $34 billion in government revenues and created
some 700,000 jobs, it also cost Americans $50 billion last year. "Three million
people suffer from pathological gambling addiction, causing costly social
problems, especially for the poor and the young," it added.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Cooling off in Kashmir

            The
Guardian of
London claimed Monday that an ecological catastrophe "far worse"
than the Exxon Valdez accident 10 years ago could happen in Alaska "at
any moment." Six "senior employees" of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System wrote
to Sir John Browne, the chief executive of BP Amoco, and to three U.S.
congressmen, warning of an imminent threat to human life and the Alaskan
environment from irresponsible oil operations there, the paper said in its main
front-page story. BP Amoco owns 50 percent of Alyeska, the company that
operates both the pipeline and the Valdez oil terminal near where the huge
tanker Exxon Valdez crashed on a reef in 1989, spewing millions of
gallons of heavy crude into Prince William Sound. (Alyeska's other biggest
shareholders are Exxon and Arco.) The unnamed whistle-blowers included evidence
in their letter of compliance failures, falsified safety and inspection
records, intimidation of workers, and persistent violations of procedures and
government regulations, the Guardian reported. Top Alyeska executives
allegedly instructed middle managers to "disregard and/or circumvent"
compliance manuals and codes of conduct and to "tone down, alter or delete
negative reports, including internal audits and surveillance reports."

            While
Indian newspapers reported Monday that Pakistani-backed Muslim guerrillas have
started pulling out of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir--a development
described by the Hindu as
"a dramatic victory" for India and a "total military rout" for Pakistan--the
Pakistani daily Dawn
led Monday on planned protests by Islamic militants against the
withdrawal. As Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif prepared to defend the
withdrawl in a national broadcast, the paper said several mujahideen groups and
the opposition Jamaat-i-Islami Party announced that anti-government
demonstrations would be held in the Punjabi capital Lahore and in the port city
of Karachi. Sharif is planning to argue that the withdrawal is justified by his
winning unprecedented U.S. backing for new Indo-Pakistani talks to end the
52-year-old deadlock over Kashmir. But Dawn said
that "persistent Indian rejection of anything it sees as third-party mediation
might undermine his assertion that President Bill Clinton's pledge to take a
personal interest in the row might yield progress."

            
Indeed, the Hindu reiterated Monday in an editorial that India must resist
third-party intervention. "The country must move to put bilateral relations
back on the rails--and obviate the need for third parties," it said. "There is
no alternative but to seriously engage in bilateral discussions with
Islamabad." In another Indian editorial,
the Times of
India said that while "Pakistan's fifth attempt at aggression against
India" has ended, like all previous ones, "in ignominious defeat," its leaders
are "in the process of trying to proclaim victory once again." To counter this,
India should compile a detailed list of the Pakistani soldiers killed in the
fighting and publish it in the media and on the Internet. The people of
Pakistan must realize the extent of Pakistani casualties in the conflict, it
said. To sustain the myth that only unsupported mujahideen guerrillas were
involved, "Pakistani officers and soldiers killed in combat have been disowned
by their generals, their services unacknowledged; even a decent burial has been
denied them," the paper said. "A nation which repudiates its war dead will have
little credibility among its own people."

            

               Dawn 's editorial Monday was devoted not to the Kashmir crisis but to the
safer subject of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It expressed misgivings about
a statement in Cairo by new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that he wanted to
modify parts of the Wye agreement. His predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu has done
"incalculable damage to the peace process" by throwing Israel's commitment to
international treaties into doubt, the paper said. "Now it is Mr Barak's duty
to correct that image and prove to the world that agreements signed by a
previous Israeli government are not considered mere scraps of paper by a
succeeding Israeli administration and that every Israeli government has the
duty and international obligation to honor treaties signed by its
predecessors."

            The
Israeli press, by contrast, was generally upbeat about peace prospects
following Sunday's meeting between Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat,
who referred to him afterward as his "friend and partner." Ha'aretz reported
that discussions on the Wye agreement would begin in about 10 days' time, after
Barak has visited President Clinton in Washington. Quoting diplomatic sources,
the paper said Barak would present Clinton with a detailed negotiating plan
that includes a Middle East tour by Madeleine Albright during the first week in
August. The plan would culminate at the end of the year in a
Barak-Clinton-Arafat summit to declare an "agreed framework for the permanent
settlement" or, failing that, a declaration of principles outlining the steps
toward a settlement. In an editorial, Ha'aretz urged Barak to help to
create a new atmosphere of trust by unilaterally dismantling the outposts
illegally established by Israelis on hilltops outside existing West Bank
settlements in "a wild, catch-as-catch-can land grab" during the run-up to the
Wye agreement.

            In
Germany, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung led its front page Monday with the wave of student
demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, which were also prominently reported in many
other leading European newspapers. An analysis in the Financial Times of London said
that the protests reflect mounting frustration among Iran's students and many
ordinary citizens at the lack of progress in implementing President Mohammed
Khatami's reforms because of opposition by the conservative clerical
authorities. It noted the disproportionate influence of Iran's 1 million
university students in a country of some 62 million where more than 60 percent
are under 25 years old. The paper claimed that while popular indignation with
the conservative clerical authorities was running high, support for Khatami
remained solid.

            Both
the Straits
Times of Sinapore and the Guardian of London ran editorials
Monday urging the United States to be more sensitive toward Russia or risk
another Cold War. "Russia means to be taken seriously, and the US owes it that
respect," the Straits Times said. "American cockiness over its display of military technology
in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, and smugness over its longest post-war prosperity
streak, can blind it to a need to cultivate its relations with Russia beyond
promoting democratisation. Russians cannot eat democracy. The US should snap
out of its hubris over Kosovo--or the world could become very dark indeed if
Russian hurt turns to mischief-making." The Guardian said that "Russia's
anger over NATO's recent actions in the Balkans is in many ways justified and
since it is not understood, is the more likely to have broad, negative
consequences for the West's dealings with Boris Yeltsin and, more particularly,
his successors."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 304: &quot;Hee, Hee, Hee&quot;

            
               You give the lead,
I give the headline from Wednesday's London Mirror : "He's Huge, He's
Powerful, He's Fast and He's Mean."
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question (No.
303)--"Decline and Fall":
            

            

               "That was a miserable year, when I watched a great man, a man I love
more than life--you know, one of the really fundamentally solid, decent
people--go from 92 to 38 in a very quick period of time." Who watched whom go
from 92 to 38 what?
            

            "Donny
Osmond, on a good Mormon friend's year of 54 divorces."-- Tim Carvell
            

            
"Former Chief Eunuch Li Ming on Emperor Pu-Yi's approval rating in 1911. Damn
that infernal Sun Yat-Sen."-- David Lofquist
            

            
"Gregory Peck about Charlton Heston's moving up the list of Hollywood's
All-Time Assholes."-- Marshall Efron
            

            "I
don't know, but in the metric system he would have gone from 100 to 10: Now,
really, isn't that a lot easier?"-- Floyd Elliot
            

            
"During his father's primary campaign, George W. Bush watched Pat Buchanan go
from 1992 to 1938, the heyday of Father Coughlin, dragging the Republican Party
with him. Now the party is trying to prevent him from jumping ship. Just
because you're repositioning yourself as compassionate, doesn't mean you want
to lose the wacko vote altogether."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            If Microsoft does
succeed in its takeover of Mattel, an unlikely event given that no such talks
are in progress or even contemplated, these News Quiz Action Figures will be
hitting Toys "R" Us just in time for some annual event traditionally cheapened
by ritualized gift-giving stripped of any genuine feeling. You know, for the
kids.

            

               Reagan, the senile old fool

               Quayle, the self-deceiving, middle-aged dunce

               Clinton, the horny hillbilly, and what a liar!

               Dole, the foxy grampaw--how comical are the erections of his withered old
penis!

               Madonna, the indiscriminate erotic glutton; how often she has sex!

               Thurmond, the 1,000-year-old man who still owns slaves

               Flockhart, the brittle underweight neurotic, yet still somehow appealing,
in a tense yet vulnerable way

            

            Enjoy their adventures
every week on C-SPANimation Saturday.

            
               Poll-Tested
Answer
            

            George W. Bush endured a
dark night of the soul when he watched his father's approval rating fall from
92 to 38.

            
               Beating a Dead Fish
Follow-Up
            

            "Most trout fishermen practice 'catch and release,'
although it is true that some still catch and eat. Barbaric isn't it? Almost as
bad as running cows down a chute and hammering their brains out."-- Brad
Spencer
            

            (Actually, for my
weekend recreation, I practice "run them down a chute and hammer their brains
out and release." Right into my neighbor's yard. Suckers!-- Ed .)

            
               Publishing Notes
Extra
            

            The cover of the new Paladin Press catalog (Vol.
29, No. 5, September) features this notice: "WARNING: Paladin Press does not
intend that any of the information contained in its books or videos be used for
criminal purposes. In specific cases involving such misuse, Paladin will
cooperate with law enforcement investigations."

            I believe a similar notice appears on the current
Knopf catalog.

            Just inside, on Page 3, is this announcement:
"EXPLOSIVE BOOKS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. In light of the current political and
legal climate in this country, we have concluded that it is no longer feasible
to publish or sell certain titles on explosives, demolitions, improvised
weaponry, and self-defense, or anything by that quirky but lovable Anne
Tyler."

            "We didn't really
include the Anne Tyler crack," they would have added, if they had a sense of
humor and, you know, added things.

            
               Clarification
            

            The Hard Rock Cafe does
not serve its customers poorly prepared food made with inferior ingredients;
the Hard Rock Cafe has no customers.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Bob Dole/Viagra, same as every other quiz.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 259: &quot;Even Educated Fleas Do It&quot;

            
               Millions of
retirees and middle-aged women do it, and officials say that's fine, as long as
they do it for "health purposes" and not to "promote superstition, spread
rumors, engage in sedition, destroy social order or hold mass assemblies." Do
what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 258)--"Swiss Dis":
            

            

               Fill in the blank as Christian Levrat assesses Sunday's referendum on
asylum-seekers: "There is a side to Switzerland that is very generous, giving
millions to refugees, and a stricter side that wants to make sure that people
coming in are not ____________."
            

            "Er,
litigious."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            "Under
17, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian."-- Paul Tullis
            

            
"Planning to stay past the weekend."-- Katha Pollitt ( Matthew
Singer , Herb Terns , Dan Simon , and Ethan Underwood had
similar answers.)

            
"Fugitive rape suspects whose parents are bankrolling their ski trips. That was
embarrassing last time."-- Matt Sullivan
            

            "Going
to upset our delicate multicultural balance."-- Matthew Singer
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Three things we know about the Swiss.

            First, they're boring, in a cheese and chocolate
way that makes the country a lovely place to massage your money. Everyone
(especially Brent Curtis) knows what Harry Lime says in The Third Man :
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of
democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

            Second, they're a refuge, said Tom Stoppard, in
Travesties --Zurich, World War I, home to Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara: "Oh,
Switzerland!--unfurled like a white flag, pacific civilian Switzerland--the
miraculous neutrality of it, the non-combatant impartiality of it, the
non-aggression pacts of it, the international red cross of it--entente to the
left, détente to the right, into the valley of the invalided blundered and
wandered myself when young--Carr of the Consulate!"

            Of course Carr was quite dotty, and neutral does
not mean pacific, as John McPhee makes clear in La Place de la Concorde
Suisse , his book on the Swiss army, our third bit of alpine lore: Their
armed neutrality includes universal military training. Every family has a gun,
and none of your sissy American pistols; these are assault rifles. The Israeli
defense forces are based on the Swiss model, the hedgehog, designed to extract
a high price from any invader--artillery presighted on every important bridge,
shelter space for every citizen and cow, cool Saab fighter planes whose pilots
train to take off from highways.

            Four things--those
red-handled multi-blade ... five ... five things--the Swatch. And the sixth
thing we know--the Alps. Numbered bank accounts would be seven.

            
               Neutral
Answer
            

            The Swiss want to make sure people coming in are
not abusing the law.
            

            More than 70 percent of Swiss voters approved
tougher rules restricting asylum-seekers and rejected a proposal for maternity
leave, presumably concerned that some incoming baby might abuse the law.

            The new law limits refugees' rights to appeal
individual persecution, and it speeds up the process of ejecting those without
identity papers.

            Although Swiss law requires new mothers to take an
eight-week leave, the Swiss have rejected financial assistance for mothers four
times since the maternity leave law was enacted in 1945.

            Levrat works for an
organization called Aid to Refugees.

            
               Gina Duclayan's
Dissent
            

            I beg to differ, Randy!
One of the favorite movies of my youth, a Tony Randall and Richard Dreyfus
vehicle called Sub a Dub Dub , a k a Hello Down There , features
the amusing antics of a researcher and his family and friends in their undersea
lab-home. Or perhaps you consider this movie to be evidence for your statement,
not against it? Pshaw!

            
               Matthew Singer's
Savvy Traveler
            

            You will recall that
John Calvin, the granddaddy of fundamentalist Protestant preachers, founded his
theocracy in Geneva, Switzerland. This has left more of a mark than you might
expect. A North American friend of mine was driving from Lyon to Geneva. A few
miles after he crossed the border, his little boy asked, "Dad, what happened to
all of the billboards with naked ladies on them?" It was an acute observation:
The prudish Swiss countryside did indeed lack for any of the casual skin that
covers France.

            
               Misplaced
Modifiers Extra
            

            Which of these
adjectives appear in a New York Times piece describing George W. Bush at
his first New Hampshire campaign appearance, and which are from the World
Book Encyclopedia (1960) article on the beaver?

            

               hard-working

               useful

               personable

               adorable

               charismatic

               interesting

               vague

               intelligent

               fuzzy

               thickset

            

            
               Answers
            

            Bush: personable, adorable, charismatic, vague,
fuzzy.

            Beaver: hard-working, useful, interesting,
intelligent, thickset.

            The choice is yours. See
you at the polls in November.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Jews.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Grade Expectations

            Next month, college students around the country
will return to campus, hoping, among other things, to achieve high grades. Of
course, "high" is a moving target. I remember when C meant "average"; today,
whenever I turn in my students' final grades, the dean's office instructs me to
treat C as the "minimum acceptable grade." This side of Lake Wobegon, we call
that grade inflation.

            It's a cliché that when grades are inflated they
convey less information. The cliché is only half true. On the one hand,
inflated grades fail to distinguish between the merely above-average and the
truly superior. But on the other hand, inflated grades do a super job of
distinguishing among fine gradations of weakness. When the average grade is B,
the strong students are all lumped together with A's, while the weak ones are
sorted into C's, D's, and F's.

            That's still a net loss
in valuable information, because employers care more about making distinctions
at the top than about making distinctions at the bottom. Therefore, college
degrees, which derive their value from the information they carry, become less
valuable on average. Here's a quick example: Mary the A student is worth
$40,000 to an employer and Jane the B student is worth $30,000; if grade
inflation makes it impossible to tell them apart, you might expect an employer
to offer them $35,000 apiece. But the inability to distinguish Mary from Jane
makes it harder to assign them to appropriate tasks. That lowers their average
value to, say, $32,000, which is what they both get paid. Jane wins and Mary
loses, but Mary's loss exceeds Jane's gain.

            Does that mean that above-average students should object to
grade inflation? Not necessarily, because students do not live by starting
salaries alone. There are advantages to living with less competitive pressure,
and those advantages could more than offset the financial losses.

            Besides, students don't
bear the full burden of those financial losses. As degrees become less
valuable, colleges must cut tuition or lose enrollments. (Or, more precisely,
they must sacrifice some growth in tuition or in enrollments, both of which
have been rising for reasons that have nothing to do with grade inflation.) A
college that can distinguish itself from the pack by maintaining high standards
should be able to reap substantial rewards in the marketplace, because its
degrees are worth more.

            If colleges pay the price for grade inflation, why do they
allow it? Partly, it's because colleges don't assign grades. Professors assign
grades, and professors face perverse incentives. Being human, they tend to take
a special interest in their own students and are therefore tempted to give
those students a boost at the expense of the anonymous strangers who signed up
for someone else's class. Besides, easy graders are more popular on campus. The
costs of leniency--measured in lost reputation--are spread over the entire
school, while the benefits are concentrated in the professor's own classroom.
Therefore the professor is biased toward leniency.

            The problem, then, is in
the gap between the professor's interests and the college's. Any solution must
involve narrowing that gap. That's where tenure comes in. An untenured
professor is like a corporate bondholder--as long as the institution stays
above water in the short run he's happy. A tenured professor is like a
corporate stockholder--he has a permanent stake in the fortunes of the
institution. Professors should have job security for the same reason Alan
Greenspan should have job security: It instills a healthy respect for the long
run.

            According to a widespread belief, grade inflation took off
during the Vietnam War era, in response to the idiosyncrasies of the Selective
Service System. According to an equally widespread belief, the late '60s and
early '70s were also a time when tenure became far more elusive. Professors
began moving from one school to another every few years, with little reason to
care about the reputational damage they left in their wakes. So perhaps the war
was irrelevant; grade inflation was the inevitable consequence of upheaval in
the tenure system.

            But tenure is at best a
partial solution to the incentive problem, because even a tenured professor
shares only a fraction of his institution's successes and failures. Let me
propose some improvements. First, college transcripts could show each
professor's overall grade distribution, allowing employers to interpret each
individual grade in context. Then, instead of damaging his colleagues'
credibility, the easy grader would damage only his own. Second, the dean's
office could assign each professor a "grade budget" consisting of a certain
number of A's, B's, etc. Once you've awarded, say, 10 A's, you can't award any
more till next year. (To cover extraordinary circumstances, I'd be willing to
allow horse-trading among professors--three A's for five B's, say--and perhaps
occasional borrowing against next year's budget.)

            A grade budget is not exactly the same thing as a mandatory
curve, because it would allow professors the flexibility to give more high
grades in one class if they're willing to give fewer in another. Still, every
now and then, a professor would have four genuine A students and only three A's
to give out. One of those students would suffer unjustly. But the A students
are precisely the ones who suffer unjustly from grade inflation. The question
is not how to eliminate injustice--which is, as always, impossible--but how to
minimize it.

            For the individual professor, a grade budget is a
stifling constraint. That doesn't make it a bad thing. Economic theory tells us
that when everyone is polluting a communal stream, everyone can benefit from
enforced moderation. It always hurts to be constrained, but sometimes it's
worth it if your neighbors are constrained too. With grade budgets, professors
would be forced to give fewer A's, but the A's they gave would be more
valuable.

            If grade budgets are such a good idea, why don't we
have them? That's a question about politics, not economics, so maybe it's best
directed to a different sort of expert. In cases like this, it's the
economist's job to explain where we ought to be headed, and the political
scientist's job to explain why we can't get there from here.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Happy 50<SUP>th</SUP> Birthday--Hope You Die Soon</SPAN>

             

            

               
                  New
                
               
                  Republic , Oct. 11
            

            The
cover story rues the 50 th anniversary of
the Chinese revolution. The expected horrors are invoked: the Cultural
Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the continuing anti-religious brutality of
the Communist Party. ... As world population reaches 6 billion, an
editorial calls for more investment in international
family planning. Encouraging smaller family size will boost economic progress
in the developing nations whose populations are still exploding.

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Oct. 1
            

            The
cover editorial reiterates the magazine's frequent
warnings that the American economy is overheated. Rising consumer debt is a bad
sign. Weak commodity demand and a strong dollar are staving off inflation, but
the Fed should pre-emptively raise interest rates before the bubble bursts.
... An article remarks on South Africa's attempt to market
itself to libertine tourists. Apartheid-era South Africa repressed homosexuals
and suppressed the sex trade. Now Cape Town promotes itself as a gay-friendly
city and welcomes sex tourists.

            
               
                  
George
               
               , October 1999
            

            The
hagiographic John Kennedy Jr. tribute issue includes excerpts of his writing,
portraits of him with his interviewees, and an over-the-top photo of him bathed
in golden light. The issue is stuffed with tribute ads, including shoemaker
Kenneth Cole's: "How do we follow in his footsteps?" ... A countdown of
the century's 100 great political moments includes dubious picks, such as the
Brooklyn Dodgers' relocation to Los Angeles, and predictable ones: D-Day is No.
2 and Franklin Roosevelt's election is No. 1

            

               
                  Rolling
                
               
                  Stone , Oct. 14
            

            A
sympathetic profile of Bill Bradley concludes that he is more sincere and more
dignified than other politicians. For instance, Bradley refuses to offer
regrets for past drug use and does not coo-coo at infants. (
                  Slate
               
offers a less rosy view of Bradley's .) ... A biting narrative exposes
life at an Ohio State sorority. Despite paeans to sisterhood and philanthropy,
girls join sororities to binge-drink, hook up, and pursue their Mrs. degree.
(For another insider view, read 
                  Slate
               's sorority girl ".")

            

               
                  New
               
               
                  York Times Magazine , Sept. 26
            

            An
article describes the newest missile defense scheme--75-miles-per-minute space
cannonballs. "Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles" orbiting Earth would be programmed
to collide with warheads. First step: Build the prototype. ... The cover
essay reflects on hate, describing it as a personal psychological reaction to
idiosyncratic experience. It cannot be outlawed. We can only overcome hate by
refusing to give haters the attention they crave.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , Sept. 27
            

            The
cover package tweaks second-wave Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs--business-school grads lured by lucre rather than a passion for
the Web. ... Yet another startup saga sketches how a 27-year-old M.B.A. student
developed a Web-business idea: He set up a site, which uses an algorithm to
tell guys where to take a date, by convincing venture capitalists to front
money, hiring tech experts to write code, working 17-hour days, and bedecking
his offices with inspirational quotes. ... An article alleges that envoys from the Bush campaign have
pressured Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura to obstruct Pat Buchanan's run for the
Reform Party nomination. Donald Trump is the preferred roadblock, because his
candidacy could attract Democratic supporters.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               
                  , Sept. 29
            

            Fetal
programming determines adult health, according to the cover story . Studies show that low birth-weight babies may
have a high risk of developing diabetes, and prenatal trauma can impede brain
development. The link between womb conditions and adult health undermines
studies that suggest disease has genetic roots. ... An article warns that Hurricane Floyd might be dwarfed by future
storms. The past 30 years of meteorological quiescence is giving way to a
period of hyperhurricanes because of a change in oceanic conditions and global
warming. (According to "," the British press blamed Floyd on excessive U.S.
consumption.)

            

               
                  U.S.
                
               
                  News & World Report , Sept.
27
            

            The
cover excerpt provides a reverent portrait of Pope John Paul
II. The pontiff is credited with inspiring the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe, persuading liberal democracies that freedom must be girded by public
morality, and opening a dialogue with other religious leaders. (Click for a

                  Slate
                "Assessment" of the pope.) ... An article probes George W. Bush's vulnerability on the firearms
issue. Bush's pro-gun positions (he barred the prosecution of people who bring
guns to churches that don't specifically forbid arms-toting) might hurt him in
a nationwide election. ... A profile marvels at the campaign-trail candor of Sen. John
McCain. He recalls his Vietnamese captors as "goddamn gooks," tells gay jokes,
and reminds reporters that he once called Chelsea Clinton ugly.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  New Yorker , Sept. 27
            

            An
essay bewails the absence of "political pizzazz" in presidential campaigning.
Since the electorate is relatively sanguine, the candidates are relatively
lethargic. The public longs for a deft campaigner who doesn't seem prepackaged.
... A profile praises Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's efforts to heal his country, as he struggles to overcome
lymphatic cancer. Colombia's most-beloved figure convinced his friend Fidel
Castro to push leftist guerrillas toward the peace table and convinced the
United States that Cuba's hidden hand was necessary.

            

               
                  Weekly
                
               
                  Standard , Sept. 27
            

            An
editorial skewers Pat Buchanan for betrayal. Buchanan is
shoe-horning himself into the Reform Party solely because of its eligibility
for $13 million in matching funds. If Buchanan bolts, Republicans will have a
golden opportunity to define themselves against Pat's brand of pitchfork
conservatism. ... A review of Buchanan's new book condemns its defense of
"America First" foreign policies. Buchanan honors Charles Lindbergh as a heroic
voice of isolationism and outrageously argues that the West instigated war with
the Nazi regime.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 285: &quot;Sir, Counterintuitive, Sir!&quot;

            
               Secretary of the
Army Louis Caldera has announced a plan that will put more guns in American
high schools. What is this program called?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
284)--"Gamy":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        On Sunday, speaking on CNN's Late Edition ,
White House economic adviser Gene Sperling said it reminded him of the game
Twister. What?
                     
                  
               
            

            "The
nude Greco-Roman wrestling that concludes every episode of Late
Edition ."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "Puff
Daddy's new board game, 'Twizter.' "-- Alex Balk ( John J. Edwards
III had a similar, but "Bendy Reachy," answer.)

            
"Hillary's efforts to distinguish between sins of malice and sins of
weakness."-- Daniel Radosh (similarly, Rachel Thompson , Craig
Pyron , John Leary , and Sean Fitzpatrick )

            " 'Our
infantile and soul-dead, hyper-consumeristic ways in a world where sunsets go
unnoticed,' said Sperling, looking up from an essay by Bill McKibben."-- Jim
O'Grady
            

            "I
haven't read the question yet, but my answer is Talk magazine."-- Greg
Diamond
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            "In all discussion of
metaphor," writes H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage , "it must be
borne in mind that some metaphors are living, i.e., are offered and accepted
with a consciousness of their nature as substitutes for their literal
equivalents, while others are dead, i.e., have been so often used that speaker
and hearer have ceased to be aware that the words used are not literal."
Certainly we can consign all sports metaphors to the linguistic cemetery. And
now, thanks to Gene Sperling, we can bury the metaphors of the casino--a
crapshoot, a spin of the wheel, a stacked deck--replacing them with the vibrant
metaphors of the rec room, i.e., Twister. One must be a little skeptical of
Sperling's personal experience with the game. Does he himself play, or has he
merely observed others? (Kids? Colleagues? High-priced hookers?) But even if he
lacks direct knowledge, he has chosen the perfect suburban verbal style for
this administration, an excellent advance on "soccer mom." Presumably, a
living, Clintonian Einstein would declare, "I cannot believe that God plays
Nintendo with the world."

            
               A Taxing Answer
            

            Republican economic arguments--in particular the
GOP's defense of its proposed tax cut--remind Gene Sperling of Twister.

            House and Senate Republicans passed separate $792
billion, 10-year tax-cut bills, which they hope to reconcile in conference
committee before the summer recess begins at the end of this week.

            President Clinton has
vowed to veto any tax cut of that size, saying it favors the rich over the
poor, could drive the government into deficit, and fails to provide for urgent
needs including Medicare reforms, education, and debt reduction.

            
               Metaphor Fun
Extra
            

            Can you give the literal
meaning of these figures of speech, each of which appeared in a recent
quotation in the New York Times ?

            1. A new sheriff in Dodge

            2. Another large piece of plaster

            3. A dangerous slope

            4. A bad apple in the box

            5. A bunch of ayatollahs

            6. A gangster

            7. A policeman

            8. The girl

            
               Answers
            

            1. Pat Robertson, firmly in control of the
non-tax-cheating Christian Coalition. Says Pat Robertson, "We have a new
sheriff in Dodge, and it's a brand new game."

            2. Judge Joyce Hens Green's ruling that the
Christian Coalition did not illegally distribute millions of voter guides meant
to boost Republican candidates. Says campaign finance lawyer Robert F. Bauer,
"This is certainly another large piece of plaster which is falling off the
ceiling of campaign finance regulation."

            3. The new sound system for the New York City Opera
that will not amplify voices. Worries traditionalist Lofti Mansourie of the San
Francisco Opera, "It is a dangerous slope. ... We have to fight hard not to
compromise the natural sound of the voice and its natural projection."

            4. Banker John Mathewson who gives Cayman Islands
money-laundering a bad name. Says banking lawyer Stephen Feldhaus, "There is a
very legitimate role for places like the Caymans where people want the ability
to operate in a regulatory-neutral and tax-neutral atmosphere. ... Mr.
Mathewson was just a bad apple in the box."

            5. Intolerant clergy who disdain sex of any kind.
Says the Rev. Richard Gorman of a coalition of priests and local residents
battling an incursion of hot-bed motels in their Bronx neighborhood, "We have a
very active clergy, but we're not a bunch of ayatollahs."

            6, 7, 8. China, the
United States, Taiwan. Says David Chou, a promoter of U.S. statehood for
Taiwan, "China is like a gangster; the United States is like a policeman. Every
time the gangster tries to take the girl in his arms, she has to call the
policeman to come save her. Our job is to get the girl married to the
policeman. Then there is no danger, and the protection is permanent."

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            
               Eyes Wide Shut .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 306: &quot;Faintness, Nausea, Disneyness&quot;

            
               Something in
Disney World is irritating both Arabs and Israelis. What? (Question courtesy
of Dave Gaffin.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 305)--"Safe Sects":
            

            

               On Wednesday, the Xinhua news agency described a step China has taken
to ensure "social stability and safety" during their big 50 Years of
Revolutionary Rule celebration set for Oct. 1. What did China do?
            

            "No to
chopsticks. Yes to Sporks."--Jon W. Davis
            

            "Tanks
and plenty of 'em!"-- Judith Spencer ( David Mayer had a similarly
tankful answer.)

            
"Relaxed the age requirements on infanticide."-- Matt Sullivan
(similarly, Joy Nolan )

            
"Promised to unretire all the Beanie Babies."-- Brooke Saucier
(similarly, Sean Fitzpatrick )

            
"Increased funding to 'Just Say No to Acts of Counterrevolutionary Hooliganism'
campaign in elementary schools."-- Keith Kurtz
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Observational humor, that's what we trade in here.
I observe that 50 years ago Mad magazine observed the popularity of
Chinese restaurants with an elegant piece of satire called "Two Chinese Guys Go
Into an American Restaurant." They had some trouble pronouncing
ba-con-an-eh-guh-zuh and manipulating the "fork."

            Many News Quiz participants observed that around
the same time, when Sinatra was still a liberal and still alive, he made The
House I Live In featuring the moving and melodious: "That's What the
People's Republic of China Is to Me," a musical observation of China's many
restaurants, female infanticide, and brutal suppression of dissent.

            If I were running the moribund Hard Rock Cafe,
here's what I'd want to observe about Chinese life: restaurants + oppression =
potential theme restaurants, and a magnet for investments from the usual crowd
of Hollywood patsies.

            We're not just an
amusing topical quiz, we're part of America's robust economic growth in pop
culture crap! Ask your broker about us, or visit us online at ... well, I guess
you're already visiting us online. So just go ahead and type in your credit
card number. I'll be over here, not peeking.

            
               Preventive Detention
Answer
            

            China has rounded up 100,000 "criminals."

            In addition to the festive mass arrests, the
Chinese plan a parade of 140,000 people along with troops, tanks, rockets, and
90 floats, including one bearing 30 leading fashion models. In a first for
official celebrations, there will be handicapped people in wheelchairs and a
contingent of private businessmen, chairs unannounced.

            The parade will be
broadcast live on the Internet at www.china10k.com .

            
               Shallow Sloganizing
Extra
            

            The Web sites of each
major presidential hopeful feature an inspirational slogan that encapsulate the
candidate's vision for America. Can you name the candidate for each of these
rallying cries?

            
               Slogans
            

            1. Prosperity With a Purpose

            2. It's Principle That Counts

            3. The Best Prescription Is Knowledge

            4. A Man's Got To Know His Limitations

            5. Advancing America's Values

            6. Family, Faith, Freedom

            7. He Wants You To Win

            8. He Wants You To Mock Ron Perelman

            9. America First

            10. Now and Always

            
               Answers
            

            1. George W. Bush: That purpose? To fight the wave of evil flying
monkeys shooting up so many schools and churches, and to buy a nicer boat.

            2. Alan Keyes: I believe he bought up Nixon's old "Experience
Counts" buttons and did some deft Magic Marker work. The principle?
Thriftiness. And goofball economics.

            3. Dr. C. Everett Koop: Not a candidate, but always a front-runner
in the nation's heart, a part of the body for which he can suggest effective
(and surprisingly affordable) treatments.

            4. Clint Eastwood: Not running, but he's so lean and leathery
that if he did, he could count on big money from the skin cream PACs. Might
have to tweak slogan to "A Man's Got To Know His Limitations and His Gentle
Emollients." But politics is the art of compromise, for money.

            5. Gary Bauer: Chosen over the livelier: It's Like the Taliban,
Christian-Style!

            6. Family Research Council: Not a candidate. And not a family, and
not doing any research, but might be some kind of council.

            7. Steve Forbes: He wants me to win, and I want him to say more
about his father's sex life; we're both going to be disappointed.

            8. I believe that one's mine.

            9. Pat Buchanan: The scary thing, he undoubtedly knows the history
of that slogan and that movement.

            10. Coca-Cola: Not a
candidate, but could be just the thing Dr. Koop prescribes for a balky ticker.
I should check.

            
               Ongoing Shallow
Sloganizing Follow-Up
            

            Participants are invited to devise slogans for the
following candidates whose sites display no slogans or, in the case of Ms.
Dole, have been inaccessible for weeks. Replies to run Thursday.

            * John McCain

            * Dan Quayle

            * Al Gore

            * Elizabeth Dole

            
                 Common
Denominator
            

            Too much MSG, too many tanks.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Leader of the Paks

            

               The Senate rejected the nuclear test ban treaty. The treaty,
which needed 67 votes for ratification, was defeated 51-48. Only four
Republicans sided with Democrats in favor of it. Although President Clinton
vowed to continue to fight for its ratification, Majority Leader Trent Lott
said it would not be reconsidered during his term. Other nations had promised
to follow the U.S. lead. The Democratic spin: Republicans let politics trump
international security. The Republican spin: A treaty that flawed would never
have worked. The Democratic reply: It certainly won't work now. Newspapers
variously said the vote hurt 1) Clinton's ability to set foreign policy
( Los Angeles Times ); 2) America's global leadership
( New York Times ); and 3) centrist, bipartisan politics (
                  Washington Post
               ).

            

               Pakistan's military ousted its elected government. Coup leader
Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf suspended the constitution and declared the country to
be under military rule, but did not announce plans to install a new government.
Musharraf accused former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of weakening the military,
crippling the economy, and tolerating corruption. Western analysts worried that
military rule would exacerbate: 1) the region's instability ( Los Angeles
Times ); 2) the fragility of Pakistan's democracy; and 3) the ascendancy
of Islamic militants ( USA
Today ). Pakistanis' reaction: After Sharif's regime, anything will be
an improvement ( Washington Post ).

            

               Basketball great Wilt Chamberlain died. "Wilt the Stilt,"
widely considered the best player of all time, is the only one ever to score
100 points in a game. He captured national attention in the 1960s through an
intense rivalry with Bill Russell and again in the 1990s with his claim to have
bedded 20,000 women. The Los Angeles Times said
Chamberlain's dominance as a center forever "changed the way basketball is
played." The 
                  Chicago Tribune
                declared that Chamberlain's skill
and popularity "saved the NBA. ... Had there been no Wilt, there would have
been no Dr. J or Bird or Magic or--perish the thought!--Michael."

            

               The world's population reached 6 billion. It has doubled since
1960, but growth is slowing as urbanization, education, and family planning
increase worldwide. Most of the continued growth will occur in the developing
world. The United Nations predicts that population will level off near 10
billion late in the next century. The rosy spin: Despite what doomsayers
predicted, overpopulation hasn't caused global catastrophe. The gloomy spin:
Well, not yet.

            

               The AFL-CIO endorsed 
               Al Gore's presidential
bid. The endorsement lets Gore use the union's resources and 13
million members for political organizing. The optimistic spin: Labor's support
gives Gore a great boost . The jaded spin: Labor's support for the
Democratic front-runner is a non-story. The AFL-CIO spin: Either way, the
attention shows we're a force to be reckoned with.

            

               Four teams remain in baseball's playoffs. The Red Sox and
Yankees are vying for the American League title. The Braves and Mets are
competing in the National League championship. Boston pitcher Pedro Martinez
threw six no-hit innings in the final game against Cleveland to make the Red
Sox only the fourth
team ever to overcome a two-game deficit in the playoffs' first round. The
Mets, who barely made the playoffs after a dismal mid-season performance, are
competing with Boston for recognition as the "Cinderella team." The Yankees and
Braves are fighting for recognition as the decade's best team.

            

               A Colorado grand jury issued no charges in the JonBenet Ramsey
case. After 13 months of investigating, the jury deemed the evidence
insufficient. Colorado Gov. Bill Owens said he would assemble a new team of
prosecutors to continue the investigation. Some critics charged that the lack
of an indictment revealed that the police work was botched. Others said that
the continued investigation of a rich, white victim's death showed that race
and class influence the justice system.

            

               A British court ruled that Gen. Augusto Pinochet could be
extradited. If his appeals fail, the former Chilean dictator could
stand trial in Spain on 35 charges of torture and conspiracy. Pinochet's spin:
The court is violating the rights of Chileans by imposing foreign laws.
Prosecutors' spin: Look who's
talking about violating the rights of Chileans.

            

               Margaret 
               MacGregor won the first man-vs.-woman boxing
match. The undefeated, 5-foot-4-inch 36-year-old unanimously won all
four rounds against male boxer Loi Chow, who is 5 foot 2 and has a record of
0-3. Some observers objected to a man hitting a woman. MacGregor's supporters
said she had landed a blow for 
gender equality. Detractors complained that she should have picked on
someone her own
size.

            

               Texas Gov. George W. Bush criticized congressional
Republicans. First he said House Republicans shouldn't "balance their
budget on the backs of the poor." Then he said his party often neglects the
disadvantaged by focusing on economic wealth. Democrats called Bush a 
wolf in sheep's clothing. Republican opponents accused Bush of running for
president on the backs of
congressmen. But Bush said his comments made a "positive case" for
Republican compassion, and some pundits said he was astute to recognize that
the Republican "revolution is dead" (Al
Hunt, Capital Gang ). (
                  Slate
               's "" analyzes
Bush's "triangulation" strategy.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <EM>Big Daddy</EM>'s Day

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Big Daddy
                (Columbia Pictures). Critics call Adam
Sandler's latest film immature, irresponsible, and only marginally funny. But
moviegoers couldn't have cared less: The film beat Tarzan for the No. 1
spot at the box office and had the second-largest opening ever for a comedy
(behind the recent Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ). Its
premise: A thirtysomething slacker adopts a child to demonstrate his maturity
to his wary girlfriend. Since it's a Sandler film (he shares a writing credit),
this "daddy" teaches his young charge how to pee in public, spit, and trip
Rollerbladers and tells him that the only thing better than drinking Yoo-Hoo is
"smokin' dope." Like most critics, the Chicago Sun-Times ' Roger Ebert is
not impressed: "Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare
office." It's not as funny as The Waterboy , it's not as sweet as The
Wedding Singer , and it fails at its only real goal: It "doesn't generate a
lot of big laughs" (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly ). (Click
here for info
on Sandler's earlier films.)

            

               
                  An Ideal Husband
                (Miramax Films). Rupert Everett
turns in a "brilliant comic performance" (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street
Journal ) as an idle and decadent bachelor in this adaptation of Oscar
Wilde's play, but the rest of the film gets mediocre notices. The chief
complaints: 1) Wilde's sharp edge has been dulled--it's "likable" and
"handsome" but "diluted" (Stephen Holden, the New York Times ); 2) the
story "unfolds with all the urgency of a dainty tea napkin" (Susan Wloszczyna,
USA Today ); and 3) the plot, a blackmail scheme with many moral
quandaries to resolve, ends too tidily and happily for its own good. (For loads
of dreamy photos of Everett, check out this fan
site.)

            

               
                  Return With Honor
                (Ocean Releasing). This documentary
about a group of U.S. pilots who were held as POWs in the Vietnam War wins
excellent marks from most critics: "engrossing and chilling" says Stanley
Kauffmann in the New Republic ; Entertainment Weekly 's Gleiberman
says, "You emerge shaken, with your perceptions--of Vietnam and of war in
general--permanently enlarged." A few carp about the film's cloying, overt
patriotism--and the avoidance of the politics and protests that surrounded the
war--with the most vocal dissenters saying it "restart[s] the John Wayne-ing of
Vietnam" (Michael Atkinson, the Village Voice ). For most, though, the
stories, told by some 20 captured airmen, speak eloquently and powerfully.
(Click here to read about the film's opening night at the National Air
and Space Museum.)

            

               Books
            

            

               
                  Who's Irish
               , by Gish Jen (Random House). Jen switches
from novels (such as Mona in the Promised Land ) to stories, and the
critics are impressed. The collection covers the same ground as her two
previous books--the immigrant and biracial experience in America--and she
covers it with "equal measures of pathos and wry fun ... the collection, at its
considerable best, finds words for all the high and low notes of the raucous
American anthem" (Jean Thompson, the New York Times Book Review ). The
New York Times ' Michiko Kakutani is less enamored than most, noting that
a few of the stories "appear to be studies for [Jen's] earlier novels and stand
somewhat shakily on their own." (Read the first
story courtesy of the New York Times .)

            

               
                  Walker Evans
               ,by James R. Mellow (Basic Books).
Mellow, a National Book Award winner, died before completing this long
biography of the photographer and writer--making it this summer's third example
(after Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light and Ralph Ellison's
Juneteenth ) of an unfinished work by a deceased author published before
proper completion. The biography reveals fascinating details about Evans' life
and provides a new insight into his art, but critics say it gets weighted down
by superfluous material the author would likely have removed had he finished
the book, resulting in a somewhat "exasperating" tome (Margaret Loke, the
New York Times ). Even worse, the ending, which details Evans' final
years and death from drinking, is still in the form of unfinished notes by
Mellow. (Click here to see a sampling of Evans' photographs.)

            

               Snap Judgments
            

            
               Movie
            

            

               
                  My Son the Fanatic
                (Miramax Films). Critics love this
British film directed by Udayan Prasad about the life and dreams of a
downtrodden Pakistani taxi driver in the north of England. Their only quibble:
It's more of an extended character study than a full-fledged drama.

            
               Music
            

            
               
                  Electric
Honey
               , by Luscious Jackson (EMD/Capitol). Solid reviews for the
all-female group's third album. Riding on the success of their breakout
Fever In Fever Out (1996), they've turned in another smooth 'n' mellow
album, but this one is "a more eclectic mix of hip-hop, pop and rock sounds
wrapped around sensual vocals" (Tad Hendrickson, CMJ ).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 300: &quot;First Sight&quot;

            
               "I've never seen
one of these," President Clinton said Monday, as he used something for the
first time. Apparently he enjoyed the experience: "Now that I'm a homeowner, I
better get one of these." What was it, and what did he do with it?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 299)--"What Would Jesus Sue?":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        In England, a group of 40 independent Christian
schools plans to petition the European Court of Human Rights to have the ban
lifted. Ban on what?
                     
                  
               
            

            "The
use of 'Baby I'm-a Want You' in the regular rotation of morning
hymns."-- Bill Scheft
            

            "Those
new British 'People's Crucifixes' with Princess Diana hanging on the
cross."-- Molly Shearer Gabel
            

            
"British beef-based religious objects."--Richard Nikonovich-Kahn
( Melody 
               Yiu had a similarly beefy answer.)

            
"Teaching creationism as science, and the Narnia books as history."--Floyd
Elliot
            

            
"Hunting, with horse and hounds, the smallest boy in the fourth form."-- Kim
Day
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Murderous gangs in East
Timor, deadly bombings in Israel and the Caucasus, scary tumors in Cardinal
O'Connor's head, fugitive financier Martin Frankel in the Holsenglacis jail,
runaway parade floats plowing into the crowd and yet not crushing a single
presidential candidate--so much news and so little time, the effect of the
summer schedule on News Quiz--which, incidentally, you can play all week
without paying New York sales tax or showering or even getting out of your
pajamas: Such is our end-of-summer malaise. Or perhaps it's just a perverse
disappointment that the anxiously anticipated NQ3C problem was no problem at
all. Today's publication of News Quiz question No. 300 resulted in no fiery
eruption on Strom Thurmond or Alan Greenspan's ... well, never mind. I'm sure
we all did the best we could, although many participants, absorbed with the
idea of burning heretics, seem to have confused the C of E with the RC, so
let's all reread Barchester Towers and study up on the Gordon riots,
with our trousers down around our ankles.

            
               Thank You, Sir, Could I
Have Another Answer
            

            Christian schoolmasters want the court to lift the
ban on their fundamental human right to hit children with a stick.

            On Sept. 1, school beatings were banned from
Britain's private schools, bringing them in line with state-run schools where
caning was outlawed 13 years ago.

            "I believe the government should not intervene in
how parents bring up their children. This is dictatorial and an example of the
nanny state,'' said Philip Williamson, headmaster of the Christian Fellowship
School in Liverpool, which is leading the protest. "It's a slippery slope.
First you can't thrash them, next you can't give them a good boot in the ribs,
then no summary executions of the really impertinent ones," he did not add, nor
did he emphasize his point by menacingly slapping his palm with the "Fellowship
Stick," as he does not call it since it does not exist.

            A spokeswoman for
Britain's Department of Education was unimpressed with the spanking-obsessed
schoolmasters. "The European Union is itself against corporal punishment so it
is unlikely to uphold any arguments that the new provision against caning is an
infringement of human rights,'' she said

            
               See Everett. See
Everett Koop. Koop, Everett. Koop, Koop, Koop Extra
            

            Which were actual topics
in Monday's "Today in Health Chat," a regular feature on Dr. C. Everett Koop's
Web site, and which are
cheap attempts to mock a beloved national figure's efforts to cash in on this
whole Internet thing?

            1. "Hey, It Itches!"

            2. "Stay-at-Home Moms"

            3. "Stay at Least 500 Yards Away Due to a Court
Order Dads"

            4. "Love the Swelling, Hate the Redness"

            5. "Memory Loss or Alzheimer's?"

            6. "What Was That Last One Again?"

            7. "Does This Smell Funny?"

            8. "Women With MS"

            9. "Women With Motorcycles--Nude! Nude! NUDE!!"

            10. "Adios, Señor Spleen"

            11. "Ostomates"

            12. "Tough Guys Don't Dance"

            13. "Tough Guys Do Dance With Ultra-Hot
Ostomates"

            14. "Conquering Self-Abuse"

            15. "Shirtless Pictures of Dr. Koop for Those Who
Surrender to Self-Abuse"

            16. "Don't Pick at
It!"

            
               Actual Topics
            

            2, 5, 8, 11, 12, and
14.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Burning heretics.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 309: &quot;Lost in Translation&quot;

            
               " 'EIN Nod:
Bodlonrwydd Llwyr I Gwsmeriaid' is not the snappiest slogan to those who speak
no Welsh. Yet the banner inside General Electric's aero-engine servicing
department in South Wales--'_____________'--is a fair approximation of what GE
has been up to in Nantgarw since it bought the business from British Airways in
1991." 
               Fill in the blank in this lead from the
Economist by translating that slogan from Welsh to English. (Question
courtesy of Andrew Solovay.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 308)--"Praise With Faint Damns":
            

            

               According to remarks made Tuesday, it is characterized "by greed and
lust for power, by hot-blooded hatreds, and stone-cold hearts." Who was
describing what?
            

            "Janet
Maslin, both Hollywood and the New York Times ."-- Matt
Sullivan ( Ann Gavaghan had a similar answer.)

            
"Leonard Stern spotlights the selling points of the Village
Voice ."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            
"Anyone describing Pat Buchanan's new book."-- John Tyrrell
            

            
"Everyone, high school."-- Noah Meyerson
            

            
"Frankly, I think the Jamaican Tourist Board should go back to that old 'Come
Back to Jamaica' slogan."-- Tim Carvell
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            If News Quiz responses
are any guide to popular taste--a ludicrous proposition, but play along--the
two most greedy and lustful and savage realms are backstage at the Miss America
pageant and inside Pat Buchanan's head. So here's my pitch to whomever replaces
Jamie Tarses (and I pray it will be well reviewed by whomever replaces Janet
Maslin, even though she reviews movies not TV shows). Beauty-contest time
travel: like the Jesse Owens story but in heels and with virgins. Berlin. 1936.
Miss Universe contest. The only two finalists with any kind of a shot are Miss
America--a surprisingly leggy Pat Buchanan--and Miss Germany--an unexpectedly
amiable Adolf Hitler. During the swimsuit competition, while helping Hitler
glue his modest one-piece to his modest ass, Buchanan learns that his rival is
a pretty nice guy who wants to do no more than conquer Europe and kill all the
Jews. Not such a terrible thing, thinks Buchanan, and certainly nothing to
start a war over. So World War II is avoided, millions of lives--you know, the
right sort of lives--are saved, and history is transformed in ways so utopian,
you'd never recognize the present. Two small samples: high-speed maglev trains
that run on water, Alan Sorkin TV shows that aren't sentimental twaddle. Brave
new world. Bold new ABC. (Did I mention that in the second season, Buchanan
travels back in time to kill Lincoln even deader? After a romantic interlude? A
three-way with Jefferson Davis?)

            
               Stepping on Some
Mighty Big Toes Answer
            

            President Clinton was describing the
20 th century. Apparently he doesn't like it. Or, more disturbingly,
does.

            Addressing the U.N.
General Assembly, the president moved beyond vague generalities and into
comforting platitudes as he discussed poverty (against it), health care for all
people (for it), and outbreaks of widespread killing (should do something to
stop them). Courting opprobrium, the president raised the touchy issue of
weapons of mass destruction and bravely declared that it would be bad if they
were used.

            
               Inspiring Yet
Empty Extra
            

            Participants were
invited to provide campaign slogans for these presidential candidates whose Web
sites lack such soul-stirring baloney.

            
               John McCain
            

            "McCain, McSaw, McConquered"-- Juris
Odins
            

            "You Want a Piece of This, Pal?"-- Tim
Carvell (similarly, Dwight K. Lemke )

            "Not an Idiot Like the Other
Republicans"-- Francis Heaney
            

            "Trust Me, After the
Viet Cong, Those Candy-Asses at Philip Morris Don't Seem So Tough"-- Andrew
Solovay
            

            
               Dan Quayle
            

            "No, really."-- Steve Gisselbrecht
            

            "Quayle 200!"-- Greg Diamond
            

            "Now with more tomatoes."-- Clyde
Gibson
            

            "Marilyn, Not
Hillary"-- Juris Odins
            

            
               Elizabeth Dole
            

            "I'm Giddy for Liddy!"-- Tim Carvell
            

            "Free me from that albatross around my
neck."-- Clyde Gibson
            

            "Spontaneous From 11:55 to 12:00 Every
Day!"-- Dwight K. Lemke
            

            "Blow-Free
Elizabeth"-- Ellen Macleay
            

            
               Al Gore
            

            "Hey, look, I only work for the guy."-- Clyde
Gibson
            

            "Ah, Why the Hell Not"-- Andrew Solovay
            

            "He didn't brand his fraternity brothers'
buttocks."-- Tom Crawford
            

            "So you think I'm dull
and cautious? I'll show you dull and cautious, you goddamn cocksucking
motherfuckers!!"-- Noah Meyerson
            

            
               Any Candidate
            

            "Meaningless Rhetoric
for a Better Tomorrow"-- Francis Heaney
            

            
               Historical Perspective
            

            "You didn't ask, but my
all-time favorite slogan comes from the 1991 Louisiana governor's race between
Republican (and former KKK grand wizard) David Duke and Democrat Edwin Edwards,
an (ahem) ethically challenged Democratic candidate who had been indicted--but
not convicted--for mail fraud, obstruction of justice, and public bribery. The
slogan? 'Vote for the crook--it's important.' "-- Andrew Staples
            

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Miss America, Pat Buchanan.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Remembering the Holocaust

            
               A Fine-Tuned
Instrumentalization
            

            

               Editor's note: What follows in an exchange between Peter Novick, author
of The Holocaust in American Life , and James Young, one of the
participants in last week's "," in which Novick's book was discussed. Both
letters are reprinted with the authors' permission.
            

            Dear
James,

            I am appealing to James at leisure to overturn the
judgment of James in haste. I apologize for the fact that, as with many
appellate briefs, detailing the grounds for the appeal will require a fair
amount of space.

            In your exchange with Philip Gourevitch about my
book The Holocaust in American Life , you wrote the following, apropos of
what you termed "the so-called 'lessons of the Holocaust,' or why we recall the
Holocaust at all": "I would suggest, contra Novick, that not every
institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate instrumentalization of it
toward cheap and self-interested ends." You add that I am "actually quite good
at ferreting out many of the instances where this is, indeed, the case."

            I'm not sure what the word "institutional" means
here--i.e., how an institution remembers. Holocaust memory, of course, becomes
"institutionalized" in curricula; in a "canon" of Holocaust literature; more
diffusely, institutionalized in popular--particularly Jewish--consciousness.
Let's turn to "instrumentalization"--a word which appears to carry a strong
negative charge for you. As you know, I never myself use that word (or its
cognates) concerning collective memory. The reason, made clear more than once
in the book, is that I think collective memories that really take hold
always do so because they serve a present or continuing purpose. That is
to say, memories take hold to the extent that they are--if one wants to use the
word--"instrumental" for some purpose. As you will recall, I make a partial
exception for certain forms of religious (or civic-religious) commemoration at
the very beginning of my chapter on "lessons": "Remembering the Holocaust,
especially for Jews, needs no pragmatic justification. It is an act of piety
analogous to reciting the Mourner's Kaddish on the anniversary of a relative's
death, to the remembrance of war dead on Memorial Day." In the introduction, I
point out that historically, Jewish memory--even religious memory--has been
selective: Events that seem to contemporaries to point up a useful contemporary
lesson are incorporated into collective memory; those that don't seem to teach
useful lessons recede, though they may be recovered later, as perceptions
change about what lessons are useful. And, a fortiori, this is true of secular
memory. Thus, for me , to say that a collective memory is "instrumental"
is to say nothing that isn't implicit in its being a collective memory.
For me , to say that Holocaust memory is "instrumentalized" says nothing
worth saying, and certainly nothing invidious or discreditable.

            For you (and others)
"instrumentalization" is invidious--and discreditable. By not explaining
why it is invidious--simply taking this for granted--and saying that I
treat Holocaust memory in America as all "instrumental," you attribute to me
the view that American Holocaust memory is somehow discreditable. I think we
ought to explore how you use the word, and thus the view you're attributing to
me. Are you saying that memories in general, or memories of the Holocaust in
particular, are "instrumentalized" when they are used for unworthy , or
at least inappropriate purposes? Let's consider those purposes for which
the memory of the Holocaust has been invoked, which are the ones I discuss
most in my book. These include both "Jewish-specific" and "general"
purposes:

            

               To rouse the conscience of the world about perceived threats to "the Jews
Hitler missed" in Israel.

               To reinforce Jewish solidarity, so that having survived Hitler, Jews will
not disappear through assimilation.

               To warn Jews to watch out for early warning signs of rising anti-Semitism
in America--signs that were ignored in Germany.

               To urge that the United States intervene against atrocities abroad which
are said to resemble the Holocaust.

               To teach tolerance and brotherhood--especially in schools.

            

            Can we agree that these are the "lessons of the
Holocaust" to which I devote the most space in the book? Which of them do you
think unworthy or inappropriate--and why? I wouldn't myself describe them that
way--and in the book I don't. To be sure, in invoking the Holocaust for these
(to me) worthy and appropriate purposes, those doing so were often led to
excess: for example, exaggerating Israel's peril or American anti-Semitism.
But that was my point . As I wrote in the book, "Once one starts using
imagery from the Holocaust--that most extreme of events--it becomes impossible
to say anything moderate, balanced, or nuanced; the very language carries you
along to hyperbole." But the ends for which the Holocaust was (to use
your word) "instrumentalized" seemed to me then and seem to me now both worthy
and appropriate.

            Or perhaps, for you, "instrumentalization" hinges
on motive : Perhaps you believe the Holocaust was invoked for these ends
"cynically" or "insincerely"? This may, in isolated instances, have been true,
but I can't recall ever either saying or implying that this was the case.
Certainly, overall, I repeatedly underlined the sincerity of those who
have invoked the Holocaust. Indeed, I extend this to some of the less
"mainstream" invocations--those that many, perhaps including yourself, think
unworthy or inappropriate. As you may recall, I underlined the good faith of
those who saw an analogy between the denial of the humanity of the fetus and
the Nazi slogan "life unworthy of life." I am myself conventionally
"pro-choice," but I would think it a dubious procedure to make that the
criterion of when it was illegitimate to invoke the Holocaust, reserving the
mantle of legitimacy for causes--like humanitarian intervention, or the
promotion of brotherhood and tolerance--of which I approve. If you differ with
me on this, it would have been appropriate for you to say: "Novick is
excessively tolerant of invocations of the Holocaust which I and many others
think quite intolerable." But you didn't say that: You said that I believe that
"every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate
instrumentalization of it toward cheap and self-interested ends."

            Let's turn to "cheap and self-interested." There
are indeed invocations of the Holocaust to which I'd apply this description. In
a section devoted to miscellaneous ways in which the Holocaust had entered
American discourse, I listed a few cases in which I thought this was so,
mentioning Hillary Clinton, Woody Allen, and a handful of others. To this one
might add the single paragraph I devote to the origin of the Washington
Holocaust Museum, which, as you wrote in your Holocaust Memorials in
History , was "proposed by then-president Jimmy Carter to placate Jewish
supporters angered by his sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia." In all,
two pages of the 281 pages in the book.

            You write that I am "quite good at ferreting out"
instances of "instrumentalization of [the Holocaust] toward cheap and
self-interested ends." Ferret that I am, I indeed accumulated quite a
collection of such instances, along with instances of what you elsewhere term
the Holocaust's "commodification." There was Judy Chicago, selling Holocaust
jewelry to raise money for her (stupid and vulgar) painting cycle on the
subject. There was--my personal favorite--the travel agency advertising a
"Jewish Singles Weekend," the high point of which was a visit to the Washington
Holocaust Museum. Of these, or the many other similar examples I've collected,
there is no mention in the book . The reason that I didn't mention them
was that to do so seemed to me "a cheap shot"--concentrating on the ephemeral
and the inconsequential--the scummy froth atop the waves of any discourse.

            There are real differences between us in
interpreting the rise of Holocaust memory in the United States. As an
alternative to my approach, in which the growth in Holocaust memory is to be
explained by the contemporary purposes it serves, you suggest a focus on the
Jewish tradition of remembering catastrophes. These traditional reasons, you
say "explain its significance for many [Jews] at a preconscious level, whether
we like it or not." I think there is something to this, which is why I
discussed it, albeit briefly, in the book. For various reasons, I don't think
this explains much about the evolution of American Jewish memory of the
Holocaust. Still, yours is certainly an arguable position, which we can discuss
sometime. If you'd said in 
                  Slate
                that you thought I didn't talk
enough about this, that would have been a reasonable comment. But you went way
beyond that--counterposing your traditional/cultural hypothesis to my alleged
view that "every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate
instrumentalization of it toward cheap and self-interested ends." Is that the
only possible alternative to your view?

            I can suggest a possibility about how such an
unjust and demonstrably false characterization of my views came to appear in
your message to [Philip] Gourevitch. That possibility has to do with the
rapid-fire e-mail exchange format of 
                  Slate
               's "Book Club" in which
it appeared. You wrote in response to an e-mail by Gourevitch "postmarked" just
two hours earlier. You were in fact offering it, as you'll see if you go back
to the original, not as a considered characterization of my views, but as a way
of introducing your own "traditional/cultural" explanation.

            But of course, once made, and available for
excerpting, it became a (highly quotable) characterization of my views.
The "conversational illusion" that e-mail promotes seduces us into the kind of
careless hyperbole common to conversation. In real conversations, a
raised eyebrow can be enough to make us backtrack. Something like this happens
in private e-mail exchanges. I can't count the occasions on which I said
something in a message that my correspondent challenged. In the next message
I'd find myself saying something like, "Of course, you're right. I overstated.
What I should have said, meant to say, was ..." But in your e-mail exchange
with Gourevitch, your characterization of my views wasn't challenged.
And unlike hyperbolic remarks in private exchanges, buried in the innards of
our computers, this one went out to God-knows-how-many thousands of
"eavesdroppers." Can you have any doubt that given your reputation as a
fair-minded and circumspect commentator on these matters your characterization
will be widely quoted as an authoritative summary of my views?

            If you want it to be so
quoted, you'll of course let it stand. If, on reflection, you want to withdraw
what I hope you'll acknowledge was a hasty and careless characterization, you
can do so here.

            -- Peter Novick
            

            Professor of history

            
University of Chicago

            Dear Peter,

            Given the narrowness of both my hasty
characterization of your position (vis-à-vis "instrumentalization") and of your
own objection to my characterization, I'm glad to be able to come back and say
now that my words were unfair to your much more complex approach to "the uses
of the Holocaust." It was especially unfair to put a word in your mouth,
"intrumentalization," which you have taken pains to avoid--and for very good
reasons. I'm sorry.

            At the same time, I wouldn't characterize my own
position as reflexively knee jerk against instrumentalization, in that I find
every memory, institutional or otherwise, "instrumentalizes" to some degree.
Which is partly why you wisely dispense with the term.

            In this, it would be a little too easy to blame the
rapid-fire format for my misstating of your approach to the
"instrumentalization" (my word, not yours) of the Holocaust. I take
responsibility, apologize for my haste, and accept your raised eyebrow. As a
format, I think 
                  Slate
               's Book Club can provide just the kind of
fresh first-response to books and ideas that the editors had in mind. But along
with these rewards come risks in such a rapid exchange, something both the
"reviewers" and readers need to keep in mind.

            The conversation
continues ... Until next word, I send

            --Very best wishes,

            James
E. Young

            
               Race Matters
            

            I found Michael Brus' comparison of racial
profiling and affirmative action ("") simplistic and misleading. He fails to
provide a realistic definition of affirmative action and does not address the
issues that would provide a context for it.

            Affirmative action allows that, given two
candidates of equal qualifications, an institution may favor the candidate that
helps it achieve its affirmative action goals. The legitimacy of these goals
comes not only from notions of "social justice" but also from the desire to
offer a more effective educational environment, a more hospitable workplace, or
a more effective school system. In public schools, for example, the
effectiveness of offering students role models with similar ethnic or racial
backgrounds is widely accepted.

            But the defect in Brus' article is not that he
fails to recognize these benefits, or even disagrees with them, but that he
never gets to how this reasoning is implemented in affirmative action programs
in a manner that is quite different from what goes on with racial
profiling.

            Racial profiling (as practiced in New Jersey)
simply singles out people of color for harassment by police. It is a convenient
way to select drivers for traffic stops that happens to accord with the racist
notions that seem to flourish in law enforcement.

            Affirmative action
celebrates the cultural diversity of our country and seeks to create a more
inclusive economy and public life. It recognizes that talent and ability are
distributed across the population and that it requires extra effort to avoid
excluding parts of the population that have traditionally been excluded. Racial
profiling is merely a way for racist police officers to express their bigotry
at the expense of our civil rights. It doesn't stop crime and it doesn't build
community. That Michael Brus can find no difference between these practices--or
that he is willing to attribute it all to the "fudge factor"--shows he doesn't
get it. He does us all a disservice by offering up this superficial
comparison.

            -- Rick Pressler
            

            New
Brunswick, N.J.

            
               Blasting Bloat
            

            Well, Shuman must have got his Ph.D. in B.S. from
MS, if "" is his typical output. I assume his purposes were to keep
ingratiating himself with the big boss as well as getting a lot of reader
feedback.

            I have been on quite a few development teams and
was waiting for a few honest comments. They were there but buried. The truth,
as I have seen it, lies in the SWAT team that tried to keep code trim, combined
with the greedy rush to keep ahead of competitors' introductions.

            Given enough skill and time, good programmers could
write much, much smaller programs with the same or more features, including
backward compatibility with older products. It is rushed, lazy, or incompetent
coding that takes the easy ways out.

            These programs are
flabby only partially because of their feature sets. Marketing-driven decisions
and programming shortcuts are the road signs to Flabby Software City.

            -- Mike Ball
            

            Boston

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Boys Do Bleed

            Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.

            Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.

            Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.

            Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight 
               Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.

            The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)

            F ight 
               Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.

            Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.

            Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.

            An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature, 
                  Boys Don't Cry
               . The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.

            That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.

            Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."

            I n 
               brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love 
                  Happy Texas
               , rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).

            It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's 
                  Mumford
               , which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             White Weddings

            Last week, the Alabama Senate voted to repeal the
state's constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage, 32 years after
the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's similar ban. Hadn't these archaic laws
gone out with Bull Connor? I asked myself as I read the news account. And
haven't we been hearing that America has rediscovered the melting pot, that in
another generation or two we'll all be "cablinasian," like Tiger Woods?

            I talked to the
measure's main sponsor, state Rep. Alvin Holmes, a 24-year statehouse veteran
who has been trying to overturn the ban for decades. "The last time I tried was
about three years ago," said Holmes. "It didn't get out of committee." Holmes
credits his success to the last election, in which a bevy of Democrats were
swept into office.

            Holmes wasn't just tidying up the legal code. In parts of
rural Alabama, he said, probate judges still refuse to issue marriage licenses
to interracial couples. Holmes explained that some of his Alabama colleagues
opposed his measure because they willfully refused to accept that the federal
government had the power to override state law--an ideology of states' rights
that goes way beyond Newt Gingrich to John Calhoun.

            When you think about it,
it makes sense that some Alabamians found it hard to jettison overnight a
300-year-old custom. Laws against interracial marriage--and the taboos against
black-white sex that they codify--have been the central weapon in the
oppression of African-Americans since the dawn of slavery. President Abraham
Lincoln's detractors charged him in the 1864 presidential campaign with
promoting the mongrelization of the races (that's where the coinage
"miscegenation," which now sounds racist, comes from). Enemies of the
20 th -century civil rights movement predicted that the repeal of Jim
Crow laws would, as one Alabama state senator put it, "open the bedroom doors
of our white women to black men." Fears of black sexuality have been
responsible for some of the most notorious incidents of anti-black violence and
persecution, from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till.

            Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco
planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In
previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent
than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and
worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage,
though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the
South's labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions
between white and black--and thus between free and slave. Virginia began
categorizing a child as free or slave according to the mother's status (which
was easier to determine than the father's), and so in 1691 the assembly passed
a law to make sure that women didn't bear mixed-race children. The law banned
"negroes, mulatto's and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white
women, [and] their unlawfull accompanying with one another." Since the society
was heavily male, the prohibition on unions between white women and nonwhite
men also lessened the white men's competition for mates. (In contrast, sex
between male slave owners and their female slaves--which often meant rape--was
common. It typically met with light punishment, if any at all.)

            If fears of interracial
sex underlay bans on interracial marriage, it was marriage that became the
greater threat. Men might rape black women or keep them as concubines, but to
marry them would confer legal equality. Thus, over the course of the
18 th century all Southern states--and many Northern ones--outlawed
all marriages between blacks and whites. Up through the Civil War, only two
states, Pennsylvania in 1780 and Massachusetts in 1843--hotbeds of abolitionist
activity--repealed their bans.

            The end of slavery should have made things better. It
didn't. In the South, the federal government initially forced the removal of
the bans in several states. But when federal troops pulled out, the bans
returned, along with a whole complex of new discriminatory laws known as Jim
Crow. In the West, 13 states passed new laws against interracial marriage, many
of them targeting white-Asian unions along with white-black ones. Only in the
North did laws against intermarriage draw real fire, coming off the books in
Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

            Still, even in the most
enlightened areas, mixed-race couples faced enormous social stigma. Clerks
refused to issue marriage licenses to mixed couples, and ministers often
wouldn't marry them. Couples that did marry faced harassment from employers and
neighbors. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, in An American Dilemma , noted that
"even a liberal-minded Northerner of cosmopolitan culture will, in nine cases
out of ten, express a definite feeling against" interracial marriage. It was,
he said, a "consecrated taboo" that "fixed" the boundary between the races.

            That changed slowly with the civil right movement, which
reshaped the nation's consciousness. In 1967, an interracial married couple
named Richard and Mildred Loving brought to the Supreme Court a suit against
Virginia, claiming the right to live there. The court sided with them
unanimously, decreeing the ban unconstitutional under the 14 th
Amendment. The fortuitously named Loving decision took its place in law
books, but not necessarily in practice. Where no one had the wherewithal to
stand up for it--say, in rural Alabama-- Loving was flouted.

            Precisely as white racists feared, desegregation
encouraged interracial unions. Blacks and whites began to meet and date,
especially on college campuses, which started admitting African-Americans in
larger numbers in the '60s and '70s. The next generation saw a surge in
intermarriage. In 1963, 0.7 percent of blacks married someone of another race.
By 1994, the figure had reached 12.1 percent. The 1960 census recorded 51,000
black-white marriages. Today there are more than 300,000. Attitudes changed
too. In 1958, 4 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriages.
In 1994, it was 45 percent. And younger generations are vastly more tolerant
than their elders, suggesting these numbers will climb.

            Of course, it's hard not to also see the glass as
half--or, more precisely, 55 percent--empty. All these numbers may be climbing,
but they remain low. What's more, the white-black marriage rate lags
significantly behind rates of white intermarriage with other, nonblack races.
Among 25- to 34-year-olds, 52 percent of Native Americans and 40 percent of
Asians married outside their race, while only 6 percent of blacks did so. The
racism that kept Alabama's constitution unchanged has hardly been eradicated.
Whether these habits will change on their own, with the maturation of a more
tolerant generation, or whether full social acceptance of black Americans will
require a concerted governmental effort, is unknowable. In the meantime, we can
take only meager pride in achieving a society in which interracial marriage is
safe, legal and, alas, rare.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Questioning the Cocaine Question

            
               Ask, but Don't
Tell
            

            Real reporters don't write, "I asked" because it's
not important who asked the question. While framing questions in a way to draw
out interesting or informative answers is important, as your article "" points
out, it's still the answer that matters. And while reporters (print and
electronic) talking on television often talk about themselves and how they
developed a story, in the newspaper itself it's the story that matters. There
really is enough self-promotion in the business, and your suggestion that we
advertise our authorship of questions would make it worse.

            Moreover, you misrepresent the article you
criticize. Gov. George Bush was not asked that day in Akron, Ohio, about
"long-ago cocaine abuse," and my story did not say he had been. He had declined
to answer a question about what he had told his daughters about drugs--on the
reasonable ground that he wanted to leave them out of the campaign. But as
NBC's David Bloom was trying to rephrase the question in a more general way,
Bush did it for him, and said baby boomer parents should tell their children
not to use drugs, and do so forthrightly.

            I then followed up with this question, for which I
make no apology because it corresponds with an obvious reality: "And if a child
asks a baby boomer parent--'Well, did you?' "

            His reply, which I
quoted and characterized as "awkward," was: "I think the baby boomer parent
ought to say, 'I've learned from mistakes I may or may not have made. And I'd
like to share some wisdom with you.' "

            -- Adam Clymer
            

            New
York

            
               
                  William
Saletan replies:
                
               You're a fine and careful reporter. A
careful reporter gives the reader enough context to put each quote in
perspective and to understand how the events of the day were shaped. Why
doesn't this rule apply to your questioning of Bush?
            

            
               Bush evidently would have preferred to talk to
the press that day about tax cuts and religious charities. Instead, reporters
asked him about issues arising from the controversy over his alleged drug abuse
and--in the case of your question--the implications of that controversy for
what boomer parents should say to their kids about drugs. In short, you, David
Bloom, and the other reporters on hand chose the topic. That's a major reason
(albeit not the only reason--Bush provided some justification in his speech)
why "questions about drug use" ended up in your headline, and "faith-based
institutions" ended up buried at the bottom. In that sense, you helped drive
the story. If you don't report this fact, aren't you omitting information that
the reader needs in order to understand the persistence of the drug
story?
            

            
               You say that "it's not important who asked the
question." But if a protester had shouted your question at Bush, would you have
reported who asked the question? If so, why not follow the same practice when
the person posing the question is a reporter?
            

            
               I share your distaste for journalists talking
about themselves, and I don't propose that we print our names every time we ask
a question. Usually, as you know, the choice of topic is fairly obvious. But
isn't there some point at which the media's choice of topic can become so
controversial and so determinative of the course of the campaign that the
principle of self-disclosure supersedes the principle of modesty?
            

            
               You're right that I oversimplified the exchange
with Bush in Ohio. The questions were about what he had told his kids about
drugs, and what other parents should tell their kids. Of course, we both know
that the implicit background to these questions was the rumors of Bush's own
drug abuse, and in that sense, this larger topic was what your question and the
others were "about." Nobody was asking Gary Bauer such questions that day
(except perhaps for pointed contrast), because the obvious hook for these
questions is Bush's alleged hypocrisy.
            

            
               Still, I should have
characterized your question more carefully. I'll take responsibility for my
oversight. Will you take responsibility for yours?
            

            
               Lines of
Succession
            

            Carter as Henry VI (see "," by Steven E.
Landsburg)? At times, Henry was mentally ill or at least clinically depressed.
So much so that it was unsafe to leave him alone with sharp objects. Doesn't
sound like Carter to me.

            Edward IV a great king? This is the guy who spurned
an offer of marriage with the daughter of the king of France, a marriage that
would have created a valuable alliance, in favor of a commoner. He married her
without notifying anyone in his court. This shortsightedness caused his chief
ally, Warwick, to defect to Lancaster, and they were able to oust Edward from
the throne for a time. It was only with the aid of his brother, the eventual
Richard III, that Edward was able to reclaim it.

            English people turning to Henry VII? That's the
biggest joke of all. Henry won one battle and, fortunately for him, killed
Richard. The English people accepted Henry as king, despite his having the aid
of foreign troops, because they were tired of civil war, not out of any love
for Henry. The fact that Henry killed off all the York heirs and blamed some of
their murders on Richard helped him keep the throne. And it let his son, Henry
VIII, become the most powerful and autocratic of all English rulers.

            So, if Landsburg is
correct, it means that we have a dictator (read Buchanan) in our future.

            -- David Brandon
            

            Los Angeles

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Peaceable Pagans

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Hey
Pru,
               
            

            
               I've got a very
wicked idea about who you really are. I think you're a fat, balding guy in his
middle 50s who smokes cigars while reading those heart-rending missives from
perplexed readers. Très cool.
            

            

               --Rick St. T.
            

            Dear Rick,

            And what do you plan to
read now that you've finished Miss Lonelyhearts ? Actually, Prudie is a
knockout. (And modest, too.)

            
--Prudie, laughingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               What you really need
to tell "" is that Wicca and paganism are simply other religions. Of course
their followers don't believe in evil or worship Satan. For one thing,
Christians created Satan--so he's their guy, not ours. To be evil is to go
against everything you're taught by the Wiccan religion.
            

            

               --Just Concerned
            

            Dear Just,

            Talk about toil and
trouble ... Prudie was inundated by lotsa mail on this subject. Interestingly,
the Wiccan mail was friendly, polite, and informative. Blessed be. The few
stinky letters were from clergymen. Go figure.

            
--Prudie, bewitchingly

            

               
                  Prudie,
               
            

            
               I recently married a woman who is a devout
Mormon. Needless to say, she has spent a fair amount of time trying to convert
me. I believe that a person's views on religion, divinity, and so on are
individual. I respect the right of anyone to believe as he or she sees fit, but
honestly, I find the whole Latter Day Saints faith a load of dingo
kidneys--restrictive, racist, and condemnatory. I also find their attitudes
sanctimonious and superior and in line with many fundamentalist "Christian"
faiths.
            

            
               So, how do I tell my
young (much younger) wife that I want her to cool down the rah-rah Mormon bit?
I love her dearly, but this is driving me nuts.
            

            

               --Alisdair
            

            Dear Al,

            Prudie is astounded that you and the little woman
did not discuss this rather loaded subject--on which you differ
profoundly--before the strains of "Here Comes the Bride" filled the church. And
she wonders if resolution will even be possible ... what with the Mrs. trying
to convert you to her religion ... which you view as a load of dingo kidneys.
If you love her dearly, as you say, it will be necessary to reach an agreement,
probably with a referee, whereby you both hew to your own beliefs and do not
discuss them. You might tell the beloved that you have decided to become Jewish
just to end the discussion. (Prudie is kidding.)

            It is a storm signal,
however, that you use the words "racist, restrictive, condemnatory,
sanctimonious, and superior" about your wife's faith and her fellow
practitioners. Prudie can only hope that, as a counterbalance, her personal
qualities are "gorgeous, loving, brainy, witty, and rich." Not to be
pessimistic, but Prudie envisions another letter from you down the line.

            
--Prudie, worriedly

            

               
                  Prudence,
               
            

            
               I am a gay divorced
father who also happens to work in a Catholic school. I am out to my ex-wife,
family, and some close friends but am hesitant to come all the way out for fear
of the implications. I do not care what people think about me, but I don't want
to bring any negative publicity to the school. I love education and would hate
to leave it. I want to find a life partner to share my days with, but my
current employment prevents me from doing so. I am tired of living in the
closet and want to be me without having to live two lives. Can you
help?
            

            

               --Mr. Q.
            

            Dear Mr.,

            Closets are for clothes, and two lives mean split
personalities. Prudie would encourage you to reorganize your life so that it is
honest. The first thing to try would be to talk with someone in authority at
your school about your sexual preference to ask if it poses a problem. The
answer may well be in the affirmative, seeing as how one parochial school
sacked a female teacher because she was divorced . But this will at least
be a start. Prudie is a little unclear as to why your being gay would bring
publicity to the school, but only you know why you think this is so.

            Because you say you
would hate to leave the educational field, why not move to a public or private
school if your Catholic school boss finds homosexuality a problem? Take it from
Prudie, all schools have gay and lesbian teachers. It's a percentage
thing. And Prudie wishes you all the best in your private, romantic life.

            
--Prudie, openly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My boss is a really great guy and the best boss
I've ever had. There's just one problem: He whistles incessantly.
            

            
               I find whistling
irritating at best, but it is positively nerve-wracking when I'm trying to
concentrate at work. My office is two doors down from his, so there's no
escaping the sound. I've tried to discreetly play music, but it doesn't drown
him out. I've also tried shutting my door, but in our office culture, that's
considered uncomfortably secretive and standoffish. Any ideas on how I can save
my sanity (and my job)?
            

            

               --Whistler's Brother
            

            Dear Whis,

            Prudie finds whistling annoying, too. It is an odd
sound and, like chewing gum, should best be done in private. You may have blown
the problem out of proportion, however. Surely this "really great guy," the
best boss you've ever had, could not be so unreasonable--or thin-skinned--as to
take umbrage at your request for a whistle-free workplace.

            Make your remarks
positive. Tell him, in your own words, that it pleases you that he manifests
such happy feelings, but the musical expression of his joy distracts you and
keeps you from putting out your very best work. A really great guy is not going
to react with anything but understanding. Unless he is so dense that light
bends around him, he will accede to your request and be grateful that you spoke
up.

            --Prudie, fearlessly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Pushing Politics and Prozac

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I didn't think Jerry
Springer should , so I'm glad he decided not to. I do think you should run for
Congress. Not only does Congresswoman Prudie have a nice ring, but your
constituents/readers would definitely benefit from all the sound advice you
could impart to all those bozos such as Tom DeLay currently taking up space in
D.C. Some friends and I have collected $23 to get your campaign started. So
think about it.
            

            
               --Electorally
yours,
            

            

               Neil
            

            Dear Elect,

            If Prudie were paranoid
she would think some of her readers were trying to get her out of the advice
business, what with one fellow, "," wanting Prudie to run for president, and
now you suggesting Congress. Prudie, however, is not paranoid, so she thanks
you for the ... well, vote of confidence. As for the $23, why don't you start
PrudiePac and see if you can't straighten out the dolts in Washington?

            
--Prudie, politically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               Two of my friends
have begun taking anti-depressants. One for depression, I guess, the other to
quit smoking. Because they are on anti-depressants now, they think EVERYONE
needs them and have literally been making appointments for their whole
families! Both have told me I definitely need them. I have a professional
therapist with whom I discussed this, and she disagrees. (My therapist is not
against medication, and in fact recommends it for some patients.) When I
explained this to these two ladies, they both shook their heads--like they know
better than my therapist. One came right out and shouted that I was in denial.
Wouldn't it be nice if people restricted their opinions to those areas in which
they had professional expertise? What do you think?
            

            

               --Christine, Rochester, N.Y.
            

            Dear Chris,

            The last time Prudie
checked, girlfriends could not prescribe drugs. It is a rule of human nature
that people often, when they add or subtract something from their lives, think
everyone else should do the same. Tune out the suggestions of these amateur
shrinks. You are right that it would be nice if people only spoke of things
about which they were expert. It would also be nice if every female over the
age of 16 had a $5,000 gift certificate at Tiffany's. Alas, my dear, neither
one is likely to come to pass.

            
--Prudie, realistically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Do we as a society
need a refresher course on what things to say (or not to say) to a pregnant
woman? My best friend is 37 weeks pregnant with her second child. She has been
getting comments about how large she is for the past three months. Worse than
even the comments, one woman just stood in front of my friend and gaped,
saying, "Oh my God!" Why would people feel the need to point out a pregnant
woman's size? And is there an appropriate response to these people that would
remind them their comments are not appreciated?
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Annoyed in Omaha, Neb.
            

            Dear Ann,

            As for why people say
inappropriate things, it usually has to do with the connector cable between
brain and mouth being on the fritz. These rude and unappreciated remarks just
slip out; the verbal equivalent of being a klutz. The way Prudie knows this is
that she, herself, has made this mistake a time or two ... well, maybe three or
four. If your friend with the belly spanning two ZIP codes wants to have a
comeback, she might try looking down, then remarking, "Pretty good, huh? And
I'm only two months along." Prudie promises you the thoughtless person will
have nothing more to say.

            
--Prudie, pointedly

            

               
                  Prudie,
               
            

            
               My girlfriend is a
staunch supporter of Patrick Buchanan for prez. I feel Buchanan is way too
liberal for my taste (I have been a big Pat Robertson fan for years). The
girlfriend also listens to Rush Limbaugh, but I know that Rush has been a
running dog lackey of the liberal Republican news media for years. A typical
liberal country club Republican! I was going to support Sen. Bob Smith of New
Hampshire in his new Conservative Taxpayers Party, but now that he's withdrawn,
there seems to be no one true to the Reagan legacy. The question is, should I
dump the girlfriend?
            

            

               --Redmond, Wash.
            

            Dear Red,

            You're kidding, right?
The part about Buchanan being too liberal supplied the hint. And Redmond is
home base for 
                  Slate
               , so Prudie will offer a choice of answers
allowing for all contingencies. 1) If the political chasm is legitimate, and as
wide as you describe, yes, undo from the girlfriend. If you guys have such
different outlooks now , future differences have the potential for major
fireworks. 2) If you are a fellow Microsoftie pulling Prudie's leg to kill time
before a Jolt Cola-break, why don't you get back to work, hmmm?

            --Prudie,
constructively

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Net's 1960?

            The
last time a new medium transformed American politics was 1960. The medium was,
of course, television, and the signal event was the Kennedy-Nixon presidential
debate, the first to be broadcast live to a national audience. Radio listeners
polled afterward gave the victory to Nixon. But Kennedy won the debate--and
arguably the election--because he came off better on television. Kennedy looked
cooler, more confident, and more handsome. He also knew something Nixon
didn't--how to project himself through the new technology. In office, JFK took
further advantage of the medium, using television to shape the public
perception of his administration. After press conferences, he would replay his
films in private, critiquing the lighting and camera angles.

            It is
already a cliché that the 2000 election signals the advent of another new
medium, the Internet. As is often the case with the Web, predictions of
dominance come in two flavors: utopian and apocalyptic. Utopians think the Net
has the power to undo the damage wrought upon American politics by television.
In their view, it stands to increase the power of ideas and diminish the
importance of 30-second attack ads. It will disenfranchise unelected elites and
give democratic power back to individuals. It will reduce the power of money.
Gloom-and-doomsters, on the other hand, assert that the Net will do just the
opposite, reducing genuine participation, threatening personal privacy, and
lending itself to new forms of manipulation by amoral operatives and moneyed
interests.

            My
prediction: This election will be more important to the Net than the Net will
be to the election. Just as 1960 conferred legitimacy on TV journalism,
Campaign 2000 promises to put the Net on the political map. It's less of a
given, though, that the Net will actually affect the campaign. In terms of the
TV analogy, 2000 may be 1956 or 1948 rather than 1960. Television existed in
those elections and was spreading rapidly into millions of homes. But for a
variety of reasons, it wasn't yet a decisive or central factor.

            So,
how can we know how important the Web is this time around? Only by casting a
skeptical eye on the ambitious claims being made on its behalf and evaluating
them against reality. 
                  Slate
                and the Industry Standard have
joined forces for a continuing real-time examination of the 2000 campaign as it
happens on the Web. In this column, we'll follow the topic where it takes us.
But to start out, here are some of the subjects "Net Election" is likely to
consider and reconsider over the next 14 months.

            
               Net

               Fund Raising
            

            One
way those goofy can quickly establish their value is by raising gobs of money.
So far, they've helped a bit. According to its most recent filing with the
Federal Election Commission, Bill Bradley's campaign so far has received
$330,000 from its Web
site . This is only about 3 percent of what Bradley has collected
overall. But there are reasons for Bradley and his rivals to like Web money
more than other kinds. One is that the cost of raising money on the Net is very
low compared with sending out direct mail or throwing a gala. A Web site is
basically an electronic collection plate, which consumes few of a candidate's
resources. For this reason, Net-based political fund raising is destined to
grow--and probably just as quickly as other forms of e-commerce.

            Web
fund raising may also point the way toward campaign finance reform. Last week,
George W. Bush initiated a practice that will surely become the norm:
declaring contributions immediately online , instead of
waiting for quarterly FEC deadlines. You could do worse than the system of
campaign finance that is evolving on the Web, where contributions limited to
the less-than-influential amount of $1,000--approximately
one-50,000 th of what Bush has raised so far--are immediately
disclosed. To be sure, there remains the problem of many times larger soft
money donations. But thanks to the Web, it's at least easy to discover which
special interests are supporting which candidates. The best disclosure site,
FECInfo, puts at everyone's
fingertips information that used to require trips to the FEC office in
Washington and hours of poring over dim microfiches.

            
               Net

               Organizing
            

            
Another advantage of Web contributions is that they often come with a promise
of volunteer time. The grass roots group MoveOn.org, which was formed to oppose impeaching President
Clinton last year, quickly gathered pledges of $13 million and 500,000
signatures on a petition, just by pinging e-mail back and forth. What's more,
30,000 people pledged 750,000 hours of volunteer time to defeat pro-impeachment
legislators in the 2000 election. You can't trust politician-haters, but if the
volunteers live up to their promises, they stand to become a significant factor
in the contest for control of the House.

            
Republicans targeted for defeat may harness the same techniques in
self-defense. Rudy Giuliani's Senate campaign reports that he has already
signed up 11,000 volunteers on the twin Web sites RudyYes.com and HillaryNo.com. Those with little inclination to hand out leaflets
at rainy commuter stations at rush hour can become "e-volunteers." By using the
Web in this way, a campaign can convert mass support into grass roots support.
Steve Forbes' Internet guru Rick Segal tried to work the Iowa straw poll this
way. He set up a national e-mail tree designed to get people to send their
friends in Iowa to Ames as Forbes supporters. How great an effect it had is
hard to say.

            
               Net

               Advertising
            

            Like
Net fund raising, Net advertising isn't destined to replace the older method
(i.e., television) overnight--or ever. But it is certain to grow as a share of
the total. TV ads are dumb, both in the sense that they tend to be crudely
demagogic appeals, and because they can't target segments of the electorate
with any degree of accuracy. Web advertising is smart, in the sense that it can
be far more detailed and specific and because it can reach a target with
surgical precision. Already, Al Gore has plans to focus on women-oriented
sites. Steve Forbes intends to advertise on day trading and investment sites,
where people who might vote for him are likely to be found. One possibility is
that these ads will develop into a new form of micro-pandering, but the process
will be interesting no matter where it leads. Techniques and conventions that
will come to seem eternal and inevitable will actually be invented in the
coming months.

            
               Net

               Issues
            

            In
1998, several congressional candidates campaigned against Internet
pornography--an issue of greater interest to people off-line than to those
online. This time, you're more likely to hear candidates vowing to protect
electronic privacy or block taxes on e-commerce. One way to gauge how important
the Web is in 2000 is by watching how seriously candidates take the Net's own
special interest issues. What we have yet to see, but can expect fairly soon,
are politicians who fit the computer industry's political profile. Internet
politics are basically soft libertarian--liberal on social issues, anti-tax,
and anti-regulation (but pro-environment and pro-gun control). The tech
industry's dream candidate would combine Bill Bradley's views on abortion, gay
rights, and guns with Steve Forbes' dedication to lower capital gains taxes.
That person doesn't seem to be running in this campaign, but he or she may
emerge in the course of it (possibly occupying the body of a current candidate
expressing somewhat different views).

            
               Net

               Coverage
            

            The
campaign news cycle has grown shorter with each successive election. Thanks to
the Web, it may be entirely repealed in 2000. These days, everyone has a Web
site and a big established news organization can drop an election-transforming
scoop into the mix at any hour of the day or night, just as Matt Drudge can.
And candidates won't have much luck with a traditional stratagem such as
semi-suppressing a story by not responding until after the evening news
deadlines. Rapid response will become more rapid than ever, with several
volleys being fired in the course of what used to be a campaign day.

            
There's lots more that we intend to chew over here: Web voting, Net gossip, and
cybersquatting. Perhaps the most interesting question will be the extent to
which the 2000 campaign will happen in cyberspace as well as in meat space. One
role model may be Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who integrated the real and the
virtual to an impressive degree in his Web-savvy 1998 campaign. Ventura
organized his original effort by e-mail, tracked his bus tour with digital
pictures, and encouraged a lively bulletin board discussion of it. To a
considerable degree, his Web site was where his campaign actually happened. As
bandwidth increases, more candidates will be able to bypass the press by
producing C-SPAN-style coverage of their own races. Whether anyone will be
watching is yet another question.

            
               Click

               
                  here to
visit the Industry Standard .
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Trippin' at the GNC

            Throw out your dealer's
telephone number--why take risks when your supermarket is selling drugs? OK,
not real drugs, but nutritional supplements , which are winning over our
drug-abuse dollar. Corner stores now stock Saint Johnswort, Snapples come
spiked with ginseng, and juice bars sprinkle ginkgo on smoothies. Supplements
are an $8.9 billion annual business now, bigger than the domestic box office of
movies. Largely unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration, these
over-the-counter compounds are legal for 12-year-olds to buy. But can they get
you wasted? Over the summer I ran up a tab at my local General Nutrition
Center--a chain with booming sales growth largely because it rounds up the
usual supplements. After sampling GNC's wares, I checked my findings against
the wisdom of Ray
Sahelian, M.D. , a Los Angeles doctor who swears by supplements, has
tried them all, and has authored several books on the matter. Here's what I
learned:

            
               Saint

               Johnswort
            

            
               For
               : Mild to serious
depression.

            
               How 
               it works: It's a
flower. Studies suggest it (like everything halfway fun these days) plays with
neurotransmitter levels, boosting serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.

            
               My 
               findings: The bottle
recommended one to three 300-milligram pills per day. I took three. On the
afternoon of the third day (it takes a while for the drug to rev up), I felt a
sudden rush of well-being. I was reading a good book and eating a great
sandwich, and admittedly this in itself may account for my good cheer. But it
felt more profound--what should have been just a sandwich was a

                  sandwich
               , what should have been just a book was a

                  book
               . Does that make sense? It did at the time.

            By Day 4 the manic rushes were kicking in. At
unpredictable moments I'd become hypersocial, expansive, and breathtakingly
productive. It was not unlike a cocaine high (er, I'm told). That is, a
surprise cocaine high that strikes at random. I'd be in a meeting with my boss
and suddenly I was Robin Williams circa 1980. These Wort flashes were sort of
delightful the first few times, but I grew to fear them--I couldn't predict
when the Wort would attack. And along with the manic highs came troughs of
fragility and moodiness.

            Hoping to push the envelope, I eventually doubled
my dosage. Result: a jaw-clenching headache of unfathomable depth, coupled with
horrid, abyss-gazing doubt and need. I quit the next day.

            
               The doc 
               says: Sahelian's a
big fan of the Wort. He thinks it works almost as well as Prozac, without the
side effects or high price. "Doesn't it add a little magic to the world? It's
great to take when traveling--the things you see become more special." I'd
guess he means something like my 
                  sandwich
                moment. Sahelian says
that since I wasn't depressed to start with, taking the maximum dosage of Wort
pushed me into mania. He starts patients off with one pill a day, and only goes
to three for extreme depression. Oops. Although I'm not depressed, I may try a
one-per-day regimen in the future--maybe I could be even happier .

            

               Cost
               : $7.99 for 60 pills--a two-month supply for me, a
20-day supply for Sylvia Plath.

            

               Melatonin
            

            
               For
               : Insomnia and jet lag.
It's "nature's sleeping pill."

            
               How 
               it works: Melatonin is a
natural hormone (produced by the pineal gland) that seems to regulate your
internal clock.

            
               My 
               findings: I get insomnia,
so I was excited about melatonin. The bottle suggested one 3-milligram tablet
before bedtime. I obeyed, but nothing happened: I was still sleepless. Instead,
I felt sluggish the entire next day. Results were no better on subsequent
nights. A few nights in, I had a vivid nightmare. I was at a picnic where
people played a game--a game in which they attempted to flay each other using
hand-held metal hooks, stripping skin away from their ribs and spines. I quit
the next day.

            
               The 
               doc says: 3 milligrams a
night is waaaaay too much. He recommends a half-milligram to 1 milligram, one
hour before bed, no more than once a week . Vivid dreams are common
("dreams like you've never dreamed before," says the doc, and I concur), but so
is restful sleep.

            

               Cost
               : $3.69 for 60 tablets of 3 milligrams each.

            
               Kava

               Kava
            

            
               For
               : Anxiety.

            
               How 
               it works: Who knows?
It's a plant from the pepper family, and its roots may affect your limbic
system.

            
               My 
               findings: I bought kava
in liquid extract form, to be taken with an eyedropper. The label said 3
milliliters three times daily. I took 9 milliliters all at once. No dice. Then
I took 12 milliliters all at once. Less dice, if that's possible. Finally, I
took 15 milliliters all at once--five times the suggested dosage. Beyond a
teensy sense of detachment and some mild balance problems, I still felt
nothing.

            
               The 
               doc says: Sahelian
(author of Kava: The Anti-Anxiety Herb ) tells me that with kava the
brand makes a huge difference. Indeed, on the Lycaeum "Trip
Reports " page, one "psychonaut" recommends "Waka-grade Kava from Fiji."
Mine came from Nature's Way Products in Springville, Utah. Sahelian says: "If
you're not anxious, you won't notice much. But those who like it really
like it. It's great if you're nervous going on a plane or to the dentist, or
before a party. Some use it as an alternative to the evening martini." A
mischievous friend swears that if you slug back a whole bottle you'll act like
Dopey dwarf for a few hours, but I cannot confirm at this time.

            

               Cost
               : $9.75 for 59 milliliters of extract.

            
               SAMe
            

            
               For
               : Depression. And
arthritis.

            
               How 
               it works: Again with the
dopamine. Like melatonin, SAMe is found in the body.

            
               My 
               findings: I don't have
arthritis. I also don't have depression, but that never stopped me before. The
bottle said one to four 100-milligram pills per day. I took four every day. I
felt nothing.

            
               The 
               doc says: Despite the
slobber of media excitement dripped all over SAMe in the last few months,
Sahelian prefers Saint Johnswort. The Wort is much less expensive and he thinks
it works better. When I sounded disappointed about SAMe, he offered this tip:
"If you want to feel something, try taking three or four pills in the morning
on an empty stomach." I tried the next morning. More nothing.

            

               Cost
               : Yow! $24.99 for 30 100-milligram tablets. At four
a day, that's 25 beans for little more than a week's worth.

            

               Gi
               nseng, Ginkgo Biloba, and Echinacea
            

            
               For
               : Ginseng's for
"vitality," ginkgo's for "mental alertness," and Echinacea's for stopping
colds.

            
               How 
               they work, allegedly:
Ginseng improves adrenal gland function, ginkgo helps circulation, and
Echinacea boosts white blood cells. They're all herbs.

            
               My 
               findings: I bought
Siberian ginseng gum and chewed a bunch but felt no particular vitality. So,
Pros: none. Cons: acrid aftertaste, acrid duringtaste, zero vitality increase,
and I had to find somewhere to spit it out. If you want to try ginseng,
Siberian is supposedly the best (as opposed to Asian or American). I also took
ginkgo. I also felt nothing. As for Echinacea, I've used it successfully a few
times, though not in a controlled study. The key is to take it just as you're
getting a cold--it appears to head it off. Friends have reported similar
success.

            
               The 
               doc says: Sahelian
seemed less enthusiastic about these. He says effectiveness varies dramatically
between brands, and that ginkgo shows more impact on older people, improving
focus and alertness.

            

               Cost
               : $1.29 for a pack of ginseng gum, $15 for a few
months supply of ginkgo, and $19 for a big bottle of Echinacea.

            

               Conclusion
            

            The Wort can be fun, and it might save you a bundle
on your Prozac bill. I'm willing to give melatonin another shot, too--at
reduced dosage. But basically this stuff is all weak sauce. If you're looking
for drugs to improve your "mood" or "mental alertness," don't throw out your
dealer's number just yet: The drugs that come closest to achieving these worthy
goals remain highly illegal or must be prescribed by a doctor. The success of
GNC and the nutritional supplement industry illustrates how eager our culture
is to embrace mood-altering drugs--as long as they don't actually work.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Look for the Union Doctor

            Last
week, when the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against the merger
of two HMO giants, the American Medical Association applauded the suit and took
credit for urging the government to file it. Insurers were "intent on capturing
the medical marketplace," seeking "too much power to dictate the health care
options offered patients," said AMA Chairman Randolph Smoak.

            Two
days later, the AMA voted to set up a doctors' union and to lobby Congress for
an antitrust exemption allowing all physicians to bargain collectively. Cynics
suggested that doctors were abandoning the Hippocratic oath for hypocritical
politics. To deflect this criticism, the AMA associated itself with favorable
images of organized labor while dissociating itself from unfavorable ones.

            

               1. We're on your side. Chip Kahn, president of the Health
Insurance Association of America (HIAA), which lobbies for HMOs, accused
doctors of seeking bargaining power to raise their incomes "at the expense of
American consumers and taxpayers." To thwart this charge, the AMA portrayed
HMOs as the true enemy of consumers, implying that doctors were taking on the
HMOs in defense of consumers. AMA President Nancy Dickey said doctors would
"battle insurance companies and managed care plans that put healthy profits
ahead of healthy patients." "Patient care is not at the top of health plans'
list of priorities," Smoak asserted. "Our objective here is to give America's
physicians the leverage they now lack to guarantee that patient care is not
compromised or neglected for the sake of profits."

            

               2. We're the little guy. HIAA officials depicted doctors as a
cartel, accusing them of pursuing "collusion" and "price fixing." At a House
hearing last week, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission officials
argued that exempting doctors from antitrust laws would stifle "competition,"
limit "consumer choice," raise costs, and reduce "quality." The AMA ducked this
critique by casting itself not as a business group but as an underdog alliance
of working folks. Doctors are waging a "David versus Goliath" battle against
the "abusive and unfair practices of insurance company giants" in a valiant
effort "to level the playing field between patients and insurers," said Smoak.
HMOs treat doctors like "ditch diggers churning through patients," added
Dickey.

            

               3. We're not greedy. Unions have a reputation for shutting
down important services and ignoring public inconvenience for the sake of
greed. The AMA wants to avoid this reputation. "I don't really believe [the
AMA's unionization] is being done for patients," one academic health care
analyst told the New York Times . "This is happening because doctors'
incomes, doctors' sense of autonomy, are getting killed."

            To
sidestep this complaint, AMA officials promised never to strike (though Dickey
conceded doctors might resist bad employers by "being a little slow in
completing some of the paperwork" required by HMOs) and avoided the word
"union," instead calling their proposed alliance "an affiliated labor
organization." The AMA's disclaimers underscored the liabilities of the "union"
label. "This will not be a traditional labor union. Your doctors will not
strike or endanger patient care," Smoak assured the public.

            The
basic political equation in medicine is that patients expect better care than
they're willing to pay for. When they're deprived of options and benefits that
exceed what they've paid for, or when they're obliged to pay premiums
sufficient to cover the options and benefits they expect, they figure some
special interest is ripping them off. The AMA's goal this week was to increase
its bargaining power without appearing to be that special interest.

            And what is the media's
verdict? Unionization shows "how aggrieved many doctors feel," says the
Washington Post . It changes the image of physicians who have "sometimes
arrogantly presented themselves as part of an elite profession as opposed to
members of a workers' group," says the New York Times , and it "may turn
out to be a strong force against health plans that unfairly use their market
power to limit quality of care." Whether the doctors' latest prescription will
cure their ills remains to be seen. But they look great.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Right Aid

            

               The House passed broad HMO reform. The bill gives patients new
rights, including the ability to sue health plans for denying care. It passed
by an unexpectedly wide margin after the House rejected more limited
protections proposed by Republican leaders. Supporters' spin: Finally,
insurers will have to pay for their actions.
Opponents' spin: And consumers will have to pay the cost through higher
premiums. The 
                  Washington Post
                called the vote a "stunning" sign
that Republican leaders have lost the ability to set the House agenda.

            

               Texas Gov. George W. Bush criticized congressional
Republicans. First he said House Republicans shouldn't "balance their
budget on the backs of the poor." Then he said his party often neglects the
disadvantaged by focusing on economic wealth. Democrats called Bush a
wolf in sheep's clothing . Republican opponents accused
Bush of running for president on the backs of congressmen. But Bush said his
comments made a "positive case" for Republican compassion.
(
                  Slate
               's "" analyzes Bush's "triangulation"
strategy.)

            

               Three people were indicted in the Russian money-laundering
case. A former Bank of New York executive and two businessmen were
charged with illegally transferring almost $7 billion to foreign accounts
without proper licenses. Investigators suspect Russian mobsters and corrupt
officials of laundering many times this amount through foreign banks. The FBI
spin: This is just the tip of the iceberg. The cynical spin: The way these
investigations go, the tip is all we'll ever see.
(
                  Slate
               's "" describes how money laundering works.)

            

               MCI WorldCom bought Sprint for $115 billion. The merger of the
nation's second- and third-largest long-distance companies is the biggest
corporate acquisition in history. With MCI's data communications strength and
Sprint's wireless network, the new company will offer the full range of
communications services. Wall Street's spin: Mammoth companies are the wave of
the future, so this marriage is a
winner. The government's spin: Mammoth companies reduce competition, so
consumers
are the losers. Wall Street's counterspin: Actually, the merger increases
competition with AT&T, which benefits
everyone.

            

               The Senate is debating a nuclear test ban treaty. In response
to Democratic pressure, Republican leaders scheduled an Oct. 12 vote after
delaying the treaty for two years. Despite public support, the Republican
majority is almost certain to defeat it. Proponents say U.S. ratification would
set an example for the other 150 signatory nations. Opponents counter that it
would compromise American security. Republicans' spin: We're outsmarting the
Democrats by calling their bluff and will win the vote. The Democrats' spin:
You're outsmarting yourselves by giving us an issue.

            

               A South Korean power plant leaked radiation. The incident,
which exposed 22 employees to radioactive water, came one week after the worst
nuclear accident in Japan's history. The risk to the South Korean workers is
reportedly "negligible ," but the condition of the 50 Japanese
citizens who were exposed remains unclear. The industry's spin: The incidents
were flukes, and everyone else is safe from future accidents. Local residents'
spin: Everyone else is as safe from accidents as we were.

            

               Vice President Al Gore is campaigning as the "underdog." He
shook up his campaign by moving his headquarters from Washington to Tennessee
and challenging Bill Bradley to a series of debates. Gore said he'll assemble a
"leaner, tougher" organization to respond to Bradley, who has recently raised
more money than Gore. The optimistic spin: Running as the underdog will
energize Gore's campaign. The pessimistic spin: Pretending to be the underdog
when he's the vice president and front-runner looks ridiculous.
(
                  Slate
               's ""  rounds up the assessments of Gore's moves;
and "" analyzes the importance of being the underdog.)

            

               The Brooklyn Museum of Art opened its "Sensation" exhibit.
Record crowds attended the controversial show, which Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had
tried to block by halting checks to the museum and filing suit for lease
violations. The museum countersued on First Amendment grounds. Giuliani's spin:
Artists are guaranteed freedom, not taxpayer support. The museum's old spin:
Withdrawing support violates this freedom. The museum's new spin: Thanks for
the free publicity, Rudy. Art critics' spin: The controversy is more
interesting than the art. (
                  Slate
               's "" and "" debated
Giuliani's move. And in "," David Cohen and Deborah Solomon debate whether the
"Sensation" art is worth all the fuss.)

            

               Russian troops entered Chechnya. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
said the army incursion and the preceding two weeks of air raids were necessary
to punish Islamic militants for recent bombings in Russia and to prevent the
militants from invading Dagestan. Russian troops control one-third of the
country, but militias are preparing to battle elsewhere. Chechens were divided
over where to direct their anger: 1) at the Russians for clumsy attacks that
mostly hit civilians; or 2) at the militants for provoking these assaults. The
New York Times worried that the strategy would revive the 1996 Chechen
war.

            

               The Supreme Court began its new term. It is expected to be the
most controversial term in recent memory, with cases on free speech, church and
state, and the federal-state balance of power. Conservatives hope their 5-4
majority will make this the defining term of the Rehnquist court. The New
York Times said the decisions are "destined to transform, for better or
worse, the legal landscape."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Wing Man

            
               General Aviation: Safe,
Legal, and Not That Rare
            

            Steve Chapman's attack on general aviation ("")
paints a distorted picture. To begin with, all transportation in the United
States is "subsidized" by taxpayers. Car drivers in Idaho help pay for
Chicago's mass transit system, for example. A safe, well-regulated
transportation system benefits everyone.

            Some 75 percent of major airline flights operate to
just 46 big-city airports, and half of all airline flights merely shuttle
passengers among just 21 hub airports. General aviation provides air
transportation for the rest of the country by serving some 13,000 airports.
General aviation carries 99 million passengers per year.

            And it does it safely. In 1998 there were 361 fatal
accidents out of 39 million flights. The "risk" of a fatal accident is only
0.000009 percent. On a per-mile basis, you are seven times more likely to be
involved in an automobile accident than a general aviation accident.

            The air traffic control system was created by and
for the airlines. General aviation is only a marginal user of ATC services. The
vast majority of general aviation flights are flown under Visual Flight Rules,
which don't require ATC. And general aviation is often forced to use ATC
services that it doesn't want or need. Many small airports have control towers
simply because of one or two airline flights a day.

            According to the General Accounting Office, the
costs of providing air traffic control services to each segment of aviation are
unknown because the Federal Aviation Administration does not have an adequate
cost accounting system. But the costs imposed by general aviation aren't
anywhere close to the number cited in the GRA study, which reached erroneous
conclusions based on mistaken assumptions.

            The bulk of federal airport grants go to commercial
(airline) service airports. In fiscal year 1997, commercial service airports
received more than $1.1 billion. Reliever airports (which give general aviation
aircraft an alternative to using commercial service airports) received $100
million, and general aviation airports received $139 million.

            General aviation aircraft don't cause delays for
airliners. The airline hub-and-spoke system (which has large numbers of flights
all trying to use the airport at the same time) and weather are the major
causes of delay for airline passengers.

            That Chapman considers search-and-rescue services
and accident investigation a "subsidy" for general aviation is absurd on the
face of it. It's an appropriate role for government to rescue its citizens,
whether they be boaters, hikers, pilots, or airline passengers. And that
rescue, more often than not, will be accomplished using general aviation.

            General aviation isn't a
"hobby"; it's serious transportation that fulfills many vital needs in the
United States.

            
-- Warren Morningstar Director, media relations
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association
Frederick, Md.

            
               The Ditch Is
Back
            

            I would like to suggest that the research for
Michael Brus' "" ("In the Event of a Water Landing") was lacking. I spent 10
years in commercial aviation with two U.S. flag carriers and offer the
following comments based on that experience.

            1) There have been numerous ditchings of U.S. flag
carriers. At least three incidents that immediately come to mind involved Pan
Am and United (Pacific Ocean), as well as Western Airlines (San Francisco Bay).
I believe that all three incidents involved fatalities; however, the vast
majority of passengers and crew survived.

            2) Air crews are routinely trained for water
landings and must be certified by the Federal Aviation Authority to fly over
water. Cabin crews receive specific passenger safety training with emphasis on
aircraft evacuation, since this is their primary area of responsibility. Flight
deck crews do not focus on passenger survival because they are responsible for
the overall aircraft systems operation and are the crew members least likely to
survive a traumatic event.

            3) While water landings are treacherous, they are
survivable, irrespective of Ralph Nader's comments.

            4) Since most major
airports are located around large bodies of water, both air crews and aircraft
are certified with airworthiness certificates based on evacuation procedures
that include water landings.

            
-- Pamela Azar Malibu, Calif.

            
               
                  Michael Brus
replies:
                
               I got my information on accident history from the FAA. Its
database does not go back to the beginning of commercial flight, obviously, so
it is possible there were ditchings before it began keeping records. It is also
conceivable that some accidental crashes into water upon landing or takeoff
were not classified as deliberate ditchings.
            

            
               How do crews receive "overwater" training? There
are no test crashes done, either by Boeing or the FAA, so "evacuation
procedures" are about the extent of the preparation--which could help if the
fuselage remains intact, but that is a big "if." Only military helicopter
pilots get dropped in water as part of their actual training.
            

            
               Are water landings survivable? Only in best-case
scenarios. There are too many variables involved to make a rule, but ditchings
of international carriers have shown that keeping the fuselage intact and the
passengers out of cold water is hard indeed.
            

            
               Boeing does not
perform crash tests on the water, nor does the FAA require them. Their planes
are subject to stress tests in a hangar.
            

            
               Tax Talk
            

            In "," William Saletan did his usual admirable job
of delineating the competing "Greenspins" of congressional Democrats and
Republicans. However, he failed to address a gaping hole in the Republicans'
tax cut plans that neither Democrats nor the media had pointed out: Namely,
that a tax cut of the size proposed might stimulate the economy to the point
that the Fed would feel compelled to raise interest rates in a pre-emptive
strike against inflation.

            In his remarks to the
Senate, Greenspan spoke of the benefits of "pre-emptive" action, i.e., moving
against inflation before it actually develops. I--and, I think, many
others--consider this remark an explicit warning to congressional Republicans
that, however the debate about the projected budget surplus goes, a large tax
cut will endanger low interest rates and thus the prosperity that makes
surpluses--and thus the proposed tax cuts themselves--possible.

            
-- Andrew B. Goodwin Clinton, Wash.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Politics of <EM>Talk</EM>

            What
does it take to win an election? First you must establish name identification,
viability, and a "vision." Then you must lower the media's expectations, rebut
charges of pandering and profligacy, and fend off attacks on your character.
What does it take to launch a magazine successfully? As Talk Editor Tina
Brown demonstrated this week, the answer is: pretty much the same thing.

            
               1.
Name identification. Having served in two high-profile offices over the
past 15 years ( Vanity Fair and The New Yorker ), Brown was well
positioned for a run at Talk . She scored an early publicity coup by
getting Hillary Clinton to appear in the magazine at its debut. But Brown also
benefited from a gaffe by her opponent, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who
responded to Clinton's appearance by banishing Talk 's launch party from
a city-owned site. His attack on Brown made the front pages of the New York
tabloids, giving Talk a free media hit.

            
               2.
Pandering. Many editors, like politicians, broaden their audience by
appealing to the public's lowest instincts--and, like politicians, are accused
of pandering. The rap on Brown is that she's "vapid" and "shallow," and her
magazine is "fluff" and "froth." A parody Web site calls Talk "Chatter!
Banter! Emotion! Solipsism! Pretense!" As often happens in campaigns, Brown
suffered an embarrassing defection last month, when writer Walter Kirn quit and
told the press he had been saddled with "celebrity profile assignments."

            
Brown's surrogates have replied that a good editor, like a good politician,
must toss a bit of red meat to the crowd now and then to sustain her popularity
and her movement. But Brown, like Dan Quayle, has lent credence to her
caricature. She has told the press that her editorial knack lies in being
"easily bored" and that the problem with celebrity hype is that it's "dull."
Faced with the charge that she's "lowbrow," Brown has espoused a "high-low"
formula under which Talk will endeavor, according to one staffer, "to
balance the higher-brow stuff and the trashier stuff." Brown's critics have
also circulated her quote that magazines should "be places where people can
picnic intellectually." These comments create an impression of flippancy and
flip-flopping, which bolsters the argument that Brown lacks conviction.

            
               3.
Vision. The best way to deflect charges of pandering and flip-flopping is
to articulate an essential message or "vision." Brown constantly boasts that
Talk has a "point of view." But when called upon to define it, she
speaks of a "look," a "tone," and an "atmosphere." Talk , she told the
Wall Street Journal , is "about expressing--without encumbrance of any
kind--a vision, in a sense, of the times that we are in." She comes off
sounding like President Bush, whose ruminations on "the vision thing" convinced
everyone that he recognized the importance of having a vision but didn't quite
know what the word meant. Instead, Brown speaks often of her "passion" and
"desire" for good writing. Message: I care.

            
               4.
Character. Some of Brown's opponents have gone negative, calling her
"ruthless" and tyrannical. She seems unsure whether to stay on message--"The
dogs bark and the caravan moves on," she told London's Sunday
Telegraph --or to make negative campaigning an issue. While her surrogates
decry the "long knives" arrayed against her, Brown accuses her rivals of "blood
sport." At times, she plays to the center, projecting kindness and tolerance:
"I don't understand this fear thing. I'm not vindictive." At other times, she
plays to her base, wearing her enemies' scorn as a badge of honor: "I've fired
a lot of people and killed a lot [of copy]. I don't make friends that way."
Like any smart politician, Brown spins the attacks on her as evidence of her
formidability. As New York Post columnist Liz Smith puts it, "What is it
about her that scares the rest of the press?"

            Brown
also has a Clintonian streak that threatens to escalate pandering into a
character issue. Bill Clinton pitches himself as the man who feels your pain.
Brown pitches Talk as the magazine of "intimacy," starting with its
cover story, "The Intimate Hillary," in which the first lady divulges her
"feelings" about her husband's infidelities. The consensus among political
pundits is that whether Brown used Mrs. Clinton, vice versa, or both, the whole
thing was "calculated" rather than intimate. Brown's assertions that the piece
plumbs the "depth" of the Clintons' "shared passions" and "spiritual intensity"
add to the impression that she's more interested in advertising intimacy than
in achieving it.

            
               5.
Fiscal responsibility. The old rap on Brown was that she spent wastefully
and ran up big deficits at The 
               New Yorker . Brown's spin is that
she cut the deficit: "When I arrived, it was losing money, and when I left, it
was losing less money." But the old rap has been overtaken by a new rap--that
Brown is fielding a "B team" of writers because she's no longer paying top
rates. Meanwhile, the hard-times ethic of fiscal austerity has given way to a
good-times ethic of "invest and grow," which frowns on frugality. Brown's
successor at The New Yorker , David Remnick, is criticized for being
"weak on the buzz factor," "sheepish" about courting fashion designers, and
addicted to "earnest seriousness." A colleague likens Remnick's avoidance of
limousine service to President Carter's despised modesty.

            
               6.
Expectations. An editor, like a candidate, must limit expectations so that
she can impress everyone by exceeding them. Brown has done so. A week ago, the
hype about Talk had spent itself. "Expectation is so high that her
enemies are already predicting the biggest let-down since Eyes Wide
Shut ," crowed the Telegraph . New York's Daily News said
critics were predicting a "gigantic fizzle." But by the time the magazine came
out, the backlash, too, had spent itself. According to Time , "the
correct attitude" prior to Talk 's debut "was to be sick of it already
without having seen it. But Brown has created something that shouts READ
ME."

            And being read,
ultimately, is the name of the game. The magazine market is less like a general
election, in which the candidate with the higher negative rating always loses,
than like a crowded primary, in which the fight for attention is crucial, and
it's worth alienating some people in order to attract others. The more Brown is
attacked, the better she does. When Giuliani vetoed Talk 's party site
and told the press it was "unimportant" and "irrelevant," all he did was make
the magazine important and relevant. The Journal put the point
succinctly to Brown: "Is any publicity good publicity?" She answered: "People
are rarely indifferent to the magazines I've put out. Sometimes they hate it,
but they are engaged." In other words, yes.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Planning for Obsolescence

            When I wrote my first textbook, the publisher
wanted to combat the second-semester used book market by sewing a $100 bill
into the binding of every 100 th book. Every student would tear his
book apart to see if he'd won. Printing with disappearing ink that lasts
exactly one semester would also discourage the used book market. But instead of
running lotteries or using disappearing ink, most publishers make used
textbooks obsolete by periodically releasing revised editions. Did I mention
that the fifth edition of my textbook is forthcoming next year?

            The naive answer to why publishers might want to
discourage the used book market is that they prefer to get paid every time a
student buys a book. But by that logic, you should never sell your house when
you can rent it: Why get paid only once when you could get paid every month?
The logic is wrong because the sale price is likely to be far higher than the
monthly rent. And the logic is still wrong when applied to textbooks, because
the sale price for a book that can be resold is likely to be far higher than
the price of a book designed to lose its value.

            If a student is willing to pay, say, $30 for a
textbook, that same student will be willing to pay $60 for the use of a
textbook that can be resold for $30 at the end of the semester. (For the sake
of simplicity, let's ignore the fact that the $30 delivered a few months from
now is worth a little less than $30 delivered immediately.) And for a book that
can be resold twice, the second owner's willingness to pay $60 means that the
first owner is willing to pay $90.

            Now, if you're a
publisher, is it more attractive to collect $30 apiece for three books printed
with disappearing ink or to collect $90 for one book that's designed to last?
As long as it's cheaper to produce one book than three, the publisher should
opt for permanence.

            That's why economists are generally skeptical about
allegations of "planned obsolescence." Every few years, someone claims that
General Electric knows how to make a light bulb last 1,000 years but suppresses
the technology to keep us coming back for more light bulbs. Likewise, Ann
Landers is forever publishing columns about how pantyhose are intentionally
designed to run so women will need a new pair every two weeks.

            But a woman who buys a $2
pair of pantyhose every two weeks has demonstrated her willingness to spend $52
a year on pantyhose. If Hanes could make a pair that's guaranteed to last a
year, she'd buy it for $52. That would be a better proposition for Hanes
than having to make 26 pairs to collect the same revenue. So the Ann Landers
theory makes no sense.

            Does that mean there's no such thing as planned
obsolescence? No, it means that planned obsolescence occurs only under special
conditions. Mistrust, for example, is a special condition. If a publisher says,
"Buy this book for $90, and you'll be able to resell it next year for $60," a
student might well respond, "How do I know you won't bring out a new edition
next year and undercut my resale market?" Unless the publisher can quell such
doubts, students won't pay premium prices for books with lasting value, so
publishers won't provide them.

            (Students, of course, are in some sense a captive
market, forced to buy the books their professors assign. But there must,
nevertheless, be some upper limit on their willingness to pay; otherwise,
textbooks would sell for an infinite price. And whatever the upper limit is, it
will always be higher for a book that can be resold than for a book that
can't.)

            In most instances of
planned obsolescence, customers have demanded it, and firms have provided it as
a service. Maybe you'd rather not spend $52 on a pair of pantyhose that might
get lost at the laundry. Or maybe you don't have $52 in your pocket right now.
By letting you buy 26 shoddy pairs at $2 apiece, the manufacturer provides you
with the equivalent of either insurance (against the prospect of losing your
entire year's supply of hose at once) or a loan (by allowing you to spread out
your payments over an entire year).

            What brings all this to mind is the recent controversy over
Monsanto Co.'s development of infertile seeds--seeds that yield crops that
don't reproduce so that farmers have to buy new seeds each year. From the
farmer's point of view, the opportunity to buy infertile seeds can be a great
boon. Instead of paying $100 for seed that should last 10 years, you pay $10
for new seed each year, which insures you against the possibility of a
disastrous and expensive crop loss.

            (Are you worried that
Monsanto would charge just as much for the infertile seeds as the fertile ones?
Don't be. Surely farmers are willing to pay much more for fertile seeds than
for infertile, and you can be sure that Monsanto fully exploits that
willingness.)

            Many high-yield hybrid seeds are infertile, though not by
design. Like mules, they're naturally infertile. Taking its lead from the
software industry, Monsanto had planned to convert this bug into a feature. But
in the face of considerable public pressure, Monsanto has agreed to stop
developing infertile seeds.

            Much of the opposition had nothing to do with
planned obsolescence and everything to do with concern that the Monsanto's
infertility gene might "leap" from its seeds to fertile seeds in adjoining
farms and eventually render those fertile strains infertile. Such hypothesized
contamination is a legitimate concern and quite plausibly a sufficient reason
to applaud Monsanto's decision. But an unfortunate side effect is the lost
opportunity to provide some socially desirable planned obsolescence.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Choking on Family Ties

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               About 10 years ago, after growing up in a
family without an appreciation of "family values," I decided I didn't have much
use for my relationships with my siblings. Both parents are deceased, and after
numerous efforts to get along with my sibs, I just quit having any contact with
them. This has alleviated a lot of stress in my life, and I really don't miss
them at all. I have a great group of friends whom I consider my family. They
are there for me like my actual siblings never were, and they understand the
lack of contact.
            

            
               The problem is that
I run into people who, after knowing me for a while, are dumbfounded to find
out I am not an only child, and they act like there's something wrong with me
because I'm not in contact with my siblings. I keep hearing, "But they are your
family!" I just figure I feel better mentally without the connection, and I
should keep things the way they are. But all these "family" people think I
should call and reconcile with them. Is there something wrong with me? Just
because I'm related to them, am I really missing something by not having them
in my life?
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Happy Without
            

            Dear Hap,

            Yes, you are missing something: Sturm und
Drang . Prudie thought this one through years ago because of a kindred
situation, though not with your particulars. If a relationship is troublesome
or destructive for whatever reason, and it's comfortable to sever
communication, there is no reason to stay yoked to a bad situation as though
one were part of a team of mules.

            Prudie is familiar with
"outsiders" offering the advice that you should just fix it up. Perhaps, in
your case, it would be simpler to tell new friends that you are an only
child ... because that is what you've made yourself, and this would end the
awkward conversations. Nowhere is it written that children of the same mother
and father have anything more in common than parents, and people who push the
issue belong in a home for the intrusive.

            
--Prudie, experientially

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I have been dating a
man who, unlike myself, still resides under the watchful eye of his parental
unit. Although his parents are very open and mostly mind their own business,
there is one issue that leaves me in a tight spot. Coming from a conservative
background, my partner has stated on many occasions that his parents won't
allow him to stay over at my apartment, even though on some nights this would
be preferable to his making the long drive home. We have been camping numerous
times but always with friends, which his parents "approve of." Trying to plan a
weekend getaway for our anniversary has been particularly trying, as his
parents would be upset, and he refuses to lie to his parents about where he is
going. Should I push the issue, or just let sleeping dogs lie and wait for him
to act like a man and make his own decisions?
            

            
               --Sincerely,
            

            

               Trouble in Paradise (well, Toronto)
            

            Dear Trub,

            You don't say how old you both are, but you're
clearly old enough to spend the night together ... and obviously have. Prudie
is getting definite vibes that your young man's "parental unit" comes with
strong apron strings.

            You have two options.
You can insist that your fella--whom I presume to be over 21--sit his parents
down and tell them about the birds and the bees. It seems to Prudie that his
parents are free to follow their own moral code, but so is he. If they invite
him out of their house, that might not be such a bad idea. If he is unwilling
to stand up to them and assert himself, then perhaps, to use your phrase, he
should lie, alone, with the sleeping dogs ... I mean the parental unit.

            
--Prudie, autonomously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               The end of the world
must be nigh. There was a news story about a couple in Philadelphia who paid
for their $34,000 wedding by selling advertising space at the ceremony and
reception! Everything, according to Reuters, "from the wedding rings to a week
at a penthouse in Cancun" was donated after the groom got 24 companies to
sponsor the nuptials in exchange for having their names appear six times--from
the invitations to the thank you notes. The bride drew the line at having
advertising banners draped across the aisle, but her perfume came from a local
Oscar de la Renta distributor, and the coffee was provided gratis from a
neighborhood supplier. Well, you get the idea. What do you think of all
this?
            

            

               --Brooksie
            

            Dear Brooks,

            Gauche, gauche, gauche,
and tacky. This cannot be the wave of the future, though, so calm yourself.
This is just the act of two tasteless clods who fancy themselves "business
minded." Prudie hesitates to think of when the baby arrives ... so she
won't.

            
--Prudie, gapingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I would like your
take on workplace etiquette concerning paychecks and benefits. I am beginning
to wonder if these are things we earn or gifts from Santa. Currently, I work
for a law firm, but I have had this experience with every job I've had in my
20-plus years of working--even when I worked as a waitress. Employers act like
it's taboo or in bad form to speak of paychecks, as in, "Are the checks in
today (on pay day)?" Are we supposed to just keep checking our mailbox or under
our desk blotters to see if Santa was good to us this month? What's with this
hush-hush attitude when it comes to being compensated for a job well
done?
            

            

               --Twin Cities
            

            Dear Twin,

            You must be the queen of
coincidence to have worked for over 20 years at different places where the
delivery of paychecks was erratic. Prudie would suggest that you go to the
office manager where you work now, or whoever writes the checks, and ask that
the time for their distribution be regularized. You need not be shy. If anyone
tries to close you down, or makes you feel as though your are talking about
things best left unspoken, just tell that person assertively that if you are
interested in guessing games you will pull out your Ouija board. Prudie thinks
if you make an issue of it you will get results.

            --Prudie, huffily

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Nuclear Infusion 

            

               Massive radiation leaked from a Japanese nuclear fuel plant.
Three employees were hospitalized, and 300,000 residents were ordered to remain
indoors. U.S. experts said the threat to widespread health appeared small. The
nuclear industry's spin: This was no Chernobyl . Environmentalists' spin: Do we need another
Chernobyl to realize that nuclear power isn't safe ?

            

               Vice President Al Gore shook up his campaign. He is moving his
headquarters from Washington to Tennessee and challenging Bill Bradley to a
series of debates. Gore said he'll assemble a "leaner, tougher" organization to
respond to Bradley, who has recently raised more money than Gore. The rosy
spin: The return to his roots will show that Gore is independent from
Washington ( Nashville Tennessean ). The skeptical spin: Put the
headquarters where you will, but a vice president is never an outsider.

            

               The Brooklyn Museum of Art filed suit to prevent New York City from
withdrawing its funding. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has halted checks to
the museum because of its "Sensation" exhibit, which includes a dissected pig
suspended in formaldehyde and a painting of the Virgin Mary that's adorned with
elephant dung. Giuliani's spin: Artists are guaranteed freedom, not taxpayer
support. The museum's spin: When you withdraw support for unpopular views, you
violate this freedom. The jaded spin: The debate is less about principles than
about self-promotion. (
                  Slate
               's "" and "" debated
Giuliani's move.)

            

               President Clinton signed a temporary spending bill. It will
fund agencies at current levels for three weeks as Congress and the White House
negotiate the 2000 budget. Separately, a Congressional Budget Office study
concluded that current budget proposals would spend nearly $18 billion of the
Social Security surplus. The Democratic spin: Republican promise-breakers are
raiding Social Security. The Republican spin: The Democrats are the real
raiders since they won't cut spending.

            

               Dan Quayle quit the presidential race, and John McCain entered
it. Quayle said he had insufficient funds to remain competitive with
George W. Bush. Pundits variously said Quayle's withdrawal revealed: 1)
moderates' control of the GOP; 2) the influence of money over presidential
politics; and 3) Quayle's lingering reputation "as a lightweight" ( New York
Times ). McCain framed himself as the candidate of patriotism and integrity,
promising to reform campaign finance and strengthen national defense. Pundits
debated whether his platform would: 1) differentiate him from Bush; or 2)
alienate him from the Republican establishment.
(
                  Slate
               's William Saletan McCain's messages.)

            

               Amazon.com opened its Web site to sales by other retailers.
Anyone can list products through Amazon by paying a monthly fee and a
percentage of each transaction. Amazon's zShops began Thursday with 500,000 new
products. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asserted that his company was becoming the
Internet's supermall. Skeptics worried that poor products or service from
unknown merchants could tarnish Amazon's reputation (
                  Seattle Post-Intelligencer
               ).

            

               The Indonesian army is withdrawing from East Timor. U.N.
peacekeeping forces now officially control the territory and are encouraging
exiled refugees to return home. Australian troops discovered nine charred
bodies, the first physical evidence of human rights abuses. The hopeful spin:
It's safe to live in East Timor again. The gloomy spin: Most Timorese don't
have homes to go back to.

            

               Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote himself into the story as a fictional
character. The forthcoming book portrays author Edmund Morris as
Reagan's contemporary. 
                  Newsweek
                featured an excerpt of the book. Former Reagan
aides called the book "pure fiction," and George Will dubbed it "dishonorable" for its distortions.
But Gore Vidal said the mixing of fact with fantasy was appropriate for a
president "whose life owed so little to Parson Weems and so much to
Pirandello." (
                  Slate
               's "Culturebox" Morris' literary
device.)

            

               Pat Buchanan will likely switch his presidential campaign to the Reform
Party. Buchanan, who sparked controversy with a new book questioning
the need for U.S. intervention in World War II, has been increasingly vocal
about his frustration with GOP moderates. The Republican and Reform parties are
divided over whether 1) Buchanan's views are too extreme to be included; or 2)
his conservative constituency is too valuable to be excluded. Democrats are
unanimous: When the dust settles, we'll come out on top.
(
                  Slate
               's "Pundit Central" the debate.)

            

               The United States won golf's Ryder Cup. The Americans'
one-point victory over the European team was the biggest comeback in the
tournament's history. American Justin Leonard's 45-foot birdie putt on the
17 th hole set off a celebration on the course before his European
opponent finished playing. Both teams called the win historic: The United
States said it was golf's "greatest moment" (ESPN);
the Europeans labeled the celebration "the most disgusting thing" the sport had
seen (ESPN).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The World Wine Web

            
               Subject:
Illegal Internet Wine

            
               From:

               Paula
            

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Sun
Oct 3

            As a liquor store owner, I'm not so concerned about
my fair state losing out on millions of tax dollars through Internet sales.
What does concern me greatly, however, is the fact that I pay $2,000 annually
to my local selectmen for the privilege of selling wines in my town. Why should
someone from across the country, having paid no licensing fees whatsoever, be
able to take potential business away from me? Granted, some locations are state
regulated, but for those of us who are privately operated, the idea of someone
being allowed to compete with us for free is insulting. I have no problem with
competition; just make sure that it's a level playing field.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
The Spanish Inquisition

            
               From:

               The Grand Inquisitor
            

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Fri
Oct 1

            This whole unsavory episode brings back memories of
skits with Monty Python ! One of my favorite lines was, "You are guilty
of six--no, seven--charges of heresy. Of course, the limits of television
broadcasting prevent me from presenting a shred of evidence to support
them."

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
Bauer and the Press Sharks

            
               From:
pdbrophy

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Thu
Sept 30

            If the behavior of the reporters was so
indefensible in your mind, why aren't they identified by name? Professional
courtesy?

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
Buchanan and "Anti-Semitism"

            
               From:
Jewish in Spirit

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Thu
Sept 30

            Nowhere does 
                  Slate
                prove
that the following definition (from the "Anti-Semitism" ) has anything to do
with the examples cited in Mr. Buchanan's book: "[Anti-Semitism] is an
ideology--an interlocked set of principles and prejudices--in which certain
nefarious traits or practices are ascribed to Jews as a people, even when few
Jews exhibit those traits or when other people engage in those practices."

            
               
                  Slate
                proceeds to name
very specific individuals, presumably Jews, whose policies Mr. Buchanan takes
to task. Where is the generalization to "Jews as a people"? Where does he
impugn that only Jews subscribe to such policies? Which of his examples involve
"traits or practices"? The examples simply do not support his premise that Mr.
Buchanan is prejudiced.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
For Artists, "Diversity" Doesn't Mean "Catholic"

            
               From:
Frederick Fittin

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Thu
Sept 30 

            The uproar by the liberals is understandable.
Catholic bashing is OK since it is, a priori , art. Doing the same
thing to, let's say, blacks or Jews, is hateful and mean-spirited ...

            I do not want my tax money to support trash art, or
any art for that matter. If I want to enjoy art, I go to the Met or MoMA in
NYC. I pay my admission for the privilege. We have no more business supporting
art precisely because one person's art is another person's trash.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
"Art" Does Not Equal "Beauty"

            
               From:
Frederick Bartlett

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Fri
Oct 1

            While the Madonna and dung are certainly (and
certainly intentionally) inflammatory, I think there's a bigger and older issue
still unresolved. Namely, that the art world thinks that the purpose of art is
to expand the boundaries of human perception and to confront our cultural
limitations while hoi polloi would be far more likely to define it as to render
beauty with skill.

            Until curators and critics manage to convince the
great unwashed that beauty and skill are irrelevant (or even antagonistic) to
art, we will have these contretemps every year or two.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
"Intrusive" Literary Devices

            
               From: Jon
Ihle

            
               Re: ""



            
               Date: Thu
Sept 30

            So a literary device fails if it is intrusive,
destroys the illusion of transparency and calls attention to itself as a
construct? Like the final scene of A Winter's Tale , or the last speech
of The Tempest ? This standard for literary achievement would also
discredit any work in the modernist tradition--for example Brecht's and
Beckett's plays. You might also have to dump a few classics on the order of
Paradise Lost or Tristram Shandy .

            It is only a very narrow and very recent tradition
in literature that demands we prop up the notion that art should resemble life
as closely as possible and in all its probabilities. This doctrine of
expressive realism is a nineteenth-century notion that most historically aware
writers have moved beyond. At least Morris isn't pretending, like most
traditional biographers, that he is in command of some untainted objectivity
beyond authorial presence or beyond fiction. The subjectivity of the author is
indelible--at least Morris has the guts to expose it.

            (To reply, click
here .)

            
               Subject:
"Normal" Weather?

            
               From:
Bill McKibben

            
               Re:
""

            
               Date: Mon
Sept 27

            I thought Mr. Plotz's article was very funny. But I
think he is factually incorrect on the question of whether severe storms are
increasing. Across this hemisphere, according to the scientists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, severe storms--meaning more than 2
inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period--are up about 20 percent compared with
the century average. That's an enormous increase in a baseline physical
phenomenon; it's as if you woke up and everyone was suddenly seven feet tall.
It begs for explanation, and the most plausible explanation, according to the
climatologists, is global warming.

            Warm air holds more water than cold air. Hence, a
warmed environment (and we've seen the ten warmest years on record since 1980)
will see both more aridity (due to increased evaporation) and precipitation
(when those clouds finally let loose). This may make me a Greeniac, but I think
it actually makes me more like a physicist. If you add more heat energy to a
confined space--the atmosphere--that energy is going to express itself, and one
way it will do so is with increased rainfall and storminess.

            (To reply, click here .)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Greenspin

            From
time to time, a great man arises among us, teaching wisdom and virtue. Awed by
his authority, the political leaders of his day embrace his legacy, distort his
words, and persecute their enemies in his name. Such is the fate of
Washington's reigning prophet, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Last
week, he testified before Congress in the midst of a partisan fight over a
Republican plan to cut $800 billion in taxes over 10 years. While Democrats
solicited his denunciation of the plan, Republicans sought his condemnation of
the Democratic alternative. Greenspan tried to preach higher principles, but
both sides twisted his answers to suit their purposes. Their fight for his
favor revolves around four questions.

            

               1. What's the comparison? Greenspan testified that debt
payment is the best use of the surplus, tax cuts are the next best, and
spending hikes are the worst. While opposing a big tax cut, he stipulated, "If
I became concerned that the surplus is going to be employed for increased
spending programs, [then] I would be strongly in favor of tax cuts now. I think
it's the second best alternative." In short, whether Greenspan supports a tax
cut depends on which alternative it's compared to.

            To
make the tax cut look bad, Democrats compare it to debt payment. At the
hearing, Rep. John LaFalce, D-N.Y., asked Greenspan whether he opposed the
Republican plan. "My first priority, if I were given such a priority, is to let
the surpluses run," Greenspan replied. LaFalce tried to quit while he was
ahead, but Greenspan insisted on adding, "My second priority is, if you find
that as a consequence of those surpluses, they tend to be spent, then I would
be far more in the camp of cutting taxes, because the least desirable [outcome]
is using those surpluses for expanding outlays." In their post-hearing spin,
Democrats ignored this caveat. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., asserted that
Greenspan had "attacked the Republican Party." Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.,
suggested that Greenspan's analysis made clear that a $500 billion tax cut was
just as "dangerous" as an $800 billion tax cut.

            
Conversely, to make the tax cut look good, Republicans compare it to spending
hikes. "My understanding from all you've said here today," Rep. Michael Castle,
R-Del., told Greenspan at the hearing, "is that you believe that debt
retirement is probably the best thing we could do. And if not that, perhaps
some sort of a tax cut. But probably the thing that could really get us in
trouble in an economic sense from your perspective is to spend it all." In
post-hearing TV appearances, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., argued that Greenspan's
essential message was to "be sure you do not increase government spending."

            

               2. Is Clinton's plan debt payment or spending? President
Clinton's alternative plan would reserve about 45 percent of future surpluses
for Social Security and Medicare while setting aside nearly 20 percent for
education, defense, veterans, agriculture, medical research, and other
programs. Armey and Domenici call this "spending." "The president is going to
spend every nickel" of the surplus, Domenici protested, "so Alan Greenspan
would agree with us" that taxes should be cut instead. "The White House is
buying down less debt, and increasing spending, and increasing taxes," added
Armey. "I'm sure Alan Greenspan will applaud our effort relative to the
president's effort to buy down less debt and increase government programs."
Conversely, Durbin spun Clinton's plan as debt payment. He claimed that when
Greenspan was asked whether he supported the tax cut, he said no. "The best
thing to do is the Democratic plan: spend down [the] national debt, invest the
money in Social Security and Medicare."

            

               3. Which excess would be harder to reverse? Since tax cuts and
spending erode the surplus, Greenspan is wary of both. Democrats, seeking to
direct his ire against the Republican plan, emphasize the difficulty of reining
in tax cuts once they've been promised. At the hearing, Rep. Ken Bentsen,
D-Texas, asked Greenspan about the "risks" of "having locked in a tax cut that
we then have to borrow more to pay for." Afterward, Durbin suggested that
Greenspan didn't want Congress to "get committed" to tax cuts. Republicans, on
the other hand, emphasize the difficulty of reining in spending. "If you create
all those new programs, you'll never get that money back," Sen. Phil Gramm,
R-Texas, argued, whereas if the money goes to tax cuts, "[y]ou could get it
back by raising taxes."

            

               4. Whose promise is less trustworthy? Democrats promise to
preserve the surplus for debt reduction by not spending it. Republicans promise
to preserve the surplus for debt reduction by cutting spending to keep pace
with their tax cuts. The Republican interpretation of Greenspan's remarks--that
taxes should be cut because the Democrats can't be trusted to refrain from
spending the surplus--obscures the contrary possibility, i.e., that the tax cut
should be avoided because the GOP can't be trusted to make the necessary
spending cuts. Democrats neglected to ask Greenspan about this possibility at
the hearing, but on Face the Nation , Bob Schieffer of CBS put the
argument to Domenici: "Some people would come back at you and say, 'Look, for
this surplus to be this large, you have to have a 20 percent reduction in
programs, [which is] totally unrealistic.' "

            So
far, the Democrats' spin has prevailed, mostly because, as the Wall Street
Journal noted Tuesday, the media have ignored Greenspan's caveat that tax
cuts are preferable to more spending. Most reports say only that he opposed the
Republican plan. None of the New York Times ' political stories or
editorials about Greenspan's testimony mentioned his qualified endorsement of
the tax cut. Instead, the Times fed its readers the Democrats'
comparison, noting that Greenspan said, "it is more important to pay down the
national debt than cut taxes." The Times ' only mention of Greenspan's
caveat was in the 15 th paragraph of a story in the business section,
which dismissed the caveat and concluded that "effectively, Mr. Greenspan was
siding with the White House" and other foes of the Republican plan. A
Times editorial chided Republicans for "seeking Greenspanian ambiguity
where it did not exist."

            This
shallow reporting doesn't just bury the Republican spin. It conceals a deeper
question about Washington's Greenspan worship. The Fed chairman made clear that
his recommendation against cutting taxes depends on a calculation that Congress
won't spend the surplus. If that calculation is wrong, he would favor the tax
cut. And on what basis did Greenspan make this calculation? His only answer was
that he "hoped" he wasn't mistaken.

            Not
only is Greenspan's answer scientifically baseless; his characterization of the
problem (whether the surpluses will "be spent") is superficial. The salient
questions, outlined above, are more relative and dynamic: whether Democratic
promises to refrain from spending the surplus are less trustworthy than
Republican promises to match tax cuts with spending cuts, and which
hypothetical error--excessive spending or excessive tax cuts--would be harder
to reverse. How could an economist of Greenspan's sophistication fumble such
important questions in such an unsophisticated manner? Because, like most
questions about how much money the government will raise and spend, they're not
economic. They're political. And instead of throwing these questions at Alan
Greenspan, Congress should be answering them itself.

            
               Photograph of Alan
Greenspan on the Slate Table of Contents by Kevin
Lamarque/Reuters.
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The &quot;Tax Scheme&quot; Scheme

            Sunday
on Meet the Press , White House Chief of Staff John Podesta demonstrated
how Democrats plan to win the budget debate. Answer to Question 1: The GOP's
new legislation "uses up the entire surplus for this risky tax scheme." Answer
to Question 2: "It would clearly be better to ... pay down $100 billion worth
of debt than pass this risky tax scheme." Answer to Question 3: Failure to cut
taxes would be "better than seeing this risky tax scheme signed into law." The
way Podesta puts it, it's not clear whether the "scheme" would cut your taxes
or raise them. That's the whole idea.

            "Risky
tax scheme" was coined in 1996 to refer to Bob Dole's proposed 15 percent tax
cut. According to Democratic National Committee and Clinton-Gore campaign ads,
Dole's plan was "risky" because it would "balloon the deficit" and force
Congress "to cut Medicare, education, [and the] environment." The rationale for
calling it a tax "scheme"--in contrast to President Clinton's tax "cuts"--was
that it would "actually raise taxes on 9 million working people" by narrowing
the Earned Income Tax Credit.

            
Clinton blasted Dole's "risky tax scheme" in every speech, but that wasn't
enough for Al Gore. In the vice presidential debate, Gore used the phrase eight
times. Pundits marveled at his robotic repetition. Dole's campaign chairman
protested that "leaving money in someone's pocket is not a scheme" but later
conceded that this "focus-group tested" phrase had killed the Republican
ticket.

            Now
the deficit has turned into a surplus, and Dole's 15 percent plan has given way
to other tax-cut proposals. But that hasn't stopped Gore from renewing his
favorite chant. At a senior citizens' rally last fall, he used the magic phrase
three times. Republicans "are trying to come up with this huge, risky tax
scheme and finance it by taking money out of the surplus that has been built up
entirely because of the Social Security trust fund," Gore warned. Two months
later, he assailed George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism," declaring,
"Compassion means reserving the surplus until we save Social Security first ...
not going back to the risky tax schemes and economic upheaval of the '80s."

            Today,
Gore and other Democrats use "risky tax scheme" with abandon, ignoring the
disappearance of the circumstances that originally justified the phrase. In
1996, a tax cut was "risky" if it would "balloon the deficit." In 1999, it's
"risky" if it would "blow the surplus." In 1996, a "tax scheme" was a plan that
ostensibly would raise taxes on some people while cutting taxes for others. In
1999, "tax scheme" is just a euphemism--actually, a malphemism--to conceal that
your opponent is proposing a tax cut and to trick uninformed listeners into
thinking that he might raise their taxes instead.

            You
can argue, as even some Republicans do, that the current tax-cut bill is a
scheme because it favors the wealthy and various special interests. But it's
still a tax cut. The only reason to delete the word "cut" when referring to the
bill is to withhold this information because you know it would incline your
audience to support the bill. For years, Republicans have called budget outlays
"spending," "welfare," and "waste" to conceal that half the money goes back to
the middle class through entitlements. "Risky tax scheme" is the Democrats'
most concerted attempt to turn this tactic against the GOP. The message is:
When Republicans mess with the tax code, somebody else is getting the money,
and you're getting screwed.

            The
price of this spin is that it insults people's intelligence, in part through
deceptive censorship and in part through mindless repetition. Podesta denounces
the GOP's "risky tax scheme" at least twice per interview. Two weeks ago, a DNC
press release used the phrase four times in a span of 60 words. Gore seems
incapable of appearing in public without reciting "risky tax scheme" three
times. Rather than simply acknowledge the tax cut and argue its merits, he's
betting that we're stupid. In the long run, that's not a smart bet.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 256: &quot;Artifacts or Fiction?&quot;

            
               The list includes
a paper shredder (Shark 200 personal security shredder), a leather picture
frame (without picture), and three pair of Jockey® shorts (athletic midway
pouch brief). List of what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 255)--"Sorry, Right Number":
            

            

               On Sunday, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and his wife, Frances,
released a statement that began: "Early this morning, we received a call that
every parent dreads." What did the caller say?
            

            "Mom?
Dad? I've decided to major in English."-- Tim Rogers ( Matt
Sullivan had a similar answer.)

            "Mom?
Dad? I'm gay. And now for the bad news ..."-- L
               arry Amoros
(similarly, Darren Thorneycroft )

            "The
good Lord called upon them to sacrifice their eldest child, as a sign of their
faith. They later learned that the Lord was making a prank call."-- William
Considine
            

            "We've
traced the call ... it's coming from inside the house."-- Daniel Radosh
and Floyd Elliot
            

            
"First, the good news: John Kasich was nearby."-- Tim Carvell (similarly,
Greg Diamond , Daniel Radosh , and Charles Star )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            The most feared (in a
good-natured, humorous way) teen news--other than the startlingly high number
of "your child was killed in a car crash" (in a lighthearted, frolicsome
way)--was this: Your adolescent is enjoying sex and drugs. This is a tricky
territory for parents who enjoy sex and drugs and liberal politics. How do you
forbid the kids to practice what you, er, practice? The hypocrisy buster?
Age-appropriate. There are many things that are permitted to adults--e.g.
driving a car--that are not wrong in themselves, just wrong for a 5-year-old.
Once you get your adolescent to endorse this idea (and to forget that Juliet
was just 14), you've won. The rest is just arguing over what age is the
threshold for each activity. Some suggestions:

            

               Drinking--21, in accordance with the law of the land

               Dating--16, in accordance with parents' senile reminiscence

               Own Monkey--12, or whenever old enough to operate electro-stick

               Own Erotic Life--18, if attending college out of state; 35, if living at
home

               Own Seat on New Jersey Supreme Court--18, or old enough to serve Gov.
Christine Todd Whitman's relentless ambition

            

            
               Slurred
Answer
            

            The caller told the Glendenings that their
19-year-old son, Raymond, had just been arrested for drunken driving, in a
parking lot, at 2:30 a.m. Most piquant detail: Frances Glendening's assumption
that this is a universal experience.

            After giving the little
miscreant a sound thrashing, the governor and his wife will throw Raymond out
of the house and disinherit him, or, if you choose to believe the pronouncement
of parents befuddled by grief: "We will offer Raymond our unconditional and
abiding love, support and guidance."

            
               Augmented
Quotation Extra
            

            (Each
final sentence added by News Quiz.)

            "... I
particularly want to congratulate the Police Department. And that boozy old
fool who piloted the Exxon Valdez --I'm sending him a bouquet of
daffodils."--New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, reacting to the Louima verdicts.

            "...
It was such a surprise that we couldn't believe it at first. How on God's green
earth could he think this makes the cops look good?"--Al Ghiorso of Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, commenting on the discovery of two new chemical
elements.

            "...
We feel this will go a long way in carrying out our responsibilities to the
parents of America. And we hope Adam Sandler makes good use of his time on
Prison Island."--William Kartozian, president of the National Association of
Theater Owners, announcing that teen-agers will now have to present fake photo
IDs to get into R-rated movies.

            "...
All I have to do is say I am going to see Star Wars ' and then sneak into
the movies I really want to see. All the kids in my class think William
Kartozian is as goofy as a New York City mayor."--Paul McSweeny, 14, who has so
little respect for phony-baloney gestures that he won't even bother to purchase
a fake ID. Kids.

            "...
He acknowledged his mistake but also said, 'Don't forget, I'm a three-time
N.B.A. All-Star,' which for every 16-year-old is the American Dream. That, and
having sex indoors."--Jay Coen Gilbert, vice president of And 1 sneakers,
sympathizing with company pitchman Latrell Sprewell.

            "...
All of this depends on Mr. Milosevic's accepting the terms of the military
technical agreement, and abiding by it. He really congratulated the
cops?!!"--Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, assessing progress in the
Kosovo talks.

            
               Mike Madden's
Headline Haiku
            

            Haven for illicit
10-digit dialing is
the death knell.
Move into Web.

            -- Philadelphia Inquirer , June 3, 1999

            (Technology section
only)

            
               Common
Denominator, Unrun
            

            Michael Jackson, White
House interns, Burbank, prunes.

            
               Common
Denominator, Run
            

            Mom, Dad, I need my old room back.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Timor Killers Caught on Tape

            The
Independent
of London led its front page Monday with what it claimed was the first clear,
documented evidence that the Indonesian army directed the slaughter in East
Timor. It published transcripts of recordings of two-way radio
conversations between the special forces unit of the Indonesian army--the
Kopassus--and anti-independence militias. Radio conversations between Kopassus
officers and militia commanders shortly before and after the Aug. 31 referendum
included Kopassus saying, "It is better we wait for the result of the
announcement [of the ballot]. ... Whether we win or lose, that's when we'll
react." Also, Kopassus: "Those white people [referendum observers] ... should
be put in the river." Militia commander (passing the order to other
militiamen): "If they want to leave, pull them out [of their car], kill them
and put them in the river." Kopassus: "They need to be stopped." Militiamen:
"It will be done." "I'll wipe them out, all of them." "I'll eat them up."

            On
Sunday, the Observer of London led with an "exclusive" report that
members of the Kopassus had been secretly trained in the United States under a
program code-named "Iron Balance." Quoting Pentagon documents obtained by the
U.S.-based East Timor Action Network and Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., the
Observer said the program "was hidden from legislators and the public
when Congress curbed the official schooling of Indonesia's army after a
massacre in 1991." The training of Kopassus went ahead nevertheless at American
taxpayers' expense "despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about
200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975," the
paper said. It quoted a 1990 cable to the State Department from an unidentified
former official of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta that the training had been "a
big help to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people and I
probably have a lot of blood on my hands."

            As the
first peacekeepers arrived in East Timor, the South China Morning Post took a hard line against the
Indonesian government in an editorial Monday, saying that "[i]f the army lets its
militia puppets fight the UN forces, then Jakarta should pay a heavy price.
International agencies should halt all aid, and other countries should bring
maximum pressure on Indonesia to act like the responsible nation it so often
claims to be." The liberal Jakarta Post predicted a strengthening of the power of the Indonesian
military with the anticipated passage in parliament this week of a new state
security bill. Condemning Indonesia's reform leaders for their lack of
resistance to the bill, the paper said it would give the military almost
unlimited power in a state of emergency, including the right to jail people
without trial. The day the House of Representatives endorses the bill will be
"a sad day for civil society," sounding the death knell for the reform
movement.

            A
commentary in the Jakarta Post warned that
Australia's leadership of the peacekeeping force could destroy the hitherto
close relationship between Australia and Indonesia. Aleksius Jemadu, a lecturer
in international relations at Parahyangan Catholic University in Bandung,
Indonesia, wrote that the East Timor militias might target Australian troops,
"thus drawing Australia into a conflict much more complicated than it ever
expected. The possibility of an open conflict with Indonesia cannot be ruled
out, particularly if pro-integration militias launch an attack from the western
half of the island of Timor." Noting that the Indonesian military is "very
suspicious" about Australia's motivation in East Timor (believing it may have
as much to do with Prime Minister John Howard's popularity at home as with
humanitarian concerns), Jemadu asked, "Does Australia have a strategic agenda
which might strengthen its bargaining position vis-a-vis its closest northern
neighbor? Now Australia's fear of Indonesia is turning out to be a
self-fulfilling prophecy."

            The
same kind of anxieties were expressed in the Sydney Morning Herald .
Michelle Grattan wrote that without a clear exit timetable, Australia's
relationship with Indonesia "will be seen through the Timor prism for years
rather than months." She said, "The surge of feeling for 'our boys' on their
departure is dangerously fuelling nationalist sentiment in both countries.
Australian business interests in Indonesia are being hit by the surge of
anti-Australian emotion. And alarmingly, despite the fact that Australia is
putting pressure on Indonesia rather than vice versa, some Australian
politicians are starting to talk in old threat-from-the-north language."

            While
remarking that Australia had played "a commendably sensible diplomatic role
throughout the latest troubles," the Financial Times of London said Monday in an editorial that
"[t]he venture has also exposed latent resentment of the potential leadership
of Australia in the region," particularly from Malaysia, which has refused to
take part in the peacekeeping force under Australian command. Le Monde of Paris made the
same point Sunday in an editorial, saying that most Asian countries (with the
exception of Thailand "which accepts all its responsibilities") regard the
intervention in East Timor as an example of western neocolonialism, but it
argued that the intervention is justified by international justice and, in the
specific case of Indonesia, by its wish "to benefit from the globalization of
trade and from substantial international financial aid." In an editorial Monday, the Bangkok Post praised Thailand's decision to join the
peacekeeping force and described it as a policy of "tough love."

            In
Spain, El País
reported an improvement in Spanish-Chilean relations because of
Chile's decision to raise the case of Gen. Augusto Pinochet with the
International Court of Justice in the Hague. It quoted Spanish Foreign Minister
Abel Matutes as saying this could bring "a complete solution" to the row
generated by Spain's request for Pinochet to be extradited from Britain for
murder, torture, and other human rights violations. It said the Spanish and
Chilean foreign ministers will meet for talks in New York this week.

            In
London, the Times reported Monday that British mountaineer George
Mallory, who died on Mount Everest in 1924, may have been the first person to
reach the summit after all. A book by members of the team that found his body
on the mountain last May revealed that he had enough oxygen to do so, and it
also offered another "tantalising clue. ... It is known that Mallory had
intended to place a photograph of his wife, Ruth, on the summit should he reach
it. No photographs were found on his body. 'Where are they,' the authors ask,
'if not at the summit?' " In an editorial, the Times (which is
serializing the book Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory , by
Jochen Hemmleb, Larry Johnson, and Eric Simonson) admitted that the evidence is
hardly conclusive but said that an American search expedition will return to
Everest next year to look for the body of Mallory's fellow mountaineer Andrew
Irvine and for the missing camera with which Irvine planned to record them both
on the roof of the world.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Gary Bauer Scandal

            Did
Gary Bauer commit adultery with a campaign aide? Rumors to that effect have
circulated for weeks. Monday, a New York Daily News gossip column asked, "What presidential
candidate is praying that a former secretary doesn't go public with her claim
that he's been having an affair with a twentysomething woman? Many on the
married Republican's campaign staff are already jumping ship." National
Journal 's Hotline broadcast that teaser, and radio host Don Imus linked
it to Bauer. The San Francisco Chronicle asked Bauer about the rumors
and published his denial Tuesday. At a news conference Wednesday, Bauer denied
that he had violated his marital vows or inappropriately touched anyone, and he
challenged the dozens of reporters on hand to produce evidence or a specific,
on-the-record allegation that he had done so.

            If
reporters had the evidence, they could have produced it. If not, they could
have closed their notebooks and walked away. Instead, they interrogated Bauer
for half an hour in front of eight TV cameras and wrote articles suggesting
that whether or not he had had an affair, he was wrong to have left open the
possibility that anyone might have thought he had done anything wrong. The
scandal isn't that Bauer committed adultery. The scandal is that without
proving that charge or even making it, the media have found ways to spin
lesser, derivative, and empty insinuations about him into a national story.
Let's examine the charges against him.

            

               1. Bauer committed 
               "the appearance of impropriety."
Unable to produce allegations of impropriety, reporters asked Bauer in
accusatory tones whether he had "met behind closed doors" with the aide,
Melissa McClard (answer: yes), and whether Bauer's aides had told him "that
people are asking questions [about it] and it's making people uncomfortable."
When Bauer challenged a reporter to define the alleged "inappropriate
behavior," the reporter replied, "That you were seen too often with a woman on
your campaign, who is described to me as being 26 years old and blond." Another
reporter accused Bauer of being "ambiguous, because you're not really telling
us ... can you understand the perception that you may have had an affair?" How
Bauer could refute such perceptions, questions, and discomfort was equally
ambiguous.

            Two
alleged Bauer accusers, former aides Charles Jarvis and Tim McDonald, finally
went on the record Wednesday. Jarvis said he had no proof of a sexual
relationship between Bauer and McClard, and McDonald said he believed Bauer's
denial of such a relationship. Rather than conclude that there was no story,
the Washington Post published an article, headlined
"Ex-Aides to Bauer Speak Out," which paraphrased the two men as saying Bauer's
meetings with McClard "looked" inappropriate and "lent themselves to gossip and
rumor." The Post quoted Jarvis as saying Bauer "has no business creating
that kind of appearance of impropriety."

            

               2. The 
               appearance of impropriety by a Christian
conservative is itself improper. A Post reporter pressed Bauer about
his closed-door meetings with McClard: "Billy Graham doesn't do it, James
Dobson doesn't do it. So [among] the people who you are close to, actually,
there is a sensitivity about meeting with women behind closed doors. I'm
not saying there should be one. I don't think there should. But there is
one." Thursday's Post reported that Jarvis and McDonald "said Bauer
spent hours behind closed doors with her and traveled alone with her, violating
the strict rules they believe govern conservative Christian married men in
their dealings with women." By framing the issue as "sensitivity," the
Post avoided taking responsibility for deeming Bauer's closed-door
meetings an important issue.

            

               3. Bauer 
               appeared to ignore allegations of the appearance
of impropriety. "Is it possible," a reporter asked Bauer, "that you may
have been engaging in behavior that was perfectly innocent [but] in the minds
of the people who work for you and respected you was inappropriate, and that
perhaps you--as it was put by someone to me--you appeared a little arrogant in
refusing to recognize, according to them, their complaints?" In other words,
Bauer's offense is that he dismissed a perception he knew to be false.

            

               4. Bauer 
               is covering up allegations of the appearance of
impropriety. Reporters asked Bauer whether aides had told him they were
"uncomfortable" about the appearance of his relationship with McClard. One
reporter asked whether Bauer's former secretary had told him, "I wish you
wouldn't behave this way with this woman." When Bauer challenged the reporter
to explain the meaning of "behave this way," the reporter admitted, "I don't
know."

            Bauer
denied that his aides had alleged actual impropriety: "No one leaving my
campaign has said, 'Gary, I am leaving your campaign because I believe you're
having an affair.' " He also denied that any perception of impropriety could be
justified: "I cannot imagine that anybody in a campaign would object to me
having a meeting behind closed doors with a professional woman." The
Post , seizing on the latter remark, reported that Jarvis "sharply
disputed Bauer." The sad truth, Jarvis told the Post , was that "people
have confronted Gary about the appearance of impropriety." Similarly,
USA
Today quoted Jarvis as saying, "Gary Bauer just went on national
television and refused to tell the truth." And what was that truth? That Jarvis
and others had quit the campaign because of their "concerns about the
relationship"--whatever that means.

            

               5. Bauer 
               improperly failed to confront the person who
apparently alleged the appearance of impropriety. "One would think," one
reporter lectured Bauer, "when you found that the source appeared to be [the
Forbes] campaign, that you would go directly to the head of that campaign and
say, 'Is this happening? Are you people doing this?' " Another reporter chimed
in, "For folks who are not presidential candidates, if somebody was spreading
rumors like that about them, I think the first instinct would be to go to the
suspected source and say, 'Are you doing this? And if so, please stop it.' Why
didn't you do that?"

            

               6. Bauer 
               failed to disprove the possibility of
impropriety. Unable to formulate a precise allegation, one reporter asked
Bauer whether his behavior with McClard had been "flirtatious or in any way
different from how you interact with other aides" (answer: no). When Bauer
challenged another questioner to explain what he meant by "inappropriate
behavior," the questioner replied, "How specific do you want to get? I'm not
sure I understand what you want." Responding to Bauer's assertion that he had
never violated his wedding vows, another reporter cracked, "President Clinton
said that too." Thursday's Chicago Tribune reported that Bauer "would not go much
further than indicating he was faithful to his wife." The collective
implication is that Bauer's denials must have been couched to protect some
unspecified kind of dalliance.

            

               7. Every 
               a
               llegation is a political
fact. Horse-race journalism ignores whether charges are true and focuses
instead on whether they're damaging. The first question to Bauer Wednesday was,
"Don't you just give this story more momentum by doing this?" Another reporter
asked, "How do you think your supporters are going to respond to all this?" The
Post , too scrupulous to say whether Bauer had done anything wrong or
even whether the perception that he might have done so would hurt him
politically, found one political scientist who "warned that Bauer could be
fatally wounded, in political terms, by the dispute" and another who "said
Bauer could help himself by saying, 'I wish I wouldn't have put myself in this
kind of situation, I'm sorry and I apologize.' " Whether the "situation" was a
misdeed or a perception was left unexplained. The Los
Angeles Times told readers that "the real news was the wall-to-wall
press throng" at the news conference.

            

               8. Bauer 
               showed bad judgment by letting the allegations of
an appearance of impropriety become a political problem. A Salon
reporter told Bauer, "A lot of us have heard this rumor. But to be quite
honest, I think most people in this room are never going to mention it and
probably didn't take it very seriously. But you've now elevated it to a point
that it will be on the evening news. And a lot of Americans, when they are
first introduced to you ... it will be for that--for denying an affair. What
does that say about your political judgment?" Within hours, Salon
published the reporter's derisive story about the press conference, titled
"Bauer: I am not a slut!"

            The
problem isn't that the media are malicious or are out to get Bauer. I know and
like at least two of the reporters who asked some of the most loaded questions
at the press conference. The problem is that they can't resist a hot story. A
sex scandal on the religious right, no matter how flimsy, seems too good to
pass up. Reporters think they have to ask the killer question or advance the
story, never mind which way it's going. The campaign is in overdrive, their
prey stands before them, and the heat of the moment carries them away. They
wonder whether Gary Bauer is strong enough to resist the urge. They should ask
the same question of themselves.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <EM>Veni</EM>, <EM>Vidi</EM>, Veto

            

               The United States is suing major tobacco companies. The suit
aims 1) to penalize the industry for concealing the risks of cigarettes and 2)
to recover billions of tax dollars spent on smoking-related health care. Last
year, Congress rejected legislation that would have settled the government's
claims against the industry for $516 billion. The industry's spin: The
government can't claim innocence after years of subsidizing tobacco and
promoting overseas sales. The government's spin: Even if our hands are dirty,
the industry should pay for the medical costs of its product. The industry
counterspin: Then we should pay nothing, since smoking saves money by
shortening lives.

            

               Tension is rising in East Timor. U.N. peacekeeping troops
exchanged gunfire with militiamen and renegade Indonesian soldiers. The U.N.
forces are securing the region to make way for relief efforts for refugees
facing disease and starvation. Monday's U.N. spin: This operation could be a
cakewalk. Today's U.N. spin: We brought the guns for a reason. (See the
Sydney Morning Herald for extensive
coverage of the crisis.)

            

               President Clinton vetoed the Republican tax cut. The bill,
narrowly passed by Congress, would have used the projected budget surplus to
eliminate $792 billion in taxes over 10 years. Both sides have hinted that a
smaller tax reduction would be acceptable. Clinton said the country could
not
afford a return to "the failed policies of the past." Republicans
charged that Clinton's tax-and-spend philosophy would do just that.

            

               A second man was sentenced to death for the Texas dragging
murder. A unanimous jury condemned avowed racist Lawrence Russell
Brewer for killing James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged alive for three
miles behind a pickup truck before his head was torn off by a concrete culvert.
Another defendant was found guilty in February, and a third is awaiting trial.
The prosecution spin: The jury sent a message that not all
Texans are racists. The defense spin: Juries should evaluate facts, not
send messages.

            

               Hope for more earthquake survivors is fading in Taiwan. The
death toll from the initial 7.6-magnitude quake has topped 2,000 and is
expected to rise as rescuers search for 2,300 people believed to be trapped in
the rubble. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless, and water, electricity, and
food supplies are cut off on much of the island. Experts warned
that Taiwan is a sign of things to come: Earthquake damage will increase
everywhere with urban development and population growth. (
                  Slate
               's
David Plotz Mother Nature's power.)

            

               Actor George C. Scott died. He was best known for portraying
Gen. George Patton and for refusing to accept the Best Actor Oscar for the
role. Film critic David Thomson said Scott was once "the great threat in
American acting--he had such drive and bite, such timing and authority."

            

               Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote himself into the story as a fictional
character. The forthcoming book portrays author Edmund Morris as
Reagan's contemporary. Historians called the technique dubious. Maureen Dowd
labeled Morris "barking mad ." Morris explained that "after several years of deep research I
was, in an almost occult sense, there when Reagan was younger."

            

               President Clinton defended his grant of clemency to Puerto Rican
nationalists. He denied Republican allegations that the move was aimed
at building support for his wife's Senate campaign. Separately, FBI Director
Louis Freeh revealed that he had "unequivocally opposed " the offer. The White House spin:
Clemency is about justice, and the prisoners' punishments did not fit their
crimes. The Republican spin: Clemency is about security, and the prisoners'
release sends the wrong message about terrorism.

            
               The Senate
reported that the United States is prepared for Y2K. The report says
that thanks to preparation by large companies and federal and state
governments, the computer bug will cause few disruptions in most Americans' lives. Last year's spin:
Confused computers could cripple basic services. This year's spin: Panicked
consumers could wreak havoc on banks and stores.
 

            

               The East Coast is recovering from Hurricane Floyd. The storm
killed at least 68 people and caused damage worth hundreds of millions of
dollars. Nearly a third of North Carolina remains shut down by flooding, and
the state now faces water pollution due to animal carcasses and sewage. Last
week's spin: Whew!--Floyd was milder than expected. This week's spin: North
Carolina is the new Atlantis. (
                  Slate
               's David Plotz the
weather reporting industry.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 321: &quot;World Series&quot; 

            
               New York, Bombay,
Sao Paulo, Mexico City--what comes next in this series? Why?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's Question
(No. 320)--"Futurific":
            

            

               
                  
                     "It is one of the most significant developments in the
history of the space age," said John E. Pike of the Federation of American
Scientists, reacting to Tuesday's big event. What
happened?
                  
               
            

            "I got
a pedicure for the first time. I had no idea of the impact I was
having."-- Merrill Markoe
            

            "NASA
replaced the faulty O-rings in Al Gore."-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            
"Quarter beer night at Hooters, just down the road from FAS
headquarters."-- Brooke Saucier
            

            "At
the AARP's request, early-bird specials will be available on all flights to the
moon."-- Ellen Macleay
            

            "I'm
excited about the Buffy - Angel crossover, too, but let's not get
too excited."-- Matt Sullivan
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            I hate the space
program. It's bread and circuses without the bread. And with a crappy little
circus that's got, like, maybe one trained donkey who isn't feeling very well.
Even NASA's most enthusiastic supporters must admit that the early promise of
this program has been unfulfilled. "The conquest of space has moved ahead with
breath-taking speed since the Space Age began on October 4, 1957," says
the 1960 edition of the World Book , without shame because it's just an
inanimate object and can't feel shame, unlike some kind of Space World
Book of the future that will know all human emotions and will be perfected
any minute. "On that day, Russian scientists launched the first true space
traveler, a chain-smoking dog named Laika, who, after befouling his kennel and
biting his trainer on the ass, was rocketed aloft in a spacesuit filled with
his own urine," it does not add. I've always favored the alternative
plan--small, unmanned probes, along with a gigantic annual bonfire of $1,000
bills folded into origami cranes. A-OK!

            
               I'm

               Not Looking Down on You, I'm Just Looking Down Answer
            

            On Tuesday, the first high-resolution image of the
Earth taken by a commercial satellite was made public.

            Space Imaging Inc. of Thornton, Ohio, released a
photo taken by a satellite 400 miles above Washington, D.C. The image of the
Washington Monument and the surrounding area is as crisp and detailed as some
military spy satellite photographs.

            The Clinton
administration approved private space cameras in 1994. Three other companies
expect to orbit their own satellites by next year. These cameras can resolve
objects as small as 3 feet wide, accurate enough to show a house or a car but
not a person, although you could make out the cloud of evil roiling around the
head of mass-death enthusiast Trent Lott.

            
               Dan

               Dickinson Calls for an End to all This Baptist Bickering
            

            Dear Randy and John
Murdoch: Lighten up. Baptists have come a long way. They're speaking to one
another in liquor stores now.

            

               Bail
               -Out Extra
            

            Below, actual lead
sentences that made participants instantly turn the page, or change the
channel, or slip a fresh clip into a cheap and easily obtainable hand gun or
"Saturday Night Special" purchased within 50 feet of an elementary school, as
our reporter goes undercover to ... well, you know--what The New Yorker
used to call "letters we never finished reading" (or something).

            

               "I ..." A.M. Rosenthal, New York Times .-- Daniel Radosh
               

               " 'Complicated' is a word for Tori Amos ..." Natasha Stovall, Rolling
Stone -- Ken Tucker
               

               "El Duque loves Chinese food, Derek Jeter loves the nightlife, and John
Olerud loves showtunes." New York Post Oct. 14, 1999-- Beth
Sherman
               

               "When you dial 911, will you get the help you need? Sam Donaldson
investigates." Promo for Monday's 20/20 .-- Matthew Heimer
               

               "As we head into high summer I find myself thinking often of summers long
ago and a way of life long gone."--Abigail McCarthy in the July 16, 1999
Commonweal magazine.-- Jim O'Grady
               

               "Attention Harvey Keitel fans ..." Start of the Entertainment Weekly
review of Lulu on the Bridge .-- Daniel Radosh
               

               "Good news tonight for New York's pro-wrestling fans." Delivered some night
last week by an anchor on the Fox local affiliate.-- Matthew Heimer
               

               "You, LESLIE GOODMAN-MALAMUTH, are the kind of man that Men's
Journal is writing for ..."-- Ms. Leslie Goodman-Malamuth
               

               "For nearly a year, while Bill Bradley labored to be taken seriously as a
presidential candidate, Al Gore studiously ignored him." From William Saletan's
Wednesday "Frame Game"-- Roger D. Hodge
               

               "Make sure to stay tuned for a live concert featuring the Backstreet Boys,
'N Sync, and 98 Degrees."-- Mary Fee
               

               "Raising a beaker with a balloon inside, Steven Jacquier peers at a wonder
of the world." USA Today , Oct. 14, 1999.-- Beth Sherman
               

               "This is Dan Rather, reporting from the eye of
the hurricane."-- Lee J. Nemetz
               

            

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Metric Tang.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             My Father's Estate

            A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school
classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase:
"I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about
money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate
tax?" It's a rude question, but it has an answer.

            My sister and I have been going through my father's
estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to
find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to
think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.

            He did indeed leave some
money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or
Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because
of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly
less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for
defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before
his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the
Internal Revenue Service.

            The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of
about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed
at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think
about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives.
They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the
expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation.
When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of
gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15
years ago.

            They never had live-in help. My father washed the
dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he
could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay
for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled,
imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him.
They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their
bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most
expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home.

            They made not one penny
of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving
themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of
posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will
primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The
only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who
were less self-disciplined.

            There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor
will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at
Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly
underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931
until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are
poetry.

            That's another item my father left: his own poetry
and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all
abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very
last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she
died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it
was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And
there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth
and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later
published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was
hardly a writer for the large audience.

            Some of them will go to
the Nixon Library, and some will be on bookshelves in the (very small and
modest) house my wife and I own in Malibu, a place he found beguiling because
he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his
furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me
because they remind me of him and because, when I stand near them in his
closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the
closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954
carrying a newspaper that said there could be no more racial segregation in
schools. And there are his mementos of Richard Nixon, his White House
cufflinks, photos of Camp David, certificates and honorary degrees, and
clippings of great events of state. And there are his love letters to and from
my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue
ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love
triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose we'll have to place a
value on these and have them taxed, too.

            But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister.
The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy
to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in
dollars and cents.

            The example of loyalty and principle: When he had
just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic
Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin
Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see
my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had
signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was
not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that
Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that
he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy.
After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.

            My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that
legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of
which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of
disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an
appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times
extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over
inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon.

            Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an
anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind;
concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel;
pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a
man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the
Stein family as RN had been.

            "Loyalty." There is no
item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.

            My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of
it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with
America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of
mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards,
which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens
the best chance in history for a good life.

            When he did consider the failures of American life
in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the
astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for
those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he
could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for
blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.

            He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He
sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and
Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the
Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But
he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal
buildings, of the statues of Bolívar and George Washington and San Martin. He
appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the
Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of
the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in
summer.

            This quality of
gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not
so far.

            He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate
between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his
longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank
where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs.
Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan
or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely on their merits to him,
not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in
my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for
riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he believed that the pleadings of the rich
merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote
our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of
pursuing only what was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I
never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for
a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him. He derived
more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club
about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that
paid him handsomely.

            My father's stance against seeking money for its own
sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his
children--cannot be taken by the Treasury.

            Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as
catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some
scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the
life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would
explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far
ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and
I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company,
for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of
the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's
education.)

            Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me
unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would
take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer
hung in my mind as a last refuge forever.

            This reassurance--that
somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well
as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and
I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax
payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.

            My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at
all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most
problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that
flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He
did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would
never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes.
He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but
that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.)
He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated
by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only
men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and
that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.

            Most of all, my father believed in loving and
appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from
the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had
been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many
issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends
at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three
homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at
the Watergate were the others.

            He could form
attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to
a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as "Suvorov," after the
Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits
on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of
paper in it.

            He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and
never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally
dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he
called "Route 29") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va.,
and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further
work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found
it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and
those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her
poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever
telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow,
whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time
trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial
feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her
kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.

            Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on
the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so
sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' " my father said, beaming even with tubes in
him.)

            Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help
that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research
we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I
was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his
simple answer was to say, "Let's do it together. It'll take half as long." I
use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's
example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close
with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of
the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class
of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went
into the hospital.

            This quality of devotion
and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my
father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent.
Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge.

            And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a
good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about
when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a
large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him
about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by
means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal
reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty
was simply without a speck of question upon it.

            This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not
right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep
it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value.

            So, in answer to the query from the forward
high-school classmate, "Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he
did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every
single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being
gone, so the death part is pure loss.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            French Cows Eat <EM>Merde</EM> and Die

            
Biological horrors dominated the British press Monday. The main subject was the
food war with France, which has refused to import British beef in defiance of a
European Union decision that it is now safe and doesn't carry mad cow disease.
British anger with France was compounded over the weekend by the revelation
that French cows are partly fed on processed human excrement. The Sunday Times of
London reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is "furious" with
Agriculture Minister Nick Brown for his "personal decision" to boycott French
food. Blair is apparently worried this could precipitate a "full-scale trade
war."

            
According to the front page of Le Figaro of Paris Monday, Brits have already declared a "war
of the supermarkets" against France. This referred to a decision by some
British supermarket chains to ban French produce. Le Figaro , in a
front-page editorial, called for a compromise. It admitted that France's
flouting of EU rules is not "good for our image," and it said it would be in
the interests of neither country to embark on a new Hundred Years' War.

            The
Sunday Times , in an editorial titled "Down With the Baguette," pointed
out--as Le Figaro did--that the balance of Anglo-French trade in
foodstuffs is vastly in France's favor. Rejecting calls for an official British
ban on French food imports, the paper nevertheless urged consumers to buy
British. "We are well placed to win a trade war with the French if they do not
see sense," it said. "If we stop eating French apples, the pips will soon start
to squeak on the other side of the Channel." In an unusually outspoken editorial
Monday, the Financial
Times of London described the French practice of "mixing sewage into
animal feed, in defiance of European law," as disgusting--"[t]hat is the only
word for it." But the FT was also against bans on foreign food imports,
including American genetically modified foods. "[L]et the consumer decide," was
its conclusion. The Times of London's lead front-page story Monday said
that advice of independent British scientists to ban French meat had been
rejected by the government.

            The
main story in the Independent of London
Monday said top American and British law firms are launching a series of
class-action suits next month to demand "hundreds of millions of dollars" in
damages from the principal companies involved in the production of GM seed
crops. Targets of the actions on behalf of farmers in the United States,
Europe, Central America, and India are likely to include Monsanto, DuPont,
AstraZeneca, Novartis, and AgrEvo, the paper said. The actions would allege
"anti-competitive behaviour" in the seed market, "questionable corporate
behaviour," and abuse of dominant positions in the marketplace. The
Independent said in an editorial, "This legal action may be the best way
to force the food companies to do what they should have done from the start:
prove that their innovations are in the public interest."

            The
Daily
Telegraph of London led its front page Monday with the news that
British transplant patients who receive pigs' hearts or lungs will have to sign
a pledge never to have children. They will also have to agree to have their
current and future sexual partners registered and monitored by the medical
authorities, to "use barrier contraceptives consistently and for life," and
never to give blood. Because of a shortage of human organs, the government has
authorized research into the use of pigs for transplants, and Britain already
has a herd of "humanized" pigs at the ready. But the authorities plan to
introduce the stringent safeguards to ensure that pig viruses do not spread to
humans, the paper said. So far, nobody has applied for a pig organ transplant
in Britain.

            The
Guardian
of London led on efforts by Celera Genomics, a U.S. biotechnology company, to
patent segments of the human genetic code before British-led moves are
implemented to prevent the "human blueprint" becoming the private property of a
few corporations. It said the company "stunned the scientific world" by
claiming to have decoded about one-third of the entire blueprint--the human
genome--in little more than a month. "The unravelling of the billions of coded
sequences in human DNA (the chemical base of all genes) is expected to
revolutionise medicine, and pave the way to genetically based cures," the paper
said. "It could also open up limitless opportunities to influence human
evolution by manipulating genetic codes."

            The
visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin to France proceeded with a similar
amount of protest to that which he encountered in Britain--and with equally
strong police efforts to protect him from it. French newspapers reported Monday
that Jiang spent three hours at dinner discussing human rights issues with
French President Jacques Chirac, but Jiang told Le Figaro in an
interview Monday that "in every country human rights should be managed by its
own government in full independence" and that the Chinese government opposed
any foreign interference in its internal affairs. The president reiterated that
China would use force if necessary against the Taiwan "separatists" and against
"foreign forces which try to impede the reunification of China." Jiang
estimated that China will need "at least 100 years" to become a developed
country.

            The shock success of
right-winger Christoph Blocher in the Swiss parliamentary elections led many
European newspapers Monday, since it came only three weeks after the triumph in
neighboring Austria of Jörg Haider, the Freedom Party leader who has praised
Adolf Hitler and called SS soldiers "decent men of character." Blocher, whose
Democratic Union of the Center appeared set to win 23 percent of the vote
(Haider won 27 percent in Austria), making it the country's largest party,
refuses to be identified with Holocaust revisionists but is in other respects
typical of the far right--he is against immigration and the European Union. The
daily Tribune de
Genève called his victory "unpleasant," but said in an editorial that
he might be "contained" by a coalition government.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             That '70s Gossip

            After making her way through this month's tabloids,
Keeping Tabs feels as though she's been stuck in a bit of a time warp. The
tabs, suffering from an overload of nostalgia, read like magazines one might
have thumbed through while waiting backstage at the Mike Douglas or Merv
Griffin shows. How else to explain headlines such as "Linda Lavin finds
happiness in the heartland" and "Rhoda shattered as charity folds"? (The latter
would, of course, be actress Valerie Harper, whose partner in the failed
venture turned out to be none other than Dennis Weaver, television's McCloud.)
Why, there's Dukes of Hazzard star Catherine Bach at a premiere! An
exclusive interview with Charles Nelson Reilly! A new album from the real-life
band that inspired the Partridge Family! The Globe , meanwhile, has
landed "showbiz insider" Charlene Tilton--she played Lucy Ewing on
Dallas , you'll no doubt recall--as its newest gossip columnist. I mean,
if Charlene Tilton's not where it's at, who is?

            After a brief check to verify that The Gong
Show is, in fact, no longer on the air, Keeping Tabs perused the
Globe 's story about rhinestone cowboy Glen Campbell, who is shown
"relaxing in the comfy floral-pattern bedroom" of his Phoenix, Ariz., mansion.
The Globe also reports that Lee "Bionic Man" Majors is set to return to
television in a British sitcom. The National Enquirer has a page of
photos of stars (including both Lisa Whelchel of The Facts of
Life and Barbara Mandrell!) sporting the hairdo made famous by Majors'
ex-wife Farrah Fawcett circa 1977. But apparently life is a mixed bag for
Fawcett these days. While the Star has a story titled "Fabulous Farrah
shows she's still got it--at 52," it also reports that Fawcett is in such dire
financial straits that she's had to cut back her gardener's visits from five to
three times a week. And the Star couldn't refrain from running a truly
unfortunate time-lapse sequence of the actress picking her nose in public.

            Even when they do manage
to focus on celebs who have actually worked regularly in the last, say, 10
years, the tabs seem uncommonly fixated on looking backward. The
Enquirer 's special double issue contains 42--count 'em!--pages
chronicling celebrity style makeovers over the years, while this week's
Star devotes 30 full pages to "before they were stars" pictures. Vanna
White was a very cute baby indeed. And Keeping Tabs is pretty sure she had the
exact outfit that Melissa Gilbert once wore in 1982.

            With so much photographic evidence on hand, it's only
natural that there's much discussion about who's had plastic surgery. The tabs'
short answer: pretty much everybody. The Globe has the requisite doctor
on hand to assess 10 celebs' before and after photos. He gives high marks to
Sharon Stone's "light-handed surgical touch" but pans Mickey Rourke, whose
"skin is pulled back so tightly he looks like a lizard."

            Those reported to be
contemplating plastic surgery include pop star Britney Spears (liposuction, per
the Star ), Judge Judy Sheindlin (face lift, breast lift, dermabrasion,
also from the Star ), and Camilla Parker Bowles ($50,000 worth of
miscellaneous fixes, to help her win the race against Sophie Rhys-Jones to
"become the new Princess Diana," says the Globe ). The most talked-about
face lift prospect is, of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both the Star
and the Globe report that the first lady, "wearing dark sunglasses and a
navy blue pantsuit," was seen visiting the offices of a Park Avenue plastic
surgeon, while the Enquirer insists that no consultations were done in
person. Instead, the circumspect first lady is said to have sent various
doctors "high resolution photos taken of her face from different angles" in
order to get their opinions.

            We learned of the putative planned lift only after
discovering that the "before and after photos" of Clinton promised on the cover
of the Sept. 28 Star were nothing more than a computer simulation--much
like the Globe 's simulated "mugshots" of JonBenet Ramsey's parents,
around whom tabloid suspicion is once again furiously swirling. Perhaps the
tabloids' loaf was sliced just a little too thin, but there seems to be an
unusually high ratio of tantalizing headlines to banal copy this month. To
wit:

            

               The new book that the Star claims "blows [the] lid" on pop star
Brandy's love life reveals such gasp-inducing nuggets as, "I liked [former
boyfriend Kobe Bryant]. He had that confidence and innocence about him that
attracted me."

               The "remote island paradise" where the Star says Frank and Kathie
Lee Gifford bumped into Frank's former paramour Suzen Johnson turns out to be
Nantucket, Mass., which last we checked sits a mere stone's throw from the
coast of Cape Cod.

               The Globe teases us with the "secret life of Sopranos hunk"
James Gandolfini, which turns out to be that he is married and has a
child.

               And those "intimate secrets" about Princess Diana offered up to the
Star by her former butler? "She'd put an outfit on and come downstairs
and look at me and say, 'You don't like this, do you?' If I said, 'No I don't,'
she'd go back upstairs and try something else on."

            

            The tabs seem so mired in the mundane that they've beefed
up their coverage of celebrity errand-running. The low point might have to be a
Globe story titled "Lisa Kudrow's friendly trip to the hairdresser,"
complete with a photo of Kudrow--whose expression suggests she may have just
realized she's not alone--with her head piled high with silver foils. The
Globe also catches every minute of Barbra Streisand and James Brolin's
action-packed trip to a plant nursery, while the Star spots rock star
Mark McGrath of the band Sugar Ray "washing his undies with the ordinary folk
at a Hollywood laundromat." (Hel-lo! Tabloid editors on holiday! Who is he
sleeping with, for God's sake?) After slogging through all three pages
of the Star 's "supermarket secrets of the superstars," Keeping Tabs was
particularly interested to learn that Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, who
seemed to just vanish into thin air at about the time the Carol Burnett
Show went off the air, are alive and well and often seen picking up "the
latest stain removers and cleaning supplies" at Trancas in Malibu. A "store
insider" at the Erewhon supermarket on Beverly Boulevard breaks the startling
news that Love Boat captain and Mary Tyler Moore stalwart Gavin
McLeod "is crazy about our almond butter."

            Finally, the Globe reports that NYPD
Blue 's Dennis Franz was spotted spending 15 minutes in a supermarket
inspecting some 50 ears of corn. "He sniffed each ear, poked it and even
counted all the kernels," confides an observer.

            Keeping Tabs is highly skeptical of a Franz corn
purchase, however, because the National Enquirer says that the actor
recently shed 35 pounds on the kind of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet in
which corn is verboten . Franz, the story says, owes it all to the diet
books sent him by--wouldn't you know it?-- Three's Company star Suzanne
Somers. We bet he'll be fitting back into those old leisure suits in no
time.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Sizzling Bacon

            

               Movies
            

            

               
                  Stir
               
               
                  of Echoes
                (Artisan Entertainment).
The second film this summer featuring a little boy who sees dead people gets
decent reviews, but most say it's not as good as the similar box office smash
The Sixth Sense . Echoes focuses on the little boy's father,
played by Kevin Bacon in "one of his best performances" (Roger Ebert, the
Chicago Sun-Times ). Bacon also possesses second sight, not to mention a
compulsion to dig up his backyard following an impromptu hypnosis session at a
party. The film "is at its best in its mysterious, genuinely chilling first
half. But as the plot kicks in, the hysteria mounts and the explanations start
coming, the tension starts to dissipate" (David Ansen, Newsweek ). (Click
here to find out about
Kevin Bacon's band, the Bacon Brothers.)

            

               
                  Stigmata
                (MGM-UA). This would-be thriller gets
punctured by the critics: "Possibly the funniest movie ever made about
Catholicism--from a theological point of view" (Ebert, the Chicago
Sun-Times ). The film stars Patricia Arquette as a beautician who is
mysteriously afflicted with stigmata after receiving a rosary with a history
from her mother. Critics term it "a silly, roiling melange of special effects
and overheated religious symbolism" that is at heart a "half-baked anticlerical
screed" with "lots of broken glass, bird feathers, dripping blood and
desperately fancy camera angles" (Stephen Holden, the New York Times ).
(Click here to visit a fan page devoted to the film.)

            

               
                  Outside
               
               
                  Providence
                (Miramax Films).
Evenly divided negative and positive reports for this unexpectedly sincere
coming-of-age story from the masters of gross-out comedy, the Farrelly brothers
( There's Something About Mary ). Directed by Michael Corrente and based
on a novel by Peter Farrelly, it's a standard fish-out-of-water tale (poor kid
from small-town Rhode Island gets sent to a snobby boarding school). Those who
like it say it's "a sweet, funny little movie" (Ansen, Newsweek ) and
that "one finds oneself asking how such familiar material breeds contentment
instead of contempt" (Richard Schickel, Time ). Critics also note that
two great performances, by Shawn Hatosy as the kid and Alec Baldwin as his
gruff dad, help lift the film above cliché. Those who pan the movie call it a
vanity project for the now-famous brothers that offers "nothing fresh, and
everything bland" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly ). Or as Susan
Wloszczyna writes in USA Today : "Let's hope they have exorcised these
pap-spewing demons and get their minds back in the gutter." (Click here to read an interview with the Farrelly brothers, and to read
David Edelstein's rave in 
                  Slate
               .)

            

               Book
            

            

               
                  For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America
Today
               , by Jedediah Purdy (Knopf). Critics dig into 24-year-old
Purdy, who argues that irony and ironic figures such as Jerry Seinfeld are a
cancer corrupting the soul of America. Unsurprisingly, Irony Inc. (a k a the
New York Observer ) shreds the book, calling the chapter on the dangers
of genetic engineering "a warning so bloated with bombast that one begins to
wish that the gene for pomposity could be extirpated for the sake of future
generations. ... I say earnestly, with feeling, What garbage! " (Adam
Begley). Harper's calls Purdy a "cornpone prophet" and blasts his
"unctuous sentimentality" (Roger D. Hodge). Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes in
the New York Times that the book is "impressive if somewhat pious" but
finds Purdy's points unoriginal: "He labors at length such crashingly obvious
ideas as the ethical ambiguities of technology." A few stick up for the
embattled author, arguing that though "the ideas expressed aren't complicated,"
Purdy "grapples with them with a seriousness that puts more seasoned--and
ironic--commentators to shame" ( Publishers Weekly ). Walter Kirn, writing
in Time , seems a bit gleeful at the fact that "the brainy nature boy has
stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably
passionate attack on the dangers of passionlessness," only to later concede
that the book is "an arduous read that would test the syntactical skills of a
tenured professor." (Click here to read the first chapter.)

            

               Snap Judgments
            

            
               Book
            

            

               
                  'Tis: A Memoir
               , by Frank McCourt (Scribner). The hype
revs up for McCourt's follow-up to his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning
Angela's Ashes . 'Tis tops all fall preview lists, and now the
first review is in: Michiko Kakutani (the New York Times ) says it's "a
considerably angrier book than Angela's Ashes . ... [T]his sour tone of
complaint does not make for particularly engaging or sympathetic reading."

            
               Movie
            

            

               
                  Chill
                
               
                  Factor
                (Warner Bros.).Critics
barely even bother with this action flick starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Skeet
Ulrich as a pair of ne'er-do-wells who end up with a load of heat-sensitive
poison on their hands. They drive it around the country in a dilapidated
ice-cream truck trying to keep it cool. "Stale macho jokes and formulaic
cliffhangers drive this chase-by-numbers thriller on the bumpy road to nowhere"
(Holden, the New York Times ).

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Flight Stimulator

            The deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the Bessette
sisters have inspired myriad debates over the safety of private planes, as well
as a lot of criticism of Kennedy's decision to brave the night sky over ocean
in his Piper Saratoga II HP. Obviously, it's not the government's role to
prevent people from taking the sort of risks they think makes life worth
living. But should Washington be spending hundreds of millions of dollars each
year encouraging the risky business of private air travel?

            How risky? In 1998, a private plane was 27 times
more likely to be involved in an accident and 225 times more likely to suffer a
fatal crash than a commercial carrier. Six hundred twenty-one people died in
private plane crashes in the United States last year, but only one died on an
airliner. Yet the government continues to subsidize general aviation--the
catchall category that covers everything from single-engine Cessnas piloted by
weekend hobbyists to Learjets carrying corporate execs. Partly due to all this
government largess, the United States has more private pilots and aircraft than
all the other nations on Earth combined.

            The biggest direct
subsidy is the air traffic control system. According to Richard Golaszewski of
the consulting firm GRA Inc., general aviation imposes about $1 billion a year
in air traffic control costs on the Federal Aviation Administration, but the
fuel taxes levied on general aviation cover only about one-third of that. The
shortfall is covered by the 8 percent federal tax on commercial airline
tickets. Also, since 1982, the FAA has furnished $4.7 billion in grants to
general aviation airports to pay for construction and improvement and has given
federally owned land to 450 airports. Heritage Foundation analyst Ron Utt
points out that the 70 biggest U.S. airports, which serve 90 percent of
commercial air travelers, get less federal money each year than the 3,233
smaller ones that cater almost exclusively to private fliers.

            When planes go down, the federal government conducts costly
search-and-rescue missions. Few victims of light-plane crashes can expect the
Coast Guard to spend days trying to recover their corpses under the gaze of TV
news cameras, but the bulk of the efforts deployed in the Kennedy accident was
not out of the ordinary. About 400 to 500 search-and-rescue operations for
missing aircraft are undertaken by the federal government each year, nearly all
of them private. (Nearly $370 million is spent annually on all 40,000 federal
search-and-rescue missions. The amount spent on general aviation search and
rescue is not broken out as a separate category.)

            Additionally, all private plane accidents, whether
they involve a fatality or not, require a costly National Transportation Safety
Board investigation. The NTSB conducted 1,907 such investigations last year,
but the agency doesn't detail its costs. The Air Force's Civil Air Patrol also
gets money to help find downed planes and pilots.

            Other inducements to
general aviation include easy access to airports. Commercial passengers
frequently find themselves trapped in holding patterns over the nation's
biggest and busiest airports as corporate turboprops carrying a few people
land. Increased landing fees and less generous treatment have reduced general
aviation traffic at big hubs in recent years, but they haven't eliminated it.
At Chicago's O'Hare International, nearly 6 percent of all landings are private
planes'. At Los Angeles International, the figure is close to 10 percent.

            All those corporate planes highlight another reality, which
is that general aviation benefits from the abuse of the business tax deduction.
Deep in their hearts, the captains of industry know that corporate jets are a
rip-off: Warren Buffett once christened his company jet "The Indefensible."
Legal fees and photocopying expenses, of course, are just as deductible as the
cost of owning and flying a private plane. So why doesn't anyone worry about
their being abused? Because traveling on a cushy corporate jet, quite unlike
consulting with attorneys, inevitably involves a large component of personal
pleasure and comfort--like staying in the Four Seasons instead of the Marriott.
The extra expense required to avoid the sweaty traveling public may yield
nothing in terms of higher productivity or profits, but with Uncle Sam footing
a third of the cost, top managers may find the perk too tempting to resist.

            JFK Jr. was pretty normal for a private pilot--a
hard-charger who fell in love with the freedom, excitement, and romance of
private aviation. But like most of his fellow fliers, he had the resources to
finance his pricey hobby without imposing so much on earthbound mortals. While
we're free to second-guess his decision to fly to Martha's Vineyard, maybe we
should be pondering another question: Why were the rest of us paying him to do
it?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 319: &quot;Formerly Known As&quot; 

            
               There's been more
and more of it at Princeton in recent years, but now a faculty committee
proposes to eliminate it or at least rename it. What's the old name; what's the
new? 
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
318)--"Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien":
            

            

               "You won't hear any apologies from me," said Dr. Stephen Ostroff of the
Centers for Disease Control. "Anyone who continues to maintain that there was
some mistake here doesn't understand the way science proceeds." What isn't
Ostroff apologizing for?
            

            "Look,
people, the whole point of the study was to see how well endangered condors
could withstand the Ebola virus."-- Greg Diamond
            

            
"Trying to pass off a few flasks of blue water and dry ice as a multimillion
dollar cancer research project."-- Floyd Elliot
            

            
"Biography, not biology. Sheesh."-- Kyrie O'Connor
            

            "Why
can't you people understand that Cybill Sheperd would make an outstanding
president of the United States?"-- Steve Roche
            

            
"Random Hearts . 'As anybody with any understanding of the scientific
process could tell you, the problem here lies with Sydney Pollack,' Dr. Ostroff
noted. 'Although Harrison Ford surely shares some of the blame.' "-- Tim
Carvell
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            To apologize
convincingly takes exquisite timing. Do it too soon and you seem glib and
insincere: "You're sorry? Well, 'sorry' won't make the dog's leg grow back!" Do
it too late and you seem, actually it's glib and insincere again. "Oh, you're
sorry about slavery? About what you did to that nice Galileo?" Too long
deferred, your apology will be dismissed as self-aggrandizing. It wasn't you
but the organization you lead that committed the misdeed. The apology shows
what a sensitive person you are, while you needn't alter your behavior at all,
unless your slaves are doing something unkind to Galileo or that gimpy dog of
his. To have meaning, the apology must convey recently acquired insight into
personal wrongdoing, something neither Dr. Stephen Ostroff nor the Fox TV
network seems inclined to do. Sorry about that.

            
               Unregrettable
Answer
            

            Ostroff is not sorry that it took so long to
realize that what seemed like an encephalitis outbreak in New York City was
really an infestation of the West Nile virus in Chicago. OK, they got the city
right almost at once, but not a lot more. And don't expect him to say, "I
apologize for all the confusion, like not bothering to get in touch with the
scientist who first identified the disease."

            It was Dr. Tracey McNamara of the Bronx Zoo who
noticed there were a lot of dead crows in the neighborhood, but her emus were
doing fine, and they're highly susceptible to encephalitis, so there had to be
some other disease at work. Creepy detail: The birds were bleeding from the
brain and had badly damaged hearts. "We had dead people and dead birds and I
thought we needed to pursue this." But she couldn't get scientists at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to seriously consider her suspicion
that the bird disease and the people disease were the same.

            McNamara is understanding about the chaos at CDC.
Alan Zelicoff, a scientist at the Federal Center of National Security and Arms
Control at Sandia National Laboratories, takes a harder line: "It is a
sobering, not so reassuring demonstration of the inadequacies of the U.S.
detection network for emerging diseases."

            "If you're waiting
around for me to say, 'Oooh, sorry your bird's brain is bleeding,' " Ostroff
did not add, "you've got a long wait coming."

            
               It's a Small, Small
World Stinking of Death Where You Really Work up an Appetite Extra
            

            War, earthquake, radiation leaks--in an age of
swift transportation, one encounters death in many forms befalling people of
many faiths. Can you navigate today's post-fatality formalities without
committing an embarrassing faux pas?

            Below, 10 denominations. After the funeral, will
food be served or do you need to bring a sandwich?

            (All facts from the
delightful new, How To Be a Perfect Stranger: A Guide to Etiquette in Other
People's Religious Ceremonies , Vol. 1 and 2.)

            
               Q: Will Food Be Served?
            

            1. Islam

            2. Baptist

            3. Disciples of Christ

            4. Christian Science

            5. Hindu

            6. Quaker

            7. Catholic

            8. United Church of Canada

            9. Jewish

            10. Episcopalian

            
               A:
            

            1. Possibly. Often, women in the local Islamic
community prepare food for mourners and their guests. (
               While the
men sit around mourning manfully, but in some larger and incomprehensible
sense, equally. Forget it, Jake, it's religious tradition.)
            

            2. Yes, but no alcoholic beverages. It would be
considered impolite for a visitor not to eat. No grace or benediction will be
recited before or after eating or drinking. (
               Use the time to
contemplate how your fellow Baptists have been on the wrong side of every
social policy from the civil-rights movement to gay rights with a stop-off to
support the Vietnam War.)
            

            3. Yes. Wait for grace to be said before eating. It
would not be considered impolite not to eat. (
               It would, however, be
considered impolite to take a bite out of a Baptist.)
            

            4. Possibly. But no alcoholic beverages. (Note:
even BYOB considered thoughtless, vulgar.)
            

            5. Varies according to tradition. (But beware of
con men: No Hindu tradition includes formal tie-in with Pizza Hut.)
            

            6. Possibly. (Although snacking during actual
service is discouraged.)
            

            7. Possibly. Given the broad ethnic mixture of
Catholicism, some Catholics may have a "wake" at which food (and often drink)
is served. (Others may be pandered to by a mayor offended by snippy art
shows. No food is served during the pandering.)
            

            8. Often refreshments or a light meal will be
served at a reception immediately following the memorial, funeral, or interment
service. (And should you get a bad clam, an excellent system of universal
health care is provided: Oh, Canada!)
            

            9. Probably. Guests should not wait for a grace or
benediction before eating. Guests will eat as they arrive, after expressing
their condolences to the bereaved. (
               Etiquette note: Don't crowd the
nova.)
            

            10. Yes, but it won't be
very good and the portions will be small. (I paraphrase.)
            

            
               Ongoing Bail-Out
Extra
            

            "And now a reply from House Speaker Dennis Hast
..." Boom. That's where I dive for my remote control like a terrier down a rat
hole--you know, if the terrier was digging really fast.

            Participants are invited to submit other actual
examples from any news source of what The New Yorker used to call
"letters we never finished reading." (Or something like that.)

            Best examples to run
Thursday.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Terrifying flesh-eating virus; stupefying
prime-time TV.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 269: &quot;Coaching Staff&quot;

            
               Sometime Thursday,
Queen Elizabeth will take off her crown, put on a purple and green dress in a
thistle pattern, and step into her carriage. Where's she going?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Monday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's Question
(No. 268)--"Pyramid Power":
            

            

               Today a 180-nation conference is to present the U.N. General Assembly
with an action plan to reduce world population growth by employing the Cairo
Strategy. Which is what?
            

            "Post
the Ten Commandments inside every classroom."-- Katherine Hobson
            

            "Not
having sex with Jews."-- Jon Hotchkiss
            

            "The
reintroduction of big cats into major urban centers."-- Jeff Brax
            

            
"Cancel plans for Straight Pride Month."--Sean Fitzpatrick ( Jim
O'Grady had a similar answer.)

            "I
missed the last couple of days because of a computer crash. Is it too late to
make fun of Giuliani?"-- Greg Diamond
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Many of you suggested
that a great way to discourage sexual urges was to flash a photo of a really
ugly person. But this seems unlikely to be effective. Such a powerful visual
image certainly didn't deter the unattractive people from mating with one
another--there do seem to be rather a lot of them--while attractive people are
in distinctly short supply. (Hence the high rates charged by Elite Models. And
try to get one over to the house: Sheesh! Like you're a criminal for asking.
Like my real name couldn't be Pierre LeCluck.) Perhaps it's because the
beauties are wan, weak, overbred: They've lost their erotic vitality like some
brittle-boned show dog or Ron Perelman's consort. Certain nations with a
history of goofball master-race ideas and a reputation for being grim and
plodding lovers--you know, Germans--have long associated sexual vigor with
Africans, Jews, and Trolls, frequently depicting us as ugly monkeys coupling
with enthusiasm, skill, and joy. Pan isn't pretty.

            
               Hey, You Kids, Keep It
Down Answer
            

            Five years ago,
countries meeting in Cairo, Egypt, agreed that the best way to curb population
growth was not to set numerical targets and launch birth-control campaigns, but
to try to improve the social status, education, and health of young women. By
one estimate, this plan would incur a rise in population from the present 6
billion to 9.8 billion by 2050, and stabilize at that level. However, at recent
meetings, conservative elements, particularly Muslims and Roman Catholics, have
sought to thwart various socially progressive aspects of the plan.

            
               Andrew Silow-Carroll's
News Roundelay Extra
            

            Participants were
invited to devise a sequentially trumping topical triad--rock, paper,
scissors--along these lines: NATO, Milosevic, Albanian refugees (NATO planes
crush Milosevic, Milosevic drives out refugees, refugees give NATO fits).

            "
'Palestinian state' issue dogs Hillary, Hillary hires Carville, Carville founds
Palestinian state."--Josh Pollack
            

            
"Republicans send big checks to George W. Bush, George W. Bush gets elected
president, President George W. Bush is appropriately grateful to said
Republicans. (John McCain unfortunately tried to skip Step 1.)"-- Doug
Welty
            

            "The
English language, the Japanese, George Bush. The English language has
infiltrated Japanese slang, Japanese cuisine caused George Bush to vomit,
George Bush mangles the English language."-- Francis Heaney
            

            
"Salinger will want Norton to return the letters to Maynard. That way Salinger
can screw Norton, too."-- Michael Brant
            

            
"Supposed Chinese spies frighten the GOP, which denounces Clinton's bombing of
Belgrade, which kills supposed Chinese spies."--Josh Pollack
            

            "God
creates world; world creates Adam Sandler the movie star; Sandler supplants
God, a thousand years of wailing and torment follow."-- Brian
Danenberg
            

            "Peter
Angelos buys Orioles, Orioles can't beat anybody, anybody would be better than
Peter Angelos."-- Josh Pollack
            

            
               Francis Heaney's
Variation
            

            "
'News Roundelay' reminds me of a game some friends and I invented in college,
which we called "Rock, Paper, Anything". Two players, on the count of three,
form an approximation of something with their hands and announce what that
something is: for instance, a butterfly vs. Rupert Murdoch. Then a third player
acts as arbiter and decides which one wins (in this case, a butterfly, because
the butterfly flaps its wings and sets into a motion a chain of events that
ends with Rupert Murdoch slipping on a banana peel and falling into a cement
mixer). Then the loser acts as arbiter for the next round. Or the winner, who
cares? This is not a goal-oriented game."-- Francis Heaney
            

            
               Patrick O'Brien's
Headline Haiku
            

            Olympic Snub Strikes

            Budget Pie And

            Sacramento's Greens
Fees

            Arid Rainy Season

            
               Orange County
Register , Front page, June 29, 1999

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Exodus.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Warren Beatty

            Since Arianna Huffington floated the idea of a
Warren Beatty presidential campaign last week, the actor's ambitions have been
the summer's most delectable political story. The jokes abound: what Warren
would do on the Oval Office carpet, whom President Beatty would hire as his
intern, etc. The 62-year-old Beatty has stayed virtually silent, but his
friends are encouraging speculation: "Warren has been consulting with
Democratic and Reform Party activists," they say. "Warren is taking this very
seriously." (Click for Jacob Weisberg's revelation that Jesse Ventura may be
courting Beatty for the Reform Party nomination.) Wife Annette Bening, they
report, is enthusiastic.

            The right thinks Beatty is a ridiculous, preening
glory hound who would preach limousine-liberal ideas. The left thinks he can
illuminate a grand populist vision with pure charisma. Both sides mistakenly
assume that because Beatty is an actor, he, like Ronald Reagan, could flatter,
seduce, and inspire voters. He charmed the panties off Natalie Wood, Madonna,
Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie, Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton, et al. Surely he
could charm the pants off a few million disaffected Democrats. (And even if the
only people who vote for Beatty are women who slept with him, he could make a
strong showing in the California primary.)

            But Beatty has always
been, in the words of film critic David Thomson, "a very uneasy actor." Beatty
is too cool and distant to be great on screen. He has made his mark on
Hollywood more as a producer and director, and it is this that explains his
political ambition. The media snicker at the actor-politician, who presumes to
speak on the day's great issues. But consider Beatty as a self-made
businessman. Beatty sympathizers such as Huffington rightly ask why Steve
Forbes, who inherited his millions, is a serious candidate, while Beatty is a
joke. Beatty has shown a ruthless, brilliant talent for manipulating the
politics of his industry. In Hollywood, where no one gets his way all the time,
Warren Beatty has got his way forever.

            In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , Peter Biskind
chronicles how Beatty parlayed the heartthrob status he'd won from 1961's
Splendor in the Grass into a controlling position as a producer. He
almost single-handedly brought Bonnie and Clyde to the screen in 1967
and made his fortune off it by negotiating a contract for 40 percent of the
gross. In the '70s, he bullied screenwriters and directors into making
Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait his way. In 1981, during the height
of the Cold War, he persuaded Gulf & Western to pony up $25 million for
Reds , a movie sympathetic to communism. A few years later, he got
Columbia to spend the then-preposterous figure of $40 million on Ishtar .
It flopped, but Beatty walked away unscathed. Most recently, he compelled
Rupert Murdoch's 20 th Century Fox to put up $35 million for
Bulworth and to give him absolute creative control over the film, even
though 1) it was a political movie and hence a lousy investment, and 2) it
propounded ideas Murdoch detests. There are endless stories about how Beatty
charmed or threatened or kneecapped this director or that executive into doing
what he wanted.

            Beatty brought those same
skills to his second career as an activist. Ron Brownstein, who chronicled
Beatty's politicking in The Power and the Glitter , notes that Beatty may
be the only star in Hollywood history who preferred to participate in politics
from behind the scenes. Beatty doesn't need the ego gratification of public
politics. He has been famous his entire adult life. In 1972, Beatty gave
speeches on George McGovern's behalf, but he disliked the high-profile role. He
was an awkward, embarrassed speaker. "He understood why the public is skeptical
of a guy who makes $10 million a year talking about the class struggle,"
Brownstein says.

            But Beatty excels at the backroom nitty-gritty. In 1972, he
aided McGovern most by organizing fund-raisers, even persuading Paul Simon and
Art Garfunkel to reunite for a McGovern benefit. (If that isn't great politics,
nothing is.) When he advised Gary Hart in 1984 and 1988, Beatty remained in the
shadows, planning media and campaign strategies. "Political pros in that
campaign thought he was a positive force," Brownstein says. Of the few public
statements Beatty has made about his potential campaign, the most revealing is
this: "There has to be someone better [than me]." This is not modesty--Beatty
has no modesty. It is his cool and honest pragmatism. He recognizes that he'd
be a better operator than candidate.

            Though he's supposed to
be a liberal icon, Beatty lacks the crystallizing vision of a Reagan. His
politics are a muddle. It's not happenstance that he is backed by such an odd
assortment of people, ranging from Republican populist Huffington to earnest
liberal Bill Moyers. Beatty is not cynical: He desperately believes the
political system is broken and needs fixing. He just seems unable to explain
how it's broken and how it should be fixed.

            In interviews, Beatty repeatedly chokes when asked for
specific political ideas. He seems vaguely to believe that there is too much
money in politics, corporations are too powerful, welfare reform was wrong, and
race is a big problem. He says he wants to conjure up the spirit of Robert F.
Kennedy and 1968. Bulworth , the closest thing to a Beatty political
platform, is a mess as political science--an incoherent, condescending slop
about the evils of lobbyists and the innate decency of black folk.

            
               Bulworth is
fabulous on day-to-day campaign tactics. This is Beatty's curse: His political
principles tell him to deplore gamesmanship, but gamesmanship may be what he
understands best. Similarly, Beatty spends a lot of time savaging Washington
corruption, yet he cultivates friendships with folks such as Henry Kissinger,
Larry King, and John McLaughlin, Washington incarnate.

            Beatty is meticulous, even anal. As an actor, he is famous
for demanding take after take till he's sure it's right. (Click to see how his
general caution contrasts with his brazen womanizing.) Movie stars can control
their images. Beatty can forbid interviews, decline to answer questions, and
refuse to appear in public. He didn't speak to reporters from the late '70s
till the early '90s.

            But politicians must answer questions, take abuse,
and keep smiling. The first thing candidate Beatty would have to learn, says
Huffington, is "to get comfortable with ridicule." It's not clear that Beatty
is willing to do that. He's too cautious. After all, he twice declined
opportunities to run for office in the '70s, when he was a much more credible
candidate than he is now. According to Brownstein, Beatty led the polls in the
1974 race to succeed Reagan as California governor but refused to run. And in
1976 Beatty resisted pleas to make a late primary challenge to Jimmy
Carter.

            Beatty's flirtation with the presidential campaign
may be a canny political tactic. He doesn't really want to run, but perhaps he
can use the threat of a candidacy to make himself a behind-the-scenes player,
the guy who delivers the left to Al Gore or Bill Bradley. In the early '60s,
Beatty turned down the opportunity to play John F. Kennedy in a movie, then
became a producer. This year, Beatty may turn down the opportunity to play
Robert F. Kennedy in a campaign, then become a power broker.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Clinton's Nuclear Alarm

            Last
week, 51 Republican senators voted not to ratify the nuclear Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty. The direct result of this vote was virtually nothing. No missiles
were launched. No bombs were detonated. No agreements were voided. The treaty
itself remained open to ratification. Instead, analysts agreed that the import
of the vote lay in the "signal" it sent to foreign governments. At his news
conference the next day, President Clinton had an opportunity to define that
signal for good or ill. He chose both. While assuring other nations that the
vote signified no change in America's commitment to nonproliferation, he told
Americans that arms control had suffered a disastrous setback and that the
United States was withdrawing from the world.

            
Clinton's equivocation on the test ban vote is the latest chapter in the
struggle between his two personalities, Policy Bill and Political Bill. Policy
Bill strives for solutions and looks for deals. Political Bill strives for
advantage and looks for fights. Policy Bill treats elections as a means to
passing legislation. Political Bill treats legislation as a means to winning
elections. Policy Bill wants arms control as an accomplishment. Political Bill
wants it as a festering issue. Policy Bill wants to frame the treaty vote in a
way that will calm the world by minimizing the perceived damage to arms
control. Political Bill wants to frame it in a way that will alarm American
voters by maximizing that perceived damage.

            
Republicans said they voted against the treaty because it lacked adequate
monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, wouldn't affect rogue states, and
imposed too permanent a commitment on the United States to refrain from
testing. Several indicated that they would have supported it if Clinton had
worked with them to amend it. By voting against it, were Republicans giving
foreign regimes a "green light" to test nuclear weapons? No, they replied. They
argued that the best safeguard against proliferation was the previously
ratified Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and that Clinton was sending a "green
light" by failing to enforce that pact. Was the GOP turning away from the
world? No, said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "The Republicans are not
isolationists. We're the party of GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO." Were they
rejecting arms control? No, said the Republicans. They observed that pragmatic
hawks such as Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., who had supported previous arms control
pacts, deemed this one unwise. "The leader of the nonproliferation effort over
the last 50 years, the United States of America, is not abandoning its
leadership," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. "I don't believe that's what that
vote was about."

            
Clinton could have used his news conference to affirm this soothing message, as
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., did in a joint appearance with Hagel. "We have
come together today to say to anyone who will listen, to the American people,
and hopefully to people around the world, that although there are not now
sufficient votes in the Senate to ratify this test ban treaty, that does not
mean that the cause of nuclear nonproliferation died on the Senate floor
yesterday," said Lieberman. "That cause ... is embraced by a great majority in
Congress," he went on. "We do want to signal to nations around the world in the
aftermath of yesterday's vote that neither the American people nor the United
States Senate are walking away from our responsibility to lead the effort"
against proliferation.

            At
Clinton's news conference, his two personalities wrestled over how to spin the
vote. Policy Bill played it down. "We will not abandon the commitments inherent
in the treaty and resume testing ourselves," he told the world. "I call on
Russia, China, Britain, France, and all other countries to continue to refrain
from testing. I call on nations that have not done so to sign and ratify the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And I will continue to do all I can to make that
case to the Senate. When all is said and done, I have no doubt that the United
States will ratify this treaty. ... We are not going to reverse 40 years of
commitment on nonproliferation." He concluded: "So I urge [other nations] not
to overreact, to make clear their opposition to what the Senate did, but to
stay with us and believe in the United States, because the American people want
us to lead toward nonproliferation."

            But
Political Bill was determined to punish Republicans at the polls by depicting
their vote as a repudiation of arms control. They had "betrayed the vision of
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy" and embraced "a new isolationism," he
charged. "The Senate majority has turned its back on 50 years of American
leadership against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They are saying
America does not need to lead either by effort or by example. They are saying
we don't need our friends or allies. ... We say to them [our allies], 'Go take
a hike.' ... We're not cooperating with them anymore. 'As far as we're
concerned ... anything you want to do with your money is fine with us, because
we have more money than you do, so whatever you do, we'll do more.' "

            
Political Bill's scare tactics destroyed Policy Bill's reassurances. "The
Chinese should have every assurance that, at least as long as this
administration is here, we support [the moratorium on] nuclear testing," said
Policy Bill. Abruptly, Political Bill interjected, "Now, if we ever get a
president that's against the test ban treaty, which we may get--I mean, there
are plenty of people out there who say they're against it--then I think you
might as well get ready for it. You'll have Russia testing, you'll have China
testing, you'll have India testing, you'll have Pakistan testing. You'll have
countries abandoning the Nonproliferation Treaty." Political Bill didn't care
how these words affected world leaders. To him, the test ban treaty was just
another wedge issue. That's why he opened his news conference not by
distinguishing arms control as a transcendent responsibility but by lumping it
together with budget politics: "In recent days, members of the congressional
majority have displayed a reckless partisanship. It threatens America's
economic well-being and now our national security."

            
Clinton's partisan teammates repeated his alarmist spin. "This vote sent a
dangerous message to people around the world," said Hillary Clinton. In a
campaign ad endorsed by Senate Democrats and the White House, Vice President Al
Gore warned, "This vote goes against the tide of history." The Senate had
decided to "roll back 50 years of progress on real efforts to stem the nuclear
proliferation," lamented Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota,
calling it "a definitive vote that said, 'Around the world, we relegate
leadership on nuclear proliferation to somebody else.' " The Democrats'
campaign chief, Sen. Bob Torricelli, D-N.J., charged, "Republican senators have
bought responsibility for the North Koreans and the Iranians and the Iraqis in
the next decade, [who] almost assuredly will continue now with nuclear
programs. ... Other nations are going to interpret this vote by the Senate as
an opportunity to break out of [arms] controls."

            
Foreign governments and the media were already inclined to interpret the vote
as a renunciation of arms control and global engagement. Clinton only
encouraged that interpretation. The vote "halted the momentum" toward nuclear
arms control and "further weakened the already shaky standing of the United
States as a global moral leader," the New York Times concluded in a
front-page analysis the day after Clinton's news conference. Another
Times story added that "fears have been heightened by what looks like an
American renunciation of any controls over its huge nuclear arsenal," and "the
appearance that Americans are moving away from international agreements and
responsibilities can also be alarming." A Los Angeles Times analysis
said the Senate was "signaling an ominous retreat from the world."

            The perverse irony of the
nuclear age is that the survival of humankind has rested as much on
international perception as on reality. Thirty years ago, it rested on the
perception that we were willing to build bombs and deploy them. Today it rests
increasingly on the perception that we're willing to stop. Clinton has the
ability to sustain that perception despite the test ban's defeat. If only he
had the will.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P>Is the &quot;Sensation&quot; Art Worth the Fuss?</P>

            Dear
David,

            You accuse me of being overly literal and insist
that I'm not sufficiently sensitive to "surface, shape, color," and the formal
qualities of art. I make no apologies for my taste. Henrik Ibsen once wrote
that you can't chose whom you fall in love with; you can't choose what works of
art you fall in love with, either. To me, a great work of art is roughly equal
to a great phone conversation--it pulls you out of your own head and allows you
to join with someone else.

            May I add that I find formalism entirely overrated?
I think it's led to a lot of arid, deadening art. It may sound old-fashioned to
say so, but I do want art to reflect lived experience rather than just
classroom questions. I think one of the problems of contemporary art is that it
has lost touch with the big themes --namely, love and nature and death.
These, of course, are literary themes rather than art themes, yet I think that
the artists in "Sensation" are helping to bring narrative back into art.
Britain, of course, is a literary culture, and basically I feel that the
"Sensation" artists are grafting literary themes onto avant-garde forms devised
in America. In other words, Americans (true to myth, we're all cowboys) are
good at busting up established conventions, and Brits (who actually read books)
are good at finding metaphorical meaning in the forms that we over here
conceived.

            Let's talk about Mona Hatoum for a moment (who I
realize is Palestinian but who lives in London and is part of the "Sensation"
generation). I loved her (wittily titled) Deep Throat --a real-life
dinner table chastely set for one. I looked at it and thought to myself, "It's
a 3-D Anita Brookner novel." I think the piece says something about female
loneliness, but it does more than that, too, because the lung projected (via
laser) onto the dinner plate brings anatomy into the equation. What does the
piece mean? Lungs allow us to breathe, but here the act of breathing seems to
guarantee little beside the likelihood of dining alone.

            And now I head off to
lunch (by myself)--

            Until
later,

            
Deborah

            P.S.:
What do you think of Richard Billingham's photographs of his down-and-out
parents? I think there's a lot of tenderness in his work.

            P.P.S.: I realize I will
never convince you of Sarah Lucas' worth (I think of her as Duchamp's
daughter), but are you at least willing to concede that Charles Saatchi
deserves points for taking a gamble on young artists instead of just buying de
Koonings and Frank Stellas and the blue-chip stuff that other collectors favor?
When collectors buy a de Kooning painting, they do not help the art world; they
merely help the art market. Saatchi, by contrast, has kept a whole generation
of artists from having to wait tables.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A Great and Gross Festival

            John
F. Kennedy Jr. was laid to rest. The ashes of Kennedy, his wife, and
sister-in-law were scattered at sea. The Los Angeles Times attributed
the crash to a piloting error by Kennedy, but a tidal wave of eulogies
(including this one from the Washington Post ) blamed a curse
on the Kennedy clan. Other explanations: The New York Times cited
hazy flying conditions , James Fallows explained the of
the flight in 
                  Slate
               , the New York Post reported
that Kennedy had been obliged to schedule the Vineyard landing by his wife , and
Fortune says that Wall Street is blaming Morgan Stanley for making JFK
Jr.'s sister-in-law work late. The Jerusalem Post pointed to a
"novelty-seeking and risk-taking gene discovered in Israel" (see "International
Papers" for ). Michael Kelly asks Washington Post readers why "we lard
up the sorrow with this great and gross festival of national media blah-blah about
Camelot and royalty and The Kennedy Curse." 
                  Slate
               's
William Saletan examines the debate over whether the .

            

               Republicans gathered support for a $792 billion tax-cut plan.
GOP leaders appeased moderates by agreeing to condition the cuts on yearly
reductions in the federal debt. In the Washington Post , House Ways and
Means chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas, accuses Democrats of supporting
"big government 
                  on 
                  autopilot
               " and
argues that the cuts epitomize compassionate conservatism. But deficit-hawk
ex-Sens. Sam Nunn and Warren Rudman assert in the same pages that the surplus
should be used to pay down the deficit . President Clinton warned, "I
will not allow a risky plan to become law."

            

               The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects
unapproved by Congress. According to the New York Times , a
congressional report accuses the Pentagon of funding a top-secret Air Force
program, an $800 million satellite, a high-tech missile defense system
previously rejected by Congress, and other unapproved purchases. The report
expresses shock at the flagrant illegality of the expenditures. "Do we get it
right 100 percent of the time? Of course not," the Pentagon responded.

            

               Ehud Barak pledged to strike peace deals with Syria and the
Palestinians within 15 months. Syria responded by asking radical
Palestinian groups in Damascus to end their attacks on Israel. His meetings
last week with President Clinton and Yasser Arafat were roundly applauded for
rebuilding relationships former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had
soured, but David Plotz explains in 
                  Slate
                why Israelis
are . In the Washington Post , Henry Kissinger warned Israelis
not to leave the United States out of the peace
process, while an op-ed piece in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz cautioned
that congressional Republicans, under the sway of the right-wing Israeli Likud
Party, will "throw spikes into the newly energized peace train."

            
Security forces quelled student protests in Iran. Young people in 18 cities had
staged protests, thrown stones, and set police vehicles on fire. Pro-government
conservatives rallied right back. "" compares the uprising to civil war and the
fall of the Iron Curtain, but the Iranian newspaper Neshat argues that
revolution is "neither possible nor desirable." The New York Times '
Thomas Friedman calls them both wrong, saying Iranians simply want the
government "to get out of their lives so they can freely partake of the
prosperity, cultural options, and opportunities that today's
world-without-walls offers."

            

               U.S. diplomats will try to soothe tension between Taiwan and
China. The island abandoned its "one China" policy, which implied
China's sovereignty over and eventual reunification with Taiwan. "Don't
underestimate the Chinese government's firm determination to uphold national
sovereignty, dignity, and territorial integrity," warned the Chinese Foreign
Ministry in response. An editorial from the Chinese Xinhua news agency vilified
Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui for venturing down "a dead alley" and swimming
against the "historical tide" of unification. The Weekly Standard
argues that America should back Lee with words now and, if necessary, military
force later, but the Washington Post reports that the U.S. envoys will
pressure him to back down. The Wall Street
Journal predicted that the spat will blow over when Lee steps down in
eight months.

            

               The Senate agreed that a new agency should supervise nuclear weapons
research. The agency would report directly to the secretary of energy.
Sponsors of the plan said it would institute accountability for security
breaches, but the House reportedly prefers an even stronger independent
agency.

            

               California enacted the country's strictest ban on assault
weapons. It eliminates loopholes that previously allowed gun
manufacturers to evade restrictions by renaming or slightly altering their
weapons. Another new law restricts gun buyers to one weapon purchase per month.
The Los Angeles Times gives its blessing , and the New York Times reports that
the ban bodes well for tighter gun control in other states.

            

               Rep. Michael Forbes, R-N.Y., defected to the Democratic Party.
The Washington Post reports that Democratic leaders courted Forbes, a conservative who opposes abortion
and gun control, in a drive to claim the six seats they need for a majority.
National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Tom Davis denigrated Forbes'
decision by likening it to "many of his past actions, inconsistent and
erratic." Jodi Kantor in 
                  Slate
                how Forbes made the
move, and David Brooks explains in the New York Times why: "party
loyalty and gratitude are never allowed to get in the way of the epic personal
drama that exists in a politician's own mind."

            

               
                  The Senate passed compromise patients' rights
legislation.
                Republicans defeated a plan to let patients sue
their HMOs but approved more access to emergency care and specialists.
Democrats protested that the reforms would apply to fewer than one-third of the
161 million Americans with private insurance. The Washington Post awards
the GOP "a clean win on an issue of prime importance to the
American public" but foresees an election-time brawl. "Today we saw what
'compassionate conservativism' pretends to be," harrumphed Sen. Barbara
Mikulski, D-Md. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asserts that
managed care has bought Republican votes and that patients will die as a
result.

            

               Cigars will carry warnings similar to those on cigarettes. The
Federal Trade Commission said the current
absence of labels implies "that cigars are a safe alternative to
cigarettes." Industry honchos protested that "cigar smokers are mature,
well-informed adults who smoke on an occasional basis."

            

               Ohio Democrats want Jerry Springer to run for Congress.
Democratic officials in the Columbus area have discussed the idea with Springer
and the state party. Politics has become entertainment, a political consultant
shrugged to the Associated Press.

            

               A generic drug may prevent death by heart failure. Researchers
announced that Spironolactone, a 40-year-old, inexpensive medication used to
treat water retention, cut death from congestive heart failure by 30 percent in
experimental trials. Twenty million people suffer from this heart condition
worldwide. Half of them die within five years of diagnosis. The New England
Journal of Medicine rushed the story to
press.

            

               Apple introduced iMac laptops. The iBook, pictured here , can function like a
cordless phone, allowing users to connect to the Internet while roaming up to
150 feet from a telephone jack. Analysts predict it will fuel sales of laptops
to the home market in general and Apple's turnaround in particular.

            

               Hewlett-Packard chose a female president and CEO. Carleton S.
Fiorina will be the first female CEO among the country's 20 biggest publicly
held companies and the third among the Fortune 500. The Wall Street
Journal says the choice proves that H-P "is serious about continuing to
revamp its stodgy image," while a New York Times editorial calls it
evidence that the glass ceiling "is at least cracking."

            

               David Cone of the New York Yankees pitched a perfect game. It
was the 16 th perfect game in Major League Baseball history. The
New York Daily News boasted of "Yankee magic," fueled by Yogi Berra and Don Larsen's presence at
the game. Even the Canadian Globe and Mail 
               agreed .

            
               Paul Lawrie won
golf's British Open. Lawrie, ranked 159 th in the world,
began the final round 10 strokes back but advanced to a three-way playoff when
tournament leader Jean Van de Velde choked away a three-stroke lead on the
final hole. The Associated Press effused that "the most stunning collapse in
golf gave way to the greatest comeback in the history of major
championships." The Scottish Press and Journal celebrated the triumph of
its native
son .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             It's Time To Keelhaul U-Haul!

            Like all superheroes worthy of the title, the
Shopping Avenger has an Achilles' heel. In the case of the Shopping Avenger,
his Achilles' heel is not animal, vegetable, or mineral but something less
tangible.

            An explanation: Last week, the magazine you are
currently reading forced the Shopping Avenger at gunpoint to read a series of
treacle-filled self-help books, and then to . The Shopping Avenger, who can
withstand radiation, extreme heat and cold, hail, bear attacks, and Eyes
Wide Shut , almost succumbed to terminal jejuneness after reading these
books. Except for one thing: One of the books, The Art of Happiness ,
which collects and simplifies the Dalai Lama's philosophy, got the Shopping
Avenger to thinking. This, in a way, is the Shopping Avenger's Achilles' heel:
thinking. Perhaps it is wrong, the Shopping Avenger thought, to complain about
the petty insults and inconveniences of life in the materialistic '90s. The
Shopping Avenger felt that perhaps he should counsel those who write seeking
help to meditate, to accept bad service the way one accepts the change of
seasons, and to extend a compassionate hand of forgiveness to those who provide
poor customer care.

            But then the Shopping
Avenger sat down, and the feeling passed.

            The Shopping Avenger does not make light of the Dalai Lama
or of the notion that there is more to life than the impatient acquisition of
material goods. If the Shopping Avenger were not, for a superhero, extremely
nonjudgmental--as opposed to his alter ego, who is considered insufferably
judgmental by his alter ego's wife--the Shopping Avenger would tell the
occasional correspondent to let go of his petty grievance and get a life.

            But the Shopping Avenger
also believes that the Dalai Lama has never tried to rent a truck from U-Haul.
If he had tried to rent from U-Haul, he never would have escaped from Tibet.
(For the complete back story, see "Shopping Avenger" column and one.)

            The complaints about U-Haul's nonreservation reservation
policy continue to pour in through the electronic mail. One correspondent,
B.R., wrote in with this cautionary tale: "Last weekend, I went to San
Francisco to help my brother and his family move into their first house. My
brother had reserved a moving truck with U-Haul for the big day. I warned my
brother about U-Haul's 'not really a reservation per se' policy that I learned
from the Shopping Avenger. He didn't believe such a thing would happen to him,
so he didn't act on my warning."

            B.R. continues--as if you don't know what happened
already--"I went to U-Haul with my brother to get our 'reserved' truck. The
store had many customers standing around looking frustrated. When we got to the
front of the line, the clerk informed us that our 'reserved' truck had not yet
been returned. We asked if we could rent one of the many trucks sitting idle in
the parking lot. The clerk laughed and said the keys to those trucks were
lost."

            B.R. and his chastened brother--the Shopping
Avenger is resisting the urge to gloat--went to Ryder. "Ryder had a truck
available for us. The gentleman who helped us at Ryder said Ryder prides itself
on being everything U-Haul is not."

            The Shopping Avenger has still not received a call
from U-Haul spokeswoman Johna Burke explaining why U-Haul refuses to provide
trucks to people who reserve trucks, but the Shopping Avenger is pleased to
note that several correspondents have written in over the past month saying
that, based on what they have read in this column, they will be taking their
business to Ryder or Budget or elsewhere.

            The Shopping Avenger
will undoubtedly return to the sorry state of affairs at U-Haul in the next
episode, but now on to this month's airline debacle.

            Before we begin, though, the Shopping Avenger nearly forgot
to announce the winner of last month's contest, in which readers were asked to
answer the question, "What's the difference between pests and airlines?"

            The winner is one Tom
Morgan, who wrote, "You can hire someone to kill pests." Tom is the winner of a
year's supply of Turtle Wax, and he will receive his prize just as soon as the
Shopping Avenger figures out how much Turtle Wax actually constitutes a year's
supply. The new contest question: How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply
of Turtle Wax?

            This month's airline in the spotlight is Southwest. Loyal
readers will recall that last month the Shopping Avenger praised Southwest
Airlines for its "sterling" customer service. This brought forth a small number
of articulate dissensions. The most articulate, and the most troubling, came
from M., who wrote, "Last year, flying from Baltimore to Chicago with my entire
family (two really little kids included), we set down at Midway in a rainstorm.
And waited for our bags. And waited for bags. And waited for bags."

            An hour later, M. says, the bags showed up, "soaked
through. We took them to baggage services at SW and were faced with the most
complicated, unclear, and confusing mechanism for filing a claim we experienced
flyers have ever seen."

            When they arrived at
their destination, M. and her family made a terrible discovery, "We discovered
that our clothes were soaked through--the top clothes were so wet that the dye
had bled through down to the lower levels, destroying lots of other clothes.
Obviously, our bags had just been sitting out on the runway in the rain. To
this day, I've never heard a thing from SW, despite calls and letters."

            This, of course, is where Shopping Avenger steps in.
Shopping Avenger knows that Southwest is different from the average airline, in
that it doesn't go out of its way to infuriate its paying customers (see: ), so
I expected a quick and generous resolution to M.'s problem.

            What I got at first, though, was a load of corporate
hoo-ha.

            "The airline's policy,
which is consistent with all contracts of carriage at all airlines, requires
that passengers file a report in person for lost or damaged luggage within four
hours of arrival at their destination," a Southwest spokeswoman, Linda
Rutherford, e-mailed me. "[M.] indicates she called for a few days, but did not
file a report in person until April 12--three days later. Southwest, as a
courtesy, took her report anyway and asked for follow up information and
written inventory of the damage." Rutherford said that M. should have submitted
detailed receipts and photographs of the damage in order to make a claim.

            Harrumph, the Shopping Avenger says. It is a bad hair day
at Southwest when its officials defend themselves by comparing their airline to
other airlines. I forwarded this message to M., who replied:

            "Wow. Well, of course I didn't file it at the
airport on the 9 th because I didn't know the clothes were ruined at
the airport. I didn't know until I opened the baggage at my hotel and saw the
ruined stuff. (And it's worth noting that we had already waited for about an
hour for our luggage with two little kids and impatient in-laws nipping at our
heels.)"

            She goes on, "I did call that evening ... and was
told that that sufficed. This is the first time I've been told that I had to
file a complaint in person within four hours. ... When I filed on the
12 th , I was never told that I needed any receipts or photos or other
type of documentation. The baggage folks seemed pretty uninterested in all of
this. ... They know that the type of 'evidence' they want is impossible to
obtain. They also know that on April 9 they screwed up the luggage retrieval
and left bags out in the rain a long time."

            Southwest's response
actually served to anger M. more than the original problem. "Before, they had a
mildly annoyed but loyal customer (who would have been placated by an apology
and thrilled with some modest token of their regret). Now they have a
pissed-off customer."

            Things do look bad for Southwest, don't they? The Shopping
Avenger sent M.'s response to Rutherford, who e-mailed back saying she thought
the Shopping Avenger was asking for "policy information." The Shopping Avenger
e-mailed back again, stressing to Rutherford that the Great Court of Consumer
Justice would, if this case were brought to trial, undoubtedly find for the
plaintiff (the Shopping Avenger serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury in the
Great Court of Consumer Justice--defendants are represented by the president of
U-Haul), and that Southwest was precipitously close to feeling the sword of
retribution at its neck.

            But then she came through, provisionally, "Yep, you
can be sure if [M.] will call me we will get everything squared away. I'm sorry
it's taken this long for her to get someone who can help, but we will take care
of it from here."

            Stay tuned, shoppers, to
hear whether Southwest makes good it promise to compensate M. and apologize to
her for her troubles.

            The story of M. reminds the Shopping Avenger of a central
truth of consumer service: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.

            Take the case of K., who found himself waiting in
vain for Circuit City to repair his television. Televisions break, even
1-year-old televisions, as is the case with K's. But Circuit City, where he
bought the television, gave him a terrible runaround. The Shopping Avenger
dispatched his sidekick, Tad the Deputy Avenger, to get to the bottom of K.'s
story. This is what he found: K. grew concerned, Tad the Deputy Avenger
reports, after his television had been in the Circuit City shop for a week.
When he called, he was told to "check back next week." When he asked if someone
from the store could call him with more information, he was refused. Weeks went
by. When K. told one Circuit City employee that he really would like to get his
television back, the employee, K. says, asked him, "Don't you have another
television in your house?"

            More than a month later--after hours and hours and
hours of telephone calls and days missed at work--K. received his television
back.

            Mistakes happen, but not, Tad the Deputy Avenger
found out, at Circuit City. The case, K. was told by a Circuit City official,
was "handled perfectly." Another official, Morgan Stewart in public relations,
assured Deputy Avenger Tad that "We got to be a big and successful company by
treating customers better than the other guy." The Shopping Avenger and his
loyal sidekick would like to hear from other Circuit City customers: Does
Circuit City, in fact, treat its customers better than the other guy?

            Stay tuned for answers.
And next month, a Shopping Avenger clergy special: TWA screws with a Hasidic
rabbi's travel plans, leaving the rabbi's wife crying at the airport. Find out
if the Shopping Avenger can save TWA from certain heavenly punishment, in the
next episode.

            
               
                  Got a consumer
score you want settled? Send e-mail to shoppingavenger@slate.com.
               
            

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Triumph of the Swill

            (Warning: This review
contains profanity and unwholesome ideas. Parental discretion is strongly
advised.)

            If you haven't seen South Park: Bigger, Longer
& Uncut , then what are you waiting for, you shit-sucking uncle-fucker?
Do you want to miss this generation's Duck Soup (1933)? True, Duck
Soup didn't resort to bunches of four-letter words--OK, cannonades of
four-letter words--for shock value. But the value of shock was cheaper back
then. Nowadays, an artist has to haul out the big guns. At an early juncture,
creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone must have decided there'd be no point in
doing a South Park film if they couldn't make Mel Brooks choke and John
Waters soil himself. You can taste their glee in hitting their marks--hitting
them and annihilating them. This isn't just the most riotously inventive movie
of the year, it's the raunch anthem of the age.

            Parker and Stone (and
screenplay collaborator Pam Brady) have concocted nothing less than an
80-minute Swiftian epic--a ribald, hyperbolic satire of the notion that movies
"warp our fragile little minds." Inspired, no doubt, by the reception to
South Park on television and to its ancestor Mike Judge's Beavis and
Butt-head , the film depicts nations going to war, thousands being gorily
slaughtered, and characters journeying to heaven and hell. But the basic
premise remains deliriously simple. The four third-grade protagonists--Stan,
Kyle the Jew, fat Cartman, and mush-mouthed sacrificial lamb Kenny--sing a
Rodgers and Hammerstein-style ode to their "peaceful, redneck, podunk" wintry
mountain town (where denizens step over the homeless on their way to church
services), and then bluff their way into an R-rated Canadian cartoon called
Asses of Fire . That picture stars a crudely drawn, Beavis and
Butt-head-type duo called Terrance and Phillip, who entertain each other by
spewing four-letter words and passing gas in each other's faces. "I wanna be
just like Terrance and Phillip," announces Cartman, who shows off his new
vocabulary at the pond on which his peers idyllically ice skate. Impressed, the
rest of South Park's youth rushes off to see what the fuss is about--or, in
Canada-speak, aboot .

            The upshot is pandemonium. By the time Asses of Fire
has been trimmed by the MPAA to a permissible one minute, the children of
America are cursing authority figures and a militant countermovement--MAC, or
Mothers Against Canada, led by Kyle's Ethel Merman-ish mom--has marked Terrance
and Phillip for execution and driven the United States to war against its
neighbor to the north. Kyle's mother could be speaking for the MPAA--which
forced last-minute cuts in this "uncut" feature for the sake of an R
rating--when she intones, "Horrific, deplorable violence is OK as long as
people don't say any naughty words."

            For all the film's
obscenities, its primary influence is musical comedy. It could have been
dreamed up at a summer drama camp with a liberal gay element. South Park
abounds in screamingly campy parodies, from the opening ensemble to Terrance
and Phillip's peppy rap duet "Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle-Fucker" to the
principal's exhortation to substitute "bum," "poo," and the phlegmatic "M'kay"
for, respectively, "ass," "shit," and "fuck" while leading a Busby Berkeley-ish
dance line. Children of all nations and races sing that Kyle's mom is a big,
fat, stupid bitch. When the film shifts to hell, the muscle-bound Satan does a
soulful, Meat Loaf-style schlock-rock ballad on his longing for a better
world--in this case embodied by a ship of half-naked sailor types lolling about
a pool. Poor Michael Bolton-ish Satan is the only character with complex
emotions; he is disconsolate over his empty affair with the recently arrived
Saddam Hussein, who only wants to fuck him in the ass and take over the world
and who is blithely uninterested in the big red devil's feelings. Maybe a third
of the movie's gags are expressly gay or else trade on such expressions as
"ass-ramming uncle-fucker," but the overall effect is the opposite of
homophobic. In the climax, an army of soldiers watches a USO show in which a
character called Big Gay Al dresses up as Uncle Sam and sings that he's feeling
"thuper." The military is rapt.

            
               South Park: Bigger, Longer & 
               Uncut is
hardly PC, but it's still a piece of joyous left-wing propaganda. The allied
forces of "morality," it says, are far more dangerous than the most "immoral"
language. The filmmakers even subvert the far right on Biblical grounds: It's
the repressive Mothers Against Canada who usher in the apocalypse. (Actually,
it's a fat, overbearing Jewish mother who ushers in the apocalypse--a scenario
that gave me pause but which on reflection seems more plausible than others
I've heard.) The movie reminds us, once again, how topsy-turvy this puritanical
culture really is. It was Albert Brooks who pointed out--when his great
Lost in America (1985) received a restricted rating from the MPAA for
its use of "fuck" in a "sexual context"--that if a character says "I want to
fuck you over this desk," the picture will get an R rating, but if he says, "I
want to fuck you over with this desk," it will get a PG-13. What the fuck, we
must ask, are children being protected from?

            You say that South Park is crude? Crass,
maybe, but rarely crude. It's not even, as some have complained, visually
crude. Yes, the animation in, say, Tarzan is more intricate, but Disney
employs vast armies of animators, each going at his or her minute task like an
Egyptian slave at the pyramids. How primitive. In South Park , the
round-headed cutouts in their parkas who hop along in front of flat backdrops
have more impact: Parker and company have boiled their movement down to the
essential gesture. The look is never monotonous: The frames are Dadaist quilts
into which real photos are sewn--and the fact that that's Saddam Hussein's head
and not a drawing makes his pipsqueak voice and cries of "Let's fuck!" even
more hilariously fatwah -worthy. And it's the kindergarten
straightforwardness of the images that makes the obscenities so delectable: The
"shits" and "fucks" rush out of these characters' mouths at hyperspeed, always
a beat faster than you expect. (The puke rushes out faster, too.)

            
               South Park: Bigger,
Longer & Uncut is my The Phantom Menace --the film that returns
me to a righteous (in this case, righteously filthy) adolescence. I've seen it
twice (the second time was even better) and plan on another visit. I won't
bring my daughter, though. It's important that she sneak in on her own.

            I doubt that I'll see American Pie a second time
because the gags aren't as intricate as the ones in South Park , and the
whole thing is rather obvious. But the movie, directed by Paul Weitz from a
first-time script by Adam Herz, made me and a lot of other adolescents-at-heart
shriek with embarrassment. This one's crude--and funny. The
long-heralded teen-sex comedy has already been dubbed Porky's 2000 , but
it's worth remembering that Porky's (1981) was a piece of sexist junk,
and that both American Pie and the vastly superior There's Something
About Mary (1998) dramatize adolescent sexual panic in ways that seem more
likely to relieve than to perpetuate it.

            The gimmick is that the male leads (the amiable
Chris Klein from Election , Jason Biggs, Thomas Ian Nicholas, and Eddie
Kaye Thomas) make a pact that they will lose their virginity before graduation,
three weeks hence. ("No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused: We
will get laid.") Subsequent jokes are grounded, predictably, in their
sundry sexual humiliations; easy stuff, but concentrated and layered so that
they add up to a vision of adolescence as a hormone-wracked purgatory. The
masochistic element takes the edge off the picture's implicit misogyny.
American Pie strives to out-gross-out its predecessors and does so
handily. I don't envy next year's teen-sex filmmaker the challenge of topping
the pie scene or the cloudy glass of beer bit. I wish a sequence that involves
a girl stripping and masturbating in Biggs' bedroom while he and his buddies
ogle her on the Internet weren't so poorly staged and acted. (The girl is so
much like a fourth-rate porn actress that the audience assumes she was hired to
help the boy become a man--but the punch line never comes.) The movie recovers
and then some when that sexy "dork" Alyson Hannigan (from Buffy the Vampire
Slayer ) shows up to chatter about her band camp experiences. You'll never
look at a flute the same way again.

            The only truly inspired segments of American
Pie feature the amazing Eugene Levy as Biggs' dad, who's always walking in
on the kid in the middle of some creative bout of wanking. Flustered but
suffused with good-natured liberal heartiness, Levy initiates a series of
"father-son" talks that are among the most excruciating ever filmed. Yes, our
parents had many of the same sexual traumas we did but, no, we don't want to
hear about them in detail. That's the ultimate gross-out.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 282: &quot;It'll Take a Miracle&quot;

            
               An inquiry into
Mother Teresa began in Calcutta, India, Monday, as Pope John Paul II opted to
fast-track her canonization, waiving the five-year post-death waiting period.
Beatification, the first step toward sainthood, requires a confirmed miracle,
and one has already been "authenticated." Name that miracle.
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
281)--"Sign Here":
            

            

               Five years ago, at a cost of $1,200, Vicksburg, Miss., erected two identical
signs. Now one has been spray-painted with the word "hypocrite," and the other
has been smashed to pieces. What do the signs say?
            

            "Three
Days of Peace, Love, and Music."-- Ken Novak
            

            "Lott
for Sale--Soft Money Welcome."-- Charles Kenher
            

            
"Vicksburg's Pledge: No Unnecessary Signs."-- Francis Heaney ( Peter
Carlin had a similar answer.)

            "In
five years, please spray paint 'hypocrite' on one of these signs, and smash the
other to pieces. Thank you."-- Richard Nikonovich-Kahn (similarly,
Francis Heaney , Floyd Elliot , R. Hastings , Lonnie
Cooper , and Bill McDermott )

            "Kirk
Fordice hates sex, violence, and guns! And he loves Pat Fordice!"-- Molly
Shearer Gabel
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            A city's signs may be
smashed and spray-painted--and where I grew up they were often pockmarked with
buckshot--but this sort of treatment is generally reserved for public property.
It is surprising how seldom one sees enameled profanity splashed across a
private car. There is the occasional graffiti-covered van (and once the first
scarlet streak appears, others swiftly follow), but not many. Our vandals
apparently lack class consciousness. They are great respecters of private
property. They refrain from defacing Mercedes or Lexuses, these being objects
of envy, not resentment. Donald Trump walks the streets unafraid that someone
will scrawl some harsh architectural criticism across his vast backside. Even
in the suburbs, where dogs run free, no poodle comes home with a hammer and
sickle spray-painted on his side. There really is no Left in America.

            
               Civic Pride
Answer
            

            "Home of Governor Kirk Fordice"

            Gov. Fordice, whose adulterous affair is nothing at
all like President Clinton's adulterous affair, continues to irritate the home
folks.

            Sam Habeed, a city
alderman, wants to get rid of the signs "to remove the mixed or ambiguous
messages that are out there about marital loyalty." Robert Wilbur, the
governor's spokesman, urges Mississippians to look at "the big picture."

            
               Tom Williams' World of
Signs
            

            A sign here in Seattle says, "No Dumping Whatever,"
but it's printed on two lines, so it's easily read as "No Dumping (Whatever)."
By confusing "Whatever" with "Whatsoever," the author of this sign has created
a monument to late 20 th -century civic cynicism: the self-mocking
sign. No one's going to obey it anyway, so why bother? Embrace the
futility.

            Others that come to
mind:

            "Speed Limit 35 mph (Yeah right)"

            "Men Working (As if)"

            "Falling Rocks (No
shit)"

            
               Ellen Macleay's
Suburban Bliss
            

            My parents were original owners of a Levittown
home--it was my first home! There were thousands of kids on the block. When my
mom made her weekly trip to the emergency room to have doctors patch up one of
my four brothers injured in a game of King of the Hill or Catch the Arrow, it
was a given that another mother would "look after" us kids, even though we were
all running in opposite directions.

            My dad would drive to
Jones Beach to load up on sand for the sandbox that he built in the backyard.
The greatest thing about the price of the home, my mom would say, was that it
included a washer and dryer. It was the only way veterans who didn't
have two nickels to rub together could own a home-- no down payment .
Mortgages ran about $57 a month. The table where we ate every meal was a picnic
table! And, yes, the ice cream man stopped right in front of the house. I had a
little chrome coin changer just like he did--I would click out two nickels and
he would click out three pennies change. Levittown was the happiest place on
earth.

            
               Kieran Healy's
Erratum
            

            In Monday's News Quiz, "Errata" should read
"Erratum."

            [If you count the
"carybdis" spelling as one error, and "errata," the plural, as another error,
then there are two mistakes, and thus errata, the plural is correct, in which
case there is only one mistake, in which case errata, the plural, is now
incorrect, in which case my head starts to hurt and I have to go lie
down.--Ed.]

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Some kind of crazy paradox.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 288: &quot;Futurific&quot;

            
               Wal-Mart's present
is rosy, with second quarter sales up 15 percent and profits up 21 percent to
$1.25 billion. And its future is even better. Marketing consultant Burt
Flickinger sees something coming that is "the best possible thing that can
happen to Wal-Mart and the worst thing that could happen to every major
competitor." What?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Thursday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Tuesday's Question
(No. 287)--"First-Class Male":
            

            

               When Fred Fournier, a health insurance broker in Novato, Calif., goes
to the post office, the employees gather round: "They say, 'Boy, that's neat!'
" What do the postal workers admire?*
            

            

               (*a gun-free question)
            

            "The
envelopes he made himself from soy noodles."-- Merrill Markoe
            

            "His
smoking package, if you know what I mean, and I think you do."-- Tim
Carvell ( Eric Fredericksen , Al Petrosky , and Alison
Rogers had similar answers.)

            "The
first form of postage in 70 years that has nothing to do with Warner
Bros."-- Cliff Schoenberg
            

            "I
went to high school with Fred Fournier, and believe me there's nothing to
admire."-- Dennis Cass
            

            "Well,
since you outlawed the obvious gun jokes, it must be his double-barreled
penis."-- Michael J. Basial
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            It is easy to mock the
postal service, but--33 cents! Anywhere in the country! In just a few days! And
you don't even have to lick the stamps anymore, which frankly, for that one
about prostate cancer, is kind of a relief. Indeed, headline-grabbing diseases
seem to make up an increasing proportion of our stamps, along with
noncontroversial nature and beloved pop culture figures. Coincidentally, these
three categories describe most of the programs on public television lately.
(Last night, the PBS outlet in New York ran a two-hour special on the Bee Gees
followed by a 90-minute special on Jose Feliciano. Then somebody got ripped
apart by a diseased ferret, but only, alas, in my 90-minute dream. ) Perhaps a
joint venture is possible: The post office can issue stamps that promote the
snoozy PBS programming, and both organizations can share the profits. The only
obstacle: To be on a stamp you must actually be dead; to be on PBS you need
merely seem dead.

            
               Priority
Answer
            

            All admire Fournier's digital postage, which he's
been using since December when it was only a crazy experiment.

            On Monday the U.S. Postal Service announced the
nationwide availability of stamps that can be downloaded from the Internet. For
a 10 percent fee on top of the postage, customers can pay with credit cards and
print out a special bar code, the first new method of supplying stamps since
postal meters went into service in 1920.

            Two private companies,
E-Stamp.com and Stamps.com, offer the service; Pitney
Bowes and Neopost may soon be approved to compete. Incidentally, former
Postmaster General Marvin Runyon is a director of Stamps.com. Which is
completely legal.

            
               Prince Philip's
Peoples of the World Extra
            

            I give the country, you
give the racist remark made about it by Britain's Duke of Edinburgh.

            
               The Nations
            

            1. India

            2. Scotland

            3. China

            4. China II

            5. Hungary

            6. New Guinea

            7. International Bonus:
the jobless

            
               The Prince Speaks
            

            1. Touring a high-tech company in Scotland Tuesday,
he noticed a poorly wired fuse box: "It looks as though it was put in by an
Indian."

            2. He asked a driving instructor: "How do you keep
the natives off the booze long enough to get them past the test?"

            3. During a visit in 1986, he said Peking was
"ghastly" and told a group of British students: "If you stay here much longer
you'll all be slitty-eyed."

            4. He said at a World Wildlife Fund function: "If
it has got four legs and it's not a chair, if it has got two wings and it is
not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it's not a submarine, the Cantonese will
eat it."

            5. He told a tourist: "You can't have been here
long, you've no potbelly."

            6. He asked a Duke of Edinburgh Award-winner who
had just returned from Papua: "You didn't manage to get eaten then?"

            7. At the height of the
recession in 1981, he grumbled: "Everybody wanted more leisure. Now they
complain they're unemployed."

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Guns.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Missing Person

            Why,
like a regretful mother,
unchained ghost, do I hover
over old photos when I'm home
for Christmas or Thanksgiving,
as if I'd all along been living

            behind
this time-lapse looking glass
I like to think of as my past.
Like to? But I was there, that's me
threading the hook with the worm,
me feeding cake off a knife to a groom

            so
sweetly, as if he were my own.
He was! Numb as a new clone,
I stare--she does--stunned, stunned:
she, to see that I appear
alone; me, to see her there

            
without a clue to what's all wrong
with the picture. Glaring, then gone
by the album's final blank pages,
what was missing or too much
there. I seem to need to catch

            a
spark of knowing in that eye,
opaque as a grape. She thinks I
will approve, imagines me the anti-
climactic aging matron of her
future: a beaming, wistful blur.

            I
am a blur. At least I'm not
what any camera I know has caught.
In albums, on walls, on the fridges
of friends, you can easily see it.
I've modeled myself like clothes that don't fit.

            If you
knew me you'd want seconds--
twins, quintuplets! There must be records
of my self-most self. Who knows?
The FBI may classify the files
holding one of my rare true smiles.

            If
only I could blow up corners
of snapshots taken by foreigners
where I have candidly intruded:
say at sunset, Nantucket pier,
blocking a darling Arsenio's ear

            Or
side by side with a Yoshiko
at Pagsanjan! There I know
the truth of who I am and was
would coincide. Me with my mother
laughing beside some Sasha or other

            in
Paris. Me with a serious smile
on a bench in Philadelphia, while
Wolfgang cavorts in the foreground
with Helga--photos to confirm
glimpses of being that conform

            to the
credible evolution of what's
really become of me. So what
if all the negatives are lost?
I know they are out there, fading
somewhere, my hairdo and dress outdating,

            but not my earnest,
softened gaze
as one of your hands touched my face
and our two shadows between us
fused darkly in the piazza at noon
just beyond Dieter or Hans, that June.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Bare Bones

            
               The Blair Witch
Project demonstrates that there's nothing scarier than nothing. The movie
has no ghosts or witches on display, and its lone bit of gore is a piece of
cloth containing a mottle of indeterminate organic material. It has no
surprises, either, since you know going in that the ending won't be happy. The
movie opens with a placard declaring that three film students went into the
woods near "Burkittsville, Maryland" to make a documentary and were never heard
from again, and that their footage was discovered a year after their
disappearance. The placard doesn't mention who edited the footage--the
ghost of Hitchcock? Cassavetes?--but that's a minor point. I could tell you the
story--give away every detail--and The Blair Witch Project would still
freeze your blood. Working on a budget that's chump change and a script that's
little more than a framework for actors' improvisations, directors Daniel
Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez have harnessed the most irrational fears of every
human alive. They have reanimated the genre not by adding to it but subtracting
from it--by cooking it down to its bare bones and then rattling those bones
like fiends.

            The first thing they've
done is remove the omniscient point of view. With the important exception of
that opening title card, there is no larger perspective. The film students--a
woman, Heather Donahue, and two men, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard (the
characters bear the actors' names)--tote their own video and movie cameras, so
that we see what they see and no more. Actually, we see even less, since we
lack their peripheral vision and are cruelly limited to whatever passes through
their lenses. Thanks to first-rate sound equipment, though, we hear everything
they hear--especially a snapping of branches in the dark outside their tent
that escalates into an omnidirectional clatter. When they yell into the
darkness ("Hello?"), the darkness remains dark. A light illuminates the
foreground, but the blackness beyond that pool seems, if anything, blacker.
There might be no more irrationally terrifying shot in the annals of film than
the one in which the camera hurtles behind Heather--a hazy white streak in the
center of the screen--amid crackling sounds as she throws a look into the trees
and shrieks: "What is that? What the fuck is that? " We never see what
the fuck that is. If we did, some part of us would probably relax, because it
would look like a special effect. But no part of us is allowed to relax.
Ever.

            Is The Blair Witch Project a work of "art"? Not by
my definition. Art rarely tortures you so single-mindedly. After the first
half-hour, in which the students interview Burkittsville residents about the
history of the Blair Witch (one Elly Kedward, found guilty of sorcery in 1785
and lashed to a tree during a harsh winter), the remainder of the movie is
their increasingly desperate odyssey through the woods. They trudge one way,
double back, pore over maps and compasses, whine, trudge some more, come upon
mysterious piles of rocks or bundled twigs, and whine even louder. The action
unfolds in a season halfway between autumn and winter, and the washed-out tones
suggest that the Blair Witch took the forest's colors with her when she died.
The grueling monotony is broken only at night, when the students go into their
tents and the sounds come again and the very celluloid seems to shiver with
cold and fear. The camera twitches incessantly: The lone stationary shot is
when Heather sobs an apology to her parents for having dreamed up the project,
and the way she's framed and half-lighted she looks like Lon Chaney's Phantom
of the Opera with nostril hair. I don't apply the adjective "visceral"
casually: The shaky camera summons up our fight-or-flight responses. Leaving
the screening, my wife was convinced she had food poisoning from an earlier
meal; when we stopped and analyzed her symptoms, we realized that she had
motion sickness. The movie had literally made her sick.

            The power of that can't
be slighted, however. I love horror pictures and am a tough scare, but I
started having nightmares about The Blair Witch Project before I even
saw it--solely on the basis of its preview. I slept even less after I did see
it. When I caught an interview with the superbly nervy Heather Donahue on
television, the first thing I thought was, "Thank God, she's alive." Then she
said, "This movie must be working because people come up to me all the time and
say, 'Thank God, you're alive.' " The other day an envelope arrived at my door
with a bunch of sticks lashed together in the familiar form of the Blair Witch
talisman. I rushed to the phone and called the movie's publicists to make sure
this was a promotional gimmick. When they said yes, I started breathing again;
otherwise, I might have called the police--or an exorcist.

            What is it about The Blair Witch Project that taps
into such primal emotions? Consider its antithesis. The remake of The
Haunting has the bad fortune to open in the same month, and what might have
been dismissed as just a lame, overstuffed big-studio scare picture will now be
held up as a counterexample. Robert Wise's 1963 original, based on Shirley
Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House , is overrated, but it manages to
evoke the eeriest aspect of Jackson's fiction: the way the characters' neuroses
acquire an inexorable life of their own and threaten to eat them alive. Nothing
much happens in the empty mansion, but when something does--for instance, a
thunderous pounding on a pair of big doors, as if all the characters'
accumulated nervous energies had been focused on one spot--the movie's
reticence pays off like gangbusters (or ghostbusters). In the new version,
directed by Jan De Bont ( Speed , 1994; Twister , 1996), that
pounding comes early and serves as an overture for a bunch of
computer-generated special effects: ghosties that swirl around like Tinkerbell,
statues that spring to life and grab people. Everything is exasperatingly,
often laughably, overexplicit, and once a dread becomes material, a ghost story
becomes a monster movie--a different, far less terrifying beast.

            Here are sound effects so hammy that they might
have been borrowed from one of those old haunted-house party albums. Doors
don't creak, they CRRRREEEAAAKKK and then close with a reverberant
KER-CHUNGGGGGG. From the second Liam Neeson and his subjects--Catherine
Zeta-Jones, Lili Taylor, and Owen Wilson--set foot in the farcically garish
Hill House, it's clear that Something Evil is watching them: You can tell
because Something Evil respires so loudly that he's either Darth Vader or an
asthmatic. By the time poor Taylor stands up to the big, bad ghost on behalf of
a lot of little, good ghosts, people in the audience are holding onto their
stomachs to keep from retching with laughter. Writing, directing, acting--this
is one of the most maladroit ghost movies ever made.

            But even if the script weren't so tin-eared and the
direction so clunky, The Haunting still wouldn't come within screaming
distance of The Blair Witch Project . The reason is philosophical. De
Bont, a lavish materialist who thinks that movies can do anything if you throw
enough money around, wants to scare you by showing you stuff. Myrick and
Sanchez want to scare you by not showing you stuff--and by reminding you how
much you can't see and will never know. With all those cameras onscreen,
they've liberated horror from the realm of movies--from the realm of the
light--and nestled it back into the dark where it was born.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            China's Spiritual Void

            
China's banning of the Falun Gong (Buddhist Law) religious sect was strongly
condemned Friday by the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong. The paper said in an
editorial that China is facing more than enough crises
already, from the economy to relations with Taiwan, and it should focus on
these problems rather than "launch a massive crackdown against a group which
has never done anything more harmful than organise peaceful protests." The rise
of Falun Gong is a byproduct of China's new materialism, it said. "The collapse
of the ideological basis for communist rule in the rush towards a free-market
economy has left a spiritual void. It is inevitable that people thrown out of
work or otherwise unsettled by the sweeping changes on the mainland should seek
solace in some form of religious-like activity. ... Beijing should consider
itself fortunate that the popular desire for spiritual inspiration took such a
benign form." Falun Gong's only sin was to build a mass organization
independent of the Communist Party. "This is something the leadership is still
not prepared to tolerate. For all the changes that have taken place in recent
years, yesterday's arrests were a reminder of how far freedom of expression
remains curtailed on the mainland." The paper reported that more than 70 Falun
Gong leaders were arrested in China this week, including Ji Liewu, a mainland
businessman in his 40s who was responsible for bringing the sect to Hong
Kong.

            
Announcing the ban Friday, the official China Daily said the
sect had engaged in illegal activities: advocating superstition and spreading
fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and
jeopardizing social stability. The paper also quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue as saying that Falun Gong had been banned because it
had not been registered in the manner required by law. She also claimed that
the sect had a declining membership of about 2 million, while other estimates
have put it as high as 100 million.

            In
Israel, Ha'aretz led
Friday with the United States urgently pressing Prime Minister Ehud Barak to
make implementation of the Wye River accord his top priority and to carry out
agreed Israeli pullbacks from the West Bank. Meanwhile, the U.S. administration
decided to go easy on Syria, with President Bill Clinton postponing a planned
telephone conversation with Syrian President Hafez Assad. Barak told
Ha'aretz that "an air of suspicion is clouding the whole issue of Wye"
and that "before this suspicion becomes mythology, it must be dispelled and
understanding must be reached."

            
Friday's Guardian featured an interview with former Chilean President Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, who has been under house arrest for several months awaiting the
outcome of Spain's request that he be extradited and tried there for murder,
torture, and other human rights violations. This is the second interview
Pinochet has given since his arrest in London last year. The first, last
weekend, was with the conservative Sunday Telegraph , which opposes his
extradition. The liberal Guardian , by contrast, wants to see him tried,
and its reporter, a former human rights activist, noted that his fingers are
"flat and meaty like those of a butcher." The general's answers in both
interviews were almost identical. He categorically denied all charges against
him and complained about Britain's treatment of him. "I wasn't in England as a
common bandit," he said, in reference to his arrest. "I was here as a
diplomatic figure and had been welcomed as such."

            In
Germany, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung led Friday on a UNICEF report that more children are
now born in poverty than ever before, and the paper discussed the growing AIDS
catastrophe in Africa, where 21 million people are infected with the disease.
Die Welt led on a new
birth control patch, developed by Johnson & Johnson, which it said would
offer strong competition to the pill when it is put on the market next year.
The Süddeutsche
Zeitung of Munich led on a new drive by the German government to get
Turkey admitted to the European Union, provided its human rights record is
acceptable.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 323: &quot;Smooth Talker&quot; 

            
               "We deal in the
basics, and all those basics are necessary necessities," said a smiling CEO,
patiently explaining to some CNNfn reporter that the company would thrive even
in an economic downturn. Why was that CEO smiling?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
322)--"We Deliver?":
            

            

               According to Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., "Sometimes it's barbecue;
sometimes it's fried chicken, sometimes it's pizza; frequently it's more than
one of those things." What is?
            

            "The
shocking diet of talking animals."-- Andrew Staples ( Paul Frellick
had similar answer.)

            
"George W. Bush's favorite food, depending on where he's
campaigning."-- David Finkle
            

            
"Cigarette flavors Philip Morris tried while not targeting children."-- Chris
Kelly
            

            
"Dishes made out of euthanized babies at Peter Singer's new chain of
animal-friendly fast-food restaurants."-- Katha Pollitt
            

            "Look.
A martini should be gin and vermouth and a twist. That's it. There's no call
for 'secret' ingredients."-- Michael Manella
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            In News Quiz responses
and in the wider culture (if there is one), food is used as a metaphor for
ideology (bread and roses; let them eat cake) and for character: Their
attitudes toward eating reveal something, well, distasteful about President
Clinton and Calista Flockhart. It is also a metaphor for sex and never more
delightfully so than in the fowl-eating scene in Tony Richardson's movie of
Tom Jones . There is, however, only one place I can think of where the
equation is reversed so that sex is a metaphor for food. In Tampopo ,
when the incredibly attractive couple in white are not actually in a gourmet
frenzy, sex is simply food carried on by other means. And it really makes you
hungry. If that's the appetite I mean.

            
               Meals for Wheels
Answer
            

            Rep. Doolittle is listing the free eats Majority
Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, serves up at his office to fellow Republicans during
late-night sessions of the House, just one of the ways he has become, according
to Marshall Whitmann of the Heritage Foundation, "the most powerful majority
whip in the history of the House."

            And he's handing out more than ribs. The basis of
DeLay's power is ladling out cash to those who please him. The chief
fund-raiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, he raises more
than half the group's money. And those who supply the funds are not neglected
either. As Alison Mitchell and Marc Lacey report in the New York Times ,
"DeLay has long had a kitchen cabinet of lobbyists who meet with him
regularly."

            DeLay is now launching a $25 million fund-raising
campaign to fight trade unions through the innovative method of establishing a
nonprofit corporation that can raise unlimited cash without disclosing donors,
a plan his fellow Republican congressman Chris Shays calls, "unbelievably
sick."

            In a rare case of
bipartisan agreement, David Obey, D-Wash., notes, "To me, the worst thing in
politics is anonymous, under-the-bedclothes money," he said. "Along with some
of the things I've seen in the House shower room," he did not add.

            
               Interfaith Extra 2--Can
I Hug the Dead Guy?
            

            I guess we've all had one drink too many and
embarrassed ourselves at a funeral. Or borrowed company funds that we had every
intention of returning, so there was really no reason to call the police. But
would you know how to treat the corpse at someone else's church, synagogue, or
prayer thingy?

            Name the Appropriate
Behavior Upon Viewing the Body for each of these religious faiths:

            
               The Religions
            

            

               Baptist

               Hindu

               Episcopalian

               Jehovah's Witnesses

               Lutheran

               Roman Catholic

               United Church of Canada

            

            
               The Behavior
            

            

               Join the line of viewers and view the body silently and somberly. ( No
cutting ahead saying, "I just have this quart of milk.")
               

               Look reverently upon the body and do not touch it. ( Especially not with
cooking utensils.)
               

               A moment of silent prayer. ( During which you can think about where to go
for lunch. Like he'd mind. He's dead.)
               

               Look upon it somberly for a few moments. ( Then look upon him with a big
goofy grin on your face and sing him a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He would
have wanted it that way.)
               

               Stand quietly and then move on. (Pretty much the way the mayor orders
all New Yorkers to behave in every situation.)
               

               A kiss is appropriate, but no tongue unless you were close before death.
OK, I just made that one up. But wouldn't that make the funeral weirdly
exciting?

               This is optional, but if it is a memorial service, there will be no body to
view. ( With their excellent system of national health, Canadians never
die.)
               

            

            (All actual facts from
How To Be a Perfect Stranger: a Guide to Etiquette in Other People's
Religious Ceremonies , Vol. I and II.)

            
               Signs That the '60s Are
Finally Over Ongoing Extra
            

            "We're both irreverent, hip and fun, but also
trusted and respectable brands."-- Robert Levitan, co-founder of some kind of
online gift certificate thing, describes his company and Whoopi
Goldberg.
            

            Participants are invited to submit other actual
news items that sound taps for that turbulent decade, if you'll accept the idea
that his pairing of "hip" and "respectable brands" travesties the spirit of
that era, which might be easier to accept if you thought that he was on acid
when he said it, or if you were right now.

            Results to run
Thursday.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            The plebian tastes of our gluttonous president.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P>Is the &quot;Sensation&quot; Art Worth the Fuss?</P>

            "What modern man wants," said the French symbolist
poet Paul Valéry, "is the grin without the cat, the sensation without
the boredom of its conveyance." Francis Bacon was fond of this quote, and
Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn are fond of Francis Bacon. Knowing this, New York
dealer Jeffrey Deitch suggested the title for the Brooklyn exhibition. Bacon
cited Valéry to mean precisely that modern art, including realist art like his
own, could do without narrative, without literary values. Indeed, art had to
strive to achieve an instantaneity that bypasses laborious storytelling. Things
have pretty much come full circle if you now think that what makes
Generation-Sensation so groovy is that they "graft" literary themes onto modern
art. I can't quite think that you are being serious when you assert that love
and death and nature are themes germane to literature to the exclusion
of the visual arts: There's plenty of each big theme, I'd have thought, in
Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Picasso.

            You coyly ask permission to voice the heresy that
formalism is overrated, as if we are writing in 1970 and you have something
brave to say. Come on, Deborah. Formalism has been the theory non grata
for quarter of a century. It has been replaced by a conceptual orthodoxy every
bit as reductive and exclusionary as Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg never
actually were. The analysis of art profits nothing by a Manichaean opposition
of form and content. It is a symbiosis of form and content that makes
for satisfying aesthetic experience. Anyway, as soon as a generation of artists
or connoisseurs declares for one, the gauntlet is dropped, and the next will
plumb for the other.

            Incidentally, you do subscribe to one
formalist dogma. The insistence that one must see an exhibition before
having anything critical to say about ideas and images within it attributes a
great importance to the visceral experience of objects, an attendance to form.
If the art is so much about "real life" as you praise it for being,
communicating beyond the precious confines of the art world, dealing with
themes and issues that are bigger than paltry aesthetic experiences, then all
credit, surely, to Citizen Rudy for plunging right in with his criticism?

            To me, Mona Hatoum, whose work you admire, is very
typical of a kind of institutionalized avant-gardist whose work sends me to
sleep on my feet. Installation--her medium--is a non-starter anyway, at best a
poor cousin of window dressing or stage design, simply the wrong instrument for
conveying subtle ideas visually (if her ideas are subtle). Hatoum's
grating nihilism always needs to revert to theories or story lines extraneous
to the actual object to have any validity, with lots of special pleading on the
feminist and Third World fronts. It's odd that you started our correspondence
by congratulating the young Brits for their raucous theory-free and politically
incorrect humor and you should end up with Hatoum, who could have been invented
for October magazine (and virtually was invented by the arid Marxist
journal Third Text ).

            Rachel Whiteread is vastly more interesting, to me,
than Hatoum. Even with her, though, the problem remains that too much of the
aesthetic decision has been taken before the work begins; that form is imposed
rather than achieved. But still, I'd say to anyone earwigging this
correspondence that it is worth going to Brooklyn, crossing the pontifical
picket line, and breezing past the offal and Ofilis just for the clear, calm,
meditative experience of Whiteread's Ghost . I've long been convinced
that it is Whiteread's masterpiece (better than her short-lived House
and the West Broadway watertower), but I'm coming round to realizing that it is
a masterpiece on any terms. So, I must say I'm grateful to Mr. Saatchi for
letting me see it at his gallery, the Royal Academy at theirs, and now the
Brooklyn Museum, too. It's a rare case of improvement on repeated viewings.

            But let's be honest:
Most of the stuff in "Sensation" evaporates even during the first viewing. As
soon as you "get" the joke, say, of Gavin Turk depicting himself in a waxwork
as Johnny Rotten, in the pose of Warhol's portrait of Elvis, there is not much
left for aesthetic uplift. As an ad man, Mr. Saatchi will be aware of the
infamous dictum of a certain master of propaganda (Goebbels) that the lie
repeated often enough becomes truth. I think the critic's job is to resist the
inevitable process by which junk exhibited often enough (and written about
enough) becomes important.

            David
Cohen

            P.S.: I hate to think of
you lonely at lunchtime. How about next week sometime?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Danforth on the Case

            

               Former Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., will lead an independent inquiry into
the assault on Waco. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed him in
response to revelations that the FBI lied about the use of tear gas. Everyone
agrees Danforth is principled and independent. Democrats say his appointment
will rebuild support for Reno, who has done an "extraordinary job ." Republicans say Reno is still incompetent
and should resign . (
                  Slate
               's and assess
Reno's performance.)

            

               East 
               Timor is in chaos. Military-backed
militias have killed hundreds and forced thousands to flee since the South
Pacific territory voted last week for independence from Indonesia. Martial law
has been declared, and Indonesia has rejected a U.N. offer of peacekeeping
troops. The international community is debating whether continued inaction
would be: 1) prudent because it is important to maintain good relations with
Indonesia; 2) foolish, since Indonesia's inability to maintain peace makes
intervention inevitable; or 3) hypocritical in light of the United Nations' active role in
Kosovo. (For more, see 
                  Slate
               's ".")

            

               Boris 
               Yeltsin is suspected of taking bribes. Swiss
investigators say that a construction company may have paid him over $1 million
in exchange for contracts to renovate the Kremlin. Yeltsin denied the charges.
The White House hinted that it doesn't believe him. Foreign leaders expressed
weary distaste and suspicion that Yeltsin is mixed up with the Bank of New York
money-laundering scandal. Russians speculated about whether he will quit early
and whether he will name Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as interim president or
force an election.

            

               Viacom is buying CBS . The $35 billion marriage would be the
largest media merger ever and would join television's highest-rated network
with the owner of Paramount and MTV. Investors' spin: It's a perfect fit , since the new company would control the
creation, production, and distribution of TV shows and movies. Media-watchers'
spin: Viacom's ascendancy reflects a new
balance of power --niche programming beats out shows aimed at wide
audiences. Consumers' spin: Yaaawn. Let's just hope they don't cancel
Touched by an Angel . (
                  Slate
               's "Moneybox" the merger.)

            

               Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed a peace
deal.
                The deal modifies the previously signed but unfulfilled Wye
agreement. The rosy spin: Peace at last! The skeptical spin: That's what they
said when the last deal was signed. The cynical spin: Now that the peace
process is back on track, terrorists are staging bomb attacks in Israel to make
sure it's derailed again. Meanwhile, Israel's highest court shocked everyone by
restricting the authority of Israeli security forces to use force against
detainees. (
                  Slate
               's "Frame Game" explains the between
peace and terrorism.)

            

               Twelve Puerto Rican nationalists accepted President Clinton's clemency
offer. The prisoners, members of a terrorist group linked to 100
bombings in the United States, agreed to renounce violence in exchange for
their freedom. Hillary Clinton had announced last week that she no longer
supported her husband's offer. Politicos disagree about which was clumsier:
Bill's offer of clemency to cultivate Puerto Rican support for his wife's
Senate campaign; or Hillary's rejection of that support in an attempt to
cultivate her own identity.

            

               Bill 
               Bradley declared his candidacy for president. He
emphasized his small-town upbringing and his distance from the current
Washington scene. The pessimistic spin: He can't beat Vice President Gore, who
is well-funded, well-connected, and leads in the polls. The optimistic spin: He
trails Gore by only a few points in crucial states and will take off as Clinton
fatigue grows.

            

               Henry 
               Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of
lying about payments to his former mistress. He accepted the plea bargain
just before being tried on 18 felony counts. The unanimous spin: Yet another
independent counsel has wasted vast sums of money trying to prove a flawed case
against a member of the Clinton administration.

            

               The Clintons bought a Westchester, N.Y., home. Terry
McAuliffe, the president's chief fund-raiser, used his own money to secure the
loan for the $1.7 million house. Pundits whether the assistance was an
apolitical gesture of friendship or an attempt at improper influence.

            
               The Houston
Comets won the Women's National Basketball Association
championship.
                They have won the title in each of the league's
three years. Everyone now agrees they're a "dynasty." The pessimistic view:
This robs the WNBA of suspense and makes it boring, which a fledgling league
can ill afford. The WNBA's view: Having a "dynasty" team helps the league
market itself. The long view: Relax, dynasties haven't killed the men's
game.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            CuteFella

            After his notorious arrest
by the Hollywood vice squad in 1995, Hugh Grant showed up on talk shows to
promote a new film and--it couldn't be avoided--offer an explanation for his
"crime." Well, not an explanation precisely. Asked about the incident, he'd
wince, bite his lip, bat his eyelashes, shrug sheepishly, and look adorably
abashed. His contrition was so winning that one cartoonist suggested he could
make big money as a spokesman for governments accused of human rights abuses.
(On Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds: "Rather a bad move ... terribly
sorry." On the Serb-led slaughter in Sarajevo: "Most embarrassing ... frightful
lapse in judgment.")

            In the gangster farce
Mickey Blue Eyes , Grant takes adorable abashment to delirious new
heights. He plays Michael Felgate, an English executive for a Sotheby's-like
New York auction house, who proposes to his girlfriend, a teacher named Gina
Vitale (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and then discovers she's the daughter and niece of
powerful crime bosses. Suddenly forced to keep company with men named Vito and
Vinnie, to bury a corpse beside the East River, and to make like a gangster
with a voice that's a cross between John Wayne and Tweety Bird, the squeamish
Englishman winces, bites his lip, bats his eyelashes, shrugs sheepishly, and
looks--yes--adorably abashed. The shtick would be irritating as hell if it
weren't so ... adorable. Grant does abashed the way Bogie smoked, the way
Marilyn flared her lips. He's not an actor of range (to say the least), but his
charismatic discomfort--his breezy uneasiness--makes him a marvelous
romantic-comedy star.

            And the first two-thirds of Mickey Blue Eyes give
him an excellent pedestal. It's the stuff of classic farce, which puts the
wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time and then fiendishly ups the
ante. Pressured by Gina's spooky uncle (a superbly restrained turn by Burt
Young) into auctioning off a paranoid son's painting--a resurrected Jesus
putting holes in disloyal disciples with a submachine gun--Michael must
simultaneously keep the gangsters happy, his fiancee (who'll pull the plug on
the engagement if she finds out he's enmeshed in the family business) in the
dark, the FBI from discovering the collusion, and--most important in farce--a
semblance of dignity. His upper-crust boss is forever escorting a potential
investor around the company, so that the two can walk in on him in poses that
the Hollywood vice squad would find suspect. The director, Kelly Makin, hits
the gags hard--he turns punch lines into slug lines--but his timing is
crackerjack. The trick in pulling off this kind of comedy is to wind a lot of
jack-in-the-boxes in full view of the audience yet still make it a surprise
when they start--at moments of peak pandemonium--springing up. The
screenwriters, Adam Scheinman and Robert Kuhn, have boned up on their Feydeau
and Fawlty Towers --not to mention the slew of mobster movies to which
they cheerfully make reference (and from which the filmmakers have hired most
of the supporting cast).

            What goes wrong? In the
last half-hour, the farcical pulse gets lost amid the crosses and
double-crosses and triple-crosses and erupting blood squibs and dud psychology.
James Caan begins hilariously as Gina's hearty, lunkish father, but then has to
get all noble under the weight of the picture's dumb, melodramatic
contrivances. Worse, Grant's linguistically hapless gangster--Mickey Blue
Eyes--never makes a climactic reappearance, so the filmmakers waste their best
invention. As long as I'm carping, even the movie's first third has problems. I
found the basic setup--that Michael has no inkling of Gina's family
ties--implausible, since where I come from you don't ask a woman to marry you
(you don't even get past the first date) until you've explained to her the ways
in which your family screwed you up and have expressed tender sympathy for the
ways in which her family did likewise. Am I the only one who thinks Alice
Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child is the dating manual of the
'90s?

            While I was on vacation, several readers wrote to say that
The Blair Witch Project hadn't scared them but, oh boy, did they freak
out at The Sixth Sense . Here, they said, was one skeeery movie!
Backlash, shmacklash ; The Blair Witch Project messed up my head
more than anything since Night of the Living Dead (1968), so The
Sixth Sense had me shivering in anticipation from its opening credits. Two
hours later, I emerged with tear-stained cheeks and a lot of admiration for the
"gotcha!" ending (the clues are there, but one shakes them off as arty
mannerisms) but not especially frightened. The ghosts were seen too clearly--I
could practically smell their greasepaint and mascara. The larger point is that
the movie, directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan, belongs to a different
genre than Blair 
               Witch , which traffics in the irrational, the
unseen, the terror of malevolent nothingness. The 
               Sixth Sense
uses the supernatural for reassurance. For all its bogey-man shenanigans, it
wants to leave you with faith in a higher order--in the possibility that even
after death wrongs may be avenged, innocents protected, and the loose ends of
one's life tied up. Ultimately, it has less in common with Blair Witch
than with such quivering lumps of sentiment as Ghost (1990) and Field
of Dreams (1989). The film could be subtitled Field of
Nightmares .

            It's often wrenching
anyway. Bruce Willis' damaged child psychologist wanders through an autumnal
universe from which the warmth has been bleached (the pale yet deep-toned
cinematography is by Tak Fujimoto), social intercourse is vaporous, and sounds
seem piped in from another dimension. (A bus accelerating and decelerating is
like a lonely groan.) As the haunted boy in his charge, Haley Joel Osment
regards the therapist sadly, as if seeing into his (lost) soul. Osment's
pinched, old-young face suggests an ancient's insight without an ancient's
defenses--a sensitivity so exquisitely morbid that you worry more for his
emotional than physical well-being. You worry, too, for his mom, played with
tremulous fierceness by the wonderful Toni Collette. "Look at my face," she
says, when her child ventures the idea that she must think he's crazy. "I
would never think that. " Maybe I've spent too much time with The Drama
of The Gifted 
               Child , but that part reduced me to a puddle of
mush.

            More post-vacation catching up: The rave reviews for
Twin Falls Idaho and Bowfinger made me eager to see them, but
neither really floated my boat. The first is an absorbing, low-budget art movie
about conjoined twins, the weaker of whom is dying and mordant, the other torn
(so to speak) between loyalty to his brother and a tenuous connection to the
external world--embodied in part by a prostitute (Michele Hicks) who looks like
Bridget Fonda as Vampira and acts like a slightly less wooden porn star. You
can't exactly say, "Ho-hum, another sentimental Siamese-twin flick," but
somehow I felt as if I'd been here before. It isn't just the willful echoes of
Basket Case (1982) and Dead Ringers (1988). It's the way the
twins (played by co-writers Mark Polish and Michael Polish, who also directed
the film) are photographed to look so wanly beautiful and dear , like the
hero of the play (not the David Lynch movie) The Elephant Man . They seem
enigmatic when whispering in each other's ears, but when you actually hear what
they're saying it's so humdrum that you wonder why they even bother to talk.
There are brilliant moments--a flickering, black-and-white dream, in which
they're separate and riding bicycles, is like a gorgeous home movie from the
'20s unearthed from someone's basement--but the mixture of Diane Arbus
freakiness and heart-tugging bathos finally feels a little cheap.

            Cheaper still is most of Bowfinger , a
one-joke movie that's like Ed Wood (1994) without the poetry or emotion
that Tim Burton managed to coax out of re-creations of Grade Z genre flicks.
The one joke--a bunch of untalented, impoverished filmmakers devise a movie
around a paranoid action star (Eddie Murphy) who has no idea that he's even in
it--is occasionally a hoot, but it also requires Murphy to act like a
scaredy-cat Negro out of a '30s ghost movie. I laughed, but I came out
depressed. On the basis of his script and performance, Steve Martin's vision of
moviemaking is of a scam perpetrated by hustling morons. Has he been spending
too much time with David Mamet?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Dissension in the Rankings

            An , and it must perforce be answered. The charge?
Fiddling. No, not the fiddling of Nero or Nashville. The matter is more
serious.

            For those not in the
academic racket, or with kids long out of college or not long out of diapers,
it might seem a trifling matter. But to anyone with an abiding interest in
higher education, the stakes don't get much higher. Because the fiddling charge
arises in the context of college rankings . In the hushed groves of
academia, few things cause more consternation than an outsider using numeral
measurements to gauge academic performance--even though colleges and
universities rely on similar measurements to rate their applicants.

            Here's the deal. Many educators say it's absurd to think
that the intangibles of a college education can be reduced to mere numbers, and
they're right. But for more than a decade now, U.S. News & World
Report has been providing kids and their parents a way to assess the most
important factor in choosing a college: academic excellence. Obviously, that's
not the only thing to think about when selecting a school. But millions of
people find the magazine's assessments useful. And it's a measure of the
seriousness with which they're taken that deans and admissions officers compete
fiercely to better their schools' rankings from year to year.

            Comes now the fiddling
business. Writing in the pages of 
                  Slate
               , Bruce Gottlieb is
admirably forthright in his condemnation. "[T]he editors of U.S. News "
he writes, "fiddled with the rules" in preparing this year's college rankings.
The provocation for the charge? This year the magazine ranked the California
Institute of Technology first among national universities, up from the No. 9
position just a year ago. "This was dramatic," Mr. Gottlieb writes, "since
Caltech, while highly regarded, is not normally thought of as No. 1."

            Fair enough. We welcome challenges to our methodology and
use them to refine and improve our rankings. To Mr. Gottlieb's gimlet eye,
however, there is mischief afoot. In awarding the No. 1 slot to Caltech, he
writes, the magazine's editors generated a sense of "surprise" by toppling last
year's "uninteresting three-way tie among Harvard, Yale, and Princeton" for
first place. "Nobody's going to pay much attention" to the magazine's rankings,
Mr. Gottlieb writes, "if it's Harvard, Yale, and Princeton again and again,
year after year." Ergo, the magazine "fiddled" the thing to generate a bit of
buzz.

            The charge bears
examination. Never mind that Mr. Gottlieb, a former 
                  Slate
                staff
writer, is currently enrolled at Harvard Law School. (One's attorney and one's
mother abjure questions of motive.) But Mr. Gottlieb is a self-described
student of econometrics, which our Webster's defines as "the use of
mathematical and statistical methods in the field of economics to verify and
develop economic theories." Put aside for a moment that the U.S. News
rankings have virtually nothing to do with economic theory. One may posit that
a mind used to grappling with the kudzu of econometrics is more than up to the
task of dissecting something as relatively straightforward as college
rankings.

            How is it, then, that Mr. Gottlieb falls so short of the
mark? The magazine's methodology for determining the rankings is based on a
weighted sum of 16 numerical factors. Mr. Gottlieb the econometrician somehow
manages to misapprehend even the most basic of these. The magazine, he says,
rates schools on "average class size." Wrong. It's the percentage of classes
with fewer than 20 students and the percentage of classes with 50 students or
more. U.S. News , says Mr. Gottlieb, also rates schools on the "amount of
alumni giving." Sadly, the econometrician gets it wrong once again. The
magazine ranks schools on the rate of alumni giving--the percentage of
alumni who donate money to their school.

            But that is to cavil. It
is not until he is well launched on his wrongheaded bill of particulars that
Mr. Gottlieb makes an interesting concession. "I can't prove that U.S.
News keeps changing the rules simply in order to change the results," he
writes. No matter. The charge is leveled, and like a parched man finally led to
water, Mr. Gottlieb keeps drinking and drinking.

            Summing up, at long last, Mr. Gottlieb concludes that the
success of the magazine's rankings "actually depends on confounding most
peoples' intuition" about which colleges and universities are the best. Had he
bothered conducting even the most rudimentary research, Mr. Gottlieb would have
seen that the charge is without merit. Over the past 10 years (1991-2000), the
top 15 national universities in the U.S. News rankings have remained
remarkably consistent. Eleven schools have been in the top 15 every single year
for a decade. Every year the top 15 have varied from the previous year's top 15
by one or fewer schools. In the past five years, the top 15 have been exactly
the same top 15. Yes, the "uninteresting" triumvirate of Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton has been there all along. So have schools like the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and others that virtually any expert would number among
the nation's best providers of higher education. And, yes, Mr. Gottlieb, so has
Caltech.

            These are data even an
econometrician should be able to understand.

            

               
                  Bruce
                
               
                  Gottlieb replies:
               
            

            One week ago, I wrote an in these pages criticizing
U.S. News ' "best colleges" rankings. I had two gripes. First, that
U.S. News fiddles with its rankings to improve newsstand sales. Second,
that the rankings suffer from a serious conceptual flaw.

            Brian Duffy and Peter Cary have written a rebuttal,
to which I have four objections.

            1. The Duffy/Cary response is padded with references
to Nero, Nashville, and Webster's dictionary, but neglects to even address my
second gripe. This is especially odd since this charge--that the rankings are
cargo-cult statistical research--seems the more damning of the two.

            Does their silence mean
they grant the point?

            2. Their comments also show a willful or
inadvertent misunderstanding of my first gripe. They essentially say there's
nothing necessarily fishy about changes--like Caltech going from No. 9 to No.
1--that surprise people. Fair enough, but totally beside the point. I'm not
saying there's something fishy about any eight-place jump--I'm saying
there's something clearly fishy about this particular jump.

            Specifically, in 1997 the magazine's methodology
section rejected the very statistical procedure--known as
"standardization"--which this year propelled Caltech to the top of the list.
The editors said that standardization would be unfair. Now, two years later,
the magazine performs a complete about face-- with no mention of their
previous stance !

            Duffy/Cary's explanation for the flip-flop is that
U.S. News "welcomes" suggested improvements, presumably including the
idea of standardizing variables. The idea that they switched to this technique
because it was suggested to them--by whom, I wonder?--is preposterous. They
were surely aware that it was an option in 1997, when they explained why it was
an inferior technique. Furthermore, "standardization" is not some
will-o'-the-wisp notion whose stock rises and falls upon weekly pronouncements
from what Duffy/Cary call "the hushed groves of academia." It is a Statistics
101 idea, known to anyone who's ever opened an introductory textbook.

            So what can explain the flip-flop that propelled
Caltech to the top? Perhaps we should follow the money. In their rebuttal,
Duffy and Cary do not dispute that U.S. News benefits financially when
the rankings change.

            Moreover, the magazine
1) dishonestly implies that Caltech, rather than the ranking formulas, have
changed with the headline "Caltech Comes Out on Top"; 2) employs linguistic
trickery to downplay how much the methodological flip-flop helped Caltech; and
3) fails to mention that Caltech probably declined in quality this year if the
U.S. News standards are taken seriously. Put simply, the "fiddling"
theory explains the facts better than Duffy/Cary's assertion that U.S.
News strives for the truth.

            3. In addition to supposedly mimicking "a parched
man finally led to water"-- what on earth does this mean? --I stand
accused as a "self-described student of econometrics." At first glance, I was
baffled.

            For one thing, nowhere in the article do I use the
word "econometrics." And the only statistical example I give is about
baseball.

            Then I remembered my
phone conversation about methodology with U.S. News ' resident
statistical expert, Robert Morse. He began our interview by asking me about my
statistical background, presumably to know where to begin his explanation. I
replied that I'd taken several econometrics courses as an undergraduate and had
spent a year working at a statistical consultancy firm in Washington, D.C.,
called Mathematica Policy Research . At the time, he seemed rather
pleased to hear this and flattered me that few reporters had similar grounding
in statistical theory.

            4. Duffy/Cary end by noting that "even an
econometrician" can see that the top 15 schools on their list don't change much
from year to year. This is meant to disarm my conclusion that U.S. News
fiddles with the rankings to confound our intuition and sell magazines.
However, as Duffy/Cary are well aware, it's perfectly possible to keep the top
15 colleges static, and still generate buzz by, say, moving No. 9 up to No.
1.

            Lastly, they seem especially proud of the fact that
the top 15 contains all those schools we intuitively feel are the "nation's
best." Well, one question: If the rankings just confirm intuition, then why buy
them in the first place? Could it be to see who is No. 1 this year?

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Got Osteoporosis?

            It will be hard to frolic through the next
millennium with bones that have turned to sawdust. That is the fate that awaits
those of us, we are told, who don't consume the escalating amount of
calcium--now at a quart of milk a day or the equivalent--endorsed by public
health officials. Just two years ago the National Academy of Sciences increased
its daily recommendation for calcium by 50 percent for older Americans. Another
upward revision and we will all have to be attached to udders with an IV.
Strange, then, that most of the world's people, who rarely if ever drink milk
and who get just a small percentage of the calcium we are told is vital, have
not devolved into boneless heaps of protoplasm. Even stranger, in many of these
dairy-avoiding countries, people get through life with far fewer of the
age-related hip fractures that plague Americans.

            This paradox has led a small number of researchers
to become dairy doubters, questioning the wisdom of the calcium recommendations
of the public health establishment. For one thing, the doubters say, our diet
is so fundamentally flawed that trying to protect our bones by taking in loads
of calcium is like trying to fill a tub with no stopper by turning up the
faucets. The problem is this: In general, world dietary patterns show that
countries where people consume large amounts of calcium are also countries
where people eat extravagant amounts of animal protein, places such as the
United States and northern Europe. These countries also suffer among the
world's highest rate of fractures due to osteoporosis, the disease
characterized by weak, porous bones. "The correlation between animal protein
[intake] and fracture rates in different societies is as strong as that between
lung cancer and smoking," says T. Colin Campbell, professor of nutritional
biochemistry at Cornell University.

            Our bodies contain 2
pounds to 4 pounds of calcium, 99 percent of which is in our bones and teeth,
the rest circulates in the blood where it is necessary for nervous-system
function. Eating animal protein, which is high in sulfur-containing amino
acids, requires the body to buffer the effects of those amino acids. It does so
by releasing calcium from the bones, literally peeing them away. But this
leaching of calcium should be offset if the balance of calcium to protein in
the diet is within a reasonable range. Robert Heaney, professor of medicine at
the Creighton University School of Medicine and a proponent of high dairy
consumption, found in a study he co-authored that the "single most important
determinate of the rate of bone gain" in young women was not the amount of
calcium consumed but the ratio of calcium to protein. But it's a difficult
balance to strike when it's common for Americans to eat double the protein we
need, with 70 percent of it coming from animal sources.

            Could there be some other dietary factor at work as well?
Retired Harvard professor of nutrition Mark Hegsted thinks there may be. He
believes calcium consumption may be at the root of our bone problems, but his
heretical hypothesis is not that we don't get enough calcium but rather that we
get too much. In an article in the Journal of Nutrition he writes,
"[H]ip fractures are more frequent in populations where dairy products are
commonly consumed and calcium intakes are relatively high. Is there any
possibility that this is a causal relationship?"

            Hegsted explains the way
such a mechanism would work. The body adapts to low calcium intake by
efficiently using what is available. Conversely, high calcium consumption
causes the body to decrease the amount of the mineral that is absorbed,
excreting the excess. That's why populations with low calcium consumption
manage to form healthy skeletons, and high calcium consumers don't develop
bones like mastodons. But what happens over time, Hegsted suggests, is that the
inefficient consumers may permanently damage their abilities to effectively use
dietary calcium and to conserve calcium in the bones later in life. As we age,
the body naturally goes from building bone to losing it. Hegsted's hypothesis
explains why high dairy consumers so often end up with rampant bone loss. He
cites studies of rural Gambian women who don't drink milk, get about
one-quarter of the calcium we're told to consume, yet rarely have osteoporotic
fractures. "It will be embarrassing enough if the current calcium hype is
simply useless; it will be immeasurably worse if the recommendations are
actually detrimental to health," he writes.

            Cornell's Campbell says our fate could be different if we
would take a lesson from the Chinese (fortunately he's a nutritionist, not a
political scientist). He has spent the last 20 years studying the health and
dietary habits of rural Chinese and comparing them to those in the West. These
Chinese consume less than half the calcium we're told is necessary, virtually
all of it from plant sources, in particular leafy green vegetables. They have
one-fifth the incidence of hip fracture of Americans. Although they consume
more calories per day than we do, only about 10 percent of their diet is from
animal sources. On average, American diets are 70 percent animal-based.

            Campbell has what could
be called the unified field theory of bones and breasts. He explains the mortal
consequences of diets high in dairy, protein, and fat. Early in life, American
girls consume lots of these, which leads to relatively dense bones, high levels
of estrogen, and early sexual maturation. The age of menarche has been dropping
for decades in this country and now often occurs as early as age 10. In rural
China, girls don't usually begin menstruation until age 15. Chinese women have
only about two-thirds of the amount of circulating estrogen that American women
do, which helps account for their far lower rate of breast cancer, says
Campbell.

            Estrogen helps maintain bone, so most women's skeletons are
fine until menopause. Then estrogen levels drop, in the case of American women
faster and lower than their Chinese counterparts. "Now they're vulnerable,"
says Campbell. "That all suggests that the factors that cause osteoporosis are
rather similar to the ones that cause breast cancer."

            Two very different sets of studies support his
theory. One compares bone density of Japanese and British women. The Japanese
get almost all their calcium from soy, the bones of small cooked fish, and
vegetables. They also have about 40 percent the rate of hip fracture of the
West. The British diet is similar to ours and so is their hip fracture rate.
Before menopause, the British women do indeed have denser bones than the
Japanese. But following menopause, the British women end up losing more bone
than the Japanese. And a spate of recent studies in this country has found that
women with the highest measured bone density, a much-desired goal according to
the literature on osteoporosis, have a significantly increased incidence of
breast cancer.

            Campbell says views such
as his are not more widely known because, "Unfortunately, we are absolutely
drowned in information coming out of the dairy industry. ... Our national
nutrition policies are corrupted by the influence of the dairy industry."

            The milk proponents offer a variety of responses as to why
osteoporosis is far less common in the nonmilk-drinking world. One is that the
theories of the doubters could be characterized as demented ravings, probably
induced by dairy deficiency. Another boils down to: "We're Americans. If we
were rural Chinese or Gambians, sure we'd be eating primarily beans and
vegetables, so thank goodness we aren't." The public health official's version
of the line, "Take my wife, please," is "Tell Americans to eat kale five times
a week."

            The milk advocates
rightly point out that physical activity, particularly the kind that requires
weight-bearing, is crucial to bone growth and maintenance. For example, while
we have turned our bathrooms into palaces of comfort, lots of the world's
people still squat over holes, which makes it difficult to finish reading the
business section, but is a real bone builder. Another theory holds that Asian
women in particular have better designed hips than Caucasians, making them like
inflatable punching toys that can't be knocked down, thus less likely to suffer
hip fractures. The problem with this theory is that recent studies show that
the Chinese diet is rapidly becoming more Westernized. Guess what, so is the
Chinese rate of osteoporosis.

            But most of all, they say, forget population statistics and
instead look at the laboratory. Indeed, there are dozens of clinical
experiments showing that high doses of calcium either arrest bone loss or even
build bone in older women. Fine, say the dairy doubters, if calcium is the
answer, then it should both prevent and cure osteoporosis, but it doesn't. The
doubters also argue that these laboratory studies, which usually run from two
to four years, may just be seeing a short-term effect. That is, there is some
initial bone-building response by the body to large calcium doses, but it may
be a temporary and unsustainable change.

            Which camp is right has
enormous public health consequences. Eight million American women and 2 million
men have osteoporosis. The disease is responsible for more than 1.5 million
fractures annually, with a direct cost of $14 billion. Of those, 300,000 are
hip fractures; one-third of the people over age 50 who break their hips never
walk independently again, and 20 percent die within a year from related
complications. With an aging population, and in the absence of some plumbing
apocalypse that will cause Americans to adopt a squatting posture to relieve
themselves, the incidence and cost of osteoporosis can only rise.

            In a way, Americans are voting with their stomachs on the
milk issue and unintentionally siding with the dairy opponents. Milk
consumption has been falling for decades. It is now about half what it was in
1945. Other beverages have displaced it--in the case of young people
especially, soft drinks. Soft drinks are loaded with phosphorus, which is an
essential and widely available nutrient. The problem is that too much
phosphorus itself causes calcium to be lost from the bones. Then there's excess
salt, another component of the average diet and a bone-killer as well.

            The battle between the vegetable advocates and
dairy advocates over the nutritional choices of Americans is like symphony
orchestras dueling with opera companies over the entertainment dollars of
teen-agers. While they're fighting, they forgot to notice the audience is at
American Pie . So it turns out that no matter who is right, the calcium
doubters or the calcium advocates, that shattering sound you will hear as the
21 st century progresses will be America's bones.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            The Life Issue

            A
month ago, when Vice President Al Gore announced his candidacy for president,
he promised to defend the right to abortion. "Some try to duck the issue of
choice," declared Gore. "Not me. American women must be able to make that
decision for themselves. I will stand up for a woman's right to choose." To
which the wags at National Review replied: "No, [Gore] won't duck the
issue; he just won't say what its name is."

            
Abortion rights advocates have ducked the A-word for years. First they said
they stood for "choice," then they changed their name to "pro-choice," and
finally they obliterated the debate's physical substance by renaming it "the
choice issue." For this, they were skewered by abortion opponents. But now the
anti-abortion folks, too, are dropping the A-word. Abortion is becoming "the
life issue."

            "Life
issues" aren't new. The Catholic Church has long discussed abortion,
euthanasia, and the death penalty under the rubric of "life issues," and a
former president of the National Right-to-Life (i.e., anti-abortion) Committee,
Dr. John Willke, has been running the Life Issues Institute for years. What's
new is the conversion of the plural phrase "life issues," which sensibly
connected topics relating to mortality, into the singular phrase "the life
issue," whose only purpose is to replace the word "abortion."

            This
verbal conversion is being driven by a political conversion. In 1996,
Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes supported the right to abortion
and was ostracized by Christian conservatives. This year, Forbes has made up
with these conservatives, largely by coming out against legal abortion. He
seems just as uncomfortable railing against abortion in this election as he was
defending it in the last one--perhaps because he's faking it, perhaps because
he worries that pro-lifers think he's faking it, and perhaps because he
worries that pro-choicers think he's not. To avoid the dreaded word, he has
renamed it.

            Two
months ago on Fox News Sunday , host Tony Snow asked Forbes about
"abortion." Forbes responded with a long lecture on "the life issue," his
"pro-life" position, "partial birth," and "parental consent." Not once did he
mention the A-word. Last month on Crossfire , co-host Bill Press asked
Forbes about "abortion." Forbes replied, "On the life issue, Bill, I've laid
out a plan of action to move the issue forward." Last weekend on Late
Edition , Forbes bragged that in 1996 he had "put out a plan of action to
move the life issue forward." Host Wolf Blitzer, understandably puzzled, asked,
"On abortion rights, you mean?" Forbes answered: "In terms of ... preserving
the sanctity of life."

            "The
life issue" seems to be catching on. Two weeks ago, Republican presidential
hopeful Gary Bauer stood in front of a Louisiana abortion clinic and challenged
his rivals "to get a lot more serious about the sanctity-of-life issue." Last
Thursday, a Bauer press release castigated other candidates for refusing to
litmus-test judicial nominees on "the pro-life issue." The word "abortion"
didn't appear until the end of the release.

            
Euphemisms reveal as much as they obscure. Abortion rights advocates adopted
"the choice issue" because they concluded the public didn't like abortion. If
abortion opponents adopt "the life issue," it will signify that they have
concluded the public doesn't like attacks on abortion, either. It will also
liberate Steve Forbes to change the subject to tax cuts, school deregulation,
and Social Security privatization--or, as he prefers to call them, the "choice"
issues.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>The Godfather of Compassionate Conservatism</SPAN></SPAN>

            
               
                  New
York
               
               
                  Times Magazine , Sept. 12
            

            In a
cover book excerpt, Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt recounts his
first year as a public-school teacher. McCourt captured the imagination of his
rambunctious class by having them transcribe essays written by kids a
generation earlier. ... An article introduces the father of
compassionate conservatism, Jewish-Communist-turned-evangelical-Christian
Marvin Olasky, who penned a book arguing that faith-based charities could
supplant the welfare state. He now chairs Gov. George W. Bush's religion-policy
committee. To practice what he preached, Olasky opened an ex-con ministry and
adopted a black infant.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , Sept. 27
            

            The
cover package debates whether the ETS plan to adjust
SAT scores on the basis of a student's socio-economic and racial background
threatens meritocracy. One piece argues that "striver" scoring is a rational
statistical tool for achieving the worthy goal of admitting more non-Asian
minorities to elite colleges. An opposing opinion claims striver scoring would
entrench the fallacy that "demography is destiny." ... A piece assesses George W. Bush's foreign policy,
arguing that he covers up his ignorance of foreign affairs by deferring to
experts from his dad's administration, including Condoleezza Rice and Brent
Scowcroft. The neorealist Bushites believe that the United States should
intervene abroad only to protect vital national interests. W.'s tutors opposed
American involvement in Kosovo and support constructive engagement with
China.

            
               
                  The
Nation
               
               , Sept. 20
            

            A
special issue focuses on new ideas for drug reform. An article redefines drug abuse as a public health problem.
Treatment on demand and the abolition of criminal penalties for nonviolent
users is the solution. ... A piece deems drug courts a cheap and
promising approach to rehabilitating addicts. Nonviolent drug offenders can
avoid prison sentences by undergoing treatment and monitoring. ... A
pharmaceutical company is promoting a prescription alternative to medical
marijuana, according to a story . Marinol controls nausea and appetite loss, the same
symptoms that lead cancer patients to smoke pot. The manufacturer's minions are
loudly opposing marijuana legalization to improve the pill's sales.

            
               
                  American
Prospect
               
               , September/October 1999
            

            The
cover story condemns the increasing use of convict labor by corporations. Among
the 80,000 prisoners employed by private companies for a fraction of the
minimum wage are TWA's reservation takers and Microsoft's software boxers.
Prison employment circumvents labor laws and hurts regular workers.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Sept. 13
            

            The
cover excerpt from Susan Faludi's much-ballyhooed book says
men have been emasculated by feminism and the new economy. Men should learn to
replace media-manufactured masculine ideals that emphasize appearance and
dominance with ungendered ideals of social responsibility and liberty.
... A profile slaps Bill Bradley for hypocrisy. He
fund-raises madly while assailing the role of money in politics, and he attacks
finger-in-the-wind politics even though he spent three times more on polling
than any other candidate during his last Senate campaign. ... In an
interview , Kevin Costner laments Hollywood commercialism and
gripes that Universal butchered his soon-to-be released For Love of the
Game . (
                  Slate
                predicted it would be a weeks ago.)

            

               
                  Time
               
               , Sept. 13
            

            The
cover story , rehashing last week's discovery that smart mice
can be genetically engineered, predicts that the bioengineering of human
intelligence will soon be possible. ... A profile crowns Chris Rock "The Funniest Man in America." The
comedian is making his mark with middlebrow movies, smart standup specials, and
his own eclectic HBO show. Rock is taking his stereotype-bending routine global
by staging his next standup special in Africa, à la Muhammad Ali's "Rumble in
the Jungle." ... A piece cringes at the new trend of body modification--or
"bod-mod"--in which people mutilate themselves by searing their skin and
splitting their tongues.

            

               
                  U.S.
                
               
                  News & World Report, Sept.
13
            

            The
cover story reviews the latest research on how babies think.
Neuroscience suggests that by the third month infants are mature enough to
reason and process language. Psychologists warn against overstimulating babies'
brains, but that has not slowed the boom in lapware--educational software for
6-month-olds. ... An item reports that high-end preschools now offer French and
theater classes. For $14,000 a year, parents get daily progress reports while
their toddlers are served salmon for lunch.

            

               
                  The
               
               
                  New Yorker , Sept. 13
            

            An
article explodes the fallacy of safe sex. Sex with a condom does not prevent
transmission of the papilloma virus, the most common sexually transmitted
disease in the United States. Papilloma causes 95 percent of cervical cancer,
and pap smears miss up to 40 percent of infections. New DNA tests may help
detect the virus, but there is no treatment. A vaccine is needed. ... A
profile of comedy icon Richard Pryor salutes his transgressive artistry. Unlike
earlier black comedians, Pryor never tried to ingratiate himself with white
audiences or cloak his rage.

            

               
                  Weekly
               
               
                  Standard , Sept. 13
            

            The
cover story argues that the complementary campaign platforms
of George W. Bush and John McCain represent a coherent governing philosophy for
the GOP. Bush wants to revive citizenship through energetic local government
and strengthened neighborhood institutions. McCain promises to fight cynicism
by reforming campaign finance and embracing a broader role for America abroad.
... An article cudgels the claim that there is a farm crisis. American
agriculture is triumphant, growing more than ever and growing it more cheaply.
Even though free-market farming kills family farms, the nation cannot afford to
prop up unprofitable agricultural businesses.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 313 &quot;What's That Smell?&quot;

            
               It was caused by
"a poisonous mix of greed, liquor, jingoism, and bad taste," writes Frank
Hannigan, the group's former executive director. What group? What
happened?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 pm. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 312)--"Ominous Anomalous":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton,
William Bennett, the president's staff, the American people, God. Which does
not belong? Why?
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Hillary is the only one who's been rooting for the Mets since 1962."-- Alex
Balk
            

            
"Chelsea Clinton; I think everybody else is in agreement that Jedediah Purdy
would make the perfect first son-in-law."-- Julie Anderson
            

            
"Edmund Morris has never claimed to have attended a barbecue with William
Bennett."-- Jennifer Miller
            

            "The
president's staff, obviously, because ... oh, wait, that's not what you meant
by 'staff,' is it? Ick, what the hell is wrong with me thinking that? I blame
Ken Starr, Bob Barr, and those scary Hutchinson clones."-- Molly Shearer
Gabel (similarly: You're all thinking it.)

            "The
American people. Everyone on the list has been, at some point, taken in by
President Clinton. The American people are the only ones who have been taken in
by Clinton and Adam Sandler."-- Bill Scheft
            

            "God.
Does not buy clothes at Banana Republic."-- Steve Schecter
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-
               Up
            

            News Quiz participants
found common ground in their loathing for professional scold William
Bennett--his perpetual disapproval, his sanctimonious speechifying, his
humorless yelping, the way the sunlight turns his hair into an auburn cascade,
the kooky little songs he sings in the shower, his tousled amorous look first
thing in the morning, the way his knowing hands, so strong yet so gentle ...
no, wait, sorry ... I was thinking of the affair I've never had with family
values huckster Gary Bauer. I get a little mixed up when I miss
breakfast--flapjacks, sausages, prayerful boo-hooing. Most important meal of
the day, says William Bennett in his Eat Well or Burn in Hell: A Child's
Recipe Book of Virtues .

            
               Weepy

               Display of Religiosity Answer
            

            All but William Bennett are on the list of people
President Clinton believes have forgiven him. Even though he doesn't deserve
it.

            Posing coquettishly for the cameras at the annual
White House Prayer Breakfast, the president said, "I have been profoundly
moved, as few people have, by the pure power of grace, unmerited forgiveness
through grace. Most of all to my wife and daughter, but to the people I work
with, to the legions of American people and to the God in whom I believe, Miss
Ellen Barkin. And I'm very grateful to all of you who have had any role in
that."

            A review of the tapes indicates that the president
did not make any overt mention of Ms. Barkin. But we know, as few people do,
through the pure power of grace, what he was thinking.

            The president was
surrounded by a phalanx of spiritual counselors including the Rev. Philip
Wogaman. "I don't for one moment think that what he's been doing has been
simply for the public relations," said the reverend with unaffected simplicity.
"Camera crews? Really? Are those things on?" he did not add.

            
               E-Commerce
Extra
            

            With various seasonal
festivities fast approaching, why not consider gifts that say, "I like you from
a perspective far to the right of most Americans." Online reactionary giving is
as convenient as today, as barbarous as the Spanish Inquisition--like
Torquemada on some kind of laser sled. A few suggestions:

            
               Family
Research Council
               
            

            Virtuous Reality
T-Shirt: "Designed for FRC's Save-Sex campaign, this clever logo on a brilliant
red t-shirt is a subtle way to impart the positive message that a virtuous life
is the reality we need to strive for. 100% pre-shrunk red cotton t-shirt."
$10-- One so seldom sees the word "subtle" and the words "brilliant red
t-shirt" in the same sentence.
            

            "Save-Sex Hold Out for
the Ultimate" T-Shirt: "Designed for FRC's Save-Sex campaign, this is a great
shirt for counselors and mentors of teens! Purple, yellow, and green logo on
white, pre-shrunk, 100% cotton t-shirt." $10-- You can "hold out for the
ultimate," but remember: Gary Bauer is only one man. And married. And denying
everything.
            

            Ten Commandment Book
Covers: "Beautifully designed, these book covers reverently portray the
importance of a higher law in the lives of our school children. Allow your
children to make a strong yet subtle statement and order a set today. Comes in
sets of 10." $3-- If just one kid comes home from school determined not to
covet his neighbor's ox, that will more than make up for his utter ignorance of
science and history.
            

            
               American Opinion
Books
               , the online store of the John Birch Society

            Poster: "Three Cheers
for National Service." $5-- Features pictures of argument-stopping Hitler,
comical tyrant Mussolini, and not actually the leader of an Axis power Bill
Clinton.
            

            Poster: "The Experts
Agree: Gun Control Works!" $5-- With cartoon bad guys Hitler, Castro, Stalin,
and Qaddafi, just like the Gap khaki ads.
            

            United Nations "Peace Is
World Control" Sweatshirt. $25-- Features a scary skull in a blue U.N.
helmet. Available only in Size XXL, showing the Birch Society's commitment to
big, fat, superstitious guys.
            

            Red, white, and blue
"Get the U.S. out of the U.N." refrigerator Magnet. $2-- First they save the
lives of innocent civilians in East Timor, then they vaccinate some infants,
and the next thing you know, they're peacefully resolving international
disputes. For the love of God, stop them!
            

            
               Eagle
Forum
               
            

            Video: Radical
Feminism : "What feminism is and why it is destructive." $21.95-- I
believe this is the one where a bunch of women get liquored up and ask for
equal pay.
            

            Video: Tribute to
Phyllis Schlafly in Song and Pictures . $5-- Oh, right, like I don't
already have this on DVD.
            

            
               Elizabeth Dole Campaign Committee
               
            

            Low Profile Official
Dole Campaign Cap. Embroidered Sanded Twill Low Profile Cap New Shallow
Profile. $14.95-- I'm no fancy campaign strategist, but I 
               think I see
where they're going wrong with the tone of this thing.
            

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Loathing William Bennett, punning on "staff."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             Harvard's $200,000 Question

            Harvard Law School has undertaken a process of
long-term strategic planning "so as to maximize achievement of its core
mission," according to Dean Robert Clark's semigrammatical but completely
businesslike manifesto in the school's alumni bulletin. As part of this
process, HLS has hired the nation's pre-eminent consulting firm--McKinsey &
Co.--to explain why law students are unhappy.

            This is not a difficult or mysterious question. It
has been explored in books such as Richard D. Kahlenberg's Broken
Contract and John Jay Osborn's The Paper Chase and One L , a
first-year-law-student memoir by future novelist Scott Turow. The complaints
don't change much. Most law students are there for lack of a better idea rather
than any special enthusiasm for the subject matter. They are heading for a
profession that is widely despised and filled with lawyers who wish they
weren't. These days, top law students can anticipate being regarded as sharks
even as other career options--investment banking, Internet startups--pass them
by in glamour, prestige, and financial reward.

            Meanwhile, they are
paying $40,000 a year to sit in large lecture halls and be hazed at random by a
distant professor with a seating chart. The curriculum mostly consists of long
appellate opinions from which they are supposed to derive legal principles on
the needle-in-a-haystack principle. These two pillars of legal education--the
so-called "Socratic method" and the "case method"--were both pioneered at
Harvard and survive there less changed than anywhere else.

            No one forces these students to go to law school or to
choose Harvard in particular. Indeed, they compete fiercely to get in. But this
just puts them in an even sourer mood when U.S. News & World
Report 's annual rankings list Harvard Law School not merely No. 2 behind
Yale but, for the past two years, tied for that honor with Stanford.

            What concerns the HLS
administration is not so much that Harvard law students are depressed, it's
that publicized studies show that they're depressed. A 1994 National
Jurist survey assessing "overall student satisfaction" ranked Harvard Law
at the bottom of the pack--154 th out of 165. HLS came in dead last
when Princeton Review asked 11,000 law students at 140 schools to
quantify their "quality of life." Now we have something the modern university
administrator can deal with. This is not psychiatry: This is management.

            There is nothing to be ashamed of in seeing a psychiatrist,
um, management consultant. Nevertheless, HLS did not announce that it was
seeking help. In fact, an alumni survey went out on the dean's own letterhead
and included a return envelope addressed to the suspiciously inconspicuous
"Research International." I received one in April. It was 14 pages long and
contained 104 questions about my experience at the school, from which I
graduated in 1997. Meanwhile, a four-member McKinsey "engagement team" set up
shop in a vacant law school office. Team McKinsey surveyed current students and
organized student focus groups on demographic themes: married students, gay
students, Latino students, Harvard Law Review members, and so on. Not
wishing to be left out, the law school faculty voted unanimously to expand the
scope of McKinsey's work to include faculty governance issues. Faculty and
staff were interviewed individually, as befits their rank.

            Actually, it makes as much sense for Harvard Law
School to hire a management consultant as it does for General Motors to do
so--though how much sense that is exactly is an open question. Systematic data
on students' concerns might be just what is needed by a law school
administration that has ignored mounds of anecdotal evidence. But turning to
McKinsey was a bit odd since the company draws heavily on HLS for recruits.
Three out of the four McKinseyites on the HLS project are HLS graduates. The
godfather of the McKinsey method (yes, another method), former managing partner
Marvin Bower, is a Harvard-trained lawyer, whose innovation was to infuse
consulting with law-firm professionalism. In light of this connection, McKinsey
is giving Harvard a steep discount. The study will only cost HLS a couple of
hundred thousand dollars.

            The connection should
also mean that McKinsey enjoys a head start in understanding the problem at
Harvard Law School. But it does raise a logical conundrum: If they had such a
lousy education, how good could they be as consultants? Conversely, if they are
as good as McKinsey's mystique implies, how bad could their professional
training have been?

            But coming up with the right answer to a question like,
"Why Are Harvard Law Students Unhappy?" should not tax the analytical skills
even of Harvard law graduates. And, furthermore, the study's conclusions are
more or less irrelevant to the study's actual purposes, both of which are
achieved by the study itself. One of these is cuddling the alumni. "NOT a
Donation Request--We Need Your Advice," read the outside of the survey envelope
sent to alumni. True enough, there was no solicitation inside. But the survey
is nevertheless a marketing device, intended in small part to gather
information as part of planning the next big fund-raising campaign and, in
large part, to create the feeling of ownership among an alienated alumni
group.

            The other purpose is cuddling the students. And here
the McKinsey study has already paid off. Students seem to feel that the mere
involvement of a management consulting firm is an indication that the
administration cares more than they previously thought. Though some faculty
members feel McKinsey's involvement shames the academy, most think it's a
healthy development for Harvard. The students and professors of Harvard Law
School would recognize this as the placebo effect--if they had gone to medical
school as their mothers really wanted.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            A-n-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-i-o-n

            When my friend Ralph Cohen announced that his wife
was pregnant, I asked what path he hoped his child would follow. "It doesn't
matter," said Ralph. "If he's happy, I'll be happy." Then, after a thoughtful
pause he added, "My personal preference is shortstop. But anything he wants to
do is fine with me." Then, after a longer pause: "As long as it's in the
infield."

            That's the difference between ordinary altruism,
where you care about other people's happiness (though perhaps not as urgently
as you care about your own), and what I'll call "imperfect altruism," where you
reserve the right to care about how others achieve their happiness.

            We all feel altruistic toward our own future
selves. That's why we make current sacrifices for future rewards. But which
kind of altruists are we? Traditional economic theory says we're the ordinary
kind--we want to be happy in the future, though perhaps not as urgently as we
want to be happy in the present. David Laibson, a professor of political
economy at Harvard, is one of a few iconoclasts who disagree. Nobody doubts
that we are imperfectly altruistic toward others. Laibson argues that we can be
imperfectly altruistic toward ourselves. And just as imperfect altruism toward
your children can cause conflict in your family, imperfect altruism toward your
future self can cause conflict in your soul.

            Here's an example:
Everyone knows that a taste for expensive pleasures can ruin your life. But a
taste for anticipating expensive pleasures can ruin your life in a far
more interesting way. If your greatest joy in life is looking forward to
tomorrow's extravagance, you've got a problem: Tomorrow is a moving target. On
Monday, you plan a lavish party for Tuesday; when Tuesday arrives, you indulge
your preference for anticipation by postponing the party till Wednesday. The
postponements continue until you die and leave a large estate.

            The tragedy here is not that you never get to spend your
money. The tragedy is that you never even get to anticipate spending
your money, because you're smart enough to foresee the whole sequence of events
even before it unfolds. If you love looking forward to parties and if you know
you love looking forward to parties, then you can never look forward to a
party. Maybe this was what Bertolt Brecht meant when he said his life had been
ruined by intelligence.

            The solution, if you can manage it, is to plan a
party that can't be postponed. Pay the caterer well in advance, and be sure to
choose one who will penalize you heavily for a last-minute cancellation.

            I suffer from a minor but
aggravating form of this affliction. I avoid reading really good books, because
it robs me of the pleasure of looking forward to them. Of course, knowing this
about myself, I never get to look forward to them either. Air travel has been
my salvation. I force myself to read good books by trapping myself with them on
airplanes. If they ever upgrade those in-flight magazines into a plausible
reading alternative, I'll be ruined.

            My friend Ray Heitmann suffers from the equal and opposite
problem. Instead of looking forward to extravagance, he likes to anticipate his
own future frugality. He particularly enjoys believing that after a certain
age, he won't spend resources to prolong his own life. But he's painfully aware
that the "certain age" keeps getting redefined so it's always safely in the
future. Therefore, he's looking for ways to limit his own future freedom of
choice.

            If Ray cared only about
his own future happiness (or, to put it another way, if Ray were perfectly
altruistic toward his future self), then you could fairly accuse him of
inconsistency: Limiting your choices can't make you happier. But Ray cares also
about how he achieves his future happiness, which makes him an imperfect
altruist, but a consistent one. If your altruism is imperfect, you can want
your future self to throw a party (or to read a book or to forgo expensive
medical care, or for that matter to save money or to quit smoking), even though
you know your future self would prefer otherwise.

            When Dorothy Parker lamented that "I hate writing, but I
love having written," she was expressing the sort of routine tradeoff between
current costs and future benefits that fits right into the traditional economic
framework. Laibson's imperfect altruists face a far subtler problem--they're
not just weighing costs and benefits, they're engaged in games of strategy
against their future selves.

            That suggests a new
answer to a question I raised in this space a few months ago, namely "" My
suggestion then was that the lock resolves a conflict between you (who believe
that a hot fudge sundae is worth the calories) and your mate, or potential mate
(who believes otherwise). According to Laibson, the conflict is not between you
and your mate, but between you-today and you-tomorrow. I don't know which
theory is right, but I do know that the door locks remain inexplicable unless
you are in conflict with someone . If all you want for your future self
is happiness and if there's no third party involved, there can be no good
reason to restrict your future options.

            Professors Per Krusell and Anthony Smith point out that
Laibson's theory makes some surprising predictions about the way people save.
Suppose you want to be frugal in the future. If you're a pessimist and don't
trust your future self to be frugal, then you might as well spend all your
money today so it doesn't fall into the hands of that future spendthrift. But
if you're an optimist and expect to practice future self-control, you'll be
inclined to save your money and pass it along into your own future good hands.
Either behavior is self-reinforcing from one year to the next. So--contrary to
what we're told by orthodox economic theory--two individuals with exactly the
same preferences and exactly the same opportunities can adopt dramatically
different attitudes toward saving.

            If you enjoy contemplating your own future
extravagance (as opposed to frugality) then Krusell/Smith reasoning suggests
something even more bizarre: The more you expect to be extravagant in the
future, the more you'll save to finance that future extravagance. But as soon
as you realize you're a "saver," you'll lose confidence in your future
extravagance and figure you might as well spend your money today. At that
point, you realize you're a "spender" and you go back to saving. Your
expectations about the future, and the behavior that stems from them, could
fluctuate wildly.

            Why would human beings have Laibson-style
preferences in the first place? Here's a wild speculation. Laibson-style
preferences lead to visible attempts at self-control, and visible attempts at
self-control are reassuring to potential mates, hence favored by natural
selection. If that speculation stands up to some reasonable tests (say a
computer simulation of resource competition among individuals with evolving
preferences), it could tie the two refrigerator-lock theories together into a
single neat package.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 327: "Haider Go Seek"

            
               Two weeks ago,
Jörg Haider led his far-right Freedom Party to a stunning second-place finish
in Austria's national elections; two weeks from now, he's coming to America. To
do what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 326)--"Scents and Sensibility":
            

            

               
                  "This is a dream for me--to find the soft parts and touch them
and even smell them. It's very exciting." Who said this about what?

                  
                     (Question courtesy of Jamie Smith and Andy
Aaron.)
                  
               
            

            "A
recently fired member of the Federal Aviation Authority's South Dakota
office."-- Beth Sherman ( Tom Crawford and Eric Akawie had
similar answers.)

            "Joe
Torre; Don Zimmer's head."-- Bill Scheft
            

            
"Billionaire or no, Martha Stewart loves mulch."-- Michael Mannella
            

            "My
grandmother, in the Waldbaum's produce department; about honeydew melons, 'good
for tomorrow.' "-- Larry Amoros
            

            "All
my answers have Peter Lorre accents."-- Ellen Macleay
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            With so much news and so little News Quiz, many
stories get neglected. However, it seemed important to provide the full text of
Pat Buchanan's speech on bolting the Republican Party. Unfortunately, for
reasons of space, I had to condense his remarks, adding nothing, just making a
few cuts and altering the punctuation to bring it into line with standard
usage. Buchanan speaks:

            "The junk yards of history are strewn with
wreckage. Dust!

            "Our own Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton, whose
desecration of the temples of our civilization and personal misconduct are good
and generous, first at the scene of natural disasters: Sir, your Turtle is in
jeopardy.

            "To those who prattle I'm not running: I'm running.
All of us must learn our English language. We can get pot doing its magic
again. We need a timeout.

            "This land is our land.
Pick up the whip. Insult a free people. Friends, the good manners are gone.
Swagger! Homage to the great god mammon! This is our cause. And so it is, that
in the name of the Founding Fathers we go forward to rescue our Lady America,
and will not quit this fight as long as there is breath within us."

            
               Huge, Old, and Hairy
Answer
            

            Dutch paleontologist Dick Mol said it about a
nearly intact woolly mammoth recovered from the Siberian permafrost last
week.

            A team of scientists was directed to the site by
local residents who found a tusk sticking up from the ground, reports the
Los Angeles Times wire service. The team dug up the head, which had
partially thawed and decayed, then halted digging for fear of destroying their
find. Using ground-penetrating radar to locate the carcass, they broke up the
frozen soil with jackhammers. A helicopter lifted the 22-ton block of frozen
dirt and flew it 150 miles to Khatanga, Russia.

            Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute in St.
Petersburg denies that the mammoth can be cloned, because during its
"preservation in permafrost, dehydration destroyed the chains of DNA. Now we
only have very small parts of the DNA chains."

            The mammoth, dubbed
Zharkov after the local man who discovered its tusk, was a 9-foot-tall adult
male, about 47 years old at the time of death; it would have looked like a
hairy elephant to the modern eye, much like ... oh, make up your own damn
joke.

            
               A. M. Extra
            

            CBS's new Early
Show debuts next week, taking on NBC's Today and ABC's Good
Morning America in the battle for moral suprema--sorry, for bigger profits
in morning television, much as the Founding Fathers anticipated when they
devised the three-network system. Competition, as we know, stimulates
creativity, so these three shows no doubt offer diverse pleasures. Which of
these shows possesses the following qualities?

            1. Studio with view of New York streets.

            2. Determinedly shallow news coverage.

            3. Near-psychotic obsession with the weather.

            4. Male and female co-anchors with eerie
resemblance to flight attendants.

            5. Inane celebrity guests promoting current
projects, quack nostrums.

            6. Tedious cooking segments include recipes for
human flesh.

            7. Guests strip to waist and fight with bowie
knives.

            8. Audience participation segment: "Which Clam Is
Tainted?"

            9. Subliminal messages urge audience to pelt Tony
Randall with bottles.

            10. Formerly hosted by a
monkey.

            
               Answers
            

            1 to 4 are true of all three programs.

            5 and 6 are half-truths, of which the true portion
applies to all three programs.

            7 to 9 are segment ideas none of the shows will
even consider, or even bother to return my calls to discuss. Uptight
bastards.

            10 is true only of
Today , but it would be a big improvement on nearly any show or
congressional committee.

            
               It Pays To Increase
Your Word Power Extra
            

            "We recognize the
importance of making the narrow-band end of the funnel as robust as possible
explicitly for the purpose of converting those users to broadband
eventually."-- George Bell , CEO, Excite@Home, explains why he's spending
a billion dollars to buy a greeting-card company, marketing prepackaged
sentiments for those unable to express themselves, until they can watch
television on their computers. Or something.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            As requested by Greg Diamond, the tally is

            Sex Jokes: 31

            Death Jokes: 7

            Conclusion: News Quiz--it's life-affirming. (In a
furtive sort of way.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            America in the Doghouse

            A
worldwide chorus of outrage greeted the U.S. Senate's refusal to ratify the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but the Daily Telegraph of London was
a rare dissenter. In a rather limp editorial Friday, it described Sen. Richard Lugar, R-
Ind., an opponent of the CTBT, as "a scholarly, moderate, highly respected
legislator" whose views should be taken seriously. "The instruments for the
control of the evil of nuclear proliferation must be effective," it said. "It
is such questions that the Senate vote has rightly raised." The
Telegraph also ran an article by Richard Perle, a former U.S. assistant
secretary of defense, attacking British, French, and German leaders for trying
to influence the Senate vote through an article in the New York Times .
"Why didn't the Senate congratulate its friends [Blair, Chirac, and Schröder]
on their wise and timely counsel?" he asked. "I suspect that one reason is that
the Senators have actually read the treaty and understand how deeply flawed it
is, how unlikely it is to stop nuclear proliferation or even nuclear testing,
and how it has the potential to leave the United States with an unsafe,
unreliable nuclear deterrent. ... In domestic affairs, no-one would seriously
propose that the police and criminals come together and sign agreements under
which they accept the same set of restraints on their freedom of action."

            
British papers were otherwise unanimous in their condemnation of the Senate. In
the liberal Guardian , foreign affairs columnist Martin Woollacott
said Republican senators "sent out a dismal message--of
American selfishness, American foolishness, and American readiness to put her
own safety first, whatever the consequences for the rest of us." A Times of London
editorial said the vote was "a serious blow to America's political and moral
authority" and that the "Senate Republicans, by exploiting the opportunity to
inflict a very public defeat on a lame-duck President, have done their country,
and their allies, a grave disservice."

            The
Independent
ran an article jointly authored by Professor Harald Muller,
director of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and William
Walker, professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews,
Scotland, who said the vote was "deplorable" and reflected a situation in which
"American policy is increasingly being shaped by people with isolationist, or,
even worse, a supremacist agenda. They want to expand military programs, weaken
international institutions and run the world by flaunting power." An op-ed
piece in the Financial
Times said the vote underlined "the extent to which international
considerations have been pushed to the fringes of American politics. The broad
consensus about US responsibilities in the world has fractured."

            In
Paris, Le Monde 's
main front-page headline Friday was "America Reopens the Nuclear Arms Race,"
and the paper said in an editorial that "in the essential area of nuclear
nonproliferation, the United States has set the worst possible example." It
concluded, "The world's greatest power will from now on be less credible on the
international scene." Le
Figaro , in a signed editorial by Pierre Rousselin, used exactly the
same phrase as Le Monde when it called the vote "an unprecedented
snub"--"un camouflet sans précédent "--to a president of the United
States. Bill Clinton's credibility is now damaged, perhaps irredeemably, as he
embarks on his last year at the White House. "French people will easily
remember the United States' virulent campaign against our nuclear tests in the
Pacific," Rousselin wrote. "At that time, in 1996, Bill Clinton defended the
CTBT to get himself re-elected. Today, Washington has no lessons to give
anybody." In a report from Washington, Le Figaro told George W. Bush
that he is now the candidate of a "blind, reactionary and inward-looking
party." The Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung of Germany said the vote was a rejection of security
through international cooperation. "That, after the Senate's decision, is what
the Europeans should be thinking about most."

            The
Washington correspondent of La Repubblica of Rome put some of the blame on Clinton for
not resigning over the Monica Lewinsky crisis. "This terrible defeat, more so
for all of us than for the image of America, was exactly what was feared might
happen in those days of 1998 when Clinton was forced to admit in public to his
own pathetic errors as a man and to his own unforgivable lies as a president,
and therefore had to undergo the indignity of a public trial over the Monica
affair. ... The price for his survival in office has been paid now and been
paid by the rest of the world."

            In one
of the two nuclear powers on the subcontinent, the Times of India said in
an editorial that it is now "absolutely certain" that neither Russia
nor China will ratify the CTBT. It said Clinton's credibility abroad has
suffered a very serious setback, not only because of the Senate decision but
also because of "the Pakistani military ignoring US advice on restoring the
democratic process in their country."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 303: &quot;Decline and Fall&quot;

            
               
                  "That was a
miserable year, when I watched a great man, a man I love more than life--you
know, one of the really fundamentally solid, decent people--go from 92 to 38 in
a very quick period of time." Who watched whom go from 92 to 38
what?
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question (No.
302)--"It's Back":
            

            

               
                  
                     
                        
                           
                              
                                 
                                    "It's back, and we
used it this summer. But they don't want us to use it too much. It's not going
to be a big deal." Who said this about
what?
                                 
                              
                           
                        
                     
                  
               
            

            
"Doctors at Kaiser Permanente talking about the hospital's heart-lung
machine."-- Jon Greenberg
            

            "The
Indonesian military on ethnic cleansing."-- Kenton A. Hoover
            

            "The
president; speaking about use of the Delta Force to combat oddball religious
groups and political dissenters who have it coming."-- Chris Thomas
            

            "The
promotion director of Sony's music division; about Jennifer Lopez's
butt."--Francis Heaney
            

            "It
was the caption for last Tuesday's Family Circus , where Dolly is showing
Jeffy the family crack pipe."-- Noah Meyerson
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            The most popular response (the one all the cool
kids are writing) plays with the "malathion" (yeah, right) the city is spraying
throughout New York to kill "mosquitoes" (wink, wink) that transmit
"encephalitis" (go on: pull the other one). It makes one nostalgic for the fear
of LSD in the water, fluoride in the water, and saltpeter in the cafeteria
food, presumably to create a docile population of human slaves with excellent
teeth who keep hallucinating that they're uninterested in sex.

            There is a difference between canny skepticism and
dumbbell skepticism. The latter is unearned and knee-jerk: "They're all a bunch
of crooks." It's a form of self-aggrandizement whose effect is to make the
skeptic feel knowing. The former is informed and terrifying: "The president was
willing to let hundreds of thousands of people get slaughtered in Rwanda." Its
effect is to make the skeptic want to throw himself out of a
10 th -floor window.

            Of course, there really
is fluoride in the water, the government really did test hallucinogens on
unknowing human subjects, and sexual vitality can be diminished by watching
television. At least in prime time.

            
               Help

               Me off the Field and Into the Answer
            

            New York Jets coach Bill Parcells said this about
the use of instant replay to challenge an official's call, a rule change
instituted for the new National Football League season that began Sunday.

            The Jets, many fans' preseason pick to make it to
the Super Bowl, lost their season opener and the services of four starters
including quarterback Vinny Testaverde, out for the season with a ruptured
Achilles' tendon.

            This concludes the News
Quiz coverage of the 1999 NFL season. Next up: NASCAR reaches out to gays,
Jews, and Patricia Duff.

            
               Andrew

               Staples' Yet More News Quizzes Extra
            

            Adding reference to Australia (as suggested by the
folks at Excite) leads to the Brisbane Airport's monthly
quiz.

            Sample: What is the second busiest domestic air
route in Australia currently?

            (Probably not the one
into Dili. Because that wouldn't be domestic. Right?-- Ed .)

            
               Sick

               Fish Follow-Up
            

            "We trout fisherman consider this an extremely
threatening situation that you make light of, especially since it is the
Colorado DFG that is largely responsible for the proliferation of the disease.
A couple of years ago, the Colorado DFG decided to go ahead and stock thousands
of trout that it knew had been exposed to the disease; wouldn't you know it,
the disease soon showed up in wild trout in Colorado and other states. Now
they're gonna spend $80 million to study it. Go figure."-- Steve
Hellerman
            

            "Oh, fine, it's OK to slander the fish in the name
of a quick laugh, but there is a whirling disease in trout. The poor little
guys just swim around and around in a circle until they die. And it's all our
fault for genetically engineering them and raising them by the thousands in
hatcheries."-- Kate Wing
            

            (My apologies to any
afflicted fish I may have offended, and to those who love to kill
them.-- Ed .)

            

               Clarification
            

            George W. Bush will
disclose all campaign contributions on his Web site; he will not let major
contributors post saucy photographs of themselves on a page called the
"Bare-Ass Eagle Club."

            
               Common

               Denominator
            

            Skepticism about just what Rudolph Giuliani is
spraying for, praying for, howling at the moon and baying for. (Look for
News Quiz Music , a hot new CD in stores this Christmas, if the man
doesn't stop us.)

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Japanese Cultural Fallout

            

               Asahi
Shimbun blames last week's uranium accident in Tokaimura on misguided
Japanese cultural values. "In the United States, technical association codes of
ethics put the greatest emphasis on protecting public safety, health and
welfare. Loyalty to employers is fourth on the list. Quite probably the
Tokaimura accident could have been avoided if just one person among those
technicians, company executives and bureaucrats had applied such a philosophy."
Despite admissions that the plant had flouted government-approved guidelines
for the handling of uranium and comments reported in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post from Western scientists that
"safety practices in Japan are 'a bit lax,' " the Japanese government restated
its commitment to commercial generation of nuclear power Tuesday.

            The
seizure last week of the Myanmar (Burma) Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, by
pro-democracy protestors "achieved precious little to advance the cause of the
hobbled pro-democracy movement in that benighted country," the Straits Times of
Singapore said in an editorial. The gunmen demanded that the Myanmar military
regime release its political prisoners and start a dialogue with dissident
leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and that the parliament elected in 1990 be allowed to
convene. Although the demands were not met, the 89 hostages taken at the
embassy were released unharmed, and the gunmen were allowed to escape.
"Myanmar, arguably one of the world's harshest military regimes, is bound to
crack down even harder on political dissidents after what happened," the paper
argued, adding that Burmese dissidents could now lose their safe haven in
Thailand since the sympathetic Thai government cannot be seen to support
terrorist groups. The editorial encouraged Asian governments to press Myanmar
to break its stalemate. It concluded, "It is far better that the military
regime drops its state of siege and deal with Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, who espouses
non-violent principles, than let the situation fester."

            The
Sydney Morning
Herald reported Tuesday that the head of the peacekeeping forces in
East Timor had called on pro-independence guerrillas to give up their weapons.
An editorial in Wednesday's SMH said, "In the overall
interests of peace and stability, Interfet [the international force in East
Timor] must have a monopoly of force for the foreseeable future." Admitting
that it will be difficult to persuade groups such as Falintil to disarm while
Indonesian troops remain, the paper said, "When the last Indonesian soldier has
left East Timor, the rationale for the guerillas remaining a fighting force
will be gone as well. It is then that Falintil should hand over its
weapons."

            At the
annual Conservative Party conference in Britain, former Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher made what the conservative Times called a "jingoistic" speech blaming all
Britain's problems in the last 60 years on continental Europe."[I]n my lifetime
all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come
from the English-speaking nations of the world that have kept law-abiding
liberty alive for the future," Thatcher said. A party spokesman told the
Times the flap was a "storm in a teacup ... in her lifetime World War
Two and the Soviet Union have been the major threats to Britain." An op-ed in
the same paper said that whereas Thatcher's legacy has proved "positive" for
the Labor Party, for the Tories it has been "little short of catastrophe." Once
the luster fades from the current Labor government, the column said, the
Conservatives "had better be standing in the centre ground. For if, when people
turn around to look afresh at this strange anachronism called the Conservative
Party, they find it where Labour wants it to be--clinging to Thatcher's skirts
on the far Right--they will simply turn straight back to Labour."

            Lino
Oviedo, who fled to Argentina in March after he was accused of involvement in
the assassination of Paraguay's vice president, was exiled to a remote
Patagonian island last week for violating the terms of his asylum, reports the
Buenos Aires
Herald . Oviedo, who had agreed not to make political pronouncements,
broke his pledge by declaring that he should be running Paraguay. Now from
Tierra del Fuego he's complaining that the harsh climate might endanger his
recent hair transplant. A Herald editorial said, "The
argument that his hair implant needs more time to take root was not only
legally flimsy but also highly unbecoming for his rugged martial profession and
his tough guy image." More berugged than rugged, perhaps.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            
<P>Is the &quot;Sensation&quot; Art Worth the Fuss?</P>

            
               
                  Click
here to view the entire "Sensation" show
online.
               
            

            Hey, are you the same Deborah Solomon I thought you
were? The author of sensitive biographies of Jackson Pollock and Joseph
Cornell? And you say Sarah Lucas is major ?

            Margaret Thatcher, whom I quote with trepidation
following your comments on the unappeased longings of conservatives, once
observed that there was no female equivalent of the (masculine) word "puerile."
"Puerile" is surely the only word for Lucas. Her gendered mattress is the kind
of garbage an immature college student would turn out the night before an exam
in a desperate bid to seem iconoclastic and "relevant." It is a squalid
irrelevance even in the context of "Sensation," but "major" would put her in
bed with the leading artists of our time, e.g. Lucian Freud--now, he
knows what to do with a mattress! And the idea that an oblique, hardly probable
cross-reference to Rauschenberg's quilts helps Lucas on the path to greatness
is risible (the jury is still out on Rauschenberg, anyway). More likely with an
artist of Lucas' intellect and attention span is that her work is a mock homage
to the cast mattresses of Rachel Whiteread--as her chum Tracy Emin's resin-cast
urinals, exhibited in New York earlier this year, are a mock homage to
Whiteread, via Duchamp.

            In vaunting two of the nastiest and silliest
exhibits in "Sensation" (you have a soft spot for Mat Collishaw's bullet hole
because it reminds you of some other orifice, you say), you expose a disturbing
infatuation with literalness, that precious "real life" you tell me you want in
art. It is this quality--or lack of quality--of simply transplanting the real
and making it into "shocking" art, which is in my opinion the bane of
contemporary art today, nowhere more painfully than at the Brooklyn Museum. By
this stage in art history we can surely draw a line under appropriation. Some
genuine artists earlier in the century did inspired things with the found
object and unleashed extraordinary images, but the spurious alchemy of lifting
things unmediated from the common culture and plonking them down in the art
gallery is truly exhausted now that it has become the academic norm. It rests
on a contradiction: It demystifies skill and imagination, and yet relies on
artists having privileged elective powers.

            Your cravings for "real
life" and youthful exuberance lead you to exactly the same folly as the popular
press: You focus on the sensationalist at the expense of the subtle and
reflective. Vastly more provocative and unsettling, in my opinion, than the
ludicrous Lucas, is Jane Simpson's Sacred : a vanity chest that is
colored like skin (or is it smudged lipstick?) and oozes dry ice and is almost
anthropomorphic in its voluptuous, erogenous curves. It doesn't jump at one's
throat with an obvious, sexual-political meaning, but evokes genuine, enriching
ambiguity. It is an old-fashioned sculpture in respect of its interplay of
forms, of the way all the elements feel like they have been thought through in
relation to the pervasive mood of the finished work. These elements--surface,
shape, color, associations--add up to something substantial, a variety of
sensations rather than merely "a" sensation. This is what I think art should
do. Anyone else who thinks the same way, come join me in the closet.

            David

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Turkey Shakes and Breaks

            
Newspapers everywhere led on Tuesday's ruinous Turkish earthquake, where the
latest tallies show more than 6,300 dead and at least 20,000 injured. Most
reports noted that although strict building codes have been in effect in
Istanbul since the 1940s, the regulations are often ignored. The Times of London said
that "shoddy construction work, cheap building materials and a reckless
disregard for safety," almost certainly caused so many buildings to crumble.
The Times noted that "Turkey has long been ... a land of ruins," but
recommended that just as the Turkish government uses the latest techniques to
protect monuments such as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul from seismic turbulence,
so should it "apply the same rigorous standards to its more mundane buildings
for it is upon them and their inhabitants that its future depends."

            Many
papers quoted the headline from Turkey's best-selling newspaper
Hurriyet : "Murderers!" El Mundo of Spain said: "Adjacent to buildings that are
completely destroyed there are others that are totally undamaged. How can this
be? Yesterday, the Turkish authorities criticized the poor quality of many of
the buildings that have gone up in the last few years in the area affected by
the earthquake, a region that has experienced heavy industrial development.
This undoubtedly amounts to criminal irresponsibility. Even more so,
considering that they knew they were building on an active fault line that has
caused dozens of devastating earthquakes in recent decades. But the builders
couldn't have put up such fragile buildings if the authorities had not
permitted it." An editorial in the liberal French daily Libération Thursday
agreed, pointing out that the "the outcome in seismic catastrophes has less to
do with poverty than with negligence."

            
Singapore's citizens won't be voting for a new president Aug. 28, because the
official screening committee approved only one of the three applicants for the
position. S.R. Nathan, 75, was the only candidate to meet their eligibility
requirements of senior government or business experience and personal
integrity. According to the Straits Times of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, the
incumbent and the country's first elected president (prior to 1993 the
president was chosen by parliament), wanted to seek re-election, but the
Cabinet declined to support him for a second term because it felt "there was a
strong likelihood that the President's health would affect the discharge of his
official duties in the next few years." The International Herald Tribune maintains that the selection was a deliberate effort to ensure
that Singapore's head of state would come from one of its non-Chinese
minorities. Nathan is of Indian descent, while the other two applicants, like
Ong, are from the country's Chinese majority, which accounts for 77 percent of
the population. The IHT said, "With Singapore's giant neighbor to the
south, Indonesia, riven by ethnic conflict, and its northern neighbor,
Malaysia, about to hold elections in which the political supremacy of the Malay
majority will again be an underlying issue, the Singapore government wants to
re-emphasize its commitment to racial equality as the bedrock of political
stability and economic growth."

            One of
Indonesia's ethnic hot spots was the subject of an editorial in the Straits
Times Wednesday. The paper said that the north Sumatran province of Aceh
"long a festering sore on the Indonesian body politic, is now an open wound."
More than 250 people have been killed and around 140,000 displaced from their
homes since May, when the Indonesian military stepped up its campaign against
the Free Aceh Movement. According to the ST , "Acehnese separatism is
fuelled by popular anger against Jakarta for taking more than it returns to the
resource-rich province, and by Acehnese insistence that they are an Islamic
enclave distinct from the Javanese who dominate the central government."
Separatists intensified their campaign in January when the Indonesian president
announced that there would be a referendum on autonomy or independence in East
Timor, but the Straits Times observed, "Amputation is out because Aceh
is unquestionably a part of Indonesia, unlike the former Portuguese colony East
Timor it invaded and then annexed in 1976." The editorial concluded that the
"carnage will stop only when reconciliation begins," but as a story in
Thursday's Sydney Morning Herald noted, the fighting is currently intensifying, with the head of
the Indonesian armed forces threatening to order a state of emergency in the
province.

            The
South China Morning
Post of Hong Kong fretted about the situation in Kosovo, where the
Serbian population has shrunk from 200,000 to 50,000 as a result of
post-conflict Albanian persecution. An editorial said, "Nato thought it was fighting for a
multi-ethnic province. Instead, it seems about to inherit a long-term 100 per
cent Albanian protectorate, ethnically cleansed by the victims of ethnic
cleansing, who can be as cruel as their former tormentors when given a chance."
The SCMP concluded, "Kosovars are better off than under Serb control,
but there is no peaceful solution in sight."

            The
Guardian
of London reported Wednesday that heavy metal rockers Led Zeppelin are the most
bootlegged musical artists in Britain. The British Phonographic Industry's
anti-piracy unit has 384 titles by the group in its collection, compared with
320 by the Beatles, 317 by the Rolling Stones, and 301 by Bob Dylan (the
subject of "Browser" column on "the bootleg fallacy"). Tenth on the BPI's list,
with 170, is Jimi Hendrix--who hasn't done many live concerts since 1970.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Coke and Porn</SPAN></SPAN>

             

            

               
                  Economist , Aug. 14
            

            The
cover story assails the widening health gap between
rich and poor countries. Of kids who die before age 5, 98 percent live in the
developing world. Alliances between nongovernmental organizations and drug
companies could catalyze research into the diseases that plague poor nations.
... An article endorses an antitrust crackdown on Coca-Cola.
Italy's competition authority has concluded that Coke abused its dominant
market position by preventing retailers from selling Pepsi. ... A
profile of porn mogul Steven Hirsch says that his
Vivid Video dominates Silicone Valley because he recreated the studio system
that used to govern Hollywood. Vivid cornered the market on porn queens by
signing them to package contracts, promoting them heavily, and sending them on
incredibly lucrative strip-club tours.

            
               
                  New
Republic , Aug. 30
            

            A
piece blasts environmentalists for ginning up controversy
over "endocrine disrupters," man-made chemicals that allegedly disrupt human
reproduction even in trace amounts. The research into endocrine disrupters has
been wildly distorted, and there is no compelling evidence of the most
spectacular claim: that the pollutants have lowered sperm counts. This hasn't
stopped greens from using endocrine disrupters to raise money and grab
attention. ... The cover story on the creepy marriage of Slobodan Milosevic says the
Yugoslav chief is largely ruled by his wife Mira Markovic, a fervent Communist.
Both believe that they alone stand against American world domination.
... An article describes DigiPen Institute of Technology, a Seattle
college sponsored by Nintendo where students learn nothing but video-game
programming. The best students drop out and take high-paying jobs with game
manufacturers.

            
               
                  New York Times
Magazine , Aug. 15
            

            The
cover story asks: "Who Lost Russia?" Some blame the Clinton administration's
blind support of Boris Yeltsin and International Monetary Fund loans or
America's insistence on economic "shock therapy" for Russia's deterioration. In
fact, Russia was never America's to lose: It has declined because of the
corrosive legacy of communism on civil society. ... An article attacks
the insular Washington establishment. Bob Woodward's latest book typifies the
"lie-free, alcohol-free, womanizing-free" standards of the establishment. The
moralistic reaction of the press to Clinton's foibles demonstrates Washington's
elitist insularity.

            

               
                  Newsweek
                
               and Time , Aug. 16
            

            
               The Blair Witch
Project takes both covers; Time 's package is meatier. Both

                  Time
                and 
                  Newsweek
                concur that the horror vérité flick's
success will prompt Hollywood to imitate Blair Witch 's guerilla
marketing tactics: They include an amazing Internet site, fake "missing"
posters for the film's actors, and leaked previews. Time says the
$35,000 movie will have the highest profit margin in film history. Both mags
rehash now-familiar Blair Witch trivia: The filmmakers sent the actors
into the woods for eight days with cameras and only a thin plotline for
direction, then spooked their stars with nighttime raids. Time
reports that some fans refuse to believe that the story is
fictional.

            
               Time wonders how the United States will handle "hard to place"
recipients when the five-year welfare limit comes up in 2001. Persistent
welfare cases don't get jobs because of mental illness, substance abuse,
transportation obstacles, child-care difficulties, and simple lack of interest.
Liberals think more job training could help. Conservatives concede that some
safety net may be necessary.

            
               Newsweek notes that while the Dalai Lama promotes religious understanding
and meditation, he opposes abortion, contraception, and homosexual acts.
... An essay on the Atlanta shooter argues that he epitomizes the
malaise of modern men disassociated from the bonds of fraternity and patriarchy
that shaped their fathers' lives.

            
               
                  U.S. News &
World Report
               
               , Aug. 16-23
            

            A
double issue examines life in 1000 A.D. The Islamic and Chinese empires were
world powers, but the conversion of the Magyars, Russians, and Vikings to
Christianity was setting the stage for Europe's ascent. A piece hints that China lost the massive technological
advantage it held in 1000 because its mandarin bureaucrats imposed too many
regulations. An article says that if you were alive in 1000, you probably
would have been a miserable peasant. ... A story says that there is still virtually no evidence linking
the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant bombed by the United States last year to
chemical weapons production or terrorist Osama Bin Laden. Officials in charge
of the bombing never consulted the experts who could have told them that the
plant was legit.

            
               
                  The New
Yorker
               
               , Aug. 16
            

            An
article reprises the Microsoft antitrust trial. The software giant belatedly
realized the importance of courting politicians and the press, but the
Microsoft charm offensive is too late: The company has already been tarred as a
bully in the court of public opinion. Bill Gates feels so embattled that he
can't contain his anger or make rational choices about how to settle
Microsoft's no-win predicament. ... A piece speculates about the IPO
potential of online pornographers. The sponsor of pussy.com is preparing to go
public. Despite huge profits, many e-pornographers have a hard time finding
bankers willing to represent them. ... A profile of Oscar Goodman
suggests that Las Vegas elected the mayor it deserves. The former mob-lawyer is
crowd-pleasing, casino-friendly, and proud of his colorful past, just like the
city he serves. ... An item condemns the indictment of Linda Tripp as
spiteful and politically motivated.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard
               
               , Aug. 16
            

            The
cover
story joins the chorus against the Iowa straw poll and attacks the Iowa
caucus, too. The straw poll is bogus because the candidates pay their
supporters' participation fees and the horserace-hungry media overblows its
significance. The state is a poor bellwether, because it is disproportionately
old, white, rural, and conservative. ... An article details
the desperation among the second-string candidates. Lamar Alexander sent out a
press release to announce that Joe Klein was writing an item about his
campaign. Steve Forbes allegedly attempted to hire temps to vote for him and is
offering straw-poll supporters free balloon rides and face-painting for their
kids.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Cronkite in a Speedo</SPAN>

            

               
                  New
                
               
                  Republic, Oct. 26
            

            The
cover story welcomes the decline of rational-choice
political science. Rational-choicers, who have dominated the field for two
decades, sought to explain political behavior through mathematical modeling.
The theoretical fad permanently handicapped political science by encouraging
academics to disengage themselves from the practice of politics. Two professors
have now proved that rational choice is based on dubious assumptions about
political actors' motives. ... An article explores the workplace paranoia industry. Consultants
profit from advising employers on how to prevent office rampages and training
managers to spot unhinged workers, but office homicides are declining, and all
the fretting may just exacerbate fear.

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Oct. 17
            

            The
cover editorial argues that free trade benefits the
environment by increasing economic growth and giving poorer countries the
resources to clean up. The related cover story applauds the World Trade Organization's
efforts to find common ground with environmentalists. The WTO should consider
the environment but not use trade sanctions to enforce environmental
agreements. ... An article questions the success of women's liberation. A
worldwide poll found that while 93 percent of women feel they are in a better
position than their grandmother was, a majority of respondents say that they
are no happier than granny was.

            

               
                  Brill's
                
               
                  Content , November 1999
            

            The
cover story identifies the 25 people who most influence what
we read, watch, wear, and think. Predictable picks include the managing editor
of Time , Rush Limbaugh, and Tim Russert. Surprising choices include the
creator of Gap ads, the managing editor of Yahoo!, and Martha Stewart.
... An article details how the New York Times muffed its coverage
of the Chinese spy "scandal." The paper got the facts wrong, played down
dissenting views, and inferred the worst from the leaks it received. The
Times acknowledged too late that it did not know how much information
was stolen or whether it had any impact on China's nuclear program. ...
An item reports that an unidentified major cable network is negotiating to air
Bare Essentials News --a nightly national news program featuring anchors
in bathing suits.

            

               
                  New
               
               
                  York Times Magazine , Oct. 10
            

            The
cover story, adapted from Michael Lewis' forthcoming The New New Thing ,
depicts Jim Clark as the personification of Silicon Valley's spirit of
relentless reinvention. In less than 20 years, Clark founded Silicon Graphics,
Netscape, and Healtheon. His latest company aims to put medical records online
and to allow Web-based insurance payments. ... An article hopes that the
confrontational Cardinal John O'Connor will be replaced by a more conciliatory
leader. The archbishop of New York, traditionally the most powerful American
Catholic, is expected to step down soon. His successor should be a peacemaker
who can bridge the ethnic differences that increasingly divide the American
church.

            

               
                  Talk
               
               , November 1999
            

            A
profile of Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals that he contemplates running for
California governor--and that he loves to paint pottery. The Terminator
decorates his ceramics with butterflies, flowers, and hearts. ... An
article explains that Al Gore enlisted for the Vietnam War out of fealty to his
father and distaste for draft dodgers: Gore deplored "the inequity of the rich
not having to serve." Gore is not asked what he thinks of President Clinton's
draft ducking. ... Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
David Kessler describes how an ex-R.J. Reynolds employee--"Deep Cough"--leaked
the feds information about the tobacco company's manipulation of nicotine
levels. FDA investigators also found a Philip Morris scientist who was silenced
and fired after his research demonstrated nicotine's addictiveness.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Oct. 11
            

            The
cover story marvels at the "Wild Bunch" of egotistical
celebrities (including Warren Beatty and Donald Trump) who are pondering
third-party runs for the presidency. The quasi-candidacy of Beatty proves that
"Monica Madness" collapsed the distinction "between the serious and the
circus." Unsurprising conclusion: The appeal of the provocateurs stems from
disaffection with two-party politics. ... A profile of Gov. Jesse Ventura argues that the former
"sideshow freak" of the "political carnival" has become the ringmaster. Pat
Buchanan is courting his support, and the Donald consults with him regularly.
... A piece reports on a new treat for kids: yogurt in a tube.
"Go-Gurt" rang up $37 million in sales during its first year of limited
distribution. Expect a torrent of foodstuff in tubes.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , Oct. 11
            

            The
cover story is ambivalent about laser eye surgery. This year
500,000 Americans are expected to spend about $2,500 per eye to have their
corneas sliced open and reshaped. The 15-minute surgery immediately improves
the vision of most patients, but 10 percent-to-15 percent have to undergo a
second procedure, and 1 percent-to-5 percent suffer permanent impairments such
as double vision. ... A disgruntled laser-surgery patient relates how
she must apply artificial tears every 15 minutes or have her tear ducts
surgically plugged--and she still can't see her kids clearly. ... A
profile applauds California Gov. Gray Davis for a fearless first year. The
supposedly timid Davis pushed through bold HMO reform, an aggressive
assault-weapon ban, mandatory high-school exit exams, and peer review for
teachers.

            
               
                  U.S.
&
                
               
                  News & World Report , Oct. 11
            

            
Critically ill patients are being misled into acting as guinea pigs for
experimental treatments, frets the cover story . Pharmaceutical companies pay physicians to test
new drugs, and research institutes pressure them to recruit human subjects.
Researchers sometimes prey on patient desperation and fail to obtain informed
consent. In one drug trial, a 2-year-old died even though traditional
chemotherapy could almost certainly have cured her cancer. ... An
article ridicules the recent spate of books on human
behavior. Books on the cultural and biological roots of crying, love, disgust,
laughter, and gossip fuel readers' self-obsession.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  New Yorker , Oct. 11
            

            An
article hypes women's interest Web site iVillage for its savvy marriage of
content and e-commerce. The founders recruited advertisers by offering
"integrated sponsorships"--that is, advertisers contributing content. By
offering free e-mail, daily horoscopes, and online discussions with sex
coaches, the site has recruited 2.1 million members. All those eyeballs have
given unprofitable iVillage a stock valuation of nearly $2 billion.

            
               
                  
Business
                
               
                  Week , Oct. 11
            

            A
profile of India's MTV generation finds that young middle-class Indians are
zealous entrepreneurs who idolize Bill Gates. High-paying technology work has
displaced the civil service as the most desirable career. ... A
sympathetic profile of Bill Bradley claims that the candidate's biggest asset
is his appeal to "NBA Dads," independent baby boomers unattached to either
party.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  Nation , Oct. 18
            

            The
cover story predicts that spending on federal campaigns in
2000 could reach $3.5 billion, while issue advocacy ads will inundate the
airwaves. Republicans are right that campaign finance reform is "class
warfare": It would wrest from the hands of the moneyed elite the
disproportionate political power it now wields.

            

               
                  Weekly
                
               
                  Standard , Oct. 11
            

            A
piece accuses avant-garde artists of "cultural blackmail."
They demand subsidies and threaten to brand the middle-class with philistinism
if it resists. The "Sensation" exhibit is "just the usual ... celebration of
the blasphemous, the criminal and the decadent." (Click for

                  Slate
               's "Dialogue" on the exhibit.) ... An article assesses George W. Bush's chances of clinching the
general election by winning California. The Spanish-speaking W. appeals to
Hispanics and has tons of money for advertising. A network of high-tech
supporters is pumping Silicon Valley for donations, while even Hollywood
honchos are buddying up with Bush.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Jabbering From the John

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Your recent column
about emboldens me to ask perhaps a rude question. Is it bad manners for a
guest to excuse himself from the dinner table, go to the small bathroom off the
dining room, and attempt to participate in the conversation? Our friend Jacob
does just that. Do you think he should wander upstairs, and if not, at least be
silent?
            

            

               --Just Wondering
            

            Dear Just,

            Prudie, too, hates to
miss a minute of good dinner party talk, but your friend Jacob goes too far.
Hollering from the loo is not acceptable. When you issue the next invitation,
tell him you'd like it if he would take a timeout from the badinage when
he needs to leave the table. Tell him it's a little idiosyncrasy of yours that
you think people conversing at the table should ... be at the table.

            
--Prudie, conversationally

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               My matron of honor is unexpectedly moving away.
She is a good friend, and I will be sorry to see her leave. Now I need to ask
another person to be in the wedding, which is two months away. The person I
want to ask is actually my best friend, and she lives in another state. She
already knows that I had asked someone else to stand up for me, so my question
is: How do I now ask her to be my matron of honor? She is really the person I
wanted anyway--she just lives far away.
            

            
               Help!
            

            

               --A.G.
            

            Dear A.,

            There are a few loose ends to your problem. First,
is the reigning matron of honor moving to Bangladesh? People travel to weddings
all the time. Your best friend/replacement matron of honor, herself, lives out
of state. It is not immediately obvious why she wouldn't have been asked in the
first place ... being your best friend.

            If, however, traveling
back for the festivities is for some reason impossible for the current M. of
H., Prudie suggests you garland the truth with sentiment when you ask your best
friend. Simply tell her she was your first choice, but you were trying to spare
her the expense ... her living "far away," etc., and you would be thrilled if
she were able to stand up for you. If she is a real friend and can spare the
time and money, she will understand and accept. If not, Prudie recommends you
figure out your third choice. Perhaps someone local.

            
--Prudie, matrimonially

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               At a small gathering
with out-of-town friends in the Shenandoah recently, the discussion turned to
politics. I don't wish to be specific, but a prominent national figure was
compared to the "Antichrist." I am reluctant to identify the target
specifically, because I allow for honest differences of opinion. My disclaimer
notwithstanding, does one have to be a Christian to comment on the Antichrist
comparison? One part of me says the allusion is nonreligious, having to do with
an assessment of evil ... fair game for anyone. Yet another voice whispers that
I should shy away from discussing the hagiography (or whatever) of a different
faith. Please let me know how Prudence would have reacted.
            

            

               --From God's Country, W.V., 
               CAK
            

            Dear From,

            The historical Jesus is
such a part of ancient and modern thought that reference to him has little to
do with whether one is a believer or not. That particular phrase has become
part of the language. (Prudie, in fact, refers to her starter husband that
way.) As for the whispering voice that's telling you one should shy away from
discussing faiths to which one does not belong, tell it that there is even a
college course dealing with this subject. It is called Comparative Religion. In
an ecumenical spirit, Prudie wanted to answer you in Islamic pentameter, but
she is fluent only in limericks.

            
--Prudie, permissively

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               I have seen many people drive haphazardly
through parking lots. I have even seen one or two flip me the bird because I
happened to obey the law, even stopping at the stop signs, which annoyingly
slows them down. Believe me, it takes great willpower to not chase after them
and shake them until their teeth rattle. Yes, you have people who take
handicapped spots when they have no right to be parking there, but even worse
are these crazies who think that parking lots are just enclosed
highways.
            

            
               My grandmother was
in a serious accident in a parking lot several years ago because of one of
these crazies. He slammed into her, then had the nerve to get out of his car,
lie down on the ground, and say he had whiplash. He blamed her! She had to go
to court as a defendant (!) all because he was trying to get out of the lot
first by speeding around her. The point is that some young jerk almost killed
her in a parking lot because he didn't want to wait. How do we deal with these
impatient, asinine, automotive airheads?
            

            

               --Aggravated
            

            Dear Ag,

            Calm yourself. This is
one of those irritants that is very difficult to redress. Our whole society,
not just drivers, has become increasingly impatient and always in a hurry. Road
rage is one byproduct of the behavior you are concerned about. Defensive
driving is probably the most constructive thing you can do. Whenever you see a
person driving erratically, reduce your own speed and try to get out of the
way. If you think someone is breaking a law, take down the license plate number
and call the police. It would be nice if all parking lots would put in those
bumps to make slower speeds mandatory, but that is not going to happen. Alas,
vehicular rodeos are here to stay, so just count to 10. Well, maybe 12.

            
--Prudie, pragmatically

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               After many
discussions among my friends, we still have not come to any conclusion about
whether we would live with someone before we married them. Do you think that
living with someone before marriage gives the marriage a more stable foundation
on which to build, or is cohabitation better left until after marriage? We were
considering the divorce rate these days and whether this is a significant
variable in the increase, or has society changed its values?
            

            
               --Yours
sincerely,
            

            

               Mellie
            

            Dear Mel,

            Your question is a kind
of hybrid of "To be or not to be" and "Which came first, the chicken or the
egg?" There are so many variables that Prudie would not consider offering a
rule or an opinion. This is one of those decisions that two people must make
based on their values, circumstances, upbringing, and beliefs. Living together
without benefit of clergy can be destructive, instructive, useful, a mess, or a
blessing. How's that for waffling?

            --Prudie, unknowingly

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Internet Envy

            The fact that the Internet will make life better
for all humankind has long been noted, even on the East Coast. What seems to
have struck the East Coast only recently is that the Internet is making a
smaller subset of all humankind--people who start Internet-related companies or
join them before they go public--incredibly wealthy. The New York Times
reported as much on its front page recently, so you know
it's probably true.

            Out here in cyberland, people have been aware of
this fact for several years. Indeed we have talked of little else since about
September 1996, which is the last time anyone mentioned a book except in the
context of Amazon.com. The basic anecdote--variations on "When I knew him in
college he was stoned all the time ... two years ago he was living in a
corrugated box on his ex-wife's compost pile (we all actually pitched in to buy
him a new futon!) ... then last week they had their IPO, and now he's worth
$350 million"--declined long ago from fresh conversational gambit through
staple to cliché.

            So what's new? Money has
always been a fraught topic. A New York writer who regularly mines his sex life
and longings for material begged off an invitation to write about the Internet
IPO phenomenon for 
                  Slate
                on the grounds that his feelings about
money are too personal and complex. And envy didn't just become a deadly sin
when its existence was acknowledged by the New York Times . Nevertheless,
the arrival of Internet Envy on the Washington-New York buzz axis is new in
several ways.

            Washington types used to be surprisingly immune to envy of
other people simply for being richer. A theory long propounded by Walter
Shapiro ( USA Today political columnist and 
                  Slate
               
contributor) is that the financial heights of Washington are occupied by
high-salaried lawyers and lobbyists, not by real accumulated or inherited
wealth as in New York. The lifestyle gap between the middle and upper class
does not yawn in front of, say, a Washington Post editor every day.
Journalists--even print journalists!--and high-level civil servants live in the
nicest neighborhoods. More important, of course, Washington has--or had--a
social status ranking independent of money. It's a place where puzzled
gazillionaires can find themselves snubbed at dinner parties by deputy
assistant Cabinet secretaries and patronized by minor TV talking heads.

            Even in New York, where
money matters more, there are (unlike in Washington) strong independent
subcultures in which a journalist or college professor or unemployed actor can
take comfort in an independent value system. They could have been bankers or
management consultants but chose not to be. And the people at the top of those
heaps, earning plenty to live comfortably, honestly wouldn't trade being, say,
curator of dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History for being just another
multimillionaire investment banker. On most days.

            So what has changed? One element, obviously, is the size of
these Internet fortunes. Hundreds of millions. As syndicated columnist Matt
Miller recently pointed out, with numbers like this surging across the
Times business section, even investment bankers "feel like wage slaves
at $10 million a year." (And, poor souls, these investment bankers generally
cannot find comfort in an independent value system.) Meanwhile, in Washington,
where even New York-style fortunes are rare, it seems that America Online alone
(located in D.C.'s Virginia suburbs) has created a vast new social stratum of
megamillionaires one has never heard of. Gives one pause.

            Second, there's the
speed. It's one thing to console yourself that at least you didn't have to
spend 30 years doing a job you would hate. That trick is a bit harder when you
read that someone (inevitably, someone with the same name as that bozo down the
hall sophomore year ... but it can't be ... look, here's his picture ... oh,
hell) joined some nothing of a company, sat there through the IPO, and cashed
out, all in a couple of years. How awful can a job be?

            Answer: maybe not so awful at all. In fact, maybe it's
remarkably similar to the job you're doing now. A third startling difference
about Internet IPO wealth is that some of it is raining down on journalists!
Writing journalists, no less, at places like Amazon and TheStreet and iVillage
(dot-com, dot-com, dot-com). This is something truly new in the history of the
known universe. 
                  Slate
               's former "Keeping Tabs" columnist Emily
Yoffe observes: "You no longer can say, 'Sure I could have made a lot of money
if I'd decided to be a Wall Street money grubber.' And it's not just [a famous
TV hack] spending every weekend speaking to the Aluminum Manufacturers for
$50,000. We're talking about journalists getting seriously rich just by being
journalists."

            Thus journalists have
joined software engineers and business executives in peddling the other basic
Internet Envy anecdote: variations on, "Oh yeah, they offered me the top job at
Somedamnedsite.com--begged me to take it, offered me 75 percent of the equity
plus options for another 75--but I turned it down." Even during the first few
years of Internet frenzy, Internet Envy was not widespread in N.Y.-D.C.
buzzworld because the whole thing seemed to be happening on another planet--to
people one not only didn't know but could scarcely imagine. Only very recently
have lottery winners started popping up in one's own neighborhood.

            Internet Envy exists in cyberland itself, too, but it is
much more straightforward. Everybody is trying to do the same thing; some
succeed, and those who don't are envious. You don't have to pretend that you're
not. And there's no queasy feeling that you must have misplaced that notice
explaining how the rules were about to change. ("In Paragraph 19, Line 106,
replace the words 'Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction' with the words 'seven hundred
fifty million dollars.' ") Also, unlike back East, there's no vertiginous
obsession with how young these IPO-heads are, because almost everybody is
scandalously young.

            The rules have indeed changed. But they're always
changing, in a couple of ways. Some changes in personal values are simply part
of growing older. Then there are shifts in the values of the general
culture.

            To oversimplify: In high
school the jocks are on top (unless, of course, armed losers storm the
cafeteria one day and mow them down). But the smart kids tend to win in adult
life. The glow of that happy discovery can last for years, as Nathan Myrhvold
explained and simultaneously demonstrated in a recent 
                  Slate
                "."
These are folks lucky enough to be able to choose their careers and to have a
good shot at success at whatever they choose.

            At the crucial moment when they make their choices, many of
these people honestly believe that money--beyond the cost of upper-middle-class
comfort--is not all that important to them, and most of them may turn out to be
right. But some are responding to the fleeting hormonal surges of youthful
idealism, or to the special status hierarchy of the academic subculture where
they temporarily reside. In the most tragic examples, a charismatic professor
will entice them into a lifetime of French medieval history, about which their
curiosity is exhausted before they get their Ph.D.s. In less extreme cases,
they become writers. Then they discover, in their 30s or 40s, that money is
important to them after all. This is the moment when reading about some
28-year-old who's suddenly worth $300 million can have an effect that requires
medical attention.

            Sometimes this personal
process of maturity or decay (take your pick) is reinforced by what's happening
in the culture. Money is never unimportant, but there are moments when it is
more important than others. This is one of them. Actually, a graph of the
changing value of money in the status market would look a lot like a graph of
the Dow Jones industrial average: It rose steadily starting about 1982--the
year a star New York Times reporter shocked his journalist colleagues by
quitting the Times to become an investment banker--crested and sank
briefly in the late 1980s, quickly recovered, and has been hitting new heights
ever since. In these days, when even the most softhearted and public-spirited
people become venture capitalists, younger readers may find it hard to believe
there was ever a time when even an extremely ambitious person, motivated
entirely by a desire to do well--rather than to do good, or to do anything in
particular--might well decide to be a journalist. But it's true.

            Of course it's possible that the stock market and the
status market have peaked together again. Price-earnings ratios are perilously
high in both. A $400 million fortune gets you about as much status as a mere
$50 million got you a decade ago. Speculators in status futures are rumored to
be pulling out of money and getting into undervalued properties including
kindness, musical talent, and short-term memory. The decline of money is also
expected to benefit blue chips such as physical beauty, according to some
analysts.

            So maybe this is the wrong moment to cash in your
reputation as a saint--based on two and a half decades spent bathing patients
in a South American leprosy clinic--for a job (with 50 percent equity stake) as
CEO of Leper.com (soon to be LPRC on the NASDAQ). In this market as in others,
timing is everything.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            What Did You Do in the War, Junior?

            The
draft issue is back. On July 4, the Los Angeles Times reported that George W. Bush avoided Vietnam by being admitted to
the Texas Air National Guard with unusual speed. That same day, the Dallas
Morning News presented Bush's side of the story. Did Bush use his connections
to dodge the draft? That depends on the standards by which his conduct should
be measured, which in turn are the subject of a vigorous spin war.

            
               1.
Morality vs. legality. The moral argument against sons of the elite who
joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam is that they jumped the line--that they used
their connections to leapfrog ordinary Guard applicants, leaving those
applicants to be drafted into Vietnam to die in their place. The Times
focused its story on the alleged unfairness of Bush's "quick" admission but
concedes that "there is no evidence of illegality or regulations broken to
accommodate Bush's entry and rise in the service."

            Since
the moral question is tricky but the legal question is open and shut, Bush's
supporters want to focus on the latter. So far, the media are obliging them.
"If [Bush] didn't do anything illegal or didn't break any regulations, how
important or serious is this allegation?" asked Tim Russert on NBC's Meet
the Press . Richard Serrano, the author of the Times piece, replied
that "it's serious in the sense that others probably had to go into the regular
service because of the favoritism that he got." But that answer didn't cut it.
Fox News' Brit Hume concluded that "no rules or laws were broken," and even
Bush's fiercest rival, Steve Forbes, confined the issue to whether "anything
illegal was done."

            
               2.
Preference vs. qualification. The Times constantly compares Bush's
experience to that of other Guard applicants. "Although getting into the state
units was difficult for most others, Bush was soon in the Guard," says the
Times . Bush got a "special commission making him an instant second
lieutenant" and "was able to jump into the officer ranks without the
exceptional credentials many other officer candidates possessed." The
News adds that in the pilot aptitude section of the written test for
pilot trainees, Bush scored "in the 25 th percentile, the lowest
allowed for would-be fliers." In short, when Bush's merits and treatment are
examined relative to other applicants', his story looks fishy.

            Bush's
response is to shift the analysis from a relative to an absolute standard, from
whether others were more qualified or more slowly admitted to whether he met
the Guard's minimum "qualifications." "I met all the criteria, I met all the
qualifications," he told reporters who asked about the Times story July
4. His spokeswoman used the same term: "The military found him absolutely
qualified to be commissioned."

            
               3.
Treatment vs. string-pulling. Bush's enemies want the story to be about how
he was treated. Bush wants the story to be about whether he pulled strings.
That's because if your dad is the local congressman, you can get special
treatment just by introducing yourself. You don't have to pull strings. The
Times says Bush "received favorable treatment," and "doors were opened"
for him. Note the passive voice. The Times found "no sign that political
influence helped Bush along," and the News adds, "Officers who
supervised Mr. Bush and approved his admission to the Guard said they were
never contacted by anyone on Mr. Bush's behalf." For the pundits, that ends the
discussion. "The favoritism was all on the side of the military reaching out to
him rather than anything he or his father did," observed Hume. ABC News' Sam
Donaldson agreed: "I am sure he got preferential treatment. But what is he
supposed to do? [Say] 'My name is Gonzalez, not Bush?' " No strings, no
story.

            The
question pundits are too coarse to contemplate is whether there's a zone
between passive innocence and active manipulation. The Guard official to whom
Bush applied for admission told the Times that Bush mentioned his father
right away: "He said he wanted to fly just like his daddy." Bush's spokesman
pointed out that Bush, "because of his circumstances, made an ideal subject for
National Guard publicity." In short, Bush knew the deck was stacked in his
favor. All he did was play the cards.

            
               4.
Location vs. job title. Bush flew fighter jets in Texas. Al Gore served as
an Army reporter in Vietnam. Gore's location sounds more manly, but Bush's job
title looks better. The Times focuses on Bush's location, warning that
he "will be asked to explain how he did not come to serve in America's least
popular war." To underscore the Texas-Vietnam comparison, the Times
notes that one of Bush's rivals, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "has joked that as
a prisoner of war in North Vietnam he slept more soundly knowing that Bush was
defending the shores of Texas from invasion." On Meet the Press , E.J.
Dionne of the Washington Post , a Gore sympathizer, suggested that the
difference between Gore and Bush is that one "went to Vietnam" and one "did
not."

            Bush
has several weapons with which to combat this characterization. Since pundits
are journalists, they find Gore's portrayal of his journalism as military
service somewhat preposterous. Gore served "as a reporter, not as a combatant,"
observed Fortune 's Jeffrey Birnbaum on Fox News Sunday . Gore
"went to Vietnam, but as journalist, not as an infantryman," agreed USA
Today 's Susan Page on CNN's Late Edition . Bush also points out that
he tried to volunteer for a Guard program that sent several pilots to Southeast
Asia. (The News indicates that he was rejected because he was clearly
unqualified. Whether Bush deserves admiration for volunteering or deserves
suspicion because he knew he would be rejected can be debated.) But Bush's most
effective point is that he was, as he told reporters July 4, "a fighter pilot."
Bush never had to fight, but he did fly fighter jets, and "fighter pilot"
sounds a lot better than "reporter."

            
               5.
How you served vs. whether you served. Investigative journalists and
critics of Bush assume that his Guard service should be compared to an
alternative scenario in which he served in Vietnam. Bush wants to highlight a
different alternative--dodging the draft and ducking military service
altogether--against which the course he chose looks better. In Vietnam, he told
the Houston Chronicle this year, "[y]our options either were to avoid
the draft or sign up, and I signed up." After the Times story broke this
weekend, Bush told reporters, "I asked to become a pilot," "I served my
country," and "I'm very proud of my service."

            Bush
has several decisive advantages on this question. Most people of his generation
know someone who avoided the draft in a less respectable way than Bush did.
Meanwhile, voters younger than Bush know little of the military and therefore
tend to be impressed that he served at all rather than concerned with how he
served. Moreover, Gore's patron, Bill Clinton, overshadows the campaign as a
constant reminder of the contrast between serving and not serving. Clinton used
the Reserve Officers Training Corps to escape the draft, then backed out and
never served in the ROTC. Against this background, Bush's Guard service looks
noble. "A lot of other people did not do nearly as much as he did," argued
Steve Roberts on Late Edition . "He did something honorable. At least he
actually joined the military." Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a Bush rival, agreed:
"Here is a fellow that went and flew airplanes and learned to be a pilot and
was prepared to go, if he had to go. That is a lot."

            Who's
winning the war over the draft? Since the talking heads agree with Bush's
competitors that it's a "non-story," Round 1 goes to Bush. But the contest
between the pro- and anti-Bush spins is less interesting than the reality that
lies between them. A pilot who flew with Bush in Texas told the News
that their service was "a non-threatening way to do your military, get paid
well for some long shifts, and feel good about your own involvement. ... It was
a cushy way to be a patriot." Perhaps the story worth telling about Bush's
military service is not whether it was cushy or patriotic, but how it was
both.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=630250921-01071999>Jamaica's Coke Problem</SPAN>

            

               
                  Economist
               
               , Oct. 8
            

            The
cover story on Communist China's 50 th
anniversary argues that the hardest part of its economic liberalization is to
come. China can only save itself from its current stagnation by fixing its
banking system, addressing environmental hazards, controlling government debt,
and democratizing. ... An article condemns "positive discrimination" in South
Africa. Well-educated blacks are "mercilessly head-hunted" for high-paying
jobs, while uneducated blacks suffer from high unemployment and poor public
services. ... A piece says Jamaica is being destroyed by drug
trafficking. A trans-shipment haven for Colombian cocaine, the island nation is
in an economic tailspin, drug violence is rampant, the army patrols the
beaches, and tourism is stagnant.

            
               
                  New
Republic
               
               , Oct. 18
            

            
Tuesday's resignation of Editor Charles Lane and the appointment of Peter
Beinart to replace him are not mentioned. ... A cover profile of financial guru Suze Orman, author of
the best-selling The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom , argues that her
simplistic philosophy--be thrifty--is good advice in an age of escalating
consumer debt. ... An article applauds Al Gore's call for a
"21 st Century Teacher Corps." The corps would offer money toward
college tuition in return for a commitment to teach after graduation. A similar
program successfully improved teacher quality for 17 years, until President
Reagan killed it in 1981.

            

               
                  New
                
               
                  York Times Magazine , Oct. 3
            

            The
cover story explains why Jerusalem could be the tripwire for World War III and
profiles the delusional extremists who could ignite it: Jewish fanatics who
want to retake the Temple Mount by force, Christian apocalypse-awaiters who
want to see the temple rebuilt, and seething sheiks who will wage war before
ceding authority over the Dome of the Rock. ... A pig could save your
life, according to an article. Swine engineered with human DNA and birthed by
surrogate sows could serve as spare-parts factories for people with failing
organs. Pig farms await regulatory approval of cross-species transplant trials.
... A piece profiles a group of white-hat hackers called "Lopht," the
Ralph Naders of the online world. They crack computer systems of companies and
agencies to reveal their security holes. Crackees, including Microsoft,
appreciate the warning.

            

               
                  Newsweek
               
               , Oct. 4
            

            The
cover story excerpts the controversial Edmund Morris
biography of Ronald Reagan. Morris initially found his subject a "shatteringly
banal" cultural "yahoo." He was "miserably blocked" until he thought of
inserting his fictionalized self into the narrative. Revelations: Reagan lost
half his blood after John Hinckley's assassination attempt, and he approved the
arms-for-hostages deal while woozily recovering from cancer surgery. Other
highlights: In Chapter 1 , Morris gushes with schoolboy crush describing his
first fictional encounter with 15-year-old "Dutch" Reagan: "His purposeful body
moved on, exuding liniment. I dropped the candy wrapper I had been holding--and
as I reached for it, his wet sleeve brushed my hand." One excerpt , in the form of a screenplay fragment, floats Nancy
Reagan's view that Jane Wyman roped the Gipper into marriage by feigning a
suicide attempt.

            

               
                  Time
               
               , Oct. 4
            

            The
c over story rehashes the conventional wisdom about
Bill Bradley. He calls for bold liberal reforms. Though he abstains from
showbizzy campaigning, he markets his virtue and "exploits his legend." His
proud reserve--a product of 40 years in the spotlight--is refreshing but does
not bode well for his capacity to shepherd big ideas through Congress.
... An article marvels at the revival of religion in China, now used
by the Communist Party to control a restive population. Christians, Taoists,
and Buddhists may practice as long as they support the state. The party still
feebly pushes secularism: It just inaugurated an annual Hero of Atheism
award.

            
               
                  U.S.
News
                
               
                  & World Report , Oct. 4
            

            The
cover story explores modern treasure-hunting. Entrepreneurs
now use cheap new technology, such as remote-operated vehicles, to salvage
artifacts from ancient wrecks. "Salvors" sell their finds online, stage
exhibitions for profit, and auction film rights. Archaeologists argue that
treasure-seekers wreck artifacts. ... An article notes that roughly half today's female juvenile
offenders were raised by mothers who were arrested or incarcerated. Many of
those mothers were casualties of the '80s crack epidemic.

            
               
                  
The
                
               
                  New Yorker , Oct. 4
            

            An
article argues that patients have too much control over their treatment.
Doctors used to dictate treatment, but in the past decade the pendulum has
swung too far toward patient autonomy. Physicians should inform patients of
their options but step in when patients make bad choices or are too distressed
to choose rationally. ... An essay in the fall books section praises
"collaborative filtering" as a substitute for the independent bookseller. You
enter your preferences and a software programs spits out the favorites of folks
who share your interests. This "doppelganger search engine" will help sleeper
books thrive in the era of superstores.

            

               
                  Business
                
               
                  Week , Oct. 4
            

            The
70 th anniversary issue looks forward to the Internet age, predicting
that the U.S. economic boom is just the start of a period of massive,
technology-driven global growth. ... A piece touts the Web as a tool of
revolution. Grassroots movements fund raise, recruit, and plan mass protests
online. When China bullied service providers into blocking pro-democracy sites,
cyberactivists tapped into off-shore servers.

            

               
                  The
                
               
                  Nation , Oct. 11
            

            An
article concludes that courts cannot be counted on to end racial profiling.
Judges have upheld traffic stops that are mere pretexts for searches and
erected evidentiary boundaries to ending profiling. Only political action will
eventually end racial profiling.

            

               
                  Weekly
                
               
                  Standard , Oct. 4
            

            The
cover story earnestly deconstructs pro wrestling, mourning it as evidence of
America's moral decline. The disappearance of the traditional Soviet or Arab
villain symbolizes the weakening of the nation-state and the spread of moral
relativism. The popularity of narcissist wrestler Hulk Hogan presaged the
election of unprincipled rogue Bill Clinton. ... An article excoriates
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's "power grab." Annan argues that any use of
force in international affairs is illegitimate unless authorized by the
Security Council. This specious doctrine could hamstring American national
security.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 326: &quot;Scents and Sensibility&quot;

            
               "This is a dream
for me--to find the soft parts and touch them and even smell them. It's very
exciting." Who said this about what? 
               
                  (Question courtesy of
Jamie Smith and Andy Aaron.)
               
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Tuesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Thursday's Question
(No. 325)--"Wrapped Attention":
            

            

               In a TV commercial running in Houston, friends cover a Diane Keaton
look-alike in bubble wrap then roll her down a hill and through a sprinkler. We
don't find out what's being advertised until the end, when the tag line comes
up. For 500 points and the game: What is the tag line?
            

            
"George W. Bush: The courage to laugh at women on death row. The creativity to
carry out the execution in bold new ways."-- Jake Tapper ( Jennifer
Miller had a similar answer.)

            
"Arrive moist and fresh. Fly Federal Express."-- Merrill Markoe
            

            
"Everybody in Packing Materials. The Gap. (You forgot to mention she was
lip-syncing "Helter Skelter.")-- Floyd Elliot (similarly, Michael
Mannella and Al Estrada-Berg )

            "A
year later this footage was found. The Blair Witch Project II ."-- Paul
Krug
            

            "We're
adding new diagnostic procedures each day. We're your HMO."-- Kim Day
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's Wrap-Up
            

            Many News Quiz
participants suggest that the entire Bush campaign is an ad for which we do not
know the product. Sure, this is cowardly, intellectually dishonest, and an
insult to the democratic process, but it's also thrifty, and that's important,
too. (Not important to G.W., who enjoys Scrooge McDuckian campaign funds, but
important in ways that will be revealed at the end. Of something.) As long as
G.W.'s policies remain ambiguous, every TV ad is a stealth Bush ad. Any
commercial that features some kind of cool car driving through some kind of
perfect landscape implicitly says: Let G.W. (the driver) take the nation (the
car) into the future (it's just over the next fashion model). Or the ad when
the Wagnerian soprano (G.W.) spears (anti-missile system) the cell phone (bad
schools?) of a discourteous opera fan (affirmative action? The Taliban?): I
think that means he wants to cut taxes for his rich friends. You can't be
overly literal. This thing works subconsciously, like workfare.

            
               Answer
            

            "Shop together, play together, eat together."

            The ad is for the Mills Corp.'s 10 th and
newest mall, each organized around the theme "total experience," by which is
meant a combination of shopping and entertainment, by which is meant a chance
to buy stuff at Foot Locker and then play a video game. The malls combine
discount shopping, high-tech amusement arcades, theme restaurants, and 24-30
screen multiplexes showing the same teen-sex comedies, but on 24-30
screens.

            The reason we don't know
why they're being so mean to Diane Keaton until the end of the ad? "That was
very deliberate. The idea is to give a sense of intrigue that this is a new
type of experience," said John Parlota, executive vice president of the ad
agency that produced the spot. "Of course, when people find out it's just
another crappy mall, they get pretty damn mad, but by then, I'm miles away," he
did not add.

            
               Weekend Weddings
Extra
            

            
               Results:
            

            

               Duke weds Duke

               Connecticut College weds Duke

               Duke weds Montclair State

               Yale weds Yale

               Mount Holyoke weds Princeton

               Harvard weds New Hampshire

               Dartmouth weds Penn

               Rutgers weds Fordham

               Barnard weds University of Chicago

               University of Colorado weds University of California, Davis

               Penn State weds North Carolina State

               St. Francis weds St. Francis

               Davidson weds Davidson

            

            
               Highlights:
            

            "The bride owns and manages olive groves in
Tuscany."

            "In the summers he is a
fly-fishing guide."

            
               Beat the Odds:
            

            The bride, 39, graduated
from Harvard Law. The groom, 31, graduated from New Hampshire College; he is an
antiques dealer.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Content-free George W. campaign.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Creationism Evolves

            The
media have been in an uproar this month over the latest putative outbreak of
creationism. "Kansas Votes to Delete Evolution From State's Science
Curriculum," shrieked the New York Times . Liberals thought the steady
unearthing of fossils, the decline of organized religion, and several adverse
court decisions had rendered creationism extinct. Instead, adversity has made
critics of evolution stronger. It has forced them to develop themes and
arguments better suited to the new environment.

            

               1. 
               Censorship. The conventional wisdom, put out by
evolutionists and picked up by the media, is that the Kansas Board of Education
"rejected," "eliminated," and "expunged" evolution from its curriculum. NBC's
Today show said Kansas had "banned" evolution. The Times
speculated that school districts might "force" teachers to dispute evolution or
teach creationism. In phrasing questions about the controversy, several
reporters characterized the issue as "censoring" evolution.

            What
the Kansas board actually did was remove evolution from the list of subjects on
which the state will test students. While liberals call this "censorship,"
conservatives spin it as an affirmation and exercise of freedom. The safest
dodge, adopted by every major Republican presidential candidate, is that "state
and local" leaders should be allowed to choose their own curricula. Republicans
also argue that "parents" should decide such matters. "I'll trust the parents
more than I will bureaucracies," proclaimed Steve Forbes.

            
Hard-core creationists have mounted a more aggressive libertarian
counterattack. In TV interviews since the Kansas decision, Jerry Falwell has
deplored the bad old days when the government "forced" creationism on kids.
Now, says Falwell, the government is "forcing evolution" on them. Other
spokesmen for creationism accuse evolutionist "censors and book-burners" of
suppressing "evidence for creation science." Falwell constantly invokes
"academic freedom," pleading that schools should "teach both [evolution and
creationism] as theories, and trust the children with their parents to arrive
at their own conclusions." When CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Gary Bauer whether
Kansas should be allowed to "ban" evolution, Bauer replied, "What Kansas did
was allow both views to be presented. ... That is consistent with America and
our free discussion of things."

            To
protect creationism from "censors," conservatives have adopted the relativism
and multiculturalism of the left. Falwell argues that "all models or theories"
should "be taught on equal footing." George W. Bush agrees: "Children ought to
be exposed to different theories about how the world started." Steve Forbes
says the facts of prehistory are "all up in the air now. A lot of what we
thought was true turns out [to be] not true. There's a raging debate. So I
leave it to local decisions." Fox News commentator Sean Hannity pleads for
"tolerance" and "pro-choice" education. "If some school districts can have
ebonics, I think others can talk about creationism," argues CNN's Tucker
Carlson. "There is room for all ideas."

            

               2. 
               Meaning. Liberal pundits, eager to pick a fight with
the religious right, attack the notion of pairing "religious instruction" with
the teaching of "scientific evolution." They accuse creationists of violating
"the wall of church and state" by imposing "a religious theory" on "the secular
educational system." It's all part of the culture war over sex education and
other school controversies, they scoff.

            This
may be good constitutional law, but it's lousy politics. According to Gallup
Polls, 50 percent of Americans believe in evolution, but only 10 percent accept
it as a purely secular account. The other 40 percent (within the 50 percent)
think God has guided evolution toward human development. And while only 40
percent want to banish evolution from the schools and teach creationism
instead, 68 percent think both ideas should be taught. The bottom line is that
if evolutionists force the public to choose between evolution and religion or
between evolution and divine creation, they'll lose.

            
Creationists, recognizing this equation, try to force precisely this choice.
They dig up quotes in which evolutionary theorists espouse atheism and scorn
"divine intervention." A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, titled "The
Church of Darwin," called evolution "the main scientific prop" for a philosophy
of "materialism" that denies God's existence. In TV interviews, Bauer rigs the
debate by juxtaposing the idea that we "descended from monkeys" with the idea
that we are "divinely made" and are "creatures of God." Evolution implies
"there is no divine intelligence involved," he told reporters last week.
Likewise, Dan Quayle attributed the uproar over creationism to "a hostile
environment against religion."

            
Conversely, creationists broaden the appeal of their own theory by associating
it with the general idea of "divine intervention" and "intelligent design."
Whereas there's no "meaning in life if we're just animals in a struggle for
survival," they argue, "If we can teach creation, there is an order, there is a
plan. You have a place in this world." On the deepest and most decisive level,
this spin has been an enormous success. While privately scorning creationism,
the media have thoughtlessly absorbed and promoted the creationists' dichotomy
between God and Darwin. The day of the Kansas decision, CBS News posed the
question this way: "Are human beings divine creations or the product of eons of
evolution?"

            Wiser
evolutionists know that the better approach is to pose a choice not between
science and religion but between literalism and interpretation. While most
people want to believe that God created us one way or another, few can swallow
the literal creationist reading of the Bible, which holds that the earth is
less than 10,000 years old. (Never mind the strictest reading, which supposes
that creation took a week.) The first theory is flexible enough to withstand
fossil evidence, but the second isn't. When asked about the Bible's literal
account of creation, as opposed to the attractive concept of divine
creation, every major Republican presidential candidate--even Bauer--has
squirmed, ducked, and tried to steer the discussion back to "faith," "morals,"
and the general idea that humans "were created in the image of God." The smart
strategy for evolutionists, in short, is to embrace theism and shift the debate
to dinosaur bones.

            

               3. 
               Elitism. Scientists and liberal commentators love to
ridicule creationists for "going back to the 19 th century," turning
kids into "scientific ignoramuses," and second-guessing "experts" and the
Supreme Court. "There is no alternative" to evolution, asserted Barry Lynn,
executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State,
during a recent Fox News debate. "There isn't really anything on the other
side." On the Today show, an evolutionist professor scoffed at the
Kansas board's decision: "Only in education would an elected board of lay
people decline to take the advice of a committee of experts."

            
Creationists have learned to jujitsu the scornful tone and overreaching scope
of these pronunciations. Responding on Today to the professor's crack
about "lay people," the chair of the Kansas board observed: "Many parents I've
talked to believe that they know what is best for their children. This attitude
[of evolutionists] has been characteristic of some parts of the education
community that only they know what is best for kids." Bauer and other
creationists accuse the evolutionist "elite" of trampling popular values and
defying the "American tradition that the people have a right to disagree with
the experts."

            The
conventional populist critique of evolution identifies it with sex education,
condom distribution, restrictions on school prayer, and other perceived liberal
attacks on religion. But as the public places its faith less in orthodoxy and
more in the marketplace of ideas, creationists are developing a hardier strain
of populism that appeals to progressive concepts such as "questions,"
"skepticism," and "investigation." Rather than defend religious dogma, they
poke holes in evolutionary dogma, scrutinizing the theory's missing links and
the mathematical probability of the emergence of complex life. Schools should
"teach the evidence ... that raises questions about how thoroughly evolution
explains everything," argues Bill Kristol.

            This
appeal to skepticism seems likely to flourish. The creationists had only five
of the six seats they needed on the Kansas board to remove evolution from the
required curriculum. They got the sixth vote by persuading a noncreationist
board member that evolution should be presented as a theory rather than as a
fact. "Before we start sneering" at Kansas, writes liberal columnist Lars-Erik
Nelson, "We might look askance at the supposed scientists and social scientists
who defend their own pet theories [such as] global warming, free trade,
supply-side economics ... with a religiouslike zeal, denouncing all doubters as
either heretics or ill-educated bumpkins."

            
Creationism, it turns out, is a case study in the evolution of spin. The
environment changes, the idea mutates, and new strains and arguments take hold.
Is it natural selection or intelligent design? You decide.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Do Presidential Candidates Use the Internet?

            Every
presidential candidacy this year is represented by an official Web site. (Click
to read 
                  Slate
               's survey of these sites.) But what of
the candidates themselves? They all give lip service to the idea of the
information revolution, and especially to the quantities of cash it's pumping
into the economy. But do they know how to use personal computers? Do
they send and receive e-mail? Do they surf the Web? How regularly do they do
so? How long have they been doing so?

            Net
Election's crack research team sent a brief e-mail questionnaire on Web
literacy to all the presidential candidates. With a touch of naive optimism, we
imagined that our reporting would be complete once we'd tracked down e-mail
addresses for each of these campaigns and shipped our questionnaires off. The
idea was that the campaign staffs , if not the candidates themselves,
would immediately download our questionnaire, hit "Reply," answer its not
terribly demanding questions on the spot, and ship back the answers within
moments. To encourage a prompt response, we assured all candidates that we
didn't intend to judge harshly those who displayed poor Web literacy,
since--let's face it--computer skills rank fairly low on the list of the things
one needs to master in order to be president.

            Alas,
even in an age where "just-in-time inventories" are believed by some to have
eliminated economic recessions, political campaigns lack the ability--or
perhaps the inclination--to respond quickly to electronic queries. In fact,
only three presidential campaigns--those of Al Gore, Alan Keyes and Orrin
Hatch--sent e-mails back. Of these three, only the Keyes campaign produced a
truly "frictionless" response (that is, responded to our questionnaire before
we started making the inevitable round of follow-up phone calls to campaign
press aides), though Hatch's and Gore's e-mailed responses, like Keyes', were
in the candidate's own words. The only candidate we spoke with directly
about his Internet use was Pat Buchanan, who said he'd been checking Amazon.com
daily to track how the controversy surrounding the historical speculation in
his new book A Republic, Not an Empire was affecting sales.
(Predictably, it's helping.) Elizabeth Dole's campaign, though very cordial
when we phoned, never got back to us with answers.

            If the
respondents are to be believed, there is no such thing as a presidential
candidate who doesn't use e-mail (though we didn't bother asking Warren Beatty,
Donald Trump, or Cybill Shepherd, all of whose candidacies remain extremely
hypothetical; and while we sent an e-mail to Bob Smith, we lacked the
initiative to try to reach him by phone). On the other hand, it's fairly common
for a presidential candidate not to use e-mail in connection with his campaign.
(Presumably this is because a candidate's e-mail address, once known by the
entire campaign staff and by political supporters, would be spam bait.)

            Here
are the survey results (click on the graphic for an enlargement):

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            George W.'s Wimp Factor

            In
1992, over the protests of outraged liberals, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton flew
home in the midst of his presidential campaign to supervise the execution of a
retarded killer. The message to voters was that Clinton, unlike previous
Democratic presidential candidates, was tough on crime. Last week, after a
gunman murdered seven people in a Fort Worth church, Texas Gov. George W. Bush
flew home to urge Americans to "pray for love in people's hearts." The message
this time is that Bush, unlike previous Republican presidential candidates, is
compassionate.

            If
Bush succeeds in projecting such sensitivity, the cure may prove worse than the
disease. Republicans used to win elections by calling their Democratic
opponents soft on crime. Clinton, first as a candidate and then as president,
frustrated this tactic by recasting gun control--previously an issue of "big
government"--as an issue of getting tough on thugs. Bush, who opposes most
federal gun control proposals and signed the law that lets Texans carry
concealed handguns, is in danger of completing this reversal. By fighting crime
with "love," he is coming across not as a gun nut, but as a wimp.

            Bush
tried to send two messages in response to the Texas shooting. The first is
that, as conservatives have traditionally argued, culture--particularly
religion--is more important than government. In remarks replayed endlessly on
television and in the print media, Bush blamed the shooting on a "wave of
evil." The killer, he surmised, "was acting as a result of evil in his heart.
And I would hope that America would collectively pray for love in people's
hearts." Rather than discuss gun control or prosecution, Bush's campaign Web
site offered visitors a single quote atop his home page: "This is a terrible
tragedy made worse by the fact it took place in a house of hope and love. My
thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and the
congregation."

            
Second, Bush tried to project a virtue traditionally scorned by conservatives:
compassion. "It's inexplicable to me how somebody's heart could be so full of
hate that he would walk into a place of worship where youngsters were seeking
God's grace and love and kill people," Bush told the media. Rushing home to
"add some comfort to the pain and sorrow," Bush regretted that "there's not
much to say" and that "all I could do ... was embrace" the victims and their
families. "It's hard to do anything but just to say, 'I love you,' " he
lamented. Rather than dismiss the shooter as a cold-blooded killer, Bush called
him a "sick person" who must be "demented."

            The
second message has curdled the first. Swaddled in hugs, empathy, and spiritual
musings on the gunman's "heart," Bush's appeal to cultural renewal instead of
government intervention comes across more as a plea for love instead of laws.
"We as a society can pass laws and hold people accountable," he told reporters.
"But our hopes and prayers have got to be that there is more love in society."
"I wish I knew the law to make people love one another," Bush added. "We can
pass laws, but there needs to be a higher law. And that is, 'Love your neighbor
like you'd like to be loved yourself.' "

            Bush
isn't the only conservative projecting such an oddly mixed message. "Most
people are going to understand what a terribly, terribly tragic thing this is,
what a horrible tormented person this is," lamented House Majority Leader Dick
Armey, R-Texas. Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, blaming the
massacre on "societal elements that create such empty hearts that commit these
crimes," adopted the leftist pose of victimhood, calling for a federal study of
"crimes against men and women of faith."

            While
Vice President Al Gore professes reluctance to "politicize" the tragedy, his
allies at the Democratic National Committee have seized the opportunity to
label Bush soft on crime. "In 1997, Bush went out of his way to make it harder
to prosecute gunmen carrying deadly weapons into churches and school events,"
the DNC charged. "You can't say you support law enforcement and then refuse to
support law enforcement's attempts to close the gun show loophole. It's time
for Bush to start listening to law enforcement and stop listening to the
NRA."

            Gun
control activists have gone further. Speaking on television and in the print
media about the Texas massacre, they juxtapose today's "weak" gun laws with the
"tough" restrictions they would prefer. They claim the support of "police" and
the enmity of "criminals." Mocking Bush's plea that he didn't "know a
governmental law that will put love in people's hearts," Handgun Control
Chairwoman Sarah Brady blasted "the cowardice of elected officials who blame
everything for the carnage--except for the guns." Texas, she pointedly
suggested, "must contemplate what its lax gun laws and liberal gun culture have
created."

            The
media seem to be having fun with the notion of Bush as a liberal. The Los
Angeles Times reported that after the shooting, Bush "again ruled out the
need for stronger gun controls. In Texas, Bush has liberalized gun laws." The
New York Times cited speculation that Bush was concerned about "renewed
charges by many Democrats that he was soft on guns." On CNN's Capital
Gang , Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal cracked that "Bush was a
little bit Clintonian, flying back from Michigan to feel the pain." U.S.
News & World Report concluded that "while Bush was concentrating on
love, Al Gore was concentrating on laws."

            
Tuesday, Bush tried to steer his campaign back to the right. Flanked by Texas'
attorney general and the state's leading prosecutors, he unveiled a plan to
hire extra prosecutors who would focus exclusively on gun crimes. Scarcely a
sentence passed his lips without a mention of "toughness." "The best way to
protect our citizens is to vigorously enforce the tough laws we have on the
books," Bush declared. "We have some very tough laws against gun violence in
Texas, and federal law with its mandatory sentences is tough as well. ... Only
with tough enforcement can we win the war against gun violence."

            Many
Republicans thought Bush's dad lost in 1992 because he was out of touch. They
thought Bob Dole lost in 1996 because he was mean and distant. This time, they
were looking for a candidate who knew how to speak the language of love. Next
time, they may be looking for a candidate who knows when to stop.

            "Frame Game" has also
scrutinized , , , , and who have hounded George W. Bush.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 295: &quot;The Gielgud, the Bad, and the Ugly&quot;

            
               Following an
outcry from, among others, Academy Award-winner Sir John Gielgud, the
Smithsonian Institution has canceled a program. What was the program, and the
problem?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 294)-- "Whose Tiara Is It, Anyway?":
            

            

               Facing sinking ratings, the producers of the Miss America pageant last
week announced a change in format, to make the telecast more entertaining for
the home audience. Name that change.
            

            "The
girls will promenade in bathing suits holding signs with their personal phone
numbers over their heads."-- Alfa-Betty Olsen
            

            
"Contestants will compete against Mickey Blue Eyes star Hugh Grant in
the controversial 'Run Like a Girl' event."-- D. Ross
            

            
"Actual AIDS babies, poverty-stricken youth, etc., for them to succor, as
promised."-- Norm Oder
            

            "The
winning contestant will, after being crowned, open up her head and show us all
the little gears and circuits inside."-- Floyd Elliot
            

            "It
will be held in the Maryland woods, and the telecast will consist of jittery
footage of the contestants' slow descent into madness as they are
systematically stalked and disappeared/disqualified by Bob Barker."-- Brooke
Saucier
            

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Tim's Wrap-Up
            

            The way I figure it,
there are two ways to go with today's question. The first, as many of you did,
is to take the competition improbably downscale--mixing implausible amounts of
sex and/or violence into the competition. (Oddly, given the results of
yesterday's News Quiz, few participants made the obvious leap and added farm
animals as well.) The other, largely neglected option: Imply that the
competition, as currently configured, is improbably upscale. Perhaps the
pageant organizers could prune the readings from Ionesco and the madrigal
recital, or they could finally stop forcing the contestants to defend their
theses. Or they could replace the Latin-translation portion of the evening
with--oh, I don't know, something frivolous. A swimsuit portion, or perhaps an
evening gown competition. Everyone likes evening gowns.

            
               Congenial
Answer
            

            The pageant's organizers
are cutting back on the number of performances from 10 semifinalists to five,
and they'll be backed by professional dancers and musicians. According to
USA Today , pageant CEO Robert Beck has found that the viewers get bored
watching the amateur talent routines. "You can flip to 20 or 30 stations and
find great entertainment," Beck says. "If, by great entertainment, you mean
programs starring Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa, or the umpteenth Discovery Channel
special on sharks," he did not add. In other USA Today news, single
diners tip best.

            
               You Be the Critic!
Extra
            

            As the best-known film
critic in America (and the only one ever to win a Pulitzer), the erstwhile
broadcasting partner of Gene Siskel holds a position of unique influence in
film. Play along as we rank the following movies, from best to worst, according
to Roger.

            
               Dances With Wolves
(Costner, buffalo)

            
               The Arrival
(Charlie Sheen, aliens)

            
               Booty Call (Jamie
Foxx, booty)

            
               Rushmore (Bill
Murray, prep school)

            
               8 Heads in a Duffel
Bag (Joe Pesci, eight heads in a duffel bag)

            
               The Usual Suspects
(Kevin Spacey, Keyser Soze)

            
               Blue Velvet (Dennis
Hopper, "In Dreams")

            
               The Ghost and the
Darkness (Michael Douglas, lions)

            

               Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tim Roth, Tom Stoppard)

            
               Answer
            

            They are in the correct
order. Each film received a half-star less than the one that precedes it. Which
means that, to Roger Ebert, Booty Call was twice as good as Blue
Velvet . And that he walked out of The Usual Suspects saying, "It was
good, but it was no Dances With Wolves ."

            
               Weeklong Extra
            

            A headline from Monday's
Daily Variety : "Dutch regulators issue equal-access guidelines."
Participants are invited to find, in an actual newspaper or magazine, a less
enticing headline. Deadline is noon ET, Wednesday. Answers will be posted
Thursday.

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Jesse Ventura moderates as contestants
Jell-O-wrestle while answering difficult questions from Regis Philbin.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Some Kind of Wonderful

            In repose, Julia Roberts
is plainly gorgeous, but she's even more so when she fastens those huge eyes on
some lucky co-star. She's the anti-Garbo: She doesn't vant to be alone.
For an "object of beauty," Roberts has an astounding amount of chemistry with
other actors. She managed to penetrate Rupert Everett's languid self-regard in
My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and made the brilliant but remote Denzel
Washington almost puppyish in The Pelican Brief (1993). In the past,
Hugh Grant has mainly had chemistry with Hugh Grant, yet in this summer's
Notting Hill , he focused on something other than his own adorableness.
Above all, Roberts warms up Richard Gere. An actor known for a narcissistic
blend of preening and Buddha-like self-containment, Gere proved in Pretty
Woman (1990) to be a marvel at reflecting her light, like a piece of space
debris that in the rays of the sun reveals jewellike facets.

            The pair's reunion,
Runaway Bride , is a laborious screwball romance, which, in its first
half-hour, had me checking off the details it got wrong about journalism,
small-town life, and human relations. Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a
hardware store clerk ( check ) and junk sculptor ( check ) with a
tendency to panic and leave her grooms open-mouthed at the altar. Gere is Ike
Graham, a New York-based USA Today columnist, who hears about Maggie in
a bar and, without even a call to confirm his facts ( check ), devotes his
next piece to an un-PC screed on the inconstancy of all women ( check )
with this "runaway bride" as Exhibit A. The column makes him instantly
( check ) unpopular with all those Manhattan USA Today readers
( check ) who recognize him on the street ( check ), not to mention
the hordes of small-town USA Today readers who wait for the paper's
delivery truck as if it were the Good Humor man ( check ). After the
subject of the column responds with a letter composed on a manual typewriter
( check ) disputing its facts, his editor and ex-wife ( check ) (Rita
Wilson) promptly ( check ) fires him ( check ).

            My notebook has about 50 more checks, but once the premise
had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the
inanities and had a good time. The director, Garry Marshall (he did Pretty
Woman , too), isn't especially talented at tying up loose ends or gliding
over awkward inconsistencies. His strength is that he loves actors (he's an
amusing one himself). He'll drop everything for a goofy face, a riff, a flaky
bit of business. It doesn't matter that Joan Cusack as Maggie's hairdresser
pal, or Laurie Metcalf as a busybody baker, or Hector Elizondo as Ike's
ex-wife's husband and also his best buddy ( check ) don't have much in the
way of rounded parts. They're in there improvising and having a blast. Compare
these larky turns to the robotic caricatures in Nora Ephron's 1998 You've
Got Mail --it's the difference between a director who thinks she has it all
figured out and one who says, "Surprise me, make me laugh."

            Maggie is a great role
for Roberts, who can be alternately warm and skittish, promiscuous and clammy.
Each of her weddings (Ike gets a videotape) is a terrific slapstick turn. Watch
Roberts' head swivel away from an expectant groom as if anti-magnetized,
bearing her out of the church on its own power. Gere, meanwhile, has become
exceedingly likable. Perhaps it's all the Zen meditation, which has mellowed
his showy Method edges. His enviably thick hair has gone from salt-and-pepper
to just salt, and those tiny, Slavic eyes have acquired a worldly glint.
Alternately mocking Maggie and enjoying her hugely, he's like a happy,
laid-back stalker.

            In the event I ever teach a filmmaking class, I'm going to
have a special unit on "The Work of Hugh Hudson: What Not To Do." The riotously
inept Revolution (1985) will be the ur-text, but I might find a place
for the genteel My Life So Far . It's not that it's bad, it's that on a
dramatic level it barely exists. I've never read the source text, a memoir by
Sir Denis Forman about his affluent Scottish childhood, but another Forman
book, A Night at the Opera , is one of my bibles--a cheeky guide to the
genre by a former deputy chairman of London's Royal Opera House. This movie is
supposed to be about the way the arrival of his uncle's dishy young French wife
(Irène Jacob) throws the estate into a libidinous chaos, but Hudson's camera is
always in the right place to catch the rolling hills and splendid staircases
and in the wrong place to catch the actors' expressions. The loss is especially
vexing since the actors (Colin Firth, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Rosemary
Harris, Malcolm McDowell) might be giving fine performances, and Robbie Norman
as the boy might be extraordinary. The script might even be good. We'll just
never know.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Nobel Prize Losers

            
Recriminations flew Friday after the collapse, amid farce and bitterness, of
the Northern Ireland peace agreement. They were directed primarily against
Nobel Peace Prize winners David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders of the
largest Protestant and Catholic parties in the British-ruled province. In
London, the left-wing tabloid Daily Mirror said that Trimble, the first minister-designate
of a new devolved Northern Ireland government (which was supposed to have been
formed, but wasn't, at Thursday's chaotic inaugural meeting of the provincial
parliament in Belfast), should give his prize back to the Swedes. By boycotting
the meeting, and thus provoking the resignation of Catholic Deputy First
Minister Seamus Mallon, Trimble "achieved the near-impossible" of making Gerry
Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, "look like a statesman," the Mirror said
in an editorial.

            John
Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, to which Mallon
belongs, the man who first brought Adams into the peace negotiations, also came
in for criticism. The Financial Times of London reproached him for failing to
guarantee that the SDLP would continue to govern the province with Trimble's
Ulster Unionist Party if Sinn Fein were expelled from the yet-to-be-created
Northern Ireland executive. Under legislation rushed through the British
Parliament this week, this would happen if the Irish Republican Army, with
which Sinn Fein is affiliated, were to persist in refusing to decommission its
secret hoard of weapons. But the FT also reproached
Trimble for his failure "to take a risk for peace." "More was needed from this
Nobel Peace Prize winner," it said--and of Hume, "More was needed from this
Nobel Peace Prize winner as well."

            
Writing on the editorial page of the Irish Independent of Dublin, Ruth
Dudley Edwards, a noted Catholic historian of the Ulster Protestants, was
strong in her condemnation of Hume. "What David Trimble begged of John Hume,
and what every moderate Ulster unionist wanted of him too, was that in the name
of democracy he would stand by the Ulster Unionist Party and refuse to sit in
government with the agents of armed paramilitaries," she wrote. "Had he
promised to exclude Sinn Fein without the beginning of decommissioning, he
could have saved the Agreement. Instead, he played the tribal card. It will be
up to his future biographers to judge this great failure of statesmanship."

            Dudley
Edwards said it was "preposterous" to blame the debacle on Trimble, who,
defending himself in an op-ed article for the Times of London Friday,
wrote that the Ulster Unionists have an undeserved reputation for saying "no."
"We have said 'yes' to many things which would be countenanced in no other
democracy," he said--to "power-sharing with former terrorists" and to "a system
of allocating ministries in the proposed Executive which would lead to an
over-representation of nationalists." Trimble pledged to continue the search
for a peace process because "the prize for success is large enough for us all
to put yesterday's setbacks behind us and to move forward." He has an
enthusiastic supporter in the conservative Daily Telegraph of London,
which said in an editorial Thursday that he deserved "the thanks of
democrats throughout the world" for his stand on the decommissioning issue.

            
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, described in the British papers as sad and
fatigued, was also criticized over the collapse of the Good Friday agreement.
"Blair suffers loss of credibility on Ulster" was an eight-column headline in
the Guardian of London. The paper said that Blair had carried off
a dramatic coup in negotiating the agreement last year--"he had the surest of
touches back then"--but that "now, as the truly historic deal lurches towards
the precipice, his own approach is increasingly confused and his credibility
damaged." The main charges against him are that he keeps inventing artificial
negotiating deadlines that aren't kept and that he "wavered wildly" in his
approach to the all-important decommissioning issue. Adding to his woes on the
worst day of his premiership, La Nazione of Florence published a letter Thursday from the
Tuscan head of the old-guard Communist Party saying Blair would not be welcome
on his annual holiday in Tuscany next month. "His 'warrior's stance' on the
Balkan crisis makes him distant from the feelings of our people," wrote Roberto
Pucci, who said there would be demonstrations against him.

            
British press coverage of the crisis was generally pessimistic, with the
Times ' editorial Friday saying that Northern Ireland finds itself once
again "at a melancholy crossroads under a lowering sky" and that its future is
now "a space colonised by fear." They qualified Blair's pledge to battle on for
peace with reports that he is privately deeply frustrated. The Irish
newspapers, by contrast, looked more hopefully ahead. Both the Irish
Independent and the Irish Times led their front pages with the news that former
U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who chaired the peace negotiations last year, has
been invited to Downing Street next week to discuss with Blair and Irish Prime
Minister Bertie Ahern what role he might play in resumed peace efforts in the
fall.

            By a
strange coincidence, Mitchell went to Buckingham Palace Thursday to receive an
honorary knighthood from the queen for his role in brokering the agreement.
"It's a day of irony," he told the Irish Independent afterward. "No-one
could have foreseen this would be the day the process encountered this
difficulty in Northern Ireland." Meanwhile, a writer on the front page of the
Irish Times began his article, "Northern Ireland experienced another day of not making
history yesterday."

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Hell on Wheels

            
               
                  Bringing Out
the Dead
                provides director Martin Scorsese with a rich milieu for
one of his patented, pumped-up odysseys of the soul--an urban bedlam as seen
through the eyes of an emergency medical technician, Frank Pierce (Nicolas
Cage). The film is based on a book by Joe Connelly, who cruised the streets of
Manhattan in an ambulance from the mid-'80s to the early '90s, when the crack
epidemic was peaking and New York had become the embodiment of everything
untenable about major American cities. Connelly spent a lot of time picking up
shooting victims, crackheads in the throes of cardiac arrest, and homeless
drunks--some from the first wave of Reagan-era deinstitutionalization--and
bringing them to the overpacked emergency room of what he calls "Our Lady of
Misery" Hospital. The book is a memoir reframed as a novel: It boils those
years down to a couple of days in which Pierce clutches vainly at the last
vestiges of sanity. Night after night, he has visions of a young Hispanic
asthmatic whom he failed to resuscitate: Her head stares accusingly at him from
the shoulders of people he passes on the street. It's not just that he can't
forgive himself for not having saved her life; it's that he can't forgive
himself for putting her out of his mind. He can't live with the idea that he
has become indifferent.

            The material has so many Scorsese-like motifs that
it's easy to see why the director fell on it and passed it on to his Taxi
Driver (1976) screenwriter, Paul Schrader, who has said he finished the
script in three weeks. I can believe that, and not just because there's so much
dialogue and narration from the book on screen. It's probable that Connelly
thought of Taxi 
               Driver and Mean Streets (1973) when he
wrote his novel, so having it adapted by Schrader and Scorsese was like closing
the circle. But what the circle really needed was opening. It's not just that
slow-motion scenes of the ambulance gliding past people beating one another up
feel like déjà vu . It's that Schrader hasn't rethought Connelly's
trumped-up story line.

            The movie starts with
Pierce and his occasional partner, Larry (John Goodman), trudging to the top
floor of a Hell's Kitchen brownstone, where a man named Burke has been in
cardiac arrest for 10 minutes. They manage to get Burke's heart started, but
his brain shows only scant traces of activity; and in the hospital he keeps
flatlining and being resuscitated--15, 16, 17 times. In and out of the
emergency room over the course of several nights, Pierce gets chummy with
Burke's estranged daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), a lost soul whose
shellshocked existence (she begins to drift back into drug abuse) seems tied in
to her dad's neither-living-nor-dead condition. Pretty soon I got the sinking
feeling that the movie was building to the possibility of a mercy killing as a
test of the hero's ability to overcome his internal chaos and feel
something. It's true that Pierce's "altruistic" impulse is not on par with
Travis Bickle's impulse to shave his head and assassinate a presidential
candidate, but Schrader and Scorsese don't view his actions with any
irony. I have a feeling they needed an ending and this one was handy.

            Their opportunism is a shame, because there's enough
texture in Bringing Out the Dead for several movies. Scorsese does
crackerjack work, and some of the cruising imagery--not a bebop legato as in
Taxi Driver but hyperfast and strobelike--is startling. There's a
scary irony built into the material: that the people charged with saving lives
on the streets can't function at normal rhythms; that their amphetamine-jag
intensity can make them as likely to want to murder people as to revive them.
Scorsese and Schrader are at their most inspired in the raucous theater of the
emergency room, in which patients on stretchers scream at one another to shut
up, and an admitting nurse (played by Schrader's wife, the brilliant Mary Beth
Hurt) takes pains to let the drunks and addicts and failed suicides know just
how much they're imposing on her. ("Why should we help? You're just going to
get drunk tomorrow.") Scorsese and Queen Latifah can be heard as the voices of
the dispatchers, and their calls--they often have to bully the drivers to
answer--are beautifully shaped comic turns. Years of sitcom work haven't
softened Goodman, whose Larry is sour, unlovable, thickened by indifference. As
another of Pierce's partners, Ving Rhames talks into the radio like a
toasty-voiced DJ ("Big Daddy Marcus is alive") and strides through his scenes
with an unlit cigar in his mouth, defiantly proclaiming his potency. The
mixture of jokiness and blood never feels cheap--it adds to the movie's theme,
which is horrified estrangement from one's own humanity.

            I must admit that the
movie made me weep a couple of times: It's hard to watch with detachment as
tubes are thrust down people's throats or as they're shocked back to life. Some
of the more jaded characters act as if life is cheap, but Scorsese doesn't. And
everything Nicolas Cage does gives weight to the filmmaker's vision. Cage has
the same flamboyantly haggard (and toothy) look he had in Vampire's Kiss
(1989), yet this time the actor is grounded. His Pierce would love to soar off
into the ether--to escape into madness--but he can't quite make the leap.
"Sometimes it's less about saving lives than being a witness," he says, in
voice-over. "I was a grief mop. It was enough that I simply showed up." Cage's
wary alertness does those words justice.

            One of the best things about David Lynch's marvelous new
film 
                  The Straight Story
                is its play on
"straight"--which is both the name of the protagonist, the failing
septuagenarian Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), and a description of the
movie's one-thing-after-another mode of storytelling. Farnsworth plays an old
duffer who hears that his brother, Lyle, has had a stroke. It emerges that they
haven't spoken for a decade, and the last time they did Alvin said some
devastatingly harsh things. So, as a kind of penance, Alvin decides to travel
hundreds of miles to Lyle's house under his own power. The only vehicle he's
legally allowed to drive is a John Deere lawn mower that goes maybe three miles
an hour. But somehow the mode of travel--and the hardship of that
travel--becomes the movie's message.

            I was impatient with The Straight Story 's
opening--the arty dissolves, the crawling pace, the sense of stasis. But once
Alvin left his mentally handicapped daughter (a radiantly simple turn by Sissy
Spacek) for the open road, it becomes apparent that Lynch needed those early
scenes. He needed to show you that as slow as Alvin is going on his tractor,
it's flying next to what he has been doing. As Alvin encounters a lot of plain
folks, both the character and the movie threaten to start seeming "dear." But
the vein of regret, misery, and the Lynchian promise of decay is always just
below the surface--and always palpable. In Lynch's last film, Lost
Highway , the director concocted an original, twisty syntax, in which
identity was mutable and the narrative moved by quantum leaps. This time he
sticks to the path, and his work is as transcendent--and as spellbinding--as
anything he has done since Blue Velvet (1986). Lynch has slowed the
world down and gotten back in touch with it. The Straight Story could be
subtitled Found Highway .

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            East Timor Hots Up

            The
Age of
Melbourne led its front page Monday with an "exclusive" report that Indonesian
military officials are systematically covering up their East Timor atrocities
by liquidating pro-Jakarta militiamen involved in the crimes. Quoting
Australian defense and diplomatic sources, the paper said Australia has
received "detailed signals intelligence" about the Indonesian military's plans
to cover its tracks before a proposed U.N. human rights investigation. "The
intelligence is believed to detail conversations between senior Indonesian Army
(TNI) figures in Bali, West Timor and possibly Jakarta about silencing senior
and middle-ranking militiamen who may be persuaded to assist the UN with
inquiries," the paper said. The intelligence shows that "they will go to great
lengths--any length--to cover their tracks ahead of such inquiries," a source
told the Age . "The information is on the lines that if any militia guys
show signs of splitting from the TNI program ... or show signs of talking to UN
investigators, then the militia members will be taken out, liquidated. There
are suggestions that deaths have already occurred there [in West Timor]."

            The
Sydney Morning
Herald led Monday with a report of "a huge build-up of troops" along
the West Timor border, establishing a front line against militia incursions. It
said the troops included most of Australia's 4,500 soldiers in East Timor. "A
pattern has emerged of militia launching small raids into East Timor to
confront the Interfet forces," the paper said. In Singapore, the Sunday
Straits
Times reported from West Timor that pro-Jakarta militias are
being trained by Indonesian army defectors to kill Australian soldiers. Capt.
Domingos Pereira, a company commander of the notorious Aitarak militia, told
the paper that they hoped to step up cross-border attacks on Australians in a
month or two. "We don't have a chance in a conventional war," Pereira said at
one of four border training camps visited by the paper's reporters. "But we can
make it very painful for them in a guerilla war. The Australians must die for
what they have done to my men and their families."

            In
Hong Kong, the South China
Morning Post reported from Jakarta that the Indonesian media are
conducting a campaign of hatred and misinformation against the Australian
peacekeeping force in East Timor. Two pro-Jakarta militiamen killed by
Australian soldiers in the territory last Thursday were described in
Indonesia's leading daily, Kompas , as "two Timorese residents." The
evening newspaper Terbit ran a photograph of charred bodies in a
burnt-out truck in Dili with a caption saying they had been set alight by
Australian troops, whereas the foreign media all reported that they were
victims of militia terror.

            In an
editorial in its Tuesday edition, the Jakarta Post
called on the ruling Golkar Party to dump President B.J. Habibie as its
candidate in the imminent presidential election. Habibie not only bears the
"stigma" of the discredited regime of former President Suharto, but he has also
performed very badly during his time in office, the paper said. "During that
time, from May last year up to the present, Indonesia has seen its fortunes and
its international reputation sink lower and lower into the depths of
ignominy."

            The
Straits Times ran an editorial Monday condemning the Republicans in the U.S. Senate
for opposing ratification of the global nuclear test ban treaty. The
Republicans "know they risk nuclear proliferation if they scuttle it" but will
do so because they "want to deny President Bill Clinton his top foreign policy
goal," the paper said. "If he fails, he cannot be faulted for trying. History
will note that it was a recalcitrant Republican Senate that killed the treaty
because of political infighting."

            In
Japan, Asahi Shimbun reported that there were 32,863 suicides in Japan in 1998--the
highest number on record. This year could turn out almost as bad, with 10,056
suicides reported during the first four months. The problem is especially
severe among men in their 50s, of whom 6,103 killed themselves in 1998, an
increase of 45.7 per cent over 1997. "The slumping economy, which forced many
companies to cut jobs, was singled out as a prime reason for the shocking
phenomenon," the paper said.

            The
China Daily
reported Monday that China has ordered complete safety inspections of all its
nuclear plants following Japan's recent uranium plant accident. The China
National Nuclear Corp. said the Japanese disaster was due entirely to "poor
management and human error" and had nothing to do with nuclear technology. Of
the three plant workers involved in the accident, two were rookies and the
third had very little operational experience, it said. "Such practices are
totally forbidden in China. All nuclear power operators in China are required
to have licenses and be well-trained."

            The
German newspapers led Monday with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's latest
electoral humiliation in Berlin. The International Herald Tribune noted
that this was the sixth election defeat this year for his Social Democrat
Party. "The state losses have come at such frequent intervals this autumn that
each is known as a 'Black Sunday,' " the paper said.

            In
Israel, the Jerusalem
Post ran an editorial Monday about the surge of the extreme right in
the recent Austrian general election. It warned that the rise of Jörg Haider,
leader of the Freedom Party, is no less alarming because he may not be a
neo-Nazi. "As a clever xenophobe, Haider has taken care to make just enough
extreme statements to justify his 'credentials' with outright racists and
neo-Nazis, while mainly sticking to more acceptable forms of extremism," the
paper said. Noting that he blames whole classes of people for his country's
ills, it commented: "Singling out groups because of nationality is no less
racist than doing so because of skin color or religion. Though it is often
treated as a milder form of racism, there is no firewall of principle
separating one form of racism from another. ... Haider is now the most
successful xenophobe politician in Europe. If his hate politics are not
universally ostracized, his power could well grow, with ramifications that go
far beyond Austria itself."

            In
Rome, La
Repubblica reported Sunday that Pope John Paul II has decided to shelve
plans for the beatification of Pope Pius XII next year because of the new
allegations that Pius XII didn't do enough to help the Jews of Europe during
World War II. The paper said the pope "did not want to bring to its conclusion"
a beatification "which divided instead of unifying" different religions and
cultures.

            In
Paris, Le Monde
led Sunday with a British court's decision to allow the extradition of Gen.
Augusto Pinochet to Spain to stand trial. Welcoming the decision in an
editorial, the paper said it "creates a precedent: No dictator or tyrant may
cite national sovereignty to claim impunity from justice."

            The
Daily Telegraph fronted the news that the Heinz Co. is considering
halting production of its "salad cream," which it created for the British
market in 1914 and promoted with the slogan, "There's a tang to living when
there's a tang to what you eat." Sales have fallen dramatically as consumers
have turned instead to vinaigrettes, salsas, and mayonnaise. Labor Member of
Parliament Dennis Turner, the chairman of the House of Commons catering
committee, said the loss would be a disaster. "It's one of the great British
foods like roast beef and pork crackling," he explained.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 263: &quot;Exchanging Glances&quot;

            
               Despite a recent
clash of gunboats, yesterday a South Korean freighter delivered something to
the North Korean port of Nampo, the first part of a trade between the two
nations. What is being swapped for what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by noon ET Wednesday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Monday's Question
(No. 262)--"Wonder Bread?":
            

            
               Michigan Gov. John
Engler says it "strengthens families, stabilizes neighborhoods, builds
communities, enhances self-sufficiency, and promotes personal well-being." What
does?
            

            

               (Q uestion courtesy of Herb Terns. )
            

            
"Spouting platitudes."-- Daniel Radosh
            

            
"Money, of course."-- P. Mattick ( Bobby Ballard , Karen
Bitterman , and Matthew Singer had similar answers.)

            
"Taunting the poor."--Floyd Elliot
            

            
"Sounds to me like somebody's rethought his opposition to physician-assisted
suicide."-- Tim Carvell
            

            
"Really, is there anything Jack Daniels can't do?"-- Brian Danenberg
(similarly, Jeff Mecom )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            "Deranged militias,
abandoned factories, and seething hostility to the poor, that is Michigan to
me." So concludes the winning essay in the state's annual ... No , wait, sorry.
That is Michigan to News Quiz participants. But to the 1960 edition of the
World Book Encyclopedia , it is so much more. It is the wolverine state,
"although scientists believe there were never many wolverines there," notes a
cranky Willis Dunbar, author of the World Book essay. Michigan is also
celebrated as the "Water Wonderland," because it has "four times as much
water-covered area as any state," a curious boast, giving the impression that
by the second paragraph, Dunbar is straining to find nice things to say.
Michigan--surprisingly submerged! Indeed, being excessively water-covered is
what sends most states whining to the federal government for emergency aid.
Still, it makes a nice license plate slogan--Michigan: more water-covered than
any of you bastards!--and it probably keeps down the wolverine population.

            
               A Panacea You Can
Live in Answer
            

            Owning a home strengthens, stabilizes, builds,
enhances, and promotes, said Gov. Engler, as he proclaimed June as
Homeownership Month, presumably weeks ago when we were all too preoccupied with
Kosovo and ourselves to notice.

            As one of the month's many activities, the Michigan
State Housing Development Authority sponsored an essay and drawing contest,
"What My Home Means to Me," for 5- through 12-year-olds whose families
purchased a home in 1998 through a MSHDA funding and loan program. The Michigan
Association of Home Builders and the Mortgage Bankers Association also
contributed to the festive mood of the event.

            For Timothy Noah's
contrary view on the salubrious effects of home ownership, click and .

            
               Equal Justice
Extra
            

            Over the past 24 hours,
authorities on two of America's most distant shores handed down punishments to
two miscreants, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood and Roughrider. A comparison:

            
               Species of
Perp
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Human

            Roughrider: Bull

            
               Weight of
Perp
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Doesn't say, but he looks around
165, maybe 175

            Roughrider: 1,700 pounds

            
               Hurtful Slur From
Insensitive Critics
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Boozy incompetent

            Roughrider: Dangerous ruminant

            
               Place of
Crime
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Pristine waters of Prince William
Sound

            Roughrider: Pristine streets of Long Island
City

            
               Place of
Punishment
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Anchorage, Alaska

            Roughrider: Queens, N.Y.

            
               Crime
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Discharging 11 million gallons of
oil from the Exxon Valdez
            

            Roughrider: Participating in unlicensed traveling
Mexican rodeo

            
               Damage Caused by
Crime
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Despoiling 1,000 miles of
shoreline and killing tens of thousands of birds and marine mammals

            Roughrider: None

            

               Punishment
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: One thousand hours of community
service over five years

            Roughrider: Shot 20 times by cops

            
               Punishment, More
Specifically
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Pick up litter in the summer

            Roughrider: Die

            
               Time Between Crime
and Punishment
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Nine years

            Roughrider: A few minutes

            
               Rejected
Alternative Sentencing
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: Jail

            Roughrider: Safely immobilized with tranquilizer
dart

            
               Comments That Put
It All in Perspective
            

            Capt. Hazelwood: "He'll be doing different things
each day. Tomorrow he could be cleaning parks."-- Fred Fulgencio, head of
Anchorage's community work service program
            

            Roughrider: "I thought I
saw a horse running down the street, then all of a sudden I noted it had horns.
I said to my family, 'Honey, that's a bull.' "-- Sandra Davis,
eyewitness
            

             

            
               Greg Diamond's Ongoing
Extra
            

            Participants have until
Sunday to mock and deride the AFI's
Greatest Legends List of movie stars by devising a TV Guide -style
plot summary of a movie in which an unlikely yet equally ranked pair--for
instance Kirk Douglas and Lillian Gish are both rated No. 17--might have
co-starred.

            Inspirational example:

            No. 24 Watch of
Evil --An evil scientist (Edward G. Robinson) hypnotizes a woman (Mary
Pickford) and makes her think that he looks like a dashing leading man.
Well-known for the catch phrase "Nyaarh, your eyes are getting heavy,
nyaarh!"

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Indifference to the poor, affection for drugs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            No. 265: &quot;Serfs Up&quot;

            
               "In England, the
rule was well established that 'no lord could be sued by a vassal in his own
court, but each petty lord was subject to suit in the courts of a higher lord.'
" 
               This surprisingly relevant bit of medieval lore turns out to
be the philosophical foundation of what?
            

             

            Send
your answer by 5 p.m. ET Sunday to newsquiz@slate.com .

            
               Wednesday's
Question (No. 264)--"The $156K Problem":
            

            

               
                  
                     Overheard at Sotheby's Tuesday: "My intention is to do
whatever he indicates to me he wants done with them. He may want them returned.
He may want me to destroy them. He may not care at all." You make the
prediction: Who will want whom to do what?
                  
               
            

            "J.D.
Salinger will want the buyer of his letters to return them to him. Then
Salinger will send them back to Joyce Maynard, and she'll auction them off
again, and once again, they'll split the take in one of the most elaborate
swindles ever devised."-- Tim Carvell
            

            "Rudy
Giuliani will want Randy Levine to destroy the entire print run of the first
issue of Talk . That'll stop people from voting for her!"-- Daniel
Radosh ( Peter Carlin , Dave Gaffen , and Douglas Wolk
had similar answers.)

            "That
scientist is still waiting for Al Gore to let him know about those test
rabbits."-- Karen Bitterman
            

            "This
is Jeb Bush's wife's response to the question of what she should do with the
'over budget' collection of clothes she tried to sneak by customs in
Miami."-- Gene Geer (similarly, Mac Thomason and Greg
Diamond )

            
"Justice Kennedy does not care what law librarians across the country do with
all the Supreme Court Reporters from 1790 through 1998. Apparently, for
all those years the justices were just kidding around."-- Charles Star
(similarly, Greg Diamond )

            Click
for more answers.

            
               Randy's
Wrap-Up
            

            Once "auction" invoked the incomprehensible
high-speed chatter of a tobacco dealer, building to the giddy crescendo, "Sold
American!" Then some Virginia farmer slipped a bag of cash to his senator, and
we all went out and drank bourbon until we puked all over the store-bought
shoes of a Philip Morris lobbyist. Lordy me, I'm as nostalgic for the old South
as Justice Kennedy.

            Now "auction" invokes eBay and the sort of human
progress that means an unsociable collector of original animation cells from
prewar Warner Bros. cartoons will now have even fewer occasions to socialize
awkwardly with others, in their pretty-boy footwear.

            And even nowier, it
means Dutch auction, which has dismal connotations, but so does everything with
a Netherlandish prefix--Dutch treat, Dutch courage, Dutch Schultz. This is, of
course, because a Dutch treat is no treat, Dutch courage is no courage, and
Dutch Schultz is no Schultz at all. Or maybe he is, but undoubtedly a very
inferior sort of Schultz. However, as 
                  Slate
               's own James
Surowiecki explains with admirable clarity, the Dutch auction is quite a fine
idea. You see, the way this thing works is if someone bids $100 and someone
else bids $5, the low bid takes it--can that be right?--but in some
sophisticated way that makes it great for everyone except the staff of
Salon . Although the fun of calling David Talbot a sap must be diminished
by the fact that last week his assets were zero, this week he's got $3 million.
What a loser. In his fancy schmantzy store-bought shoes.

            
               Beholdin' to You
Answer
            

            J.D. Salinger will want Peter Norton to return
those letters--that's my prediction--and on the way over, maybe pick up a pizza
and some beer--no, malt liquor--and some pornographic magazines, and some
30-weight motor oil, and that cute girl at the 7-Eleven. That's what I
forecast. Time will tell.

            On Tuesday, at a Sotheby's auction, Norton, creator
of the popular software Norton Utilities, paid $156,500 for 14 letters Salinger
wrote to Joyce Maynard 27 years ago.

            In other
80-year-old-recluse news, Simon & Schuster announced the impending
publication of The Dream Catcher , the memoirs of Salinger's 43-year-old
daughter, Margaret.

            
               Fun With Fordice
Extra
            

            Caught in an adulterous
liaison, Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice, a flamboyant champion of family values,
resigned Tuesday as co-chair of Dan Quayle's presidential campaign. ("I said,
'I'm going to do what's best for you, Dan.' ") No pesky blanks to fill in, no
messy matches to, erm, match. Simply join me in kicking a Southern governor
when he's down.

            "Fordice's Four Principles
of Good Government" (for more official Fordice twaddle, click here):

            
               

                  

                     Is it pleasing in the eyes of the Lord?

                     Is it good for the people of Mississippi?

                     How much does it cost?

                     How are we going to pay for it?

                  

               
            

            Fordice answers a reporter
about that vacation with a Memphis widow:

            "Let me tell you
something, you invade my privacy this way, six months from now, I'll whip your
ass."

            Fordice explains he's not
a hypocrite:

            "You say somehow I've
betrayed the idea of family values? To me, the idea of family values has to do
with a father and a home with a mother and father and children and
nurturing."

            After pleading memory
lapses for weeks, Fordice admits that it was indeed lover Ann Creson who was
with him at the wine-heavy lunch that preceded his car crash:

            "Of course it was. Did
you ever doubt it? I told you the absolute truth I had no clue what was going
on. I still don't, other than what I was filled in on. Later on, of course, I
found out that's who I was having lunch with."

            Fordice explains that when
the president has an affair, it's bad, but when the governor of Mississippi has
one, it's OK:

            "I have never lied
before a grand jury. I have never lied to the people, wagging my finger on TV
and telling blatant lies about my conduct."

            
               Dance in America
Extra
            

            " 'Hockey,' performed to
Cole Porter's 'Every Time We Say Goodbye' and to music by Alkistis
Protopsaltis, is a gliding in-line skating duet for the deliciously goofy Tony
Guglietti as the Player and Cheryl Lewis as the Elusive Puck who tames
him."-- New York Times , June 24, 1999

            
               Lois Ambash's
Headline Haiku
            

            Delegates vote to
unionize
approval of politicians' lies
as the world heals
at a nude beach.

            
               --New York
Times , June 24, 1999

            
               Greg Diamond's
Ongoing Extra
            

            Last chance to mock the
AFI's
Greatest Legends List of movie stars by devising a brief plot summary of a
movie in which any equally ranked pair--for instance Charlie Chaplin and Joan
Crawford are both rated No. 10--should have co-starred. Replies due by
Sunday.

            Inspirational example:

            No. 17 I Am
Spondylosis! --A brash young man (Kirk Douglas) plots to marry a rich
heiress but finds himself smitten instead with her mute widowed grandmother
(Lillian Gish).

            
               Common
Denominator
            

            Leftover Lewinskiana.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Personal Space Invaders

            

               Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com.
            

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               As a child of the '60s and '70s, I am more
touchy-feely than Oprah. To most of my friends in my own age group, this is
considered normal. (And I guess even to most of my friends in other age
groups.) However, I am aware that one of my better friends is just too reserved
for this invasion of his personal space. Despite resolving not to make him feel
like he's being assaulted, I often forget myself when we are together and
realize too late that I'm either sitting too close or talking too close or
worse, being a hug-Nazi.
            

            
               He tolerates this,
though it clearly makes him nervous. He is tremendously enjoyable company, and
I am accustomed to viewing affectionate gestures as rewarding someone for this.
Could you offer me some helpful suggestions for being, well, more
prudent?
            

            

               --Affectionately,
            

            

               Recidivist Hugger
            

            Dear Re,

            Prudie sees from your e-mail address that you are
female (unless, of course, you've hopped on someone else's machine) and
believes that touching friends is mostly a feminine trait. In any case, this is
what the situation looks like from here: You have the habit of getting close
and touching people; you are aware that in some instances this is regarded as
an invasion of someone's personal space; you and the reluctant touchee are good
friends; you would like to bag your habit of "rewarding" him with physical
contact, but sometimes you just can't help yourself.

            The key, it seems to
Prudie, is that you are close friends, and that he tolerates it--though
uncomfortably--while you want to accommodate his comfort zone. Why don't you
annex humor and honesty to this dilemma and deal with it openly? Say to your
chum something like: "I have this lunatic habit of touching my friends, and I
also tend to get too close. I know this is not comfortable for you, so the next
time you feel crowded, just say, 'Down girl, down.' " Well, you get the drift.
The two of you should decide on a code phrase that suits you, and in time,
Prudie predicts, there will be no discomfort at all--on either side.

            
--Prudie, spaciously

            
               
                  Dear
Prudie,
               
            

            
               You display a wide
range of knowledge, so let me run something by you I have not seen you deal
with before: have you any ideas about making some serious money--fast? I hope
you can help. I'm in a bind.
            

            

               --BPL in Tennessee
            

            Dear B,

            Your question is
actually the bailiwick of Prudie's aunt, the first Prudence, the one who
started this column. Alas, no kind of economics is within this Prudie's
purview. Just from reading the financial section, however (as close as Prudie
gets to monetary information), one suggestion for you might be to get on
Michael Eisner's bad side. Those people seem to do really well.

            
--Prudie, killingly

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Thirty years ago in
college I had a brief fling with a young man who has remained a dear and close
friend. We never repeated our physical intimacy. Now he has finally (!)
married, and his wife, fascinated by his long-term friendship with a girl from
college, persistently asks if I ever slept with him. I have tried every trick
in the book to keep from answering her truthfully, from "Why in the world would
you need to know that?" to "It was the '60s ... how can I possibly remember?!"
But she won't give up. How can I answer her without answering her? How can I
get her to drop the subject? I'd like us all to remain friends. Her husband
refuses to satisfy her curiosity as well. I don't want to come right out and
say, "It's none of your business what happened between your husband and me when
we were 18," and I guess I am looking for a nice way to say MYOB.
            

            

               --Perplexed in Pendleton
            

            Dear Perp,

            You tried the nice way of saying MYOB (which is Ann
Landers' wonderful shorthand for "mind your own business"), and it didn't work.
I refer to your quip about it being the '60s, and how could you be expected to
remember anything ? Prudie's first thought was to suggest that you tell
the proverbial "little white lie" to make the subject go away. Then she decided
that white lies, or turquoise, for that matter, should not be encouraged ...
that there must be a better way than dishonesty, no matter how admirable one's
intent. For this reason, Prudie asked an attorney who is also a Harvard
Divinity School graduate to be a Prudie.

            His position was that lying is unethical, therefore
it is important to consider how not to answer rather than compromising
one's integrity. If the wife's concern is that a sexual relationship might be
going on (that is, a present-tense concern) or is merely curious about the
past, this is a question she must ask her husband--the person directly
involved. The proper communication is with the relevant person--her spouse. If
this rather thick woman persists in her questioning, you might say: "I never
answer questions about the personal lives of my close friends. Please do not
ask me to violate my friendships by pursuing this line of inquiry. This is a
boundary I care about." Such an approach protects the confidentiality you share
with your old friend and directs the wife to the appropriate source (her
husband) allowing you to know you have behaved in a morally ethical manner.

            Prudie--who did not
attend divinity school, but the school of hard knocks--would like to point out
that most people who are not candidates for Dutch elm disease would figure out
that there might, indeed, have been a little experimentation of the sexual sort
and quit already with the interrogation. This, however, is an altogether
different problem. Good luck to you, and my compliments for wishing to do the
right thing.

            
--Prudie, privately

            
               
                  Dear
Prudence,
               
            

            
               Though it is not on
a par with Kosovo and Chinese spying, I nevertheless have been reading about
Hugh Hefner, the geezer in pajamas who founded Playboy around the time
my father was a young man. As I understand it, he is currently occupied, very
publicly, and supposedly romantically, with three women whose names are like
Handy, Dandy, and Randy ... or something like that. How would you categorize
this behavior, and what do you think it's about?
            

            

               --Really Confused
            

            Dear Real,

            Pathetic and Viagra.

            And Prudie thinks the
opportunists, I mean, young women, are named Randy, Brande, and Mandy ... or
something like that.

            --Prudie, disdainfully

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            Beavers on Probation

            
               Beaver
She-Men
            

            
According to the Ottawa Citizen , Canada's national animal is sexually
confused. A research team at the University of Guelph's Ontario
Veterinary College recently dissected 11 male beavers that were native to
Spencerville, just south of Canada's capital, and found that they all had
uteruses. They found the same curious biology in the majority of beavers from
three other locations as well. The finding wasn't such a surprise to the
researchers, whose routine post-mortems in the last few years have turned up a
very high percentage of such "pseudo-hermaphrodite" beavers. Ken Fisher, a
professor of biomedical sciences at the veterinary college, believes that the
development of a uterus is a normal part of a male beaver's genetics and
embryology: But "I wouldn't bet the farm on that," he says. "I'd bet a cup of
coffee."

            
               Smart
Banking
            

            Is it
too soon to prepare for a glut of academically inclined babies from China? The
newly opened "Notables' Sperm Bank" in Chengdu accepts donations only from
scholars who are under the age of 60, have no history of congenital diseases,
and are at the very least an associate professor. Of course, as the
Independent of Bangladesh points out, it has yet to be scientifically
proved that "intellectual quality can be enhanced by cattle breeding
techniques." But in the next few years, new data should be available.

            
               Shoot the
Loon
            

            An
economics professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia is urging Canadians
to ditch the "loonie," as the country's dollar is fondly called, and join a
monetary union with the United States. A report, co-authored by Richard G. Harris and
Queen's University's Thomas J. Courchene, argues that such a partnership would
be economically advantageous for Canada. But what about Canada's national
pride? "All the hang-ups that we now have about our paper money are going to
... go the same way as the buggy whip and typewriters," says Harris. The
Canadian government and the
Bank of Canada aren't biting, the London Independent
reports. Harris has found one supportive group, however: Quebec separatists who
believe that the currency union would ease Quebec's own transition to
sovereignty.

            
               Kangaroo
Saviors
            

            A
computer science professor has designed a "marsupial" to help search-and-rescue
teams in times of crisis. The robot, designed by Robin Murphy of the
University of South Florida,
has a pouchlike cavity inside of which a smaller "daughter" robot is stored.
The mother and daughter robots work as a team--the mother carries a load of
communications equipment and battery power into the search site, then deploys
the daughter to poke through the debris and rubble for evidence of survivors,
the Washington Post reports. (Click here
for a video clip of the "launch" of the daughter robot.) The robot system is
safer than dispatching human rescuers and, when space is tight, more
effective.

            
               Probation
Officers
            

            Since
1936, the American
Association of University Professors has censured universities that do
wrong to their faculties. This year's additions to the hall of shame are
Johnson and Wales University
and Mount Marty College.
The AAUP charged J and W with wrongful termination for not renewing the
one-year appointments of two professors teaching in a doctoral program in
educational leadership. Mount Marty administrators allegedly violated the
due-process rights and academic freedom of an English professor, who had been
trying to revive a local chapter of the AAUP, when they fired him a few months
ago. Does the AAUP censure matter? Some say the mark is "a serious stigma,
others call it a joke," reports the Chronicle of Higher
Education . Most administrations do their best to reform after receiving
the citation. This year, a record number of institutions (seven) were able to
persuade the AAUP that they had cleaned up their act and should be removed from
the list; 50 schools still remain under censure.

            
               School's Out,
Forever?
            

            
Despite achieving their primary goals, Mexican students are still on strike.
Nearly three months ago, when the administration at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico proposed a raise in student tuition from 2
cents to about $150 a year, students closed down the classes with a strike,
affecting 267,000 students and 30,000 professors. So why are students still
occupying the campus's major buildings? The Washington Post reports that
the students have escalated their demands to include the rollback of half a
dozen changes the university has imposed in recent years, including limits on
the number of years students have to earn degrees and tougher enrollment
standards. With negotiations at a stalemate and summer vacations removing the
motivation for an immediate solution, both sides appear to be settling in.

            

               Cybercheating
            

            The
Scotsman reports that Edinburgh University is withholding exam results from 90 computer
science students while the administration determines whether or not they used
the Internet to cheat. Graders became suspicious that students were sharing
answers via e-mail and using the World Wide Web to search for information when
they noticed similarities in the students' work--some to the point of being
identical. Although the incident has raised questions about whether electronic
cheating is commonplace, a spokesman for the university asserts that "there is
no evidence this is a more serious and widespread problem."

            
               Mau Mauing Goes to
College
            

            
Following a bloody assault by students at Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University,
Ile-Ife, last month, students are calling for the dismissal of a top
administrator, who they hold responsible for lax campus security. According to
the Associated Press, the attackers belong to a campus secret society that
functions like a gang, retaliating against students and teachers who oppose
them. The melee left at least seven students dead and incensed fears that
cult-related violence is rising on Nigeria's university campuses. The student
union president has promised a continued boycott of classes until campus
security is improved and the vice chancellor dismissed. The societies, which
have been blamed for dozens of rapes, murders, assaults, and arson attacks over
the years, are widely considered to be the most serious problem facing Africa's
largest university system.

            
               Packing
Heat
            

            
According to a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public
Health, as many as 400,000 undergraduates in the United States own a
handgun. The study also shows that student handgun owners fit the profile of
the average American gun owner: white men who live in the South and West or in
rural areas. The Chronicle of Higher 
               Education also reports
from the study that it points to a "worrisome association" between gun
possession and student drinking. Henry Weschler, one of the report's authors,
warns, however, against overreacting to the study: "We're not pointing to
hordes of drunken college students running across campus armed," he said. "I
don't want to give that impression."

            
               Chinese
Threat
            

            Top
U.S. schools and laboratories are worried that repercussions from the alleged
theft of nuclear secrets will hamper the recruitment of talented Asian and
Asian-American researchers, says the Wall Street Journal . Since the
charges in May that China gathered a rich harvest of nuclear secrets from
ethnic Chinese lab workers, the U.S. government has slowed the visa approval
process, making academic exchanges with China more difficult. In addition, low
morale is evident among Asian and Asian-American scientists, since suspicions
abound in the workplace. Dahwey Chu, a spokesman for the Asian-American
personnel at the Sandia
National Laboratories in New Mexico, commented, "Today it would take a
brave lab administrator to hire someone with a Chinese name."

            
               Scientists Who
Thawed Their Work Destroyed
            

            New
York City's power outage in early July may have damaged hundreds of experiments
that Columbia University medical researchers were conducting at laboratories in
upper Manhattan. The backup generators designed to power the various machinery
and refrigerator units failed. Currently, researchers are trying to determine
the extent of the loss.

            
               Comings and
Goings
            

            Stanley Fish, formerly of
Duke University's English department and now dean of liberal arts and sciences
at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, has lured two more high-profile scholars to join his ranks--the
transsexual economist Deirdre McCloskey from the University of Iowa, and Gerald
Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Chicago.
... Elsewhere, the University of Pennsylvania has finally lured
provocative criminologist John J. DiIulio Jr. from Princeton. DiIulio will take
his endowed chair in August. ... The North Carolina-based National Humanities
Center has announced its fellows for 1999-2000. Scholars will
investigate a range of subjects including techno music and globalization,
avarice in the late middle ages and Renaissance, and African-Americans and
foreign affairs.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
            <SPAN class=120490521-01071999><SPAN class=630250921-01071999>The Oddest Men in the World, Siegfried and Roy</SPAN></SPAN>

            

               
                  
                     
                        Economist
                     
                  , July 17
            

            Not
one but two editorials compare Iranian President Mohammed Khatami to Mikhail
Gorbachev. Like Gorby, Khatami must muffle his reformist impulses in order to
avoid provoking hard-line conservatives. The first piece cautions him against alienating his core
supporters, but the other predicts that his regime will survive the
current uprising. The students who toppled the shah were both more alienated
and better organized than today's lot. ... The next Balkan war will take
place in Montenegro, predicts the magazine. The tiny republic is itching to
secede from Yugoslavia. Western diplomats, chary of further destabilizing the
region, are urging Montenegrins to bide their time.

            

               
                  
                     
                        New
                      Republic , August 2
            

            The
cover story complains about the pathologizing of normal
personality traits, a tactic used by pharmaceutical companies to drum up
business. The latest example: the classification of shyness as "social anxiety
disorder." Drug makers underwrite research into "social phobia" and stoke
public hysteria with slogans such as "Imagine Being Allergic to People." If
you, like Donny Osmond, are among the 1-in-8 distressingly diffident Americans,
a new drug can treat you. ... An article condemns the simplistic and snide cultural coverage in
the New York Times , which is corrupted by commercialism and the paper's
obsession with reporting news. The Times covers what Prozac might have
done for Willy Loman rather than the artistic significance of Death of a
Salesman .

            
               
                  Vanity
Fair , August 1999
            

            A
profile of eccentric German animal illusionists Siegfried and Roy describes
life inside their "Jungle Palace" on the fringes of Las Vegas. It is nearly
impossible to convey how breathtakingly weird they are. They live with 55 white
tigers, 38 servants, and 16 lions. Roy sleeps with the young tigers. Siegfried
has a mural of himself naked, with cheetahs, on his bedroom walls. They greet
people by saying, "Sarmoti"--an acronym for "Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the
Impossible." The couple deflect the question of whether they are gay but do
claim a friendship with Michael Jackson. Still, they draw 700,000 people a year
to their stage show. ... A profile of Patricia Duff traces her
career as a manipulative, self-destructive femme fatale . After she
failed at three marriages and at attempts to leverage wealth and connections
into a career as a political powerbroker, she wed Revlon CEO Ron Perelman. Now
that marriage is kaput, and she has run through 16 law firms during the divorce
and custody proceedings, and is now battling Perelman over issues such as
whether $36,000 is an adequate annual clothing allowance for her 4-year-old.
... An article on celebrated death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal
condemns his admirers for ignoring the clear evidence of his guilt.

            
               
                  
                     
                        New York Times
Magazine,
                      July 18
               
            

            The
cover story explains how a con man peddled 200 forgeries of modern masters
through top auction houses. John Drewe "authenticated" paintings by
infiltrating museum archives and inserting documents about artworks'
provenance. This scheme corrupted art history and undermined the reputations of
auction houses, whose "experts" sold some obvious fakes. ...
An article describes how Ernest Hemingway began confusing himself with his own
heroes. While living in Cuba during World War II, he formed a spy ring and even
hunted for German subs in his fishing boat. His writing never recovered after
this series of misadventures.

            
               
                  Time and
Newsweek , July 19
            

            Both Time and
Newsweek celebrate the U.S. Women's World Cup win. The Time
cover
story says that "Soccer Mama" mania was carefully orchestrated by the
sport's steering committee and sponsors such as Nike but that the enormous
crowds shocked even organizers. ... The Newsweek cover story reveals
the gender-specific coaching strategy of the U.S. women's team. Assuming that
women internalize tough criticism, the male coach tried positive reinforcement
instead. He tacked inspirational quotes to players' doors, emphasized what each
player did right, and provided an "imaging" tape for each player, consisting of
her best moves set to her favorite music.

            A Time special
report revises the conventional wisdom about which foods are good for the
heart. Cholesterol isn't necessarily unhealthy, and margarine is as bad as
butter. Saturated fat is still evil.

            
               Newsweek explores how hate
groups are exploiting the Internet to recruit kids. Online games, comic strips,
and downloadable music, such as "Go Back to Africa," entice children. White
supremacists are developing their own Webmasters to spread their message on
2,000 sites. ... 
               Newsweek explains a new musical hybrid: Rock 'n' rap, a k a
"hick-hop," in which white performers such as Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock combine
hard rock with the violent themes and outlaw imagery of rap.

            
               
                  U.S. News &
World Report , July 19
            

            An
analysis
suggests that George W. Bush is just dimwitted enough to be president. Bush's
factual errors on the campaign trail are Reaganesque, underscoring that he is
not a detail-oriented drone like Al Gore. ... The cover story ranks
America's best
hospitals. The top three are: Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and
Massachusetts General. ... An article agrees
that President Clinton's poverty tour brought necessary attention to the
genuine suffering of Appalachia but argues that his package of investment
incentives is not an economically efficient way to help the needy.

            
               
                  The New Yorker ,
July 19
            

            A
piece calls Hillary Clinton's campaign kickoff "cunning" and "brilliantly
staged." The cover cartoon, however, depicts her as a tourist ambling through
Central Park, about to be mugged by a truncheon-wielding Rudolph Giuliani.
... An article explains how Harvard Business School has remade itself
from corporate prep school into entrepreneurial boot camp. New offerings
include a course titled "Women Building Business" and field trips to Silicon
Valley startups. ... A profile of Andrew Cuomo argues that he has
brought his father Mario's brand of liberal zeal and moral grandeur to his post
as secretary of housing and urban development.

            
               
                  National Review ,
July 26
            

            The
cover story
declares that America is in the midst of a "Gay Moment." Homosexuals are
demanding cultural attention, and the debate over homosexuality has shifted
from morality to "is he or isn't he?" Pro- and anti-gay polemicists debate the
sexual proclivities of Jar Jar Binks and Abe Lincoln. (To read

                  Slate
               's authoritative evaluation of Tinky Winky's sexual
orientation, click .) ... A piece asks where
George W. Bush stands on affirmative action. The governor says he wants to
eliminate racial preference but to guarantee "affirmative access." His record
is equally wishy-washy. Even so, his Delphic statement of principles might
hoodwink conservatives and moderates.

            
               
                  Weekly
Standard , July 19
            

            The
cover story concludes that Hillary Clinton is a deft campaigner. Her "listening
tour" effectively reinforces the perception that she was dragooned into running
for the Senate and makes it easier for her to deflect uncomfortable
scandal-related questions. ... The editorial defends Vice President
Gore. AIDS activists say the veep is doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical
industry by preventing South Africans from obtaining cheap AIDS drugs. But
evisceration of patent protections could slow the development of the drugs poor
countries need.

         
      
   

   
   
      
         
             David Rieff

            If "intellectual" were a title like "baron" that
could be inherited, few people would have a stronger claim to it than David
Rieff. His father is University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff, the
author, most notably, of Freud: The Mind of A Moralist . His mother is
essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and political activist Susan Sontag, as iconic
an intellectual as our resolutely anti-intellectual culture is ever likely to
recognize.

            David, the only child of their brief marriage, may
well prove to be the most influential member of the family. He is certainly the
most visible, holding forth in the pages of everything from the Wall Street
Journal to the New Republic to Salmagundi . More than any
other journalist, Rieff has tried to mold the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda into
a coherent worldview. For him, these wars exposed the political bankruptcy and
strategic incompetence not only of Western governments but, even more starkly,
of the international do-gooder establishment--the United Nations, the
International Committee of the Red Cross, and the proliferating nongovernmental
organizations that provide relief on the ground in times of emergency.

            Rieff has relentlessly
argued that the prevailing paradigms of humanitarian assistance and
international law are inadequate to the brute realities of the post-Cold War
world. A willingness by the Western powers--in particular the United States--to
intervene on one side in military conflicts rather than treat them as
quasinatural disasters is the only way to advance the causes of democracy and
human rights. While his response to NATO's intervention in Kosovo has been, as
we shall see, ambivalent, the decision to intervene is evidence that Rieff's
arguments have, for the moment, prevailed.

            There is an obvious irony in the fact that the son of one
of the most implacable critics of American imperialism in the '60s should
emerge as one of its most vocal champions in the '90s. More amazing still is
that Rieff couches his saber rattling in the language of dissent. He takes
strong, uncompromising positions that leave him curiously unaccountable. When
his mother went to Hanoi in 1968, she returned with the conviction that a North
Vietnamese victory was the best outcome for Vietnam, for America, and for the
world. In the decades since, she has had to grapple with the consequences of
that position. Rieff's interventionist stances on Bosnia and Rwanda evade such
reckoning. He is always ready to take a position on what should have been
done.

            Rieff has also
short-circuited criticism by making arguments that, if they are not flatly
self-contradictory, can only be the stages of a grand dialectical
work-in-progress of Hegelian complexity. He has hailed those who work for NGOs
as heroes, while decrying the NGOs themselves as "feudal lords" of "the new
medievalism." He has heralded the end of the nation-state and dismissed rumors
of its death as exaggerated. He is a self-described "Neo-Wilsonian" who is
skeptical of liberalism, hostile to the United Nations, and suspicious of
empire. He has called the advocates of civil society "the useful idiots of
globalization" even as he has co-edited a new book-- Crimes of War: What the
Public 
               Should 
               Know --that seems to rest its hope for a humane
international order on the shoulders of transnational, extra-governmental
institutions. The only position he consistently advances is that he is right
and everyone else is wrong.

            Before he became the intellectual conscience of the new
world order, Rieff was an editor, reviewer, and travel writer. His first two
books, Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America
and Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World , relate his discovery that
the cultural geography of American cities was being transformed by a new wave
of immigrants from the Third World. Apparently, he made the discovery all by
himself. The nonimmigrant residents of Miami and Los Angeles appear in Rieff's
books to be, if not entirely clueless about what's going on around them, then
at least hopelessly unable to explain it. "Everyone I knew was taking the
transformation of their own country in stride," Rieff marvels in Los
Angeles . Not him: "Often, I would sit in a restaurant and be literally
unable to follow the conversation going on around me, so mesmerized was I by
the Laotian busboy, or the Peruvian parking lot attendant, or the Haitian
dishwasher--our new fellow countrymen. Who are they? I thought. Who are we? I
thought." What the hell are you looking at? thought the Laotian busboy.

            Even then, Rieff was
thinking on a global scale, pondering the decline of the nation-state, the
transformation of the international economy, and the obsolescence of New York
City. He was also indulging his taste for grandiose pronouncements:

            
               The great lesson of New York's decline was that the curtain comes
down just as surely on historical periods as it does on individual lives. ...
And what could be said about New York seemed to me to apply also to America as
a whole. In retrospect, Reaganism had been less a period in which the United
States reassumed the mantle of empire than one in which new empires--Japanese
finance, the European Community--began to take their proper role in the
world.
            

            In retrospect, this is nonsense, but at the
time it no doubt seemed prophetic. Rieff might have reread these passages
before he wrote a scathing review of Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the
Olive Tree for the Los Angeles Times last month, in which he
ridiculed Friedman for just this kind of naive extrapolation of the future from
the present. Friedman may be guilty of the fatuous contention that no two
countries with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other, but
Rieff, in Los Angeles , indulges in some fast-food mysticism of his own
when he sees a harbinger of our globalized, miscegenated, Third World future in
the advent of the pita fajita.

            While Los Angeles
aims an occasional rhetorical jab at the left, Rieff's second book on Miami,
The Exile , was an act of defiant apostasy, sympathetic to the Cuban
émigrés' sufferings and aspirations, and contemptuous of the Castro regime. In
the precincts of the American left that still dream of Fidel and Che in the
Sierra Maestra, Rieff's book was greeted with murmurings of disapproval--the
kind of murmurings that had greeted Sontag's famous Town Hall declaration of
the moral equivalence of communism and fascism some years before.

            In 1992, Rieff went to Europe to explore the transformation
of its cultural geography by Third World immigration. He ended up,
fatefully, in Sarajevo, just as the first details of the Bosnian genocide were
becoming known. His experience in Bosnia awakened his conscience, and made his
career.

            The book that resulted,
Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West , is an unrelenting
indictment of the international community's inability--or unwillingness--to
step in and stop the killing. It is an odd piece of reportage, with no interest
in the evocation of place. This is post-traumatic journalism--repetitious,
impatient, and emotionally raw. The Bosnians--in whose name Rieff brings his
indictment against an indifferent world--function as a kind of abstraction. We
see very little of their lives, and only rarely hear their voices. They are the
Laotian busboy, only more like us. At the heart of the book is the claim that
by treating a political cataclysm in strictly humanitarian terms, Western
governments and the United Nations assured the destruction of a democratic,
multicultural nation in the middle of Europe and abetted the cause of Serbian
fascism. Those who protested NATO's action in Kosovo because it lacked a U.N.
mandate should read Slaughterhouse to see what an earlier mandate
produced: ethnic cleansing superintended by men in blue helmets.

            Even though Kosovo was the West's attempt to compensate for
the failures outlined in Slaughterhouse , as recently as last September
Rieff opposed military action against Serbia in an op-ed, calling such
intervention unwarranted because the sufferings of the Kosovars "pale in
comparison" with the starvation of refugees in southern Sudan and Sierra Leone.
"Unless one believes that the lives of Europeans are intrinsically more
valuable than those of Africans, the humanitarian justification for military
intervention is unsustainable," he wrote.

            Does David Rieff
contradict himself again? Has he already forgotten that Slaughterhouse
castigates former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for making a
similar formulation, describing as "racist" the world's attention to Bosnia and
disregard for the sufferings of the Third World? Didn't Boutros-Ghali earn
Rieff's undying scorn when he told the besieged Sarajevans he could name 10
places in the world where things were worse?

            But last autumn's dove became a hawk again this spring.
Shortly after NATO's bombs stopped falling and Milosevic capitulated, Rieff
assessed the lessons of Kosovo in a short Newsweek piece that made the
case--from the safety of retrospect, naturally--for ground troops. The question
of ground troops was not strategic, but moral. "Had the West been willing to
unleash a ground war to secure its military, humanitarian and human-rights
objectives," Rieff argued, "there would be more room for optimism." So much for
southern Sudan.

            Rieff's Newsweek piece did allow that, in
spite of having "to fight a just war with one hand tied behind its back ...
NATO actually succeeded to a greater extent than might have been predicted."
"Might have been" is either disingenuous or overly modest, since Rieff himself
had, almost from the start, pronounced NATO's action an unambiguous failure. In
a cover story in the New Republic in May, Rieff painted a grim picture
of "lost Kosovo." "The real question," Rieff insisted, "is whether the refugee
emergency is going to be permanent ... or whether NATO actually intends to
fight a war that will allow the refugees to return to Kosovo."

            If that question has, for the moment at least, been
answered, you won't hear it from David Rieff. Don't expect to see him marching
in any victory parades. But don't look for him at any protest marches either.
In the months ahead, you'll most likely find him in the pages of the opinion
journals or across the table from Charlie Rose, heaping scorn on the U.S.
government, NATO, the United Nations and, of course, the left, whoever they
are. He will continue to lecture us on the importance of choosing sides, and of
fighting to win. He will remain passionate, eloquent, and sure of himself. But
I, for one, can't read him without hearing t